This past Easter Sunday, my family ate heartily and
discussed some of the current political and economic issues of the day. There
may be better ways to wash down a tasty Easter ham than a lamentation on the
state of the republic, but we haven’t found it yet. Our conversation settled on
how many pension holders have been screwed by their municipal or corporate
overlords.
The unofficial conclusion we reached over our Easter meal
was that the United States is long overdue for a resurrected organized labor movement.
Labor unions represent only about 11% of the American workforce, and a majority of union members
today are government workers who can’t strike. The upside to this is that a lot
of government workers have very good, stable jobs that are safer and more
lucrative than their non-government worker counterparts. But most workers are
continually getting screwed.
The labor movement was spurred on by the large impact of
industrialization and it was designed to protect industrial laborers and
tradesmen. It has not adapted to the changing economy. The majority of American
workers today are not industrial tradesmen.
If there was a viable labor movement in the U.S., I would
have a real union to join. I work as a financial journalist. The company I work
for actually cut our salaries years ago during the financial crisis. They
technically restored the salary cuts years later, but haven’t given raises
since and continued to cut our pay in other ways, such as stopping all matching
401k contributions, gutting healthcare benefits, and the like. They’ve also done
a lot of outsourcing. Employees with many years of service to the company under
their belts were shown the door, their jobs shipped off to India.
A labor union would have fought all of those things, but
there is no labor union representing us. We are considered too “professional”
to join a union, though not professional enough to be tossed aside like
yesterday’s garbage if someone outsourcing shyster can save the company a few
dollars. But we don’t have much recourse since there is no collective
bargaining going on. People vote with their feet and while people are leaving
the company in droves, the rest of us are there are spending our energies looking
for other work rather than fighting a good fight (and since I need my job and
have four mouths to feed, I’ll kindly not mention the name of the company I
work for here).
I dream of the day when the outsourcing C.E.O. gets a brick
through his living room window and four flat tires on his way to work. There
should be real unions to contend with when
companies want to cut pay, cut benefits or cut jobs. This isn’t because I think
the answer is some kind of socialist worker’s paradise. To paraphrase what
Winston Churchill said about democracy: Capitalism is the worst economic system
there is except for all of the others.
There seems to be a great illness of myopathy among our current class of capitalists. They
think only in the short term and only in terms of the bottom line. I have no
problem with businesses making hard decisions and scoring a healthy profit, but
a lot of executives are not thinking ahead much farther than the next quarterly
report. Sure, the slash-and-burn fiscal ass-fucking they’ve been giving
American workers has increased profits now, but what kind of company are they
going to have in five years?
But our companies have pursued these policies and the
results are predictable. American capitalism no longer means industriousness
and hard work, but rather goldenparachutes and amorality.
Just as democracy doesn’t work without real political
opposition, real capitalism doesn’t work without American workers having some
kind of say over their working lives. Labor unions were once the source of that
power. They can be again.