Unions have been fighting the 1% vs 99% fight for more than 100 years. Now the rest of us are learning that this fight is also OUR fight.
The story of organized labor has been a story of working people banding together to confront concentrated wealth and power. Unions have been fighting to get decent wages, benefits, better working conditions, on-the-job safety and respect. Now, as the Reagan Revolution comes home to roost, taking apart the middle class, the rest of us are learning that this is our fight, too.
The story of America is a similar story to that of organized labor. The story of America is a story of We, the People banding together to fight the concentrated wealth and power of the British aristocracy. Our Declaration of Independence laid it out: we were fighting for a government that derives its powers from the consent of us, the people governed, not government by a wealthy aristocracy telling us what to do and making us work for their profit instead of for the betterment of all of us. It was the 99% vs the 1% then, and it is the 99% vs the 1% now.
We, the People
Democracy is when We, the People decide things together -- collectively -- for the common good of all of us. Our country originated from the idea of We, the People banding together to watch out for and protect each other, so we can all rise together for the common good, or "general welfare." Collectively we make decisions, and the result of this collective action is decisions that work for all of us instead of just a few of us. This is the founding idea of our country.
Unions Protect the Interests of Working People
The same is true for unions. Unions work to bring We-the-People democracy to the workplace. Like the old story about how it is harder to break a bundle of sticks than the same sticks one stick at a time, unions are organizations of working people, banding together so their collective power can confront the power of concentrated wealth. By banding together in solidarity, working people are able to say, "No, you can't do that!," and bargain for a better life for all of us.
Organized Labor Sets the Standard
The benefits that unions win don't just go to the union members, they become the standard. When labor won the fight for an 8-hour day and 40-hour workweek with overtime pay, that became the standard. When labor fought for minimum wages, that became the standard, when labor fought for workplace safety, that became the standard. Labor's fight is a fight to set the standard for the rest of us.
Labor stands up to the 1%, and uses their organized power (bundle of sticks) to win better pay, benefits and working conditions for the 99%.
"Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts." -- Molly Ivins
Eroded Rights
Working people banding together to bargain with management -- "collective" bargaining -- is a fundamental right in the United States, but this right has eroded along with the rest of our democracy. For many years, the mechanisms of government that were supposed to enforce these rights were "captured" and instead were working against the rights of working people. Bob Borosage explains in "The Forgotten Leading Actor In The American Dream Story,"
Globalization gave manufacturers a large club in negotiations -- concessions or jobs get shipped abroad. And often the reality was concessions AND jobs got shipped abroad. Corporations perfected techniques, often against the law, to crush organizing drives, and stymie new contracts for the few that succeeded. The National Labor Relations Board, stacked with corporate lobbyists under Republican presidents, turned a blind eye to systematic violations of the law.So now union workers are down to about 7 percent of the private workforce. Virtually the only growing unions are public employees -- teachers, nurses, cops. Not surprisingly, conservative Republican governors, led by Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, used the budget squeeze caused by the Great Recession to go after these unions, combining layoffs with efforts to eviscerate the right of public employees to organize and negotiate.
The Fight is on
"Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dorian Warren, at Salon in "America's last hope: A strong labor movement," writes,
The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we've seen in every major policy debate of recent years.Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it's been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why -- a la Wisconsin and 14 other states -- they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.
... Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers' liberty (employers fire workers illegally in 1 in 3 union campaigns for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.
Restore the Middle Class
Unions brought us a middle class, and now that the power of organized labor has eroded we find ourselves in a fight to keep the middle class. Borosage again,
We emerged from World War II with unions headed towards representing about 30 percent of the workforce. Fierce struggles with companies were needed to ensure that workers got a fair share of the rewards of their work. Unions were strong enough that non-union employers had to compete for good workers by offering comparable wages. Unions enforced the 40-hour week, overtime pay, paid vacations, health care and pensions, and family wages. Strong unions limited excesses in corporate boardrooms, a countervailing power beyond the letter of the contract. As profits and productivity rose, wages rose as well.When unions were weakened and reduced, all that changed. Productivity and profits continued to rise, but wages did not. The ratio of CEO pay to the average worker pay went from 40 to 1 to more than 350 to 1. CEOs were given multimillion-dollar pay incentives to cook their books and merge and purge their companies. Unions were not strong enough to police the excess. America let multinationals define its trade and manufacturing strategy, hemorrhaging good jobs to mercantilist nations like China.
The result was the wealthiest few captured literally all the rewards of growth. And 90 percent of America struggled to stay afloat with stagnant wages, rising prices and growing debt.
Support Bargaining Rights for Labor
We all need to understand that labor's fight is our fight. Now that labor is under attack across the country, we need to understand that we are also under attack. As labor loses rights and power, all of our pay and benefits fall back. We need to support the rights of working people to organize into unions and bargain collectively, to fight our fight, the 99% vs the 1%. This battle right now is the whole ball game.
"To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that."
-- Janeane Garofalo
This post originally appeared at Campaign for America's Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.
Sign up here for the CAF daily summary.
Follow Dave Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dcjohnson
Any time in history when we have had neo-liberal economics also know as laissez faire, free-market, labor has had to fight for their rights.
Gilded Age through 1929---Laissez faire ruled the day, Labor stared unionizing against greedy owners.
1933-1979-- neo liberal economics was gone and the middle class grew. We traded with other countries but it was under the Bretton woods agreement.
Now with the Free-market globalization it's time to fight again, against the greedy Davos.
We need regulation on the market.
Davos Man, referring to global elites who "have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations". The phrase refers to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
The former Samuel P. Huntington-- American political scientist professor at Harvard University.
This article is so off the mark. But one little piece of it is exactly correct: "Globalization gave manufacturers a large club in negotiations -- concessions or jobs get shipped abroad. And often the reality was concessions AND jobs got shipped abroad."
Globalization is the problem, absolutely right. We agree. But how are unions the solution? Explain exactly how unions are going to reverse offshoring and bring back manufacturing. The fact is, unions are one of the reasons WHY offshoring is as bad as it is: in tough times, unions refused concessions (unlike German unions) and wanted corporations to take losses unilaterally.
And this is a myth: "The benefits that unions win don't just go to the union members, they become the standard." Do you know the cost of that standard? It is higher unemployment, a direct result of unions!
"... unionization (as well as the minimum wage) frequently produces higher wages at the expense of fewer jobs, and that, if some industries are unionized while others are not, wages will decline in non-unionized industries. By raising the price of labour, the wage rate, above the equilibrium price, unemployment rises. Trade unions often benefit insider workers, those having a secure job and high productivity, at the cost of outsider workers, consumers of the goods or services produced, and the shareholders of the unionized business. The ones who are likely to lose the most from a trade union are those who are unemployed or at the risk of unemployment or who are not able to get the job that they want in a particular field."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_trade_unions#Unemployment
Our problem has nothing to do with unions (they are part of the problem, not the solution). It has to do with globalization, which can only be addressed with changes to trade policy and tax code.
The following can be found in US Code, Title 29, Chapter 7, Subchapter 2, Section 151 of the National Labor Relations Act (1935). Congress recognized the impact that unionization has on increasing wages and stimulating demand when it declared a policy in support of collective bargaining. (Edited to fit in the word limits of this comment):
The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers....substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries........
It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid and protection.”
Those opposed to workers want to make the workers' past their future...
http://libcom.org/library/us-thibodaux-massacre-1887
US: The Thibodaux Massacre of 1887 | libcom.org
"One of the most interesting, and probably least known events in Louisiana history is the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887, the second most bloody labor dispute in U.S. history.
Although most of the blood letting occurred in the environs of Thibodaux, the strike encompassed a larger area. The strike affected sugar plantations in St. Mary, Terrebonne ,and Lafourche parishes. These parishes make up an area known as the "sugar bowl." Thibodaux is the parish seat of Lafourche.
The plight of the sugar cane worker in 1887 was one of back-breaking labor and meager pay. Most field hands were paid approximately 13 dollars a month. They were also paid in script. Script was basically a coupon redeemable only at the company store owned by the planter. The store´s prices were normally marked up 100%. You can see that the worker usually wound up being indebted to the planter. Louisiana law stated that if a worker owed money to a planter he could not move off the planters land until the debt was paid. This law essentially reduced the plantation laborer to the status of serf..."