There is power in the union

The majority of people working in food industry jobs earn low- to poverty-level wages, do not have health benefits and have little to no chance of advancement, according to a study. The Food Chain Workers Alliance found that only 13.5 percent of those working in farm, food processing, warehouse, grocery store, and restaurant and food service jobs make a living wage. Food system workers use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce the report said. 81 percent of the workers surveyed never received a promotion, 79 percent did not have paid sick days or did not know if they do, 53 percent reported coming to work sick, 83 percent don't receive health insurance and 58 percent have no health care coverage.

"Seven of the 10 lowest-paying jobs in this country are in food service," said Saru Jayaraman, who wrote the report and is director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, which helped analyze data from the survey. "Given that the food industry makes up much of the nation's workforce, and if these are the jobs that are growing and proliferating, we need to be very concerned about the bad conditions."

Together, food production, processing, distribution, retail and service industries sell more than $1.8 trillion in goods and services per year, which accounts for 13 percent of the America's Gross Domestic Product. There are 20 million workers - one-sixth of the nation's entire workforce - in these five core segments of the food chain, and 17 million of them make as little as $18,900 a year. The top-paid eight CEOs in the food system, after combining their salaries, stock options and benefits, earn $200 million, equal to what 10,300 food system workers earn. Joann Lo, executive director of the Los Angeles organization. "So the money is there. They're just not spreading the wealth."

The food industry is a particularly cut-throat evolution of capitalism, in which all human interests are secondary to cost-cutting and price-dropping.

There is a simple reason why all those huge employers of retail and service workers—Target, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Whole Foods, and countless others—are so emphatically anti-union: fear. These companies know that unions represent a sort of power for their workers that their workers will otherwise never have. That power translates to better working conditions and higher wages. That, in turn, eats into a company's profits. Corporations are machines designed to make money for shareholders. They do it well. To expect them to do anything but minimize wages and maximize profit is to misunderstand their nature. 

Governments are controlled by moneyed interests. No reasonable person can expect the the government to use its powers of regulation to serve the interests of workers. If the workers cannot turn to the government to protect them from the unrestrained predations of corporate capitalism, then the workers must find a way to protect themselves. Unless they plan to plunder the stores where they work for guns and start the revolution, then their best tool is a union. A strong union of workers, standing together, is in a position to bargain with a company, because a company needs employees in order to make money. Employees, alone, are in no position to bargain with a company, because employees need to eat. If you've ever asked for a raise at work, you should understand the concept of leverage: to the extent that your employer needs you, you have it, and you're able to get something (increased wages) for it; to the extent that your employer considers you replaceable, you lack it, and therefore have no way to improve your own position. In the retail and service industries, employees lack leverage almost by definition. Anyone who makes trouble can simply be tossed out and replaced. Unions give those employees leverage. That leverage is a means to achieving the value of your labor. It won't be a too big a wage. Any union that bankrupts the employer is a failure, because all the union members end up unemployed. It is in the interest of unions to achieve the best possible conditions for workers that still allow the company to trade competitively. The existence of a union does not throw off the balance of power in the workplace, the lack of a union does.

Draw one line on a graph charting the decline in union membership, then superimpose a second line charting the decline in workers income share, and you will find that the two lines are nearly identical. There must be some mechanism by which the workers can assert their interests. Otherwise they will be crushed by the machine. It's plain to see.