The North Coast times-eagle., August 01, 2005, Page 16, Image 16

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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S E A G L E , AUGTEMBER 2005
FRANCES J ETTER
LABOR’S LABOR LOST
The American labor movement seems to be coming undone, not quite near
death but grievously battered, its most recent wound a split-off by dissenting unions
from the AFL/CIO at its national meeting in July. The argument is about the use of union
dues, whether to pay off politicians or spend the money recruiting new union members
to regain the power labor has lost the past two decades Nearly 50% of Oregon’s and
Washington's union members are affiliated with the breakaway unions, to give an
indication of how serious the split is. The country is in a period of severe decline of the
personal and political rights of people who work for a living, which makes it imperative
working people understand what is at stake on the job and in the democracy at large,
and to remember that Abraham Lincoln said labor is superior to capital and "deserves
much the higher consideration." I was once president of a small company union and
the following is an article I wrote about the perplexities of labor in America.
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 temporarily 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 (with salaries plus perks) equal to exec­
utives 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 corpora­
tions employed off-shore 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 manufacturing 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 strike Union busting has frightened union leaders into painful compromises and binding
agreements are torn up by management.
The legal framework of the labor movement needs radical change. Political solutions in
which workers' 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 rights 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 willing to risk and endure longstanding picket lines like auitomobile mechanics
(who lost both their strike and their jobs) several years ago in Astoria, Oregon.
Rebirth of a robust labor movement requires enfranchising 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 primary 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 without them it's worse." That perception is all
too apparent when thousands of workers lose their jobs, the discrepancy in wages and benefits
between management and labor is obscene, and the people who have jobs are required to
produce more for less pay with 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 o f 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 McCUSKER
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