Originally this was just one "kinda out there" article in a little union organizing pamplet I wrote a while back and have yet to put out. I recently chanced across this particular article and thought maybe it belonged somewhere like this instead.
It is no more, or less, than just one man's musing on the most important question of our age: How do we save ourselves and our planet from this probably terminal illness of unending corporate egos and greed?
Let me start with this little disclaimer. The opinions I am about to express here are not yet generally accepted in the Labor Movement, However, as more and more environmental awareness comes to the general public, it is, of course, beginning to affect the views of union membership and should eventually be reflected in Labor’s goals and objectives, in Union leadership, in bargaining and organizing strategies and in overall Union tactics towards socio-economic change.
Most people are aware, whether they agree or not, that the overwhelming majority of scientists, or at least the majority of those who did not get their degrees from the University of Blind Faith, now believe that if major changes are not made in our industrial societies, we are going to cause serious climatic disturbances within the next 50-100 years.
Without trying to divine the future or scare anyone, I would point just a few of the scenarios that have been cited. Sea levels will rise several feet as polar ice melts flooding many coastal cities and regions here in the U.S. Population displacements similar to those that happened with hurricane Katrina in 2004 could become rather commonplace, particularly along the southern and eastern coasts. In addition, significant changes in weather patterns are likely to occur in many inland regions. These could cause major disruptions of the agricultural strategies on which our now largely urban societies depend. Worldwide, the troubles could be even greater. A shifting of the monsoon rains away from southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, for example, could easily lead to the starvation of a billion plus people. Under these circumstances, it is almost certain that desperate wars will break out between nations, or even between national regions, all over resources as basic as water and agricultural land. Disease, fed by large migratory populations and widespread malnutrition, is almost certain to run rampant. Clearly this is not the future we want for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.... but unless we act to change NOW, it is the legacy we are likely to leave them.
Many would ask why I put the blame for the dire ecological straits humanity finds itself in on the corporations alone. There are three answers to this question:
- Internationally, the corporations hoard and control the overwhelming majority of the Earth's capital, material and human resources. This alone gives them the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that humanity successfully adapts to changing environmental conditions and that the unique bio-diversity of this planet is preserved. If we are ever to carry human civilization beyond the earth itself, probably several centuries from now given the vast technical challenges associated with the colonization of space, we are going to desperately need that bio-diversity in order to make other, very different, worlds our own.
- The corporations, taking the profit motive to absolute absurdity, are actually creating all of these environmental problems. In the products they make, in the methods they use to make them, in the vast quantities of resources they waste through the "disposable" form of consumerism that they promote, and in their blind obsession with the next fiscal quarter, they are totally responsible for the ecological catastrophe that is coming, and that they are most often too short-sighted to even see.
- For sixty years the corporations have had the tools and techniques by which the literally billons of individual changes necessary around at millions of facilities around the world might be made to get us to the critical goal of Sustainability, the point at which our modern civilizations can be maintained in balance with the Earth's natural processes. The methods I am talking about here are those first developed by Deming, Juran and others in the economic devastation of post World War II Japan. Often referred to as Total Quality Management, 4th Generation Management, Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, Quality Management Systems, and a considerable number of other names, these methods and principles have been widely toyed with by the corporations and actually applied in many places, but never holistically, only in scattered bits and pieces as corporate executives and managers have picked and chosen what parts of the Quality ideology would fit into their own fundamentally quantitative management techniques. Therein lies the problem.
After more than a half-century of exposure to the concepts, tools and methods of Quality the most fundamental truth of Quality is still not widely understood or accepted. This truth is an exceedingly simple one and is as old as humanity itself. It is this: Humans make superior long-term economic decisions when they do so in small groups or "teams" through consensus decision making without any single individual being "in charge". In a fully developed Quality management system, and currently there are none that I know to exist, there can be no such thing as hierarchal authority. All decisions from the natural work group level, to the department level, to the plant or facility level, to the various subdivisions of the corporate level must all be made through small group consensus. This is how it worked at the band, clan, and tribal levels of the hunting and gathering cultures of our long forgotten ancestors and this is how we must organize ourselves socio-economically if we ever are to live, like them, in balance with the Earth's natural processes.
It is not hard to understand why this truth is so hard for managers and corporate executives to swallow. They clearly understand that if real Quality management systems ever evolve, that each and every one of their petty little chiefdoms must fall. But in the greater ecological scheme of things all of them are truly petty, from the head of the smallest department, to the CEO of the largest multinational corporation, they are the sources of the institutionalized fear that Deming and others so warned us about. It is this fear that prevents the 99% buy in from all stakeholders that we truly need to make all the changes we need to make in the very short period we need to make them if we are to reverse the environmental destruction we are causing. We have to become vastly more efficient, and the quantitative form of management that these industrial chiefdoms represent simply have too much waste built into them for that to happen. This is just in the nature of any form of authoritative productive system and this has been true since the birth of agriculture, when mankind first began utilizing systems of quantitative production.
In short, the all powerful CEO or manager must go the way of the all powerful king or noble. They must either vanish entirely or be reduced to figurehead status. And of course, they are all opposed to such ideas. They would prefer to cling to the wealth, power, titles, and/or delusions of self importance of their stations, even if by doing so they are waging unrestricted ecological warfare on our grandchildren or great children, and their own as well.
Clearly they are going to need considerable amounts of "help" in making the decision to do the right thing. They are going to have to be forced to give up their power. In theory governments might be able to make them, through legislation, if the vast economic influence with which corporations worldwide pervert democratic governments could somehow be overcome. But we are seriously up against the clock here. Even if all the necessary changes could somehow be legislated in the next fifty years or so we have left before we reach the tipping point, there would still be the problem of enforcement. To ensure that all companies were complying with law would require massive increases in the size, funding and power of the governmental agencies responsible for enforcement. In the U.S. alone the EPA would likely need to be the size and have the funding of the Department of Defense.
Practically speaking, government is not going to save us. We must save ourselves. And the only cultural institutions other than government who have ever had any historical success in resisting Big Business internationally have been Unions. The corporations well know this. This is why they have been seeking to drive unions into extinction here in America since the Regan era. Labor is the only real check to their near absolute power over mankind.
It will not be an easy thing even so. In America, and even more so in many other countries, the law is clearly stacked against Labor. It has always been so. Under the so-called "management rights" doctrine of the NLRB for example, management has the right to mismanage facilities right into plant closings or even bankruptcy. Still, through strikes, boycotts, hard bargaining, and other legal and sometimes not-so-legal methods unions have historically proven themselves capable of successful resistance, even when the law itself must be overcome.
Quite frankly, as great as the odds are against workers around the world uniting and acting to prevent the massive ecological destruction on the horizon, it is still probably our best hope. The only other chance is worldwide revolution of the type Marx and Engels promoted so long ago, most probably to occur in our children's or grandchildren's generation, but given the levels of modern military technology and the historical cost of such revolutionary movements, the blood price of this will be absolutely horrifying. It will still be less of a blood price than if the corporations have their way, though, and are allowed to seriously diminish the Earth capacity to support life at all. Still, if it is within our power, we owe it to our descendants to absolve them of such a terrible necessity and the only means we have of doing so is through unions.
The coming together of the environmental movement with the Labor movement is a thing that is both desirable and necessary. Both desperately need each other. Labor needs the fire, passion and vigor of the youth who are much more concerned about things like global warming than older workers tend to be. Thus "Saving the planet", one shop...or office.... or warehouse...or whatever, at a time, is the cause that could re-galvanize and re-invigorate the Labor moment. The environmental movement needs Labor even more perhaps, because only Labor can offer a legal, non violent means of stopping production and drying up profits in order to get the attention of the corporations who are, in one form or another, the chief contributors to nearly all of these problems. Indeed, this marriage of the environmental and Labor causes worldwide may be our only hope, other than bloody and uncertain revolution, of preventing humanity from mass-producing, mass marketing, and mass profiteering ourselves right into extinction.
Now I know that all of these ideas are somewhat grandiose. Who am I to believe I have the right to address them at all? For all I know Jesus may really be coming back "very soon" as the evangelicals would suggest, or perhaps the world really will end in 2012 as so many internet junkies seem to believe. I am not quite arrogant enough to entirely discount either possibility. But if, in fact, the sands of history do keep flowing, humanity is going to have to deal with these problems, one way or another, and very soon. The corporate executives who control nearly all of the Earth's resources are not giving the matter much thought, so people like myself must, as vastly under qualified as "we" may be.
Clearly, someone has to do something.
So I would say this to my coworkers here at (censured...for the time being at least), and indeed, to workers of all types all over the globe:
Join or Form yourselves into a Union. Fight for better pay, benefits and working conditions, for a voice in your work life, for workplace fairness, justice and dignity. But also fight to transform these maladaptive corporations into environmentally responsible corporate citizens before it is too late, so that vast numbers of our descendants may not have to perish solely because of corporate egos and greed.
Even the lowest of the animals make great sacrifices to ensure that their descendants survive. So if we must endure the ridicule or threats of our bosses and co-workers in forming a union, or brave the hardships of strikes, or if we must lose our jobs, or go to jail, or ultimately, in the final resort, even sacrifice our lives, so that our descendants might live.... then this is simply what we must do.
In all of our alleged superiority over the other creatures of the earth surely we can be at least this "human."