Is it time to start organizing labor via secret societies again?

[gordonzola]

I read the paper every day but I try not to let it get to me. I fully believe that the capitalist press exists in part to demoralize us. Still, there was a quote in the article about a failed organizing drive at Wal-Mart that got to me.

Cody Fields, who earns $8.10 Per hour after two years at the garage, said he originally backed the union "because we need a change" but said the antiunion videos* were effective. "it’s just a bunch of brainwashing, but it kind of worked," he said.

Sigh.

Oddly, this quote only appears in the print edition of today’s Chron. Not in the online version or the NY Times online version where it was syndicated from.



*Shown as part of a daily anti-union campaign by Wal-Mart’s full-time anti-union organizers.

Comments

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I love/hate my daily dose of propaganda.

[bklyndispatch.livejournal.com]

Oddly, this quote only appears in the print edition of today’s Chron. Not in the online version or the NY Times online version where it was syndicated from.

hmm... curious. I read it in the print version of the NYT today and like you sighed in disappointment.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I felt united by our sighs, even though we are 3000 miles apart. Thank you.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

This highlights the bind that I see labor being in. The only way to get more fairness in combating this kind of employer brainwashing (as that worker rightly called it) is through changes in labor law and the way it's administered by the NLRB. But labor can't get those changes because it's too weak politically--couldn't even get them under Carter or Clinton, and certainly not under Bush and a Republican-dominated House and Senate.

That said, it's really, really hard for me not to get angry at those workers. Previous generations of workers organized against incredible odds--physical violence, starvation, a legal system that treated unions as criminal conspiracies. But they knew there was a class struggle and which side of it was which. These guys, you show them some management propaganda and their brains turn to tapioca. (Or they already were tapioca thanks to a lifetime in late 20th century US culture, which is management propaganda from morning to night and from the cradle to the grave...)

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

yeah, I pretty much agree. But, I wold say that they were being asked to do something nearly impossible too. Someone has to be first, but if they actually did vote for the union a heavy anvil would surely fall on thei heads. I think that actually explains the quote. They knew they were being "brainwashed", but seeing through it didn't make them angry and want to fight back, it made them realize the resources Wal-Mart had to make them miserable if they dared vote union.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

It's true, it's easy for me to be brave from the sidelines. Most of my life was in a securely unionized industry; the one time I took part in an organizing drive, the employer was the University of Pennsylvania and the recognition issue wasn't even disputed. This also illustrates the difference between then (1967) and now--we submitted a majority of signed authorizations ("A-cards") for the bargaining unit and the University accepted that instead of demanding a representation election. Nowadays A-cards are typically the prelude to an all-out union-busting campaign. This is one of the big issues in the labor law reform program that was defeated under Carter and basically hasn't dared raise its head since.

I've been following the Andy Stern "restructuring" proposals inside labor; I don't have any strong opinions about them one way or another, though I'm doubtful that changes within labor can reverse the decline unless there are also profound changes in law, political climate, etc. Labor was in retreat through the 1920s but made a dramatic comeback after 1934 and on past the war into the postwar social compact. But that comeback took place as part of the huge shifts in politics and economic structure ushered in by the Depression, which included a kind of "officialization" of labor under the Wagner Act as part of the New Deal's answer to capitalist crisis and perceived revolutionary danger. My imagination isn't good enough to conceive anything parallel in our future...

take the candy, don't get in the car

[flowerlane.livejournal.com]

I regard the NY Times as the print equivalent of the pervert who tries to lure children to get in his car. "Hey I have some really nice candy, want to see my puppy?" The crossword puzzle is definitely the candy.

Re: take the candy, don't get in the car

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

see, to a lesser extent the Chron is the same way. They obviously spend all their writer money on the sports columnists, because they are the best around. But I gotta follow the Niners and the Giants. ;)

Re: take the candy, don't get in the car

[flowerlane.livejournal.com]

You bet - I can't pass up that crossword puzzle. But the Chron does give a lot more local news than you would get from electronic media. Appointments to city commissions, local scandals (my favorite), and what I call the "dead girl count". I check the Chron just to be sure all my clients made it through the weekend.

[beelavender.livejournal.com]

People feel comfortable. They have running water, after all. Both hot and cold!

It will take a crisis.... which I do not wish to witness.... to make people understand the danger of current policies.

Sigh.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Good thing your hiding out in England then. Could you adopt me?

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

There's some slightly better news from Quebec this week. The labor board ruled that Wal-Mart was intimidating workers trying to forum a union.

What bugs me isn't the intimidation, that's predictable. It's that people continue to buy stuff there. Even people who were active in their own unions.

[loolica.livejournal.com]

"We believe people are free to make choices on issues like unionization."

notice they never say that people are free to join the union, just free to make (vague, unspecified) choices about the union.

i actually think the opposite is needed, gordo, not secret organizing drives, which is still, more or less, what unions are doing today, but BIG ASS PUBLIC union drives.

i think, up here, in canada, that the canadian labour congress needs to get on board. i think THE goal of the labour movement in canada for the next five years should be to get all the walmarts in canada under collective agreement. i think it's time for the unions to declare all out war on the multinationals, one multinational at a time. what are they going to do, close every walmart in canada?

actually, as consolation prizes go, that would be pretty sweet.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Please do that then send help to the south.

and I was kdding about the secret society thing, though no union gets organized without some secrecy. I just would like to see a more traditional response to being forced to watch management propaganda, like a group of masked workers with axe handles paying the full-time propagandists a visit.

[rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com]

The ILWU longshore locals used to have groups like that to deal with scabs. They called them Education Committees.

[kest]

well, in some places it's the only place to buy item X. and thats usually because the other place in town that used to sell item X stopped carrying it after Walmart moved in because they couldn't compete. It's a vicious circle.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

sad but true.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the good news. kinda. what will that mean do you think?

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

I dunno. The union looks at it as a PR victory. Labor board rulings certainly cannot keep up with a fast-moving global corporation.

In my neighbourhood, they're trying to resist a Wal-mart. Maybe this will help.

Will Americans care? It happened outside your borders, and it was in the French province of Soviet Canuckistan.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Will Americans care?

mostly? of course not.

I think the problem IS the unions..

[bunnybutt.livejournal.com]

All the unions I've had contact with, or had family have contact with, have been corrupt. One of the favorite family stories from my family's neck of the woods (portland, OR, more or less) is about union organizers and the KKK, back in the 30's. My generation associates "union" with "Jimmy Hoffa", to a large extent. There's no doubt union organization in the early part of the 20th century was important, and powerful, and led to positive change, but in the intervening 50 years they have developed a reputation for nefarious dealings that at least equal the reputation of the big corporate entities.

Now, I think the worst thing to happen to the good old USA in the last 100 years or so was making corporations the equivalent of a legal entity, e.g. human person. I despise them and the capitalist system they stand for. But unions? Their rep is so bad I've gone out of my way to steer clear of them in my career.

So I've no doubt that the anti-union propoganda was persuasive. No doubt at all.

Modern capitalist morality.

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

If you tell people that they work for a company that is exporting jobs to a brutal dictatorship, weakening the dollar, lowering wages in the community, abusing workers, and overpaying their executives, they shrug and say "I got mine."

But if you ask them to a join a union, suddenly they would never sully their hands with such rotten scum.

Re: I think the problem IS the unions..

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

whether the anti-union propaganda was persuasive is not in question. Obviously the workers voted resoundingly against the union. And I think on a short term basis they did what made sense for themselves. It was a hopeless little organizing dirve if ever there was one.

but long term? even a corrupt union is better than no union, imo.

Ever wonder why unions got so "corrupt"? it's fascinating. short version? Bosses kept hiring goons to rough up or kill union members and organizers. organizers had to hire goons to protect union members. Bosses then jailed many of the more effective or radical union leaders. Power vacuum let the goons take over and they saw no need to actually organize when money could be made in simpler ways.

But still, even while doing horrible things, unions can't approach the scale of badness of the big corporate entities. I don't think unions are radical, certainly not the UFCW, but even bad unions are a necesary counter-balance that this country is in dire need of right now.

Re: I think the problem IS the unions..

[bunnybutt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I studied union history. It didn't depress me quite as much as corporate history, but close.

I don't necessarily agree that all big corporations are the more evil of the two. Even today, many big companies fear unionization enough to treat their workers more than fairly (though I've noticed a decline in the last 5-10 years). Time will tell whether this is a boom/bust pattern, since it's only happened twice in industrialized history where companies are publicly held.

As for corrupt unions being better than no unions.... I don't necessarily agree. I think if you're going to claim to stand up for people's rights, you have an obligation as an entity to self-reflect, clean house and not become another dirty wheel in the same ugly machine. When Union Leaders stop collecting salaries on par with CEO's, I might reevaluate.

Re: I think the problem IS the unions..

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

well, I don't know what "More than fairly" means at a time when the ratio of highest to lowest paid workers has increased has increased continually since the high point of unionization.

But I agree about union leader salaries, house cleaning, and business unionism in general. I think union administrators should get wages commiserate with the unions they work for, factoring in seniority etc. (though I will say their ratios are still better than regular CEOs).

But in a competition for more evil, I don't really think there's a competition.

Re: I think the problem IS the unions..

[flipzagging.livejournal.com]

I don't think that violence is the only problem. I guess I'm arguing both sides here, but I have my issues with unions too.

I'm volunteering in a school in a poorer neighbourhood, and it's obvious that between the unions and the bureaucracy, they have marginalized parents and students. Some kids get something out of it. But all too often, it's a place where they pretend to teach students and the students pretend to learn.

I know an idealistic teacher, and he says the biggest problem now is the unions. He says they protect incompetents, and spend most of their energies consorting with politicians. He's no young libertarian fool -- he's in his 60s, and used to be a union man himself. But now he's disgusted with them.

[pink-jacket.livejournal.com]

I read that this morning too in the Chronicle and felt a shock and then sadness, as always with reading the paper. I picture a war room type atmosphere with the anti union "experts" buddying up to the guys, giving them cigarettes, the videos running non stop. Oh Cody.
I was morbidly fascinated to see the part about the meatcutters who unionized in 2000 in Texas and then Wal-Mart replaced it's meat cutting operations "in the south" with prepackaged meat. ugh.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

yeah, doom awaited that union in this political climate, that's for sure.

[thomasroche.livejournal.com]

Eeeeeyow.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

One possible definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again, and expecting different results.

The UFCW keeps to trying to organize Wal-Mart on the basis of single stores (as in Jonquiere) or worse yet, tiny departments within a single store. Then Wal-Mart either closes store/department in question as punishment for a successful campaign, or points to the closing as a warning of what can happen if you let the evil unions in.

Yet the UFCW keeps up this organizing strategy, hoping that somewhere they'll end up with an exemplary success.

Conclusion: the UFCW leadership must be completely crackers.

Organizing Wal-Mart will take a strategic strike at multiple stores. It will not be a get-rich quick scheme; it will take years of preparation, some amount of clandestinity, and a cultural revolution of sorts in at least a section of the U.S. working class.

I don't exactly see the institutional leadership that took a hatchet to P-9 during the Hormel strike pulling that off, do you?

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

No, I completely agree with you here. Locally, their was a lot of support work for the UFCW because of the grocery workers strike down south and the threatened local one here. Our co-op, though not UFCW affiliated, was donating to the strike fund and sponsoring some events with their "young workers" group. But it hurt a little. I wanted to sign the letter of support we sent with "Remember P-9!" or "Cram your Spam" but didn't.

It's just the sad state of recognizing you are being manipulated and knowing that it's the best option, short term, to go along with the manipulation that is so depressing. What a world.

I don't know if the UFCW is just doing this to say that it's "working hard" to organize Wal Mart ,or if they're working on a beyond hopeful "maybe these workers will be the martyrs we need" theory because they're so bereft of ideas.

[bebopmonkey.livejournal.com]

thats cause they work for the MAN, G.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

Unions are not a good buy for the workers, and have their heads up their own asses anyways.

So, how many of you have been in a union, and for how long? 5 years in ASFME and one in the Teamsters for me. Both jobs sucked. Yes, the union helped, but but it caused its own problems too. ASFME seemed to only care when the bitching reached the point of risking people voting to disenfrancise them.

Unions are pure seniority, and you cannot transfer that. I would have loved to transfer to a different school district, but the only thing I would have kept was my CALPERS retirement, I'd have gone to the bottom of the senority heap, and from 8 hours a day to 4, at least a 25% pay cut, and last choice of the routes.

Unions are traps for sucky jobs at this point.

I think they need to look at the skiled trades, and make it so that unions are desireable to the employers as well. Make it so that everyone knows that a union worker is a better worker.

Or, go the route of our host here, he's not in a union, now is he?

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

nope, not in the UFCW. historically, since the downfall of the Knights of Labor, co-ops and unions haven't gotten along so well. though there are certainly exceptions. But, as I mentioned above, we were donating voluntarily to the UFCW strike fund via payroll deducation.

But I don't think that there's any question that in terms of pay, benefits etc. workers do better when their industry is unionized. The reason the UFCW lost so big in SoCal, and the reason the stakes were so high, is because the gorcery business is in the proces of getting de-unionized: on the low end by Wal-Mart on the high end by Whole Foods.

also as I mentioned above, those workers were probably gonna get real fucked if they unionized. that was the real message of the brainwashing, imo. It was the lack of real options that I found so depressing.

[7leaguebootdisk.livejournal.com]

My pet outrage is housing costs, they should be 1/5 or less of what they are, that is the cost of growth restrictions. Not fun to have kids and not be rich.

[metacara.livejournal.com]

I haven't ever been in a union but my friend is a unionized Safeway worker. His entire family was hit by a drunken driver resulting in hospital stays for his wife and two daughters, and permanent physical and neurological injuries to his son. Because he was a union member he did not lose his job even though he had to take extended leave from his position at the time of the accident, and because of his union he was able to access home care for his son and take a flexible schedule for about a year after the accident. Unions definitely are flawed but when the chips are down, they're a better bet than management. There is no question that were he not in a union, he would have lost his job or at least lost his position with the company. Safeway doesn't care who drives the forklift. So yes, unions may have their heads up their asses, but I don't agree that they're not a "good buy" for the workers, unless you mean the obvious: that if you unionize you'll be fired. That is pretty obvious at this point. OTOH, my mother was a teacher and good lord, how she hated the teacher's union, because they were such pantywaists about issues like class sizes but they would strike over salaries in a hot minute. She felt that the union was totally out of touch with what teachers really needed in the classrooms, and she was right, but would the school system be any better without the unions? Would class sizes be smaller if it were entirely up to the administrators and principals? Doubtful. I just think that although there are big problems with unions in America today, it's wrong to write them off entirely. But I will admit that I have never had a union job, so I may be talking out my ass. But if they ever do unionize lawyers, I would carry the card.

[sarianna.livejournal.com]

Hello there!
ginoushka pointed me in your direction tonight. I concur with her judgment of your spiffiness, and am planning to add you to my friendslist, barring any objections, of course. So, hiya!
-Sarianna

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

of course there are no objections.


I do find it odd that this post attracted sarianna/e's who've never commented before though. coincidences are weird.

[sarianna.livejournal.com]

rawk. will be friending you tonight then.

i just took a look, and it seems that while she and i live in the same area, we have only one mutual friend (who lives in texas). odd.