Labor Power

"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right to work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining." — Martin Luther King Jr.

"What we’re trying to get to is to get Missouri on the map as a place where businesses want to be and where that they would like to locate. National-siting corporations, frankly, they’re taking a look at Missouri and saying, "Are you a right-to-work state or are you a forced-union state?...the other states that are right-to-work states, where they have a freedom to join or not join a union, they’re going to the top of the list. We’re losing out." Luann Ridgeway, a Republican state senator from Missouri

American bankers and big corporations are flush with cash. But in the political world, it is the good union jobs that are suddenly an evil thing. It is the labor movement, and not the banking sector, that is getting attacked. Good old union busting! "State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees," The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse reports. Wisconsin's governor wants to bar state workers from forming unions altogether. Ohio's governor is launching the biggest assault on unions seeking to outlaw strikes by school teachers, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing, and end a rule that mandates non-union construction workers on public contracts be paid union-scale wages.10 states plan to introduce legislation that would bar private sector unions from forcing workers they represent to pay dues or fees.

High unemployment, sluggish economic growth , state welfare cuts...who's to blame? The unions, of course, is the argument. The unions are the enemies of the working man. The working class must destroy unions for their own good ! Unions are the perfect scapegoat: an organization which a mass of disgruntled outsiders can be easily convinced to blame for their own problems (Immigrants are another good scapegoat!). Blaming unions for unemployment is a brilliant stroke of political acrobatics, because it appeals to the very people that would naturally be allies of organized labor: the working class. So the argument also goes, the municipalities and states that entered into pension and benefit agreements with their employees, and then, through poor financial planning combined with the overall collapse of the global economy due to Wall Street's insatiable appetite for handing out subprime loans, found themselves unable to honor those agreements. This, according to some, must mean that public sector unions themselves--not the elected officials who screwed up the states' finances--are evil. Therefore, private sector union workers who are natural allies of public sector unions should turn against them, until they are destroyed. This will benefit you, fellow worker. Uh-huh , we get it! Public sector workers should sacrifice, not those who caused the recession and who are now sitting pretty.It is a race to the bottom.

20, 30 years ago, pension funds, which were supposedly holding the money for the retirees that had already been paid into a system, were largely invested in safe securities. It was usually two-thirds in bonds, one-third in the stock market. But over the years, as governments reduced their pension contributions, they encouraged these funds more and more to invest in the stock market. So, precisely when the market crashes, all these pension funds, because now they are overwhelmingly exposed to the equities market, now suddenly find—reporting historic losses now in the pension funds that now have to be made up. So you’ve got the very politicians who pushed moving these pension funds into the equities market are now having to deal with the consequences, but they want the workers to pay for it. The pension funds got built up as a substitute for direct wages. So, it’s not like these pension funds were on top of what the workers were getting and just icing on the cake. It was what was the very basic condition of work, which is, when you’re finished working, you need to be able to live. Ther is the old saying, "You’re too old to work, but you’re too young to die." The labor movement historically has fought for those pensions, and those pensions have been given in trade-offs against current wages or as some described deferred pay . Had stock prices not plummeted and had the state governors continued paying into the pension fund rather than skipping payments for like 10 years there wouldn’t be this crisis in pensions. The state governments contributed to the problems because they just simply didn’t fund the pension obligations that they had, thinking that that’s somebody else’s problem—the old kick the can down the road. And now all of a sudden it’s the workers’ fault.

The apologists of capitalism say there is a new class war— between supposedly well paid public sector workers on one side and not-so-well-paid private sector workers on the other side.Yet the real class war are those on Wall Street making a million, two million a year, trying to squeeze private sector workers, trying to squeeze public sector workers, by divide and rule.

“Once voters know who’s behind these fights, and that these are the same people who want to dismantle Social Security, and want to dismantle unemployment insurance, and basically want to repeal minimum wage I think they’re going to have a little better understanding of where these things are coming from,” said Naomi Walker, the director of state government relations at the AFL-CIO.

The Secretary-Treasurer of the giant public workers union AFSCME, Lee Saunders explained “The ultra-conservatives are trying to make the public sector the enemy because the private sector is being hit so hard,” he said. A main focus, he said, would be pushing back against “misinformation” on the allegedly lavish pay of public workers. “A lot of that information is dead-ass wrong,” he said.

Working people can organize and form unions. Unions do more than raise wages. They improve working conditions and safety. They provide protection against abuse, intimidation and wrongful dismissal. Non-union employers have to compete, partly to keep out unions, so the existence of unions helps everyone. Unions also have political power, they spend money and mobilize their members to vote. Union members continued to earn more than non-unionized full-time wage and salary workers, with average weekly earnings of $917, compared with $717 among non-union workers. If you have public sector workers stripped of their capacity to have unions and to protect themselves, their living standards will decline but also the public services that people get will decline.

In 2010, the rate of union membership among wage and salary workers was just 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier and down from more than 20 percent in 1983.The number of union members fell by 612,000.15.7 percent of workers aged 55 to 64 are in unions and just 4.3 percent of workers aged 16 to 24 as members.

In the 1940s a third of private sector employees were unionized. Now it's down to just 6.9 percent. Unions only remain strong in the public sector, where membership is 36.2 percent. If you read the papers or watch the news, you will see an anti-public service union story almost everyday. These are the people who teach your kids, pick up the trash, clean the sewers, drive the buses and trains, they're the police and fireman. The stories will tell you their pension fund liabilities will bankrupt the states; that it's unionized teachers who have ruined our schools. Charter schools -" without unions -" are the new favorite charity for billionaires. Businesses have become very good at beating unions. And they're getting better at it. According to Business Week,"over the past two decades, Corporate America has perfected its ability to fend off labor groups." Demonising labour has a long and dirty history in America. Now, in times of trouble, American politicians have fallen back on the oldest stereotype they know: the evil union.

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union explains "The decline in the number of workers who have a voice on the job makes it more difficult to reverse the economic trends that continue to put workers and our communities in crisis."

Workers do not possess any effective countervailing power against Big Business to fight them. Unions used to provide that power. Competitive labor markets have steadily displaced top-down collective bargaining. Competitive for whom? Employers have been steadily gaining at the expense of their employees and the job market for decades. Your average middle income worker has very little real bargaining power anymore, and this isn't due to chance or to fundamental changes in the economy. Rather, it's due to a long series of deliberate policy choices that been made over the past 40 years. The corporations and the rich know perfectly well what the biggest threat to their wealth is, and this is why the steady erosion of labor rights has been, by far, their single biggest obsession since the end of World War II. Not taxes but the unions. And right now it is all about weakening the one sector of union movement that’s still relatively quite strong , and that’s the public sector unions.