The class struggle on the job

In 49 of the America’s 50 states there is no law requiring a just or reasonable cause for employee termination. Most Americans can be legally fired for almost any reason. Private sector workplace relationships tend to operate under the standard of employment-at-will, which means you can be fired for the color of your shirt, your political views, supporting your favorite sports team or for refusing to fetch your boss a cup of coffee. The Bill of Rights does not apply to your office. Any union contract worthy of the name will include a just-cause clause, protecting workers from arbitrary termination while leaving room for management to act in case of economic necessity or poor job performance. But 93.4% of private sector workers don’t have a union, and serve at the whim of their employers.


Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits “employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” (But not sexual orientation: Only 21 states have anti-discrimination laws on their books, and it is still legal under federal law to be fired for your sexual preferences or gender identity.) The National Labor Relations Act theoretically protects workers trying to form a union or engage in “other concerted activities for the purpose of…mutual aid or protection,” but the law is notoriously weak and its sanctions rarely deter employers. In 1987 the legislature passed the Montana Wrongful Discharge Act, which states that (after a six-month probationary period) a worker can only be fired for a good reason, like “failure to satisfactorily perform job duties, disruption of the employer's operation, or other legitimate business reason.”

Roughly 150 Americans die on a daily basis as a result of their jobs, a new study from the AFL-CIO has discovered.
In addition to the 50,000 workers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates die a year from work-related disease, the union found that about 4,700 workers were killed on the job in 2011. Those numbers combined produce the 150 deaths per day tally. 3.8 million Americans suffer work-related injuries and diseases each year. Experts cited by the AFL-CIO estimate that underreporting may put that number closer to 11 million. At current staffing levels, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration could check the country’s 8 million workplaces once every 113 years.
Workers are a commodity to be had at the lowest price and to be discarded at will. The sustained war on workers has left unions trying to prevent rights from being weakened rather than setting the agenda.

Now they want to take away the 8-hour day and 40-hour week. Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 is the law that brought us the eight-hour workday and the 40-hour workweek. Workers literally fought and died to secure these concessions from employers. This law does not prohibit employers from requiring workers to work over 40 hours but obliges employers to pay overtime at an enhanced rate. H.R. 1406, The Working Families Flexibility Act, which lets employers offer "comp[ensation] time", time off, instead of overtime pay which of course reduces the amount workers can earn. You can't use comp time when you want to, only at your employer’s discretion.

Capitalism always, always, always puts downward pressure on wages. The less they pay us to do the work, the more they get to keep. It's simple as that. The capitalist will never give up until unions are abolished and workers have to take whatever work they can get underwhatever working conditions the greedy employer decides to impose.