I was never a big organized labor guy. My only experience with unions in my formative years is the shutdown of the local Alcoa plant in Vancouver, WA, sometime in the late '80s, and the subsequent hard times we faced after they moved that production to some foreign place that didn't have standards for wages and workplace safety. I didn't have anything against unions, per se, but they seemed like something from my father's time, nothing to do with me.
But I was wrong then, and all it took to convince me was going through some hard times in my dad's place, raising a family on crap wages, abused by bosses who could easily replace me, working hurt, working sick, working unpaid, all to keep a job that only barely put food on the table. To keep a job that constantly assured me that it wouldn't keep me if I stepped out of line, got uppity, or just plain earned too much seniority. They were big on firing people who'd earned raises for the flimsiest of reasons.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union managed to organize our store within a year of its grand opening. I have to admit, I wasn't particularly thrilled. It was $50 a month dues out of a check that was already a couple hundred short of what we really needed. But some of the least bearable conditions started changing right away as the union rules kicked in. We were no longer forced to work overtime. Managers couldn't threaten to fire us, couldn't call us at home when we were sick and browbeat us into working anyways. We got paid for every second on the clock. We got breaks. And best of all, me with a wife and a sick baby, and a lot of pain from repetitive motion and assorted dents and dings from work, we had healthcare.
I won't say organized labor saved my life, but only because I've never been fond of hyperbole. But I will say that going to work was getting harder and harder everyday, wondering how long I could last, knowing my fate was scrawled across the scowling face of the store manager, a mean, unrepentant sadist whose scruples could be readily described as reptilian. The union didn't save my life, but it's damn sure they kept me in my job, kept me from arbitrary termination, which kept my in my house. They didn't save my life, but they made my life livable, and that made all the difference.
So I provided a short history of labor, its effect on the US economy, its perilous position in today's hostile climate below the squiggle. I wrote it a couple of years ago, when Card Check was trying to make its way through the Congress, and it wasn't looking good. And since you know the story of how that went down, I excerpted those parts for brevity. I hope you enjoy it.
Forty years ago, roughly 35% of America's workforce was organized under collective bargaining contracts. Studies have consistently showed that for every union job there are two non-union jobs that benefit from prevailing wage and compensation packages that mimic what organized labor has negotiated. Basically, for the forty-year span from the end of WWII until the middle of Ronald Reagan's first term as president, the American middle-class saw consistent gains in their standard of living and in their share of aggregated capital as a direct result of the overwhelming muscle of the unions. Since there was near universal prosperity, American business thrived as well, with consumer spending steady and plenty of cash flowing in a robust economy that only faltered when Paul Volker, then Fed Chairman under Reagan, raised the federal funds and prime rates drastically to combat what was termed "stagflation" by the press.
Anti-union business and political leaders leaped on that opportunity to push the meme that the recession was a result of American business's inability to compete due to union strangleholds on the manufacturing sector. This is the era that gave rise to the first generation of conservative pundits that delivered coordinated talking points from the RNC. While the American public was being asked to accept the notion that they were the problem, Ronald Reagan was deconstructing the Fair Labor Standards Act. Reagan's first substantial shot across labor's bow came in '81 when he fired the entire striking aircraft controller's union (PATCO) and hired a new staff comprised entirely of non-union scabs. He followed that up by appointing virulently anti-union ideologue Harold Dotson as the National Labor Review Board chairman, which served as the starting gun for private industry to bust up any and all nascent union organizing efforts. That paved the way for mega-corporations, such as WalMart, to maintain a highly illegal no-tolerance stance against union organization without fear of government interference. What FDR and Congress had built as a foil for unchecked worker abuse after the Great Depression was dismantled by a doddering Alzheimer's sufferer in a short eight years. Workers have never recovered, and the "average American" is now three years salary in debt to the banks that are receiving federal bailout money.
The results of the past 20 years of anti-union dominance in Washington D.C. are striking. Wage stagnation has pushed solidly middle-class sectors into poverty wholesale. 45 million Americans are without health care. 14% of American workers are working one or more part-time jobs because they can't find full-time work. Class mobility trends almost exclusively downward. 95% of all American wealth resides in the portfolios of only 1% of its people. Workers who are caught organizing unions are routinely fired without recourse. The American economy that George W. Bush continually asserted was strong excluded almost all of the American people.
This is the new normal, if we allow it. If we stay passive, keep our heads down, look the other way as our civil rights are redacted to exclude the fundamental tool we have to fight rampant corporate power, then this is the new normal.
The Daily Kos has a new editorial group, Daily Kos Labor. If you're at all interested in returning America to Americans, raising median wages, lifting people out of poverty, and checking the corporatists and the neocons, you should follow them and pay attention.