By William A. Collins
Minutemanmedia.org
Owners line up,
To despise;
Workers who would,
Organize.
Union organizers in America should feel lucky. Nowadays they rarely get beaten to a pulp or murdered. Those remain common hazards of the trade in Latin America and Asia.
Not to say that unions here are having an easy time. Money and law are heavily stacked against them. Our president has populated the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with members who believe that the AFL-CIO is run by Nikolai Lenin, who in turn takes orders from Osama bin Laden. And while the new Congress may indeed slightly favor making it easier for workers to organize, such reform is unlikely to make it past the filibuster or the veto, let alone Washington’s phalanx of sleek corporate lobbyists.
OK, it is true that in the realm of Indian casinos, a new court ruling specifically empowers workers to organize, which they will surely try to do. This win, however, is merely a distraction. Native Americans will just as surely fight like any other defensive employer, but as with state and local governments, they’re not the worst guys.
The worst guys are businesses. Take Circuit City. It’s firing senior employees because they make too much, and hiring new ones at rock bottom wages. Wal-Mart, for its part, strives to minimize full-time employees altogether so as to keep down benefit costs.
These, of course, are companies that can’t outsource. Nearly everyone else who can shift production abroad does so, and those who can farm out work to faceless contractors at low wages do that too. For some who can use illegal aliens, such as meat packers, so much the better.
The auto industry offers a different self-destructive wrinkle. Heavily unionized, its workers have long dutifully supported the bosses with Buy American campaigns. This has irked environmentalists because those good old American cars are famously wasteful and polluting. So what has happened? American consumers, unmoved by product loyalty, started buying more-efficient Japanese cars. The Japanese in turn started making these cars over here, but in fiercely anti-union shops. So while Detroit lays off, Yokohama hires, leading to a speedy reduction in total union employment.
And just to make matters worse, the federal government leads the way in demeaning all workers. The legislation setting up Homeland Security specifically prohibits unions, and anti-labor officials currently run the Labor Department. It’s like a trip down the Rabbit Hole.
Prudently, not leaving anything to chance, the corporate community and the national Republican Party also support think tanks for the purpose of further undermining unions. You see their Swift Boat-style treatises in newspapers and hear them on TV. It is worth big bucks to business to keep workers unorganized.
Many citizens recently had an opportunity to grasp this scenario when Tribune Media’s sale of two papers, the “Greenwich Time” and Stamford “Advocate” to Gannett fell through. It seems that 38 editorial employees there are unionized, and Gannett did not want to chance introducing such a dangerous infection into its otherwise pristine Camelot of non-union workers. Many million bucks were at stake in this failed deal, simply to keep out a union.
Hereabouts, the Food and Commercial Workers have now settled with Stop and Shop Supermarkets, which action has stoked embers of hope in many a worker’s breast. Still, one good agreement is not enough to foment change. Worker pay and benefits remain stagnant overall, while owner and management rewards continue to skyrocket.
We live in a classic period where money means almost everything, and those without it had better provision up the storm cellar for worse times ahead.
William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut.
