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Can labor unions make a comeback?
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An editorial in the NY Times last week is well-timed for consideration for today, Labor Day. The editorial address how awful workplace conditions are in some of this country's economic sectors. Entitled "Workers in America, cheated," it's a reaction to what the Times calls "the most comprehensive investigation of labor-law violations in years," conducted by the Center for Urban Economic Development, the National Employment Law Project and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The researchers sought out "people often missed by standard surveys" and found abuses everywhere: in factories, grocery stores, retail shops, construction sites, offices, warehouses and private homes.
As I read the editorial I kept thinking of Charles Dickens. He'd have had a field day writing about some the treatment suffered by American workers at the hands of their employers.
This is particularly painful because American workers are the most productive on Earth. They do not get six weeks of vacation as they do in many European countries or even 19 as they do in Canada. The Average American gets 13 days vacation a year, if they get any paid vacation at all. One quarter of American workers get no vacation at all.
Yet, squalid working conditions can be found everywhere in the workforce: factories, grocery stores, retail shops, construction sites, offices, warehouses and private homes. In the editorial said, "The word sweatshop clearly is not big enough anymore to capture the extent and severity of the rot in the low-wage workplace."
Workers told of employers who ignored the minimum wage, denied overtime, took illegal deductions to pay for tools or transportation, or forced them to work unpaid before or after their shifts. More than two-thirds of them had endured at least one wage violation in the previous workweek. More than a quarter had been paid less than the minimum wage, often by more than $1 an hour [less]. Violations typically robbed workers of $51 a week, from an average paycheck of $339.
The report paints an acute picture of powerlessness. Of workers who had been seriously injured on the job, only 8 percent had filed for workers' compensation — a symptom, researchers said, of the power of employer pressure. Although 86 percent of respondents had worked enough consecutive hours to be entitled to time off for meals, more than two-thirds had had their breaks denied, interrupted or shortened. Workers who complained to bosses or government agencies or tried to form unions suffered illegal retaliation: firing, suspension, pay cuts or threats to call immigration authorities.
To say the least, the Times editorial calls this "morally abhorrent." Another point we should put on the record:
The report has particular significance for immigrant workers, who made up 70 percent of the survey (39 percent of them were undocumented). Workplace abuses are flourishing in the absence of a working immigration system, where illegal immigrants are vital to the economy but helpless to assert their rights.
The report upends the argument that the way to help American workers is to make illegal immigrants ever more frightened and exploitable. Only by protecting all workers will the country begin to rebuild a workplace matching its ideals of decency and fair play.
The Haymarket Riot of 1886
That's certainly not true. Look at the economic excesses of a Bernie Madoff, or the incredible excesses of Wall Street in the slicing and dicing of mortgage deals to the point where they brought the world's economy to the brink of collapse.
The free market system needs oversight. It's not capitalism; it's the capitalists. They can't be trusted. The free market system cannot be left alone on its own. There is no protection in the free market system for people who will be victimized by the rapacious, who use the system to their advantage and don't care about anybody else.
And the same can be said about the matter of labor. I've wondered over the years why labor unions have continued to lose clout in this country.
It was inevitable to some degree that unions would lose their luster. As the American political pendulum began to swing to the right in the 1980s and the country took a more conservative turn, labor unions became less attractive to people.
There was a time, too, when labor unions engaged in excessive behavior that didn't do their cause any good: violent behavior, criminal behavior, rumors of collaboration with organized (seen Jimmy Hoffa lately?).
Some of these conditions sound like throwbacks to the 1920s and 30s. It raises several questions: Why is this tolerated, and why is there no protection against it. In fact, the larger question here may be: Why haven't people in these kinds of working conditions turned to labor unions as a way of regaining some clout and protecting their livelihoods.
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Troops guarding the railroads during the Pullman Strike
In the last quarter century or so, unions have declined. In 1984, 20 percent of the American workforce was unionized. Last year, 12 percent.
How is this happening given the findings of the report cited in the NY Times editorial? Why would employees working in unfair, deplorable, even illegal conditions not consider a labor union? Or more to the point, why isn't the union looking to unionize workers who have something worth fighting for: Better working conditions?
Have unions faded that badly? Are they more harm than good? And with only 12 percent of American workers in unions, why should the rest of us care? Professor Clete Daniel, a labor expert at Cornell University, says a revived labor movement could benefit workers both in and out of unions:
There is definitely a need for forces that promote a fairer sharing of wealth," he says, noting that the gap between America's rich and poor is the largest it's been since 1928. Over the last 75 years, unions helped secure benefits like unemployment insurance, Social Security, and the 40-hour workweek. These admirable goals does not excuse labor of the tactics they have used to damage the economy and hindrance they have caused the United States in its struggle to remain economically competitive.
Yet, earlier this year, Mike Eastman with the Chamber of Commerce, argued that "unions have outlived their usefulness. Employers know they need to offer certain benefits and good wages to keep good workers."
How can that be true given the findings of the report? People say that government should run more like a business. You mean like the businesses in this report: Paying people less than minimum wage, denying overtime and lunch breaks, taking deductions out of their pay for using company tools or transportation. And worse, victimizing undocumented workers because you know they can't fight back.
This is an argument in the illegal immigration debate I've never understood. I can't imagine the people who say they are pro immigrant workers not wanting to straighten out the system if, for no other reason, than because the way the system is now, chaotic without the implementation of existing rules and regulations, illegal immigrants are easy prey for the unscrupulous who employ them and cheat them on a regular basis.
Nor can I imagine why the people who say they are anti-immigrant workers not wanting to straighten out the system if, for no other reason, than because the way the system is now, chaotic without the implementation of existing rules and regulations, illegal immigrants can cost Americans jobs.
So on this Labor Day, 2009, what do you say in the face of this editorial in the NY Times, particularly if you are one to defend the free market as the best way for free men and women to thrive --what do we say in these kinds of excesses? And what do we do about it? And then, how can it be that labor unions have not gotten stronger and stronger in the last 10 years as these kinds of excesses have proliferated throughout our society? How can that be?
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