TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH
COAST
VOL23NO250CENTS
AUGTEMBER 2001
In a dark time the eye begins to see
~Theodore Roethke
FRANCES JETTER
LABOR S LABOR LOST
Born to be slaves, and struggling to be lords.
-THOMAS MOORE
Labor Day means little more than a final three day
holiday that ends the Silly Season Once it celebrated working
people but now that is a joke Unions don't march on Labor Day
anymore and the few who put on a show are merely window-
dressing.
Andrew Levson wrote in The Working Class Majority that
clichés about the USA as a classless society are "exposed as
hollow by the simple fact that American workers must accept
serious injury and even death as part of their daily reality." Every
year 100,CXX) workers are killed or die of work related accidents
or disease Forty thousand are disabled and about 6 million are
hurt at work. "Imagine the universal outcry that would occur if
every year several corporate headquarters routinely collapsed,
crushing 60 or 70 executives," Levison wrote. "Or suppose that
all the banks were filled with noxious dust that constantly
produced cancer in the managers, clerks and tellers Finally, try
to imagine the horror if thousands of university professors were
deafened every year or lost fingers, hands, sometimes eyes,
while on their jobs"
The power of American labor unions as a force to
represent and protect the rights and persons (as well as jobs)
in American industry has faded over the past decades This
erosion of social and political equity of people who produce the
gross national products of the American market is due in part
to an increasing global economy and to international competition
and ease of capital flight Union strike power is vulnerable to
diversified megacorporations, especially in highly automated
industries, and virtually powerless to halt overseas relocations
Union busting has decimated some of the country's largest and
formerly strongest unions Labor law has failed to protect
workers and government acts as a tool for the company
Corporations breach labor laws and are not held accountable
Union strikers are arrested and heavily fined The bitter assault
by government and industry has crippled union power to such
an extent that unions are unable to gain significant wage raises
or protect the jobs of hundreds of thousands who are sacrifices
to company mismanagement, downsizing, or divestiture as a
result of incessant corporate Wall Street inspired takeovers and
mergers.
The American labor movement succumbed to its own
success and the long savored revenge of the bosses it tempo
rarily trumped The power labor gained was immense, was
bitterly won and carelessly lost When the Reagan administration
chose to attack in the early 1980s by breaking a strike by aircraft
controllers and forever banning the strikers from government
work, it was aware the labor movement was weak and unable to
resist a savage campaign of union busting
Unions were by then little more than huge bureaucracies
that had lost contact with their rank and file Their leaders were
raised to social levels (vwth salaries plus perks) equal to
executives of equal rank Dissent was usually squelched within
the locals while union and corporate officials colluded on the
same class level. For members of most unions mandatory dues
were (and remain) a tax on their wages at the same time they
were denied meaningful or coherent representation.
The corporate class bitterly resented the labor
movement's power and exacted savage revenge throughout the
Reagan/BushSr. years, attacking unions in their shops like
wolves circling downed beasts. The older industrial unions were
ripped apart. Thousands of workers were forced to take huge
pay cuts and the loss of medical and insurance benefits to keep
their jobs in industries that were crippled, dismantled or sold off.
Many thousands more were laid off when plants closed or
relocated to the third world. Communities that depended on
smokestack or sold-off industries paid huge ransoms (of public
money) to keep them operating or to attract newer ones. Top
echelons of corporations dismantled their subsidiaries to protect
their headquarters bastions from corporate raiders in the
meantime feeding on each other in a frenzy of takeovers
Their unions gutted and powerless to protect them,
American workers were pawns and generally losers in the
bloody corporate wars, disinherited at the same time American
corporations employed foreign labor to make their products at
cheaper cost.
The new realities of world commerce aggravates the
problems affecting American labor American corporations
subsidize cheaper labor and manufactunng costs in third world
countries by ordering finished products from them instead of
producing domestically, which adds not only to imbalance of
trade but shrinks the number of jobs for American workers. Real
work shifts overseas where the only competition is in degrading
wages and increasing production, especially among young
women reminiscent of U.S. sweatshops in the early part of
the 20th century and more recently in the Pacific southwest
As the American working force shrinks the power of the already
weakened unions is further eroded Workers in need of work
accept lowpaying and non-union jobs and lose their rights and
protection.
Trotsky was right when he said that labor must be
universal rather national because corporate industry is global
Jobs are cut in the USA and exported offshore to third world
countries with nonexistent or harassed labor movements
Violations of international workers' rights are used for
competitive advantage by U.S. corporations that are searching
the world for impoverished countries with low wage workers,
even employing slave and prison labor while engaging in
destroying labor movements and imprisoning or murdering labor
leaders
Unions once were, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut,
admirable instruments for extorting something like justice from
employers But labor is badly wounded and its history is treated
like pornography Strikes are crippled with injunctions and
workers are denied government aid while on stnke Union bust
ing has frightened union leaders into painful compromises and
binding agreements are tom up by management
The legal framework of the labor movement needs
radical change Political solutions in w4iich vorkers' rights and
union democracy in its broadest sense are guaranteed are
necessary. A generous concept of labor democracy would give
workers more rights, both in collective bargaining and law, and
would allow them a voice in investment policy and in such
matters as layoffs, plant shutdowns, takeovers and in selection
of top management. The tax code should be revised to credit
companies that avoid layoffs in profitable times and give
employees a stake in company policy as well as good medical
coverage and broad retraining opportunities. Workers' rights
should be manifested in various ways that would prohibit
employer interference in their decisions about organizational
representations, which should include unions with only a minority
of workers, and mandate collective bargaining that leads to solid
contracts
Radical changes in labor law must obviously be
accompanied with wide involvement of women, blacks, Asian
and Hispanic Americans (plus physically handicapped and
mentally retarded workers), and should focus on a social
crusade framed as an extension of American democracy instead
of pressure group whining. A special effort should be made to
recreate a social justice movement like civil nghts in the 1960s
Such a sharply defined crusade would be an initial stage in
educating and mobilizing union members. The next objective
would be for these members to spread labor's gospel as far as
possible in schools, churches, civic meetings, political caucuses.
To bring strong political support into the labor movement, more
workers need to be organized and be wiling to risk and endure
longstanding picket lines like Astona mechanics (who lost)
several years ago in Astoria, Oregon.
Rebirth of a robust labor movement requires enfranchis
ing women and minorities, the rise of vigorous new leaders
untainted by corruption, reversing the decline and increased
costs of education, and most importantly, collective action and
collective bargaining to halt labor's collapse in post-industrial
America. Reestablishment of a union culture in the United
States and radical reforms of union laws must be a pnmary goal
for the good reason that labor and production are at the heart of
economic and political health and survival
As the man said, "Unions are bad. but wthout them it’s
worse" That perception is all too apparent wrfien thousands of
vorkers lose their jobs, the discrepancy in wages and benefits
between management and labor is obscene, and the people v/io
have jobs are required to produce more for less pay wth little or
no job security
The first permanent national labor organization in
the United States, the International Typographical Union,
acknowledged at its first convention in 1850
"It is useless for us to disguise from ourselves the fact
that under the present arrangement of things, there exists a
perpetual antagonism between Labor and Capital one side
striving to sell their labor for as much and the other striving to
buy it for as little as they can "
-MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
This article is dedicated to Juanita Huebner who is once again fighting for the Union.
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