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Last October, Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus blew a gasket, spewing outrage in all directions. "This is the demise of civilization," he exploded. "This is how a civilization disappears. I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it!"
Bernie's outburst came during an hour-long conference call with various other corporate executives and their political operatives. The purpose was to collect industry funds for a campaign to kill a piece of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Yes, the spark that ignited Bernie's fury, the hellish horror that he insisted would produce America's Armageddon, was a simple labor bill, and he was demanding that the corporate powers rally to save civilization as they know it.
"As a shareholder, if I knew the CEO of the company wasn't doing anything on [EFCA]...I would sue the son of a bitch," he foamed. "If a retailer has not gotten involved in this...he should be shot. They should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."
He didn't specify whether such traitorous executives should be shot first, then thrown out of their jobs, or vice-versa-- but you get the point: Corporate America is working up a feverish panic over the very notion of linking the term "employees" with the concept of free choice.
"It is a political nightmare and a public policy disaster," shrieked a PR flack for a corporate front group opposing this legislation. He even claims that top executives "are ready to riot in the street about it." Now that's exciting! I, for one, would pay to watch a horde of red-faced, Gucci-clad, CEOs rioting, wouldn't you?
Who needs it?
What EFCA does is to restore workers' freedom to organize themselves into unions so they can bargain with corporate chieftains for fairer wages and benefits. That's it. Wait, you might say, can't they do that now? Wasn't this settled back in the 1930s with collective bargaining laws and creation of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to protect worker rights?
Yes--and no. It's true that 75 years ago our country took a stand for promoting workplace democracy--a fundamental national principle that the great majority of Americans still embrace. But corporations are not democracies. They are hierarchical, secretive autocracies, and most have never taken to the idea that working families ought to have a say in how they are treated. Thus corporate executives and lobbyists have worked steadily and stealthily over the years to erode these democratic gains, pushing against them especially hard in the past couple of decades.
Indeed, since the Reagan years, there has been a pernicious campaign by corporate interests and their political enablers to spread the myth that unions themselves are archaic entities, no longer necessary or wanted. Sure, there was a need for workers to get organized back in the bad 01' Depression era, but that was so last century. As the corporatists might put it:
Hey, Bucko, we're all in a modern, global economy today, where we no longer have "workers," we have "associates," and we deal with each of them as independent units, giving America a flexible workforce so we can minimize labor costs and maximize shareholder value. Unions just get in the way of this, don't you see?
This line of self-serving Corporate Think was articulated last fall by John Engler, the former Michigan politician who's now chief lobbyist (and self-appointed labor theorist) for the National Association of Manufacturers. "In the sophisticated workplaces of the 21st century," he lectured, "you see management and labor often work closely together to beat the competition. When they're doing that, the need for unions is obviated."
What Professor Engler is telling us is that ergo, ipso facto, and ad absurdum, he's a gooberhead.
The need for unions is hardly obviated when workers have been dramatically increasing their productivity and generating more national wealth, only to be rewarded with falling wages, plummeting purchasing power, elimination of health-care benefits, and cancellation of pensions. Meanwhile, corporate downsizing and offshoring of jobs are rampant, part-time work is the new norm, and job-safety rules have been sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street's profit demands. Note also that CEOs who so loudly bemoan union wages are paying themselves in the neighborhood of $10,000 an hour, contributing to the widest income inequality seen in America since the 1920s. This gap between the rich and the rest of us now ranks as the worst in the industrialized world.
These realities not only explain why today's workers need unions, but also why there is such a widespread yearning for them. A 2006 poll of the general public by the Pew Research Center found that 68% of us believe labor unions are necessary to protect working families. In that same year, a survey of workers by pollster Peter Hart indicated that as many as 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow--if they could.
See more stories tagged with: labor, corporations, unions, employee free choice act, efca
From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, March 2009. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of the book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. (Wiley, March 2008)
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