which side are you on? are you pro-union or are you opposed to unions? chances are if you are a democrat you favor unions for the most part and if you are republican you are for busting them up. i am always surprised by my republican friend's willingness to support an agenda which favors the wealthy when they are clearly in the middle class. (when they are in the upper class, it merely makes more sense.)
at blue diamond the union buster's pounded two themes: strikes and dues. it worked, too. the vote at blue diamond was against the union by nearly a three-to-one ratio. in spite of statistics anyone who can browse the internet can access, which will show that union workers enjoy greater wages, benefits and treatment, across the board, than their non-union counterparts, blue diamond employees voted against their own interest.
make no mistake about the proposed aid to the big three auto companies. the reason richard shelby and others remain opposed to the idea of making a bridge loan to these companies, (or any other form of aid,) is because they want to take this opportunity to break the united auto worker's union. in addition to the $70 per hour auto worker myth, which continues to be bandied about in the media, even after the agreement reached saturday for some funding senator bob corker of tennessee continues to ask auto workers to make sacrifices, as if it is the workers who caused this mess.
- as if the auto workers repealed glass-steagall.
- as if auto workers traded in derivatives.
- as if auto workers collected ceo salaries.
- as if auto workers kept the workers at foreign auto plants in tennessee and south carolina and alabama from unionizing.
- as if auto workers offered those foreign auto companies all those great deals to move to whichever state they ultimately chose to move to.
bob corker has access to all this information just like you and me but he continues to parrot the party line because he is beholden to big business, the wealthy, nissan and volkswagen. the fact is foreign auto companies have flourished in the united states in large part because of the subsidies given to them by southern states to attract jobs, in many cases at costs that clearly outweigh the benefits.
for obvious reasons, the foreign auto companies are attracted to these right-to-work states. while you may notice the link i inserted there is to the afl-cio's website, common sense should tell you that the only leverage workers have against their wealthy employers is the ability to band together annd to threaten solidarity, which is to say, to strike if negotiations are not fair and commensurate with the value employees add to the business.
in the united states, unions have lost a great deal of their strength over the years. however, the best example we have of effective unions are those of the major sports leagues' players. in these unions and their collective bargaining agreements we can see how a fair and mutually prosperous deal can be reached.
major league baseball players have went out on strike a couple of times and when that has occurred, the multi-millionaire owners have been hurt. (right where the pain renders them most uncomfortable, too, in their bank accounts.) these players have certain advantages common workers cannot hope to have such as mass recognition, but what they have been able to do is point out that fans, (customers of major league baseball,) pay to see the very best players and accordingly, they know who those very best players are. so when they threaten to strike, the owners understand that if these players refuse to play, fans will not come out for minor league players and so the cash flow they have come to expect to benefit from will cease. instead the owners negotiate in what turns out to be pretty good faith because the union and agents have access to financial numbers that show exactly how much money the game generates and since they are the attraction, not the owner whose primary contribution is providing the capital to get the team/enterprise up and running, they are able to get a fair and equitable deal/contract.
it is the same in detroit. wealthy shareholders may own the company or at least, act in unison like a wealthy business owner, but without those workers in the line doing what they do to assemble cars, the cash flow stops. however, auto workers have not been able to negotiate the best contract as evidenced by salaries demanded by ceo's in that industry. ultimately, public opinion and perception tilt this negotiation in favor of the wealthy shareholders and executives and this is what needs to change.
the sooner the american public stops allowing unions to be demonized and starts supporting them, the sooner we will begin to reverse the trend of the last 30-40 years and start closing the gap between the top and bottom tier wage earners.
support the employee free choice act so workers like those at blue diamond can organize in spite of the now requisite efforts at union-busting. in fact, in paul krugman's rolling stone article from two years ago you can read about how union busting has evolved. here is an excerpt:
Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it
harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to
protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical
purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular
example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor
law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But
the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers
who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily
care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift
-- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the
Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to
unionize.
the one good thing abot the severe financial woes we are entering is that the likelihood of americans waking up and beginning to vote in their own best interests, get better informed about the issues that affect their lives, (and wages,) and move to return to the policies and practices that created the relative economic boon this country experienced in the'50s and '60s, is increasing.
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