- As Labor Day approaches, what better time to assess the
state of working America. It's under assault and weakened by decades of
eroding rights in the richest country in the world once regarded as a model
democratic state. It's pure nonsense in a nation always dedicated to wealth
and power, but don't try finding that discussed in the mainstream. Today,
it's truer than ever making the struggle for equity and justice all the
harder. That's what ordinary working people now face making beating those
odds formidable at the least.
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- In a globalized world, the law of supply and demand is
in play with lots more workers around everywhere than enough jobs for them.
It keeps corporate costs low and profits high and growing with Business
Week (BW) magazine reporting in its April 9 issue "the share of (US)
national income going to corporate profits (compared to labor) is hovering
around a 50 year high." BW then quoted Harvard economist Richard Freeman's
research paper saying only "a global pandemic that kills millions
of people" could cause a labor shortage and elevate worker bargaining
power.
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- There's little in sight, and the result is a huge reserve
army of unemployed or underemployed working people creating an inevitable
race to the bottom in a corporatized marketplace. It harms workers everywhere,
including in developed nations. They're outsourcing good jobs abroad to
lower wage countries and pressuring workers to do more for less because
they've got little bargaining power to fight back. More on this below.
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- Organized Labor in the US - Its Rise and Decline
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- Organized labor's rise began modestly and was fragile
in the earliest days of the republic. It gained strength in good economic
times, then lost it in downturns like the depression in 1873. By the 1880s,
things were better as the nation underwent rapid industrialization. With
it came rising prosperity and workers wanting a share of the benefits.
They turned to unions for help with skilled artisans leading the way helping
the unskilled as well in their efforts to organize.
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- New labor organizations arose, older ones expanded, and
as they did, they grew more active and militant. It led to the "great
uprising of labor" in 1886, including the landmark Chicago May 4 Haymarket
Riot protesting police violence against strikers the previous day. Its
impact was hugely negative at first. It forced organized labor to regroup
and settle in for a long period of recovery.
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- This was at a time the incipient labor movement was over
two million and rising beginning with its organizing efforts launching
it in the 1870s. By the 1880s, it had enough strength to stage huge strikes
for better pay and working conditions like the struggle for an eight hour
day that had 80,000 strikers parading peacefully down Chicago's main Michigan
Avenue on May 1, 1886 in what's now regarded as the first ever May Day
Parade.
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- Workers were helped from community-based emerging independent
political parties sensitive to their rights. That's unheard of today in
an age where no effective political party stands for working people despite
Democrats and Republicans saying they do. Workers are now on their own.
They're left to struggle in a global marketplace with pathetically little
help weak unions can provide.
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- Earlier in the 19th century, the first national union
arose as workers began asserting their rights. It was called the National
Labor Union (NLU), emerged after the Civil War, but was short-lived. Next
came the Knights of Labor in 1869 with a mandate to protect all workers
including women and blacks after 1883. They were represented by industry
groups rather than trade and skill level that was common until then. Its
goals were high but achievements few at a time of widespread worker repression
in the 1880s. It led to its decline as a more resilient union emerged the
result of disaffection with the Knights.
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- It was called the American Federation of Labor (AFL)
and was founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886 to replace its predecessor, the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The ill-fated American
Railway Union (ARU) followed in 1893, the largest industrial union of its
day for a time, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that at its
peak in the 1920s had 100,000 members.
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- The Wobblies are still around 102 years after Big Bill
Haywood, Eugene Debs and others founded the union in 1905 as a commitment
to working people in their struggle with corporate employers. It's motto
was "an injury to one is an injury to all," its goal was revolutionary,
and it's still true to its root ideology today as stated in the current
IWW Constitution:
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- "The working class and the employing class have
nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are
found among millions of the working people.....Between (workers and employers)
a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class,
take possession of the means of production, abolish the (unfair) wage system,
and live in harmony with the Earth....It is the historic mission of the
working class to do away with capitalism....By organizing industrially
we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the
old."
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- That philosophy under dedicated men like Haywood, Debs
and others set the Wobblies on a collision course with government and big
business that tried to crush it. During WW I in 1917, it was vicious under
Woodrow Wilson's Justice Department (DOJ). It used the repressive Espionage
and Sedition Acts to raid and disrupt union meeting halls across the country.
It's the same tactic used today against Latino immigrants and Muslims in
the concocted "war on terrorism" and the one against undocumented
workers.
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- In 1917 and later, Wilson's DOJ acted much the same way
arresting 165 Wobbly leaders on the grounds they hindered the war effort
by using their First Amendment right to speak out against it. They were
tried near war's end in 1918, all convicted, and given long prison terms
under a Democrat President thought of reverentially today. Bill Haywood
was luckier. After conviction, he was released on bail and fled to the
Soviet Union where he remained until his death, but the IWW was never again
the same.
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- They were hammered again from 1918 - 21 during the infamous
Palmer Raids under Wilson Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. He targeted
radical left wing groups like the Wobblies at the time of the first "Red
Scare" after the 1917 Russian Revolution. It launched J. Edgar Hoover's
career in the DOJ Bureau of Investigation's new General Intelligence Division
that later became the FBI in 1935. The IWW is still around, still dedicated
to its founding principles, but it's worldwide membership is only around
2000, mostly in the US.
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- The AFL fared much better. It became the largest union
in the first half of the 20th century even after the founding of the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 with which it merged in 1955.
Today, it's still the country's largest federation of unions. Its web site
claims a membership of around 10 million workers, even after the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), Teamsters, UNITE-HERE and United
Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) broke away from the federation in 2005.
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBC) did as
well in 2001, and the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA)
left in 2006. They formed a new Change to Win federation in September,
2005 representing about 5.5 million workers. It likely left AFL-CIO with
fewer members than it claims with its true size closer to 8 million or
less.
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- AFL-CIO's state is a metaphor for the times. Organized
labor today is weak in the face of declining membership and corporate dominance
with workers losing out in a globalized world. It's fall has been long-term
and painful with worker rights hammered since the 1980s. It's a long way
today from when the landmark Wagner Act passed in 1935 under Franklin Roosevelt.
It established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) guaranteeing labor
the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management for the
first time ever, but it wasn't an act of kindness.
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- It came at the height of The Great Depression when those
in power feared the worst. FDR and Congress acted to save capitalism at
a time they feared mass worker hostility might boil over like it did in
1917 Soviet Russia. Like all other worker victories, this one came through
struggle. It was from organizing, pressing their demands, taking to the
streets, going on strike, holding boycotts, battling police and National
Guard forces supporting management against working people, paying with
their blood and lives and finally achieving results. They got an eight-hour
day, a living wage, and on-the-job benefits because strong unions went
head-to-head with management and won. It's worlds different now with corporate
giants in bed with friendly governments, and Democrats and Republicans
vying to see which party can be more accommodative.
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- From the 19th century forward, it was never easy for
labor from the height of the movement's strength to the present. Unions
were always disadvantaged even at a time of reasonable labor-management
harmony. The passage of the harsh 1947 Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations
Act showed how tenuous their position always was. Harry Truman vetoed the
bill but was overridden. He called it a "slave labor bill" and
then hypocritically used it 10 times, the most ever by any President to
this day. The law throttles organized labor by giving the President power
to stop strikes by court-ordered injunction for 80 days. He can claim the
national interest, some other one, or none at all that's always the same
one - to help corporate management deny workers their rights.
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- Taft-Hartley is still the law and was last invoked by
GW Bush in the summer of 2002 against 10,500 west coast dock workers "locked
out" (not striking) by the Pacific Maritime Association representing
shipping companies and terminal operators.
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- Earlier in 2001 and new in office, Bush showed his anti-labor
stripes straightaway. He invoked the Railway Labor Act blocking a threatened
strike by 10,000 mechanics, cleaners and custodians at Northwest Airlines
set for March 12. He acted again against United Airlines' 15,000 mechanics
in December. He also took management's side in August, 2006 against Northwest's
8700 flight attendants' planned job action against the bankrupt airline's
unfair demands for huge wage cuts and increases in hours worked. Bill Clinton
was just as unfriendly invoking the Railway Labor Act against American
Airline's pilots and to prevent railroad strikes 13 times.
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- Laws like these, and Presidents' willingness to use them,
crushed the spirit and letter of the Wagner Act. They greatly weakened
or revoked hard won provisions, and as a consequence, diminished union
clout. Taft-Hartley allows stiff penalties for union violations but minimal
ones for companies. It enacted a list of "unfair (union) labor practices"
prohibiting jurisdictional strikes (relating to worker job assignments),
secondary boycotts (against firms doing business with others being struck),
wildcat strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, mass-picketing against scabs brought
it, closed shops (in which employees must join unions), union contributions
to federal political campaigns, and more while legalizing employer interventions
aimed at preventing unionizing drives.
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- It began a process of gradual erosion of union power
to bargain collectively. That's their weapon now weakened because of devious
employer tactics. They can illegally fire union sympathizers (thousands
each year) and get away with only minor wrist slap fines after years of
expensive litigation to prove wrongdoing. Further, employers can fire workers
for any lawful reason like incompetence or no stated reason at all. Even
the right to strike is neutralized with employers able to hire replacements
or threaten to ship jobs offshore. With government on their side, they're
empowered to fire union workers and legally replace them with lower-paid
scabs or Latino immigrants.
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- The Reagan administration marked the beginning of the
current trend in its first year. He was contemptuous of organized labor
while hypocritically saying "I support unions and the rights of workers
to organize and bargain collectively." He showed it in August, 1981
by firing 11,000 striking PATCO air traffic controllers, jailing its leaders,
fining the union millions of dollars, and effectively busting it in service
to the monied interests backing him. It was a shot across organized labor's
bow and a clear message to business and industry of what to expect from
a friendly Republican President. Nothing changed since under Democrat or
Republican administrations with workers unable to match the power and influence
of capital. The toll ever since has been devastating.
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- Union membership has been in steady decline from its
post-war high of 34.7% in the 1950s. It held fairly constant through most
of the 1970s at around 24% where it stood in 1979. At the end of the Reagan
era, it was down to 16.8% and is currently around 12% overall with about
36% of government workers unionized but only 7.4% of them in the private
sector. It's the lowest it's been since the beginning of the mass unionization
struggles of the 1930s and in the private sector in over 100 years. It's
because of Democrat and Republican antipathy to organized labor and corporate
threats to close plants and outsource jobs. It's forced workers to take
pay cuts and fewer benefits that are dropping to where they'll be none,
and they'll be on their own to live or die by market-based rules rigged
against them.
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- George Bush supports corporate interests aiming to crush
unions so they have free reign to treat workers any way they wish or go
find other work. In the wake of 9/11, he took on public sector unions straightaway.
He denied 170,000 new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees their
civil service protection and right to bargain collectively. Those affected
included Transportation Security Administration (TSA) newly federalized
airport screeners. They lost their right to unionize in the name of national
security that could as easily been for any reason or none at all. But this
was just for starters. Bush also wants federal positions contracted out
to private companies. That jeopardizes 850,000 federal employees likely
to get lower pay, fewer benefits, loss of other unionized rights, and many
of them ending up out of work.
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- Overall, organized workers always get higher wages and
greater benefits, which explains why strong unions are vital. The evidence
comes from David Sirota in his his 2006 book, "Hostile Takeover."
He showed:
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- -- 89% of union members have employer-paid health care
coverage compared to 67% for nonunion members; as fewer companies now provide
it, those numbers are lower; in addition, companies continue making employees
pay a greater share of the cost of coverage;
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- -- employers pay a larger share of union member health
care premiums than nonunion members get (but the percentage is falling);
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- -- over two-thirds of union members have short-term disability
insurance compared to about one-third for nonunion workers;
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- -- union members get about 26% more vacation time and
14% more total paid leave than nonunion workers; and
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- -- Economic Policy Institute (EPI) data show union influence
gets high school graduating members about 8.8% more pay than nonunion workers.
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- Greater worker clout under unions is why management wants
to destroy them. It's to deny working people their right to organize, earn
more and get greater benefits corporations don't want to provide. It's
happening in the gilded age of George Bush, and a recent example came in
a ruling late last year when his administration's NLRB ruled 3-2 against
registered nurses' right to union membership if they perform certain minimal
supervisory duties.
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- It was in a case where United Auto Workers (UAW) were
trying to organize nurses at a Taylor, Michigan-based hospital. US labor
law doesn't guarantee supervisors the right to organize making the NLRB
ruling hugely important for up to eight million workers in other trades.
It may potentially deny their right henceforth to qualify for union representation
if employers want to use this ruling to add enough supervisory responsibilities
to employees' job descriptions to throw them into a union-exempt category.
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- Bush further ended the Clinton administration's regulation
requiring federal agencies vet companies' compliance with the law when
awarding federal contracts. He also issued harsh anti-union, anti-worker
executive orders (EOs) as well as a tsunami of other repressive ones. He
barred automatic union-recognition agreements on federally funded construction
projects, abolished labor-management cooperation partnerships aimed at
improving productivity and working conditions, and mandated contractors
henceforth must inform employees they no longer had to join a union without
having to tell them it's their legal right.
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- Just the way Ronald Reagan busted PATCO, George Bush
tipped his hand straightaway in office. He's a company man and union-hater,
so henceforth it's been open season on workers and their rights under his
administration. His policies range from:
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- -- a one-sided support for management; -- stripping workers
of their right to unionize; -- cutting pay raises for 1.8 million federal
workers on the pretext of a "national emergency;"
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- -- denying millions overtime pay; -- appointing anti-union
officials; -- scheming to weaken (and then end) retirement security by
replacing Social Security with risky private accounts managed by Wall Street
sharks that so far has gotten nowhere because of public opposition to it;
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- -- weakening environmental regulations and protections;
and more in an endless war on workers in service to corporate interests
that elected and own him.
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- The failed "immigration reform" legislation
was, in fact, a Trojan Horse. It's down but not dead and remains a thinly
veiled scheme targeting all workers. It's a dagger aimed straight at organized
labor in a plan to create a workplace of unempowered serfs, a "bracero
America," including US citizens having few or no benefits and no security.
If this legislation ever becomes law, workers will be at the mercy of business
to hire and fire them at will.
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- Another anti-labor tool is the repressive Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) arm. It conducts paramilitary border and workplace assaults on undocumented
Latino workers as part of a larger agenda to disenfranchise all working
Americans and deny them the right to bargain collectively with management
through unions. By targeting undocumented workers first, the eventual aim
is to create a large exploitable disposable reserve army worker pool; strip
all workers of their rights; empower employers to offer low wage, low or
no benefit jobs; and pretty much be able to operate as they please.
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- The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) - Some Hope for Worker
Rights Now Denied
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- EFCA was introduced to "amend the (landmark pro-labor)
National Labor Relations Act (passed in 1935)" that's been systematically
dismembered piece by piece ever since. Its aim was to "establish an
efficient system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations,
to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during
organizing efforts, and for other purposes." On June 26, Senate Republicans
blocked labor's top legislative priority by preventing the bill's supporters
from getting the 60 votes needed to end debate and bring it to a vote.
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- For now the bill is dead, but if it ever passes, it will
change federal law on worker rights. They'll henceforth be able to organize
by signing cards authorizing union representation, penalize employers violating
worker rights to do it, and establish new mediation and arbitration processes
for first-contract disputes. It might also end or slow down the firing,
demoting, laying off, or suspending without pay of over 20,000 US workers
annually because of their union activities.
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- The bill was introduced in the 108th and 109th Republican-controlled
Congresses but failed to pass. It was introduced again in the 110th Congress
on February 5, 2007, got 233 co-sponsors by month's end, and passed in
the House March 1, 2007 for the first time. On March 2, it was placed on
the Senate calendar where leading Democrats expected it to pass despite
Republican opposition. They were wrong.
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- That's bad news for a bill that would have won back some
worker rights after decades of losing them. It's backed by over five dozen
organizations including the NAACP, United for a Fair Economy, Jobs with
Justice and numerous other civil, human and labor rights groups. The US
Chamber of Commerce and other organizations joined with big business against
the bill. They oppose all worker rights, and their lobbying paid off. They
claimed the bill allowed them the right to organize before employers can
explain why doing it is not in their best interest. Ignored is that union
workers always have more rights that include higher pay, greater benefits
and added job security. That's bad for business and why corporate giants
fought to kill the bill.
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- They have a powerful ally in the White House making their
job a lot easier. In a mid-February speech before a business lobby group,
Dick Cheney announced George Bush would veto EFCA legislation if it passed
on his watch. He assured those attending this administration will keep
its anti-labor record unblemished on something polls show 77% of working
Americans want but won't get as long as George Bush is in office.
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- Global Unionization - Another Potential Ray of Hope
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- In April editions of The American Prospect, the Washington
Post and ZNet, Harold Meyerson wrote about "a radical new direction
for the globalized economy" in his article titled "Unions Gone
Global." He noted the United Steel Workers (USW) here are negotiating
a merger with two of Britain's largest unions to create "the first
genuinely multinational trade union" that with about three million
members will be the world's largest. Meyerson reported the goal, as USW's
Gerald Fernandez put it, is "to fight financial globalization (by)
fight(ing) it globally....by building a global union (in this case a) federation
of metal, mining, and general workers."
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- The partners in this one stated a commitment to "fund
human rights and union rights in parts of Africa and Colombia" where
more unionists are killed annually than anywhere else, and the country
gets billions in US aid each year to help out. They also plan a global
effort "to protect employees' retirement benefits" from corporate
predators wanting to end them. For now, there's no way to know if the idea
behind the merger will spread, whether workers here and abroad will benefit
from it, or even if the USW and their British partners will follow through
effectively on their committed aims to help win back what unionized workers
have been losing for years.
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- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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- Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and
listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour Saturdays on TheMicroEffect.com
at noon US central time.
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