Setting the Record Straight on Unions

The recent economic meltdown has brought some slimy little creatures out from under the rocks.  Our political system, with its reliance on mass media, has spawned a new species of commentators and pundits...sometimes called "talking heads."  These creatures take the events of the day and "spin" them to conform to their particular political bias.  A common tactic in the case of negative events is to assign the blame to people of opposing views or political persuasions.  In the case of a positive event, they seek to assign the credit to their heroes, even if they had nothing to do with the events in question.  In recent years, this has been refined to a fine art, particularly by the Republican political machine, which is well-oiled with virtually unlimited funds from their various sponsors.  These include mega-corporations, fundamentalist Christian organizations, and far-Right-Wing think tanks.  The Democrats have a few competing organizations, but they are dwarfed in comparison to the Republican juggernaut.

The overall strategy is usually to flood the media with a mass of disinformation, confusing the voting public, and then to hammer home a series of lies and distortions that promote their particular point of view.  Using the strategy of Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, they rely on endless repetition of the lies.  History has shown that, as Goebbels predicted, if lies are repeated often enough, some of the people will believe them.  The disinformation machine was in particular evidence during the recent Presidential election, when it spewed forth blatant lies claiming that Obama was a Muslim, a terrorist sympathizer, an illegal immigrant, a communist...and a lot more.  It was gratifying, and somewhat surprising, to see that the American public saw through most of this garbage and rejected it. 

The current economic crisis has many causes, but most analysts of ALL political persuasions would agree that the major cause is wild and irresponsible speculation in financial markets.  This can be directly traced to a deliberate and concerted effort by financial institutions, and their well-rewarded representatives in Congress, to undermine or destroy the regulations imposed on them after the Crash of 1929.  The history of this is well known and acknowledged by economists and financial analysts who have studied the events that led up to the present situation.

There are other unrelated and semi-related causes of our predicament.  The explosion in consumer debt, the great real-estate bubble, etc.  But the creatures under the rocks saw an opportunity to hang a scapegoat label on one of their most hated enemies...labor unions.

This opportunity presented itself when the Big Three domestic auto manufacturers appealed for financial assistance.  Financial institutions had asked for the same kind of help and the creatures had only words of praise.  Eight hundred billion for Wall Street?  No problem.  But twenty five billion for Detroit!  No way!  We can't afford it!  And besides, it will just reward those greedy, lazy, overpaid union workers.  Let 'em go down the tubes!

Accompanying this was a barrage of anti-union rhetoric about $70 or $80 per hour wages for UAW workers.  This was quickly refuted, but it didn't even slow down the deluge.  When it was shown that union and non-union workers in auto plants made essentially the same wage, that fact was ignored and shouted down.  When the difference in TOTAL labor costs was shown to consist mainly of insurance and retirement benefits, and that most foreign countries, where competing auto manufacturers operate, have national health insurance and pension plans, those facts too were ignored or distorted.  When it was pointed out that including the costs of pensions and health care for retirees in calculating the wages of current workers was grossly misleading, the spinmeisters pirouetted away and changed the subject.

And now, they are trying to give their anti-union campaign a historical foundation by blaming unions retroactively for the '29 Crash and the Great Depression that followed. 

Too many lies!

It is time to set the record straight on unions, and what they have done for the middle class in this country.

Here is a bit of history from the Library of Congress Learning Page:

In the early 1930s, as the nation slid toward the depths of depression, the future of organized labor seemed bleak. In 1933, the number of labor union members was around 3 million, compared to 5 million a decade before. Most union members in 1933 belonged to skilled craft unions, most of which were affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

The union movement had failed in the previous 50 years to organize the much larger number of laborers in such mass production industries as steel, textiles, mining, and automobiles. These, rather than the skilled crafts, were to be the major growth industries of the first half of the 20th century.

If unions were not a major force in the early 20^th century, how could they be responsible for the Depression? 

Here is a Wikipedia site that exhaustively examines the multitude of causes for the Depression that have been advanced over the years.  Nowhere in this lengthy enumeration is there the slightest suggestion that labor unions had anything to do with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression

So when did unions become a major influence on labor?  Only after FDR was elected, and government policies were changed to encourage union membership.  But that was in the middle of the Depression, so it was hardly a cause of the Depression.  By then, FDR's New Deal economic stimulus programs were working, and unemployment was dropping.  And then WWII put an end to the Depression, with the massive government spending for production of war materials.

The era following WWII was a true economic boom, and it also saw the greatest growth in union membership.  The growing power of unions enabled them to negotiate decent salaries and benefits for millions of workers, resulting in huge increases in consumer spending and the standard of living for Americans.  These were the salad days for the American middle class, and boom times for the economy.

Since then, unions (and the middle class) have been in slow decline, but this accelerated during the 80's with Reagan's outright hostility toward unions, and the subsequent growth of international "free trade" which put American labor at a huge disadvantage to lower-paid foreign workers, who worked for industries that were often subsidized by their governments.  The resultant "hollowing out" of the American middle class has happened as labor unions lost their influence.  The result, sadly, is that our nation has become an oligarchy, with a small group of rich and powerful people controlling everything, especially the media.  The rest of us are fed a constant stream of propaganda and disinformation by that media designed to keep us in our proper places as serfs of our new lords.

Naturally, labor unions represent a threat to the power of the elites, and so there has been a deliberate and concerted effort to discredit unions, to discourage union membership, and to make labor organizing efforts as difficult as possible.  This effort has been very successful.  Union membership has fallen from about 30% of workers in 1970 to 12% in 2006.  Meanwhile median income for unskilled and semi-skilled workers has been falling steadily, while the profits of their employers, and particularly their top executives, have risen dramatically.  Workers' pension and healthcare benefits have also declined.  Could the decline in compensation for American workers be a result of the decline in union membership?

To recognize how important the labor unions have been in improving the lot of the American worker, here is a little more history. This is taken from an essay by historian Howard Zinn called, "Perspectives on a Living Wage."

"In the late 19th and early 20th century the country was controlled by corporate wealth. There were great monopolies of oil, steel, banking, railroads; JP Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller, and all their workers were being treated in the most miserable way, and at every economic crisis it was the working people who were suffering. When there was an economic crisis in 1893, the children of the working classes of the cities were dying in huge numbers of disease and starvation.

"The IWW, formed in 1905, was in good part a rebellion against the conditions of working people. They organized in the mines; they organized in the mills. Their most successful organizing was done in 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with a textile strike of mostly immigrant women and girls working in the mills whose wages were being cut. The women and girls went on strike, and the IWW went in there to help them. And while most strikes are lost - most strikes are desperately lost - but enough of them win to tell workers that yes, if you persist and if you don't give up, you can defeat even the great corporations. That's what happened in 1912 when the workers and the IWW defeated the American Woolen Corporation in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

"The '30s were an amazing period of working class organization. That's when the CIO - the Congress of Industrial Organizations - was formed. That's when the sit-down strikes took place, an amazing new tactic of strikers, not leaving the factory and walking the picket line and facing the police, but staying in the factory and holding on to the property of the corporation and demanding that their union be recognized and that the conditions be changed. This was a high point in the organization of the American labor movement and the working class movements.

"All of this is a history that is now continuing, I think, with the movement for the living wage that's taking place across this country. While the labor movement itself is not as powerful or as well organized as it was in the '30s and '40s, working people are still rebelling against their condition, and very often community people - whether it's students or other people in the community - are working along with these people in factories and mills and the janitors and bus drivers to get a living wage. So it's a long saga which still goes on."

I shudder to think what the working conditions would be like in American factories if it were not for the unions.  Capitalism, at least as it is practiced in the United States, has many virtues, but compassion for workers is not one of them.  Instead, the attention of the owners of business is focused on maximizing profits.  With no opposing force, they will relentlessly drive down the cost of labor with no regard to the health or safety of the workers.  Labor unions are absolutely essential to balance this force and give workers a chance to live decent lives.

Even in non-union shops, the influence of the unions is felt.  Toyota pays wages in their auto plants that are comparable to those paid in union plants in Detroit.  Why?  If they failed to "compete" the workers would quickly organize (or at least threaten to) to force the company to provide equal pay.   If the Detroit plants go under, you may be sure that Toyota, Honda, Nissan and all the rest of the non-union shops will drop their wages in a New York minute, and their workers will suffer.  Those non-union workers should be enthusiastically supporting the bailout for Detroit!

Every union hater has his favorite story of lazy, featherbedding union workers.  Unions, like any other organization of humans, have their faults and frailties:  Unreasonable "work rules," corruption, and yes, even excessive wages and benefits sometimes.  But I will say this to workers who disparage unions and wish for their demise:  Be careful what you wish for.