[Peace-discuss] right to association, right to a union

[Ricky Baldwin]

Well, Wayne, I appreciate learning more about you.  You have led a very interesting life, for sure.  I could recount some of my life, childhood in a trailer, single mom, or on welfare, without electricity, working on a railroad, etc., but I'm not sure it would enlighten anyone about this specific issue.  I will just point out this concerning your bootstrap story: white people in this country, even poor ones, have hand holds in their long scrabble up the economic cliff that many blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, et al., do not.  They are often subtle - such as an opportunity to drive a tractor as a kid, a face that reassures bankers or potential business partners - and whites do not often even notice that these things do represent a kind of white privilege.  Such privileges often have a nasty consequence in addition to simply excluding others by definition: they impress those who have been able to "make it" or "get by" that everyone ought to be able to,
 if they simply had the pluck and determination of a "winner" - but that's probably not what you meant it to sound like.

The fact is, too, many abusive employers make tremendous profits, as I'm sure you're aware, so I'm not really sure of your point about "getting good results."  Sounds a bit like the old argument that slaveholders didn't really beat their slaves all that much because of their "economic interest" - which is sound BS, as I'm sure you know. 

I'm not sure how you mean a reform like this would "put workers in charge of production".  If only we could.  All the Employee Free Choice Act would do is lessen some of the repression faced by workers in the US every day.  It's largely unreported and unknown, and it's as common as streetlights.  It would be a substantial gain for the workers who face this kind of repression, but it would not "put them in charge."

I assume you're joking about people voting with their feet, too.  I suppose Iraqis who don't like being bombed to smithereens can just vote with their feet, too, likewise Americans who don't like Blackwater, police repression, etc.

I worked with a bunch of laundry workers in Buffalo, for example, who labored under the such hazardous conditions that when I tell people the story, they think I'm talking about another country or another century.  The laundry had very profitable contracts with area hospitals, cleaning linens, gowns,  etc.  The sheets and things were often soiled with human excrement, blood and unidentifiable fluids.  Workers often discovered turds, used needles - even human body parts - in the laundry.  There were no labels or warnings of any kind of what deadly diseases they might face, and not even the basic provision of gloves or safety glasses.

The mostly black, mostly female workforce was routinely harassed by white male supervisors - not just with sexual/racial comments and innuendo, common enough there - but by grabbing employees from behind, etc.  One manager apparently had a predilection for licking a female employee's exposed, sweaty back.

Every day huge bags of laundry swung overhead, weighing hundreds of pounds, suspended on cables by heavy hooks.  Sometimes the bag would fall.  Sometimes the hooks would fall.  Electric wires dangled everywhere, some of them in standing pools of water and other chemicals.  An employee would get "wet shocks" from this.  Exits were blocked, and egress was narrow and obstructed.  Fire hazards were everywhere.  Workers were frequently fired for "insubordination" - voting with their feet? - you see, there was a ready pool of desperately poor, underemployed and unemployed workers ready to step in to replace them.

Of course there are laws against some of these conditions.  However, because of the supremacy of "property rights" in the US Supreme Court, OSHA is not allowed on the premises without permission or a specific court order, which is hard to get.  Employees of course knew that working there sucked, but without an advocate well-schooled in the US labyrinth of rights-on-paper none of it is of much use.

One realistic option that can actually help workers like these is the one they decided to take: they took action themselves.  They banded themselves together in a union, much as we band together to try and interfere with our government's war, torture and other abuses - largely on behalf of the "captains of industry" so to speak.  But the fight was long and hard, as you might imagine starting out from such abysmal conditions.  The employer was ruthless, but the workers were determined.  

At any rate, the point is, and as a good libertarian you will understand it, people in this country are at the moment being denied the right to join unions, as a real right and not just a right on paper, and this law would help.  If a majority of employees at a work site want a union, they can get it.  Then if they can't bargain a contract, a mediator will help.  Employers can express their opinions, but if they attempt to interfere with the employees' free exercise of their rights, there will be penalties, though probably not enough.

And by the way, undoubtedly many workers do not know what they are doing, union or non-union.  Many bosses, too.  How many of us have stories of trying to explain to thick-as-a-post managers or owners how a process works or how to fix it, etc?  Too many to count.  Does the "invisible hand" of the allegedly "free" market weed these out?  Hm, I guess the economic events of the last month answered that, if there were still any real doubts after Enron, etc.

 Ricky


"Only those who do nothing make no mistakes." - Peter Kropotkin




________________________________
From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
To: Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>
Cc: peace discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 12:37:35 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] right to association, right to a union

Ricky,
I don't have any workers.  Its just my wife and I, but if I were
employing someone I would want them to wear the sort of
socks that I told them to, and I would like to be able to fire them
simply because I didnt like their attitude, and I would not
desire the hassle of being second-guessed by some 3rd party for my
management decision.

If they work for me, they are there to do a job and if they wont or
cant do it then I don't need them around.

It sounds like to me that this law you favour aims at putting the
workers in charge of the production.  That might
be ok provided that its their business to begin with, meaning that they
provided the innovation, management and 
sweat to get the thing going.  Quite frankly most of the workers are
incapable of doing that, otherwise they would be
working for themselves in their own shop rather than punching the clock
for someone else.  I don't mean that
to sound belittling or deprecating of others.

I have been self employed most but not all of my  adult life.  I
started driving a tractor on the farm at age 9.  I worked in
the oil field as a roughneck beginning at age 13.  It was dangerous
work but it paid good and I made enough 
money to buy some cows that along with working oil field in summers I
was able to get through college and get 
a DVM degree in 1980.   After that I had my own business in the
countryside for fifteen years.  I have had an
few employees in the office at times.  It's a hassle having employees.
 
I went to China in 1996 and worked a few years for the Chinese
government for $250 (two hundred and fifty dollars) per month.  It cost
me about half of that
for my housing.  I lived exactly as the Chinese live, ate what they
eat, did what they did, washed my clothes by hand.  We worked 7 days a
week most of the time, 
we worked on Christmas day like it was just another day (but I met my
wife the first time working on one Christmas day)
and we frequently worked through the night.  No one ever complained
about work.  No one ever complained that they were cold.
Nobody complained that they didnt have any money.  Lots of times I had
to dig through my desk to find enough money 
to buy breakfast (it cost about a quarter).  We did have some fun
describing in eloquent terms how hot it was.  It got up to 45C (113F)
in the summer of 1997.  Nobody
laid down their work and went home.  We were excited about the work
that we were doing and that was enough most of the
time.  If you got sick, you went to the hospital and they gave you a
combination of herbal and Western medicine
and you got over it.  I had a root canal without anaesthesia.  The pain
was brief but very intense.

After I got married, I did need a better job so I quit the ministry of
agriculture and got a consulting job.  

I do understand hard work and labour and poverty, and although at times
my poverty might have been 
somewhat voluntary, there were times when it most certainly was not.

The coal mines in southern Illinois were unionized.  The workers were
on strike almost more often
than they were employed.  Finally the coal mines were shut down and the
workers either moved away
or got jobs in the prisons.

I really dont know anything much else about unions or union workers
except when I worked for the 
University of Illinois in 2001 to 2004 and the farms were unionized. 
The university farms had cows dying because
the workers didnt know what the  they were doing, er...they needed more
training, and they didnt care and the department heads at the
university didnt
dare fire them.  From what I have seen it doesnt appear that unions are
compatible with agriculture.

From my perspective it looks like excessive regulation and excessive
pressure from unions is driving business out of Illinois
and out of the United States.  I have visited Canada.  It's a real nice
place except that there are so many Canadians there.

If employers are good, they will take good care of their workers.  I
work for some farms who have had the same workers employed there
for more than 20 years.  The manager of the farms treat them like they
are members of the family.

On the other hand, I have worked for people who are abusive of workers
and they typically don't get very good results.
I do have sympathy for everyone in those situations.

I do think that all workers are employed by will, and that it is the
right of the worker to quit and the right of the employer to fire.
If your proposed law is aimed at destroying that relationship, you will
just export more jobs to places where a more satisfactory
production environment exists and further damage the US economy.

Please explain the law you propose more clearly if I have missed
something.

It looks like to me from the research I have done that this bill has
passed the House but got hung up in
the Senate.

Ricky Baldwin wrote: 
Hey folks,


Not sure who’s doing AWARE’s agenda for Sunday
meetings
these days, but I’d like to put an endorsement request out for
discussion.  It’s from Jobs With Justice, to
which AWARE
belongs, and which was instrumental in starting US Labor Against the
War.
 
Jobs With Justice and many other organizations
are currently
pushing – and trying to collect a million postcards in support of –
national  legislation to protect an important
right of
association that has been under severe assault because it threatens the
steep American
gradient of power between employer and employee: a workers’ right to
join with
his or her co-workers in a union.  The
bill is called the “Employee Free Choice Act,” and it’s nothing to
sneeze at.
 
Since 1935, in response to mass uprisings of
workers – many
of them thrown out of work in the Great Depression – the US Congress
enacted
and the President signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also
known as
the “Wagner Act,” establishing the right to form, join and participate
in unions
as the official policy of the US government.  It was a compromise, enacted to stave off a feared revolution
of the
type that other countries had experienced, notably in 1848 and
1917-1925.  It did not cover everyone.  It specifically excluded large classes of
workers – agricultural and domestic workers, both much more numerous
than today
– mainly as a means of cutting out Southern blacks and poor whites from
the New Deal.
 
But in the wake of passage, union membership
increased in
the US 
to over 30 percent, raising the overall standards of wages, safety on
the job,
etc., even for non-union workers.  Union-sponsored legislation, like the OSHA Act in 1970 – which
has saved
thousands of workers’ lives even with its faults, began improving the
lives of
all workers.  But it was no panacea, and
it was certainly not invulnerable to attack from anti-worker forces. 
 
The Wagner Act and its many “reforms” added
afterwards, when
the threat of revolution had cooled, also took the US down a different path
than other
industrialized nations have taken.  There
are two legal doctrines concerning workers that most Americans have
never heard
of, and not because they slept through high school social studies
classes.  One is called the “master-servant”
relationship, which basically says if your employer orders you to do
something,
you have to do it (with some minor limitations, obviously, for illegal
activity, etc.) or you could be disciplined or fired – there are few
exceptions, including civil service regulations for some public
employees, and
union contracts.  
 
Second, workers who are unrepresented by a union
are “employed at will,” meaning they can
be fired “at any time for any reason or no reason.”  Obviously
there are a few legal restrictions
there, too: racial, sexual or religious discrimination, etc.  Can you be fired even if you did nothing
wrong?  Absolutely.  For
voting Democrat or Republican or
Green?  If you’re not a public employee
and you don’t have a union, absolutely.  You can be fired because you wear socks the boss doesn’t like.  You can be fired just because.  Does
this really happen?  Yep - the relative
operation of the employers' "economic interest" can be debated, but it
happens - and there is
nothing illegal about it – at least not in this country.
 
Workers in the US who are eligible for union
rights and who wish
to take full advantage of union protections can’t just sign up and BANG
they
get union rights.  No, workers in the US have
to win an election process – one in which workers could be prohibited
from
union organizing on the job, union organizers could be barred from the
premises
entirely, and employers and managers were permitted to hold “captive
audience”
meetings to slander the union and threaten mass layoffs or plant
closings.  Employers and managers also
frequently call
individuals into the office for a nice, quiet, intimidating “chat,” one
on
one.  Employers frequently fire the
ringleaders if they can identify them, even though this is illegal
(it’s hard
to prove), and hire union-busting law firms to run intimidation
campaigns, spy
on workers, spread rumors and sew any kind of dissent they can think of.
 
Employers may also hire new employees – such as
family
members – who they know to oppose unionization, or to whom they can
promise the
moon, and thus dilute the vote.  They may
also declare that certain employees are “supervisors” and thus
ineligible to
vote, and so on.
 
Penalties for employer misbehavior are woefully
inadequate:
often the sentence is posting a notice in the workplace stating that
the
employer has violated such and such provision, blah, blah, blah.  Penalties for the workers and their unions
who violate guidelines, on the other hand, can amount to one of the
worst
things that can happen, besides being fired and having a pay cut: they
lose
their right to a union.
 
Even if the workers win a union election,
employers may keep
them tied up in court for years afterwards or may refuse to bargain a
fair
contract.  According to the law, if the
union cannot win a contract with the employer there could be another
election
to get rid of unionization, and under the oppressive circumstances that
prevail
the disgruntled employees may change their votes (if they are even the
same
workers – employers often use this time to drive off the strong union
supporters).
 
So what does the Employee Free Choice Act do
about all this?  It doesn’t address all of it.  There are a lot of things I’d like to see
fixed in labor law, primarily who’s eligible.  But one thing it does establish is a right that Canadians, for
example,
take for granted.  If more than half the
workers at a workplace want a union, they get it.  Period.  They sign a card or petition and it’s done.  If
they don’t want a long drawn-out expensive
election, rife with intimidation and legal battles, they don’t have to
have to
do it that way.
 
The bill would also strengthen penalties on
employers who
coerce their employees or otherwise violate their right to join a union.  And it establishes a mediation and
arbitration if workers and their employer cannot agree on a first
contract.  But the main provision is
establishing the
much beleaguered right to unionization in the first place, and
employers are
already fighting tooth and nail to block this bill.  That says
something, right there.

 
AWARE can help by endorsing this campaign.  It costs no money, just a decision.  And I’ll bring postcards for anyone who’d
like to sign one.  Thanks.
 
Ricky
 
 
"Only those who do nothing make no mistakes." - Peter Kropotkin



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