Unions Battle New Age Robber Barons

After a year in which the majority of Americans suffered the effects of recession, including tens of thousands who lost jobs because of rising unemployment, hundreds of thousands who lost homes in the subprime mortgage crisis and millions who lost their shirts because of unrelenting gas price hikes, Merrill Lynch & Co. informed us last week that, by contrast, the rich still got richer.

Merrill found that the number of dollars in millionaires' bank accounts grew faster than the number of millionaires did, a trend expected to continue. The average wealth of the world's richest was more than $4 million, the highest it has ever been, according to Merrill. They're an elite club -- one-fifth of one percent of the globe's 6.7 billion people.

That was last week. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the strike against Phelps Dodge Corp. The Fortune 500 copper company conspired with Wharton School faculty members to devise a plan to destroy the miners' union, as well as several Arizona towns where they lived, and the middle-class way of life supported by their union paychecks. The corporation -- the guys with all the money, the guys who actually owned the homes, grocery store, hospital, even the bowling alley in the Arizona towns of Ajo and Morenci, the guys who had the power to get politicians to call out the National Guard and teargas citizens -- those guys won.

The nexus of the two -- the millionaires and Phelps Dodge -- is lessons learned by the labor movement in the quarter century since the Fortune 500 firm succeeded in withdrawing money from paychecks of middle class people who actually manufactured things and placing it instead into the hands of that tiny percentage of millionaires at the top. To succeed now, unions must be able to stand toe-to-toe with global corporations on their own turf, which means in many cases unions too must be global, must accrue substantial capital and must be intellectually nimble because strikes alone clearly won't win these contests anymore.
From the Phelps Dodge ordeal, my union, the United Steelworkers, which represented the copper miners, learned to be wary. We learned to be prepared so we would not be jumped again by the likes of Phelps Dodge, a corporation bent on a union's utter destruction.

In this quarter century, we recognized the essential power of capital. Global corporations clearly have it. And they can raise more when they want it. Goodyear is a perfect example: When the tire firm wanted to deny benefits earned by loyal retirees and to turn its back on workers whose earlier financial sacrifices had helped it return to profitability, Goodyear went to Wall Street in the fall of 2006 and got itself a $1 billion loan to try to break our strike. Unions now must have the foresight and solidarity to develop strike and defense funds well in advance that are substantial enough to respond when corporations waltz up to Wall Street or Bay Street or the equivalent financial district in any major city in the world and nab the loan they want to smash a union.

Also over these past 25 years, we realized the power of solidarity with our brother and sister union members internationally. This proved crucial in contesting global corporations such as Gerdau, the 14th largest steelmaker in the world, with 45,000 employees, more than 300 industrial and commercial facilities in 14 countries including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the U.S., Spain and India. When Gerdau Ameristeel CEO Phil Casey decided he wanted to break our union and locked out 300 of our members in Beaumont, Texas in May of 2005, we responded by taking the fight global with the help of the Brazilian Confederation of Metalworkers, CNM/CUT, with whom we had an alliance. The Brazilian steelworkers knew exactly what sorts of protests would most annoy and embarrass the Gerdau family in their hometown in Brazil. Later the Brazilian workers joined steelworkers from the U.S. and Canada at a demonstration in the Toronto, Canada financial district just before a Gerdau annual shareholders meeting at which the president of the Beaumont USW local spoke. Ultimately, Gerdau replaced Casey as CEO and we got fair contracts.

We have similar alliances with four other unions internationally. And, this week, at our convention in Las Vegas, we will sign an agreement with the UK-based international union, Unite the Union, to create the first global union, comprised of 3 million active and retired workers from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and Ireland, ready to meet the challenge of bargaining with global corporations.

Still, in addition to all that, we need moxie, ingenuity and brilliance to win. That one-fifth of one percent of the world's 6.7 billion people is willing to spend a lot of its wealth to hire Wharton School professors and law firms to bust unions. They pay lobbyists to get laws changed in Washington, D.C. to make it harder to unionize and more difficult for us to get fair contracts. They've succeeded in doing that during the entire two terms of the Bush administration. They're willing to spend what is really a pittance to them in order to ensure that they'll keep getting richer. And, as a result, the middle class will continue to evaporate in this country.

So we've got to use everything we've got, every ounce of our verve and wits to fight back. And we've done well, frankly, when we have. Look at two recent cases. One is the Esmark buyout by OAO Severstal and the other is the U.S. International Trade Commission's affirmative vote on sanctions for circular welded steel pipe from China.

Finally, last week Esmark announced it would sell to OAO Severstal, a decision that the Steelworkers had wrestled with Esmark for months to achieve, while fending off Esmark's attempts to deal with another company. In the typical sale of a company, the union would not be involved, but the Steelworkers had the foresight long ago to get provisions in contracts to obligate companies to include them in what are called successorship and right-to-bid clauses.
The USW's most innovative negotiators, corporate researchers and lawyers got those provisions in contracts and secured a win before the ITC. The ITC ruled in June that the U.S. industry producing circular welded pipe was injured as a result of imports from China, allowing imposition of antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese circular welded steel pipe.
It is a new century now. We look forward to electing a Democrat to the White House. The presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, is a man of hope. And we hope that Congress will pass and he will sign the Employee Free Choice Act to ease unionization and that he will begin to turn around eight years of Bush administration persecution of labor unions.
In the meantime, as the rich get richer, we must remain vigilant. Because unions are the stewards of the middle class, we must ensure our viability. We must nurture and grow our solidarity. We must become financially formidable. We must be intellectually intimidating. We must be globally encompassing.

Comments

[molderic]

HuffPost's Pick

I am glad to see a union blog on HPost.
Blue collar workers sent their kids to business school, who became hired guns to kick mom and dad out of work.

I'm a union electrician, since 1969. We must organize every level below the nosebleed section into unions. My wife, an IT project manager, doesn't think she's a worker, but a professional. Banking, insurance, health care, construction and law professions need to organize all workers. Then they may be less willing to undercut their working blue collar brothers and sisters.

Want to eliminate poverty, cut crime and drug/alcohol abuse? Organize. People with good paying jobs don't need crime to get by.

Americans, by a one percent majority, want to belong to unions. Why don't we have more union members by percent of the workforce? Because unions depended on the government for support and protection, and that dependence was betrayed.

Big labor must become international, robust, creative, inspirational. I agree with your premise. We need to inspire, strengthen and broaden the horizons of american union members as well.

[Mike169]

Nice post. I have to say though that in 1977 with a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress the Labor Reform Act was defeated. It was an Act that would put some teeth into the law (the Taft-Hartley ant-labor act) which to this day allows for union busting by managements without serious punitive damages. Additionally under this president Bush reporting of union finances and activities has reached an oppressive state. No one ever hears about these things because no newspapers report anything but strikes, labor corruption, and picket line violence. I often hear that "unions are no longer necessary". If anyone thinks that this is so ought to take a close look at their workplace - actually it doesn't even take a close look any more. Management's in most workplaces pretend to care for their workers but the expendable unit of any workforce has, unfortunately, become the worker.

[Binckeslaw]

My recollection is that Carter's proposal passed in the House but was fillibustered by the Republicans in the Senate. The failure to enact Carter's attempt at labor law reform was the real turning point in labor's fight to level the playing field that Taft-Hartley altered in management's behalf. The PATCO situation was just a logical consequence of its defeat. People forget what Carter tried to do for America's unions as frequently as they forget that he proposed strong alternative energy programs that were scrapped by Reagan on day one.

[stack]

Molderic,
I hope you are a leader in your electricians union. You clearly have the talent and passion necessary.

[dadw5boys]

OUT OF WORK?

BECOME A UNION ORGANIZER.

After all these years the middle class has been repeating the HATE UNIONS motto of the Big Corporations now need those Unions to keep their standard of living. I find this espically funny since most of the middle class were college educated. Guess the Educators forget to tell them about the robber barons.

[MagisterLudi]

The ONLY way to fight multi-nationals is with union power. In countries where unions are strong: Sweden Denmark, Israel, the salaries are high and so is the general standard of living.
If corporations can go international, so should most unions.

Workers ( blue and white) of the world, unite!

[Mike169]

It would be nice if unions could go international - that, after all is a Marxist concept (First International etc.). Unions are allowed to operate only in their own countries whereas corporations - read this as those who write the laws in this country - can relocate anywhere they can get in. They get in, of course, as beneficiaries of US military power.
Unions have working relatonships with many European unions and this, at times, gives US unions a little bit more leverage when dealing with multinationals. Think about this when you're contemplating union power and lack of it. The US spent trillions of dollars fighting "communism" from the late 1800's to the late 1900's. If you know a little about unions you will know that the US unions were in the forefront of that effort taking money from the government to undermine legitimate uniuon creation in Europe, Asia and Latin America. That's the only way American unions were allowed to operate "internationally" at that time and I suspect that the right wing of this country continues to hold the unions down except for them to do their bidding.