Jay Gould, the 19th Century dastardly Robber Baron, once said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." He'd be smiling right now. We see people being pitted against each other every day--whether its private sector workers complaining about public sector workers' pensions, or parents and teachers tussling over a crumbling public education system. And, now, I'm very worried that the economic crisis is going to create deep, wounding fissures in the labor movement with long-term damage for mobilization to oppose the unrelenting class warfare in the country.
In the area of so-called "free trade", at least two unions--my own union, the UAW, and the United Food and Commercial Workers--have announced that they are supporting the so-called "free trade" deal with South Korea. I wrote extensively about this in an open letter to my union. Near the end of the letter, I asked:
Sure, each union, for the price of its support, can get a few concessions in any so-called "free trade" deal. We can get jobs some jobs. I certainly can imagine, given the dire predicament of UAW members, that any promise of some jobs is welcome.
But at what price?
Is the price of a hammering down of wages worth it—because that is precisely what will happen if we continue to let the NAFTA-style of trade grown and mutate.
Is it worth letting another NAFTA-style deal pass which is a link in a chain that connects tax cuts for the rich, the growing divide between rich and poor, the decline of union power, and Wall Street greed?
In New York, there are now two very severe, horrendous examples of a breakdown in labor solidarity. First, the building trades are apparently joining up with our newly elected governor, Andrew Cuomo, and the business community in an alliance to attack the public sector unions over wages and pensions.
Let me repeat that: one sector of the labor movement is going to be a willing participant in an attack on another sector of the movement. Working people fighting working people--Jay Gould's wet dream.
Their trades have suffered 20 percent unemployment in the economic downturn, and the union argues that healthier state finances and lower taxes will spur development and construction work.
And while, on average, the construction workers earn more than their union brethren in the public sector, they have the rankling perception that government unions have not shared in their recent suffering.
"We’re advocating for a fiscally sane economy in New York," Mr. LaBarbera said Thursday. "This is not about bashing public-sector unions. But without a fiscally sound environment, we will not be able to attract new businesses to the city; we’ll continue to lose business."
The construction trades don't see, or have erroneously chosen to believe, that the fiscal crisis is somehow the result of wages and benefits of public sector workers.
This is pure nonsense. It is phony.
But, it is the direct outcome--inevitable outcome--of an obsession about the debt/deficit, an obsession fed by the president and too many Democratic leaders.
I recently wrote in "It's Not Raining, We're Getting Peed On: the Scam of the Deficit Crisis" that we don't have a debt or deficit crisis at the federal level.
The state can't print money--but there is no debt crisis here either, nor in any other state, if we actually returned to a sane system where the wealthiest paid their fair share. Two years ago, I wrote about the state finances, in response to our outgoing governor's foolish rhetoric about attacking workers' pensions:
We could wipe out the budget deficit--or, certainly trim it down to something trivial--by raising taxes on the very wealthy and going back to a more progressive taxation system that we had in the 1970s. You know this: if the state replaced the existing rate structure (consisting of 5 brackets with rates ranging from 4.0 to 6.85%) with one consisting of 14 brackets with rates ranging from 2.0 to 15.0%, we could bring in $6-7 billion more, and perhaps as high as $11 billion.
Even The New York Times pointed out:
"...there is surprisingly little evidence to support the proposition that rich New Yorkers would bolt if forced to pay higher income taxes."
But, the construction trades have been mislead, fooled and distracted by the rhetoric of "generous" pensions.
Instead of going where the money is--the rich--one wing of the labor movement is now under the impression that the only way to get its slice of the pie is to jump on a bandwagon that wants to run over and eviscerate thousands of hard-working people.
Honestly, I want to weap.
You think that isn't enough? Check this out.
The Walton family has got to be one of Jay Gould's great ideological keepers of the flame. He'd be proud of the Waltons:
Wal-Mart has at least 80 class-action lawsuits in dozens of states pending against it.
Wal-Mart abuses women, and is the defendant in the biggest sex discrimination case in history.
Wal-Mart is a habitual tax-dodger.
Wal-Mart's heirs buy expensive paintings but won't give their workers decent health care.
Wal-Mart sued a disabled women, demanding she give back money she won in a settlement.
Wal-Mart exploits children in Mexico.
And, now, apparently the same construction trades are going to help the very same Wal-Mart open a store in New York City--in opposition to a long-standing alliance of labor and community groups. From The Wall Street Journal today:
Wal-Mart's effort to open its first stores in the city still are being fiercely resisted by unions that represent retail and grocery store workers, who protest the retailer's wages and opposition to unions.
But the talks with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York indicate a divide-and-conquer strategy for labor by the world's largest retailer, which has been ramping up a public and political push to clear the way for its entry into New York City. While the retailer might use union laborers to build new stores here, it could still use nonunion retail workers to staff them.
This is disturbing at many levels. Wal-Mart is the example of a company that does not play by the rules, nor is a company that has the best interests of the country at heart. It will break rules whenever it can.
Wal-Mart would prefer to have a very high value of the dollar--which hurts millions of working Americans whose businesses can't be competitive in the export world--because a high dollar keeps labor costs low in China, where Wal-Mart produces most of its products, and, then, those products come into the U.S. on the cheap--and swells the bank accounts of the already fabulously rich Waltons.
Wal-Mart is a company that profits on poverty. It sells to people who shop there primarily because they can't afford to shop elsewhere--and it employs people at wages and benefits so low that people are so poor...that they have to shop at Wal-Mart.
Once those construction jobs are gone, the legacy of Wal-Mart will live on for a lot longer--a legacy of poverty and exploitation.
I want to acknowledge the challenge of any union in the vicious world we live in. It's a cutthroat economy. The rich get richer. And the Darwinian fight for survival gets more harsh.
But, I also want to echo the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller who criticized German intellectuals who ignored the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s:
"In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up."
What will happen when the employers come for the construction trades? Or what will happen when they come for the autoworkers...or any of us? Without the unity to understand that we must stand for each other--even in the face of the temptation to get a few crumbs--we will all end up paying the price.