Since conservative orthodoxy has turned out to be voodoo economics after all, now would be an excellent time to unmask its demonization of labor unions as yet another con job that big business has pulled on the American people.
You know the knock on big labor. It's bleeding the private sector. The health care benefits and pension plans it has extracted from the private sector are ruinous to global competition. Its contracts prevent bad workers from being fired. Unions are losing members, they're losing power, and as a sign that organized labor is in its death throes, its number one goal -- the price it's extracting for helping Democrats win -- is stealing the right to a secret ballot from American workers. Is nothing sacred?
This menacing caricature of labor is standard Republican dogma, core CEO doctrine, conventional Washington wisdom, kneejerk media narrative and a traditional Beltway litmus test of Democrats' neo-liberalism, common groundism, post-partisan centrism, and countless other euphemisms for a willingness to shaft the workers who voted for you.
A massive corporate PR onslaught now under way is attempting to convince Americans that unions want to bring Soviet-style tyranny to the American workplace. The proposed Employee Free Choice Act, you see, is a dangerous threat to democracy. If this bill passes, when outside activists try to force the workers of a company to unionize, those workers will no longer be able to cast secret ballots. Instead, unions will force workers to vote in public, leaving them vulnerable to intimidation and retaliation if they don't knuckle under to the labor goons.
What a crock. This case -- this one-note war that Chambers of Commerce are waging on the Employee Free Choice Act -- is a textbook disinformation campaign. Whether Americans fall for it will be a measure of whether corporate propaganda in a post-derivatives, post-bubble, post-masters-of-the-universe era still has juice.
Here's how organizing actually works under current law. To unionize a workplace, a union has to get more than 30 percent of that company's workers to sign cards saying they want the union to negotiate with management on their behalf. The union gives the cards to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which certifies them and sets a date for a vote within 42 days.
During this period -- which the company can drag out for years via NLRB extensions and appeals - the balance of power between management and labor is ridiculously lopsided. Owners enjoy a monopoly. While pro-union workers can only post literature in break areas during break time, employers can distribute anti-union information anywhere and at anytime. While owners can enforce a total ban on employees' even talking about unionizing outside the break room, bosses can hammer away at how bad unions are at mandatory staff meetings. Management can threaten workers, and unleash professional union-busters in the workplace, and can claim that unionizing will shut down the work site. At one-on-one meetings, supervisors can tell employees that "a union is a declaration of disloyalty to me personally and an affront to everything the company stands for." When at long last election day arrives, the polling place is right on the job site, where workers can be forced to run a gauntlet of grim supervisors who will watch their faces as they mark and cast their ballots. Under these circumstances, it's a miracle whenever the organizing side tops 50 percent and gets a union. This is the fabulous process that big business says that big labor wants to take away from workers.
But here's how it would work if the Employee Free Choice Act were passed. To organize a workplace, a union would have to get more than 50 percent of the company's employees to sign cards saying they want to unionize. Those cards would go to the NLRB for certification, and then -- well, and then it's all done: the union would be recognized.
In other words, the right to a secret ballot that business says labor wants to steal is actually business's right to a protracted unilateral campaign of intimidation.
What's more, the Employee Free Choice Act says that if workers want a secret ballot election, they can have one. That's right: there's nothing in this legislation that would stop employees from casting their votes in private. The difference is that under the Employee Free Choice Act, the decision to call for a secret ballot election would be an option exercised by workers, rather than a union-crushing privilege that management automatically exercises.
Over the past few months, pretty much all of the Reagan credo has proven to be delusional. The magic of the marketplace, the holiness of deregulation, the good of greed, the genius of "supply side" tax cuts, the wisdom of the wise men of Wall Street: except for the Gipper's famous smile, precious little of Republican fundamentalism has withstood reality's recent assault. All that remains of conservative orthodoxy is the most massive transfer of wealth from the middle and the bottom to the one percent on top since the Pleistocene era. That, plus the slander that Americans' rights at work are a grave threat to freedom.
Their bonuses may have been capped, their jets grounded, their securitized mortgages and credit default swaps unmasked as tulipomania. But there is an obdurate arrogance in the financial power elite that no clawback has yet reached. It reared its head in their attempt to crush unions and break contracts under cover of rescuing the auto industry, and it was apparent in the threat by their wholly owned Senators to derail Rep. Hilda Solis's (D-Calif.) nomination as Secretary of Labor because she supported the Employee Free Choice Act.
Workers who belong to unions are as patriotic as any other Americans. Across the economy, unions are making painful concessions to keep their employers in business. In the wake of this economic meltdown, maybe it's time to put to rest, at long last, the conservative canard that respecting workers' rights to unionize and to bargain collectively is tantamount to a communist coup d'etat.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and e-mail me there if you'd like.
You are 100 percent right,but the RNCorp still has the single most powerful tool. Talk Radio.
Let Rush keep his 20 million dittoheads,but the 1000's of parroting like minded hosts of talk radio in local markets has to be broken up. No other media outlet has the ability to repeat and reach 10's of millions every day all day.
EXAMPLE 2million for O'Reilly is a good day and he is one of the more successful cable guys.
The only hope is for the FCC to brak up the monopoly and diversify ownership at the local level.
https://unionshop.aflcio.org/stickers_c42.cfm
http://www.parade.com/export/sites/default/news/intelligence-report/archive/does-america-still-need-labor-unions.html
The union had brought in an organizer to sell my co-workers on voting for a union. He and a couple of his spent weeks making threats that my home and family would be in danger from angry union members if I didn't join.
I passed the information to management and told the union henchmen that they would be the first people to suffer if anything unusual should happen to my home and/or family. I never joined.
Since then, unions have been all but wiped out by the growing power of the corporations and their paid flunkies in the media and government.
The pendulum has swung way to far to the other side now... corporations are raping the workers with fewer worker protections, loss of pensions and benefits, shipping jobs overseas, and a myriad of other ways.
Unions CAN serve a number of good purposes as long as a balance between the union and the corporation is maintained. Having EITHER too strong destroys that balance and kills the goose that lays the golden eggs.
"We the people" have already shown that we can make changes in government if they refuse to listen, and it's time we made one hell of a lot of noise about Congress passing this "Secret Ballot' bill... among other things.
"Over the past few months, pretty much all of the Reagan credo has proven to be delusional."
What is wrong with signing the cards, having a reasonable time to debate, and then casting a secret ballot? Again - If you think the company controls too much of the debate process - fix that - don't eliminate the last step.
Thank You.
Will the administration's efforts be pushed through int he middle of the night in Congress and we all wake up to no Social Security benefits? The silence on this is deafening.
We have to hear about it from across the pond:
Democrats rebel against Barack Obama's overhaul of Social Security
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5792733.ece
Remember the Alternative Minimum Tax?
As I see more of the devastation that is Michigan since the loss of union jobs,and the peripheral economic benefits that the non-autoworkers enjoyed because of the auto industry employees,I am convinced that the GOP(especially in MI) is hell-bent on reducing us to the status of the Deep South. Even local business owners,most of whom have been successful because of the money spent in their stores/businesses/et al by autoworkers,still rail against Unions and their membership,and yet still expect us to patronize them. Effin' amazing.
Until ALL workers come together,and realize their collective power,we will always be at the mercy of Corporate Rulers. Until business owners realize that a populace with economic power(you know,the former middle-class) is their lifeblood,and that union members used to make up a lot of that populace,they will continue to revere the notion that unions are bad for business. The sooner these awakenings occur,the sooner common sense will prevail. I ain't holdin' my breath...
At least the "deep south" as you snidely refer to it is not begging the rest of the country for handouts. We need to once again embrace sustainable business, or we have none at all, it is despicable to have the tax payers on the hook for everything that fails. And just like the Soviet Union, eventually the tax paying folks run out of money floating an unsustainable business stifiling nation-state, then you collapse.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html
Notice, MI is receiving $0.92 for every federal tax dollar. 6 of the top 10 states are in the deep south. So, your statement that "At least the 'deep south' as you snidely refer to it is not begging the rest of the country for handouts." is false.
There are so many small companies already knuckling under, i know a few, and if they were forced to be unionized, they would fail. And a lack of business choice hurts everyone.