labor movement – Page 2

Job-focused, but not labor-focused

President Barack Obama appears to be turning his attention to creating jobs.

One might think that, given the state of the American economy and the pain being felt by the American worker, that it would have been a prime focus of the first two years of his administration. I would argue that it was, though he was unsuccessful largely due to an unwillingness to buck the Washington consensus or castigate Republicans, creating a stimulus that was too small and too focused on tax cuts to actually do much good.

So now, as Paul Volcker steps down as an “outside” economic adviser (not exactly sure what that means, unless it refers to the fact that Volcker was basically ignored), Obama is creating a new panel that will be charged with creating jobs.

And at its helm will be General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Mr. Immelt will be chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that Mr. Obama intends to create by executive order. In a statement issued shortly after midnight, Mr. Obama said he wanted the council to “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.”

Immelt said that the panel will include a broad range of economic players, including labor, but it is unclear what role the people who actually do the heavy lifting will have. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the panel or the president will do much if anything to address the serious power imbalance that has developed in recent decades between labor and management or the decline in union membership that has plagued workers for years, an imbalance highlighted in a column by David Leonhardt in yesterday’s Times (and the focus of an upcoming column by me in The Progressive Populist). The “basic structure of the American economy,” which has led to three jobless recoveries in the last 20 years, is “an important factor,” he says — and one made all the more devastating by the imbalance of power between labor and management.

Relative to the situation in most other countries — or in this country for most of the last century — American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees, letting them go when they become a drag on profits and relying on remaining workers or temporary ones when business picks up.
Just consider the main measure of corporate health: profits. In Canada, Japan and most of Europe, corporate profits have still not recovered to precrisis levels. In the United States, profits have more than recovered, rising 12 percent since late 2007.

For corporate America, the Great Recession is over. For the American work force, it’s not.

I’m hoping that Immelt and his panel can help, but unless labor has more than a token seat at the table I just don’t expect much to happen.

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Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Dispatches: Movement needed to revive labor

Dispatches on the labor movement — or the need for a new one — is finally up.

Where have all the union members gone?

Union members used to make up between 35 and 40 percent of the private-sector workforce; now, according to most estimates, fewer than one in 13 private-sector workers is in a union.

That sharp decline offers as good an explanation as any for what has happened to middle-class wages over the last four decades.

So, rebuilding the labor movement would seem to be key to rebuilding our economy, leveling wages and improving the lots of those who do the work.

How to do that? Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas but not a lot of unity among unions and even less of a favorable atmosphere among business or government.

Unions were hopeful that the Obama administration would bring with it a new union-friendly approach. But it has done relatively little to improve the ability of workers to organize. Card check — the chief reform sought by the major unions — appears dead, at least for now. And rather than using the government’s new stake in the auto industry to bring unions to the table, to empower workers, the administration attacked them, forcing a renegotiation of contracts and making the United Auto Workers the poster child for what the Detroit carmakers had been doing wrong.

The failure to reignite the union movement has surprised some, given the explosion of union growth during the 1030s. Fear, according to one North Jersey labor attorney, is partly to blame:

Nancy Erika Smith, a prominent labor union attorney, says she is “disheartened” by the “go it alone” attitude of many workers.

“Everyone seems so afraid to join together and help each other,” says Smith, whose office is in Montclair. “It’s a time when people should want to stick together.”

Contrast that with the Great Depression, for example, when hard times spawned labor aggressiveness — the founding of the United Auto Workers (1935), American Newspaper Guild (1933), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (1937), the predecessor of the Communications Workers of America (1938).

“Hard times drove people together to offer mutual protection,” she says.

Another North Jersey union leader, David McCann of the Service Employees International Union, points to a different kind of fear: Fear of change, especially as it revolves around race and the loss of privilege.

McCann sees the divisions over health care and other issues as surrogates for a much larger, if silent, fear. The fear of change represented by the election of a black man — “a black man with a funny name,” says McCann — to the presidency.

“A lot of this is code — this is racial. The election was easy, but now those with an interest in defeating this president are resorting to unsaid fears about change,” he says.

This may be true, but any analysis of that earlier period of union growth has to reflect the aggressive organizing that took place over the first three to four decades of the 20th century, the apathy that came with success and the impact that the red-baiting of the 1950s had on the radical critique that had been a staple of the earlier labor movement.

Union growth in the 1930s was not just a product of the economic times, but a culmination of the efforts of hundreds and thousands of workers demanding their rights and working to alter the one-sided social contract under which they lived.

Their success altered the definition of what it meant to be working class, with factory workers suddenly finding themselves earning middle-class wages and moving into quiet suburbs. One result was a shift in the labor movement from improving the lives of the laboring classes to a business unionism in which individual unions focused only on the lives and wages of their members, ignoring the organizing side and creating a disconnect.

When middle-class labor jobs started to disappear in the 1960s — at a time when minorities began to claim their own piece of the American dream — the movement crashed and burned. It was a two-decade process, but one that has left labor wandering in the desert.

So, don’t expect the bad times — or even card check — to reverse the losses. The labor movement has to begin to think of itself as a movement representing all workers again. It is going to be a painstaking process that will take the movement outside of its traditional industries to white-collar jobs and immigrant and minority communities.

Unfortunately, that means we’re still several years away from a real rebirth of labor in America.

Free choice for workers

Frank Askew offers a powerful rejoinder to the corporate folks who are opposing the Employee Free Choice Act:

But as the renowned Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once reminded us, the life of the law is not logic, but experience. And experience has demonstrated over the past many years, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which allegedly guarantees workers the right to organize unions, is irretrievably broken.

I speak with some personal experience in such matters. I spent the 95th Congress (1977-78) as special counsel first to the House labor-management committee and then the Senate labor committee.

What was even then apparent to any open-minded observer was that national labor law was nothing but a hunting license for employers to prevent union organizing. All they had to do was harass union organizers, fire union supporters and drag out elections forever, all with the help of highly paid and skillful anti-labor consultants.

Of course, those tactics were all illegal, and eventually the employers would pay fines, sometimes even large fines, but that was small change compared with having to sign a union contract. They might even have to rehire some of their fired employees years down the road, but by then the wind had been removed from the sails of the organizing drive.

The result, he says, has been the steady decline of unions and the wages of all workers.

Hence the need for EFCA:

The National Labor Relations Act, a major component of FDR’s New Deal, by permitting union organization of major U.S. industries, provided an important stimulus to the economy in the late 1930s and post World War II era. That was before employers discovered the many tactics to avoid the law. Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act could again provide a stimulus to the economy as the nation struggles to emerge from its current financial crisis.

Auto bailout plan as anti-union cudgel

We have an auto bailout. The broad outlines:

The plan pumps $13.4 billion by mid-January into the companies from the fund that Congress authorized to rescue the financial industry. But the two companies have until March 31 to produce a plan for long-term profitability, including concessions from unions, creditors, suppliers and dealers.

The bailout plan sets “targets” rather than concrete requirements about what those concessions may be, meaning that Mr. Obama and his advisers have enormous latitude to decide how to define long-term viability.

It includes, of course, a little gift from the anti-labor Bush administration to the UAW:

Already, Ron Gettelfinger, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said he was “pleased” that the administration acted on the loan requests, but said the President added “unfair conditions” that singled out blue-collar workers.

Mr. Gettelfinger said the union expects to appeal to Mr. Obama to alter the expectations for wage and benefit cuts. According to Treasury Department officials who drafted the wording, Mr. Obama would be free to change the requirements and loosen the standards, especially on how much workers will have to give up.

Empty Wheel offers this:

The President of the United States just dictated that American corporations pay their employees significantly less than the employees of foreign owned manufacturers. And/or, he dictated that American corporations pick the pocket of their senior retirees.

The union wage target, Empty Wheel adds, is part of an effort to break the union and require that “employees of American-owned companies make significantly less than the employees of Japanese-owned companies.”

Bush is demanding is that the UAW lower wages plus pensions to the level of Japanese wages plus pension (though since they have very few retirees, their pension number is basically zero). Alternately, they could lower this number by basically picking the pocket of a bunch of seniors, by taking away pension money those seniors already earned while they were still working. But one or the other will have to happen.

“In other words,” dday at Hullabaloo writes, the plan creates a race to the bottom because

the UAW must take wages and work rules that are the same as non-union plants, and since “wages” include benefits and legacy costs, and the Big 3 have quite a bit more of those than their Japanese counterparts, this would depress wages FAR BELOW non-union plants.

It’s a pretty bald move by an outgoing president who had told Congress that he had supported its earlier bailout plan, which did not include the union clause.