The Workers' Fight

For the fortunate few their are record profits, escalating CEO pay and an ever-growing share of the nation's income. The whole point of capitalism is that one person's labor enhance's another person's capital. After dipping during the Great Recession, corporate profits have now skyrocketed past their pre-recession level. After-tax profits and corporate profits as a share of Gross Domestic Product are now higher than they were in the middle of the last decade, after a similar vertical spike. Americans’ ability to collectively bargain has waned, so has their power to keep all corporate revenue from going to top executives and shareholders. The laws and rights structure of America emphasize the primacy of ownership. Owners' rights extend over the whole of a company's revenue, including salaries. Unions are the one check and balance on their power - the only one. Workers have no other power or right to maintain this necessary balance except to organize and collective bargain. Unions may need to be reinvented but they are indispensable.

Economist Heidi Schierholz of the Economic Policy Institute explains " ..there are few alternatives for workers from which to choose from. The lack of bargaining power is tied to a lack of outside options for employment. That's why the number of voluntary quits is very, very low." Workers don't have much power individually when there is a long line of people applying for jobs extending around the block and that situation undermines the bargaining power of workers both individually and collectively. The government sector has cut 502,000 workers from payrolls. The collective power of workers through their unions has been severely diminished by a set of devastating policy changes, most recently with restrictions on public employees' bargaining rights in Wisconsin and enactment of anti-union "right to work" legislation in Indiana.

The systematic weakening of union power, accompanied by the fierce competition for a shrinking number of quality jobs, has set the stage for wage-slashing by U.S. employers. Starting wages in manufacturing—a mainstay of high-wage, family-supporting jobs—have dropped by 50% in just the past six years. Two-tier and multi-tier wage structures—which freeze the pay and benefits of long-term union members at current levels while slashing starting wages by 40% or more for new workers—have begun to proliferate in the face of labor's weakened bargaining power. Unions have declined due to intentional union-busting from corporations with assists from federal and state governments. Historians have shown that the supposed "Grand Bargain," where companies agreed to unionized workplaces in return for an end to radical workplace action was never accepted by the capitalist class. Corporations repeatedly looked to move their unionized factories to non-union states. When unions proved too popular across the United States and when federal labor and environmental protections began affecting profit margins, corporations lobbied the federal government to promote globalization, first through the Border Industrialization Project that allowed American companies to build on the Mexican side of the border and then through a full-scale race to bottom, as companies traveled the globe looking for easily exploited labor. Recent labor defeats are simply the next round in this corporate assault upon the rights of working people. Capital owners like to keep labor disorganized.

 The United Auto Workers has been forced to accept pay packages for new hires at the Big Three manufacturers that provide half of what new hires got a decade ago. At $14 an hour, new auto workers earn about the same as America's service-sector workers.

General Electric's which enjoyed a 16% increase in profits in 2011 on top of $14.2 billion in 2010 and managed to pay no corporate taxes was able to force its unionized workforce to accept a new system of risky high-deductible healthcare policies and to exclude new workers from defined-benefit pension plans. But nothing is more indicative of GE's new mindset than the recent wage cuts imposed at its non-union plant in Mebane, North Carolina, where veteran workers had earned as much as $23.67 per hour. After being recalled from brief layoffs, long-time workers with up to 20 years of service at GE discovered that their pay had been cut by 45% and that they had been removed from the company's defined-benefit pension plan. In last year's negotiations  GE repeatedly informed labor unions that it viewed $13 per hour a competitive wage in manufacturing.

Toyota's goal has become $12.64 an hour, the median wage for comparable manufacturing in Kentucky, where it has its largest plant, or $10.79 in Alabama, where it is building a new plant.

Unions are necessary. There is no other proven method to ensure that working-class people receive decent wages, safe working conditions, or a voice on the job. Unions continue to provide workers high-quality representation, helping them receive the full value their work generates while protecting them from capricious bosses, hazards on the job (unions were responsible for making health and safety legislation), and harassment from superiors. There are no other known systems that provide workers these benefits. An organization that collects the people together to coordinate how they structure workers' relationships with their employers is necessary for every industry. Without that system, employers hold all the cards. While management possesses the ability to coordinate labor pricing, workers do not. Working classes need an organizational structure that allows them to negotiate pay and benefits. A union structure of some type allows labor to concentrate power is critical to negotiating higher average labor prices. As anyone who's worked for a major corporation knows, you dont negotiate with your manager at review time. You can complain, beg, wheedle or whatever -- but he or she already has decided pretty much what you'll get and unions provide a counter-balance to that management dictatorship. Human Resource departments are ineffective, controlled by my employer. To assume they have any notion of "fairness" or right and wrong when dealing with an individual employee or group of employees is laughable. They are only as fair or as responsible as they are forced by some external mechanism; whether that be PR, government regulation, or, more importantly, employee unionization. In an economy where even having a job is considered lucky, a body willing to defend workers' rights is more than welcomed.

Without stronger unions and more determined workers' resistance we can expect even further acceleration of wage-slashing in America.