The War on Workers

By David Sirota
The San Francisco Chronicle

Monday 04 September 2006

U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige labeled one "a terrorist organization." Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, called them "a clear and present danger to the security of the United States." And U.S. Rep. Charles Norwood, R-Ga., claimed they employ "tyranny that Americans are fighting and dying to defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan" and are thus "enemies of freedom and democracy," who show "why we still need the Second Amendment" to defend ourselves with firearms.

Who are these supposed threats to America? No, not Osama bin Laden followers, but labor unions made up of millions of workers - janitors, teachers, firefighters, police officers, you name it.

Bashing organized labor is a Republican pathology, to the point where unions are referenced with terms reserved for military targets. In his 1996 article, headlined "GOP Readies for War With Big Labor," conservative columnist Robert Novak cheered the creation of a "GOP committee task force on the labor movement" that would pursue a "major assault" on unions. As one Republican lawmaker told Novak, GOP leaders champion an "anti-union attitude that appeals to the mentality of hillbillies at revival meetings."

The hostility, while disgusting, is unsurprising. Unions wield power for workers, meaning they present an obstacle to Republican corporate donors, who want to put profit-making over other societal priorities.

Think the minimum wage just happened? Think employer-paid health care and pensions have been around for as long as they have by some force of magic? Think again - unions used collective bargaining to preserve these benefits. As the saying goes, union members are the folks that brought you the weekend.

The government's numbers explain how unions have helped their members. According to an analysis of federal data by the Labor Research Association, average union members receive a quarter more in compensation than nonunion workers. Eighty-nine percent of union members have access to employer-sponsored health care, compared to just 67 percent of nonunion workers. Unionized workers receive 26 percent more vacation than nonunion workers.

Unions also benefit nonunion workers. That's thanks to the "union threat effect" whereby anti-union companies meet higher standards in order to prevent workers from becoming angry and organizing. For instance, Princeton researchers found in industries that are 25 percent unionized, average nonunion workers get 7.5 percent more compensation specifically because of unionization's presence.

The flip side is obvious: The more corporations and politicians crush unions, the more all workers suffer. It is no coincidence that as union membership and power has declined under withering anti-union attacks, workers have seen their wages stagnate, pensions slashed, and share of national income hit a 60-year low. As Council on Foreign Relations scholars put it, the decline in unions "is correlated with the early and sharp widening of the U.S. wage gap."

Big Business claims union membership has declined because workers do not want to join unions - a claim debunked by public-opinion data. In 2002, Harvard University and University of Wisconsin researchers found at least 42 million workers want to be organized into a bargaining unit - more than double the 16 million unionized workers in America. A 2005 nationwide survey by respected pollster Peter Hart found 53 percent of nonunion workers - that's more than 50 million people - want to join a union, if given the choice.

Increasingly, however, workers have no real choice. According to Cornell University experts, 1 in 4 employers illegally fires at least one worker during a union drive, 3 in 4 hire anti-union consultants, and 8 in 10 force workers to attend anti-union meetings. When workers petition the government to enforce laws protecting organizing rights, they are forced to go before the National Labor Relations Board, which is both run by anti-union presidential appointees, and chronically understaffed so as to slow down proceedings. When Democrats have tried to expand workers' union rights by introducing the Employee Free Choice Act, the GOP has prevented a vote on the legislation.

So when GOP lawmakers pledge their commitment to workers at Labor Day celebrations today, remember - Republicans are waging a war on the very workers they purport to care about.



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Insidious Anti-Labor Bias Hurts Workers
By Joel Connelly
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Monday 04 September 2006

In what I hope was an early-morning miscue, the weekend KPLU newsreader recently told listeners that "labor bosses" were gathering in Wenatchee for the Washington State Labor Council's annual convention.

Defining terminology, on the airwaves and deftly inserted in mainstream media, has been one of the right wing's small triumphs in forging America's new Gilded Age.

Anyone who protests social injustice is a "bleeding heart." Those who commit themselves to its prevention are "do-gooders." "Liberal" is practically a curse word. Anybody who preaches reconciliation is "soft" - on crime, on communism, on "Islamic fascism."

Union officials get labeled as "bosses," while executives who slash corporate payrolls or dump employee pension plans get celebrated as "cost cutters" and "downsizers."

A generation ago, Sen. Robert Kennedy was joining Cesar Chavez as the leader of California's impoverished farm workers broke a fast by taking communion. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was checking into a Memphis motel to continue his support of striking sanitation workers.

Nowadays, vulgar billionaire Donald Trump gets feted on a TV show where his function is to say, "You're fired!"

Labor leaders are lucky to get one network talk show invite a year - on the Labor Day weekend. Talking heads from conservative think tanks get to tell us who counts, and who does not, in the new Gilded Age.

One recent book, "Epitaph for American Labor," published by the American Enterprise Institute, actually argued that the free market has removed the need for workers to organize and assert their rights.

"America today is more than ever an equal-opportunity society where individuals can rise on their merits, a condition that makes unions irrelevant," wrote author Max Green.

Unions are in decline. In 1960, organized labor spoke for one-third of America's work force. John F. Kennedy formally launched his fall campaign before a huge Labor Day crowd in Detroit's Cadillac Square.

"The labor movement lifted up working people - not just union members, all working men and women," the late Monsignor George Higgins, longtime adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote shortly before his death.

Nowadays, labor represents less than 15 percent of the nation's workers: As a union member, I am part of only about 10 percent of workers in private industry who remain organized.

In the Puget Sound area, labor still counts - at times, in places.

The burn barrels that go up periodically outside Boeing's Everett assembly plant signal a union - the aerospace Machinists - that can still sustain a strike, win a fair contract and turn back management's demands for concessions.

By contrast, the 2000-01 Seattle newspaper strike was an unmitigated disaster in its impact on employees and employers alike.

A well led, focused organization - the King County Labor Council - was pivotal in electing Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels.

An initiative sponsored by the State Labor Council is responsible for Washington having a $7.63-an-hour minimum wage, compared with the pitiful $5.15-an-hour federal minimum.

On the minus side, the Service Employees International Union spent more than $250,000 on an unsuccessful 2004 primary challenge to state Rep. Helen Sommers. The Democrats' budget brain in Olympia fought back, and won.

Driving past the SEIU's big purple phone bank trailer - parked off Denny Way - a question often came to mind: Why don't you go pick on a reactionary politician somewhere?

But the value of unions goes far beyond political clout.

If you work in a corner office atop a glass skyscraper, these are the best of times.

The stock market is up. Executive salaries are way up. Even though we are at war, the Bush administration has cut taxes for the wealthy - and wants to cut more.

But if you wash windows or floors in that skyscraper, life is a struggle. It involves taking a second, even a third job.

Even if you are a midlevel employee, chances are that your income has lately gone flat.

"The problem we face is not only a loss of living standards, but a loss of moral standards as well," Monsignor Higgins wrote. "Increasingly our economy is sending the message that it values accumulated wealth over honest work. In this economy it seems that everything is going up - except the earnings of working people."

In the new Gilded Age, and the new global economy, demeaning people does not matter.

Consider the Enron employees who believed reassurances from company brass, only to lose jobs and retirement savings.

Or airline retirees who have seen companies file for bankruptcy protection and dump pension plans.

Or laid-off workers who watch the downsizing boss reap millions in salary and stock-option benefits.

A few years back, a retired Philadelphia laborer told an AFL-CIO-sponsored discussion: "There is no longer the relationship that once did exist between company and employee, where there was a bond, a family type of feeling. Today, it's a 'me' feeling: What's the bottom line? What am I going to get out of it?

"I think that this situation is ugly, not only for us as workers but for us as a country."