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Eco Justice Fight Needs To Go
Beyond Union Fight To Organize
by Danny Schechter
 As I was leaving the Take Back America conference in Washington Tuesday afternoon, the buses were arriving to bring delegates and activists to Capitol Hill to join union members rallying for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which was being debated in the Senate.
According to one report: “Defying 97-degree heat, heavy humidity and a planned Republican filibuster, several thousand workers and their allies rallied in Washington Tuesday to demand the Senate pass the Employee Free Choice Act.”
The bill’s passage was far from certain as labor fights an uphill
battle for its survival and the right of workers to join unions. This
issue is one of many that is critical to Democrats who want to take the
government back because unions have long been a main funder and
grassroots energizer of the party.
Writing on TomPaine.com, Dmitri Iglitzin reprised labor’s challenge and eroding position:
“In
many ways, the lack of overwhelming support for EFCA is surprising.
Under current law, workers who want to form a union must currently
undergo a risky, grueling and time-consuming “pre-election” period that
culminates, if they’re lucky, in an election held under the auspices of
the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). If they’re not lucky, the
workers are instead fired or otherwise discriminated against. One
recent study, conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
found that about one in five union organizers or activists can expect
to be fired during the pre-election period.
Should the workers
succeed in unionizing, moreover, their chances of ever obtaining a
collective bargaining agreement with their employer are grim. According
to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency,
nearly half of newly organized bargaining units fail to negotiate a
first contract within two years of a successful organizing drive. The
result of these barriers to successful unionizing is manifest in the
steady decline of union membership, now 12 percent of the workforce
(7.4 percent in the private sector), down from 20 percent in 1983 and
35 percent in the 1950s.”
It’s not surprising that in a
corporate dominated country labor has to struggle endlessly for its
rights. Leading the fight against the bill are big lobbyists fueled by
big money. According to the AFL-CIO these groups hide their special
interests by claiming to be champions of democracy in the work place
and never revealing their economic interests in the issue. Here’s what
the battle turns on, according to the Center for American Progresss:
“‘Under
current law, an employer can insist on a secret-ballot election,’ even
after a majority of employees express their desire to organize. ‘The
proposed law would give employees at a workplace the right to unionize
as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so.’”
Suddenly,
business interests which usually line up against extending more
democratic rights in the society insist on it for employees knowing
they can intimidate them to vote against unions. Those well-known
guardians of democracy, the Chamber of Commerce, spent a record $72
million on lobbying. VP for labor policy Randel Johnson told The New
York Times, “We’ve targeted [The Employee Free Choice Act] as our No. 1
or No. 2 priority to defeat.”
But there is something more
profound underway here that neither the unions or the activists that
rallied to support them seem to connect with: the fact that our economy
has changed fundamentally from one built around production in factories
to one spurred by consumption at malls. It is easy to see workers
getting targeted as a group but harder to understand how we as
consumers are under a more profound economic attack. As privatization
sweeps through the society, there has been a privatization of economic
pain.
As jobs are outsourced and unions shrink, there are new,
often silent, battles being fought in our post-industrial society that
most politicos and unions don’t seem to understand or relate to.
Economist Michael Hudson explains it this way in my film IN DEBT WE
TRUST (Indebtwetrust.org):
“People have difficulty realizing
that the new economic conflict in our society is between creditors and
debtors. There’s still a tendency of many left-wingers to think in
terms of the class war and the wars between employers and employees.
But the real economic war, where all the money is being made is between
creditors and debtors because that’s the free lunch.”
No
wonder that financial institutions and real estate companies are now
the leading source of political money. Their influence steers
politicians away from protecting consumers as we saw when, and as my
film reveals, $151 MILLION was spent on lobbying the bankruptcy
“reform” bill which was passed with bi-partisan support. So when it
comes to money issues that matter, the Democrats are as much a part of
the problem as the Republicans.
You just can’t see the world or
real power through a narrow partisan lens as much as you may want to. I
was unsuccessful in getting my movie and the issues it raises about the
financialization of our economy on the agenda at the Take Back America
conference, although Co-Director Bob Borasage has now promised to
sponsor a screening in DC. (And you can too—see below).
I have
also been unsuccessful so far in getting unions to show the film, even
though I spoke with some prominent leaders who agreed that the issue is
important and that their members are hurting. Perhaps their reticence
has something to do with revenues they depend on from union credit
cards. Jonathan Tasini explained in his blog that there is a lot of
credit card money fueling the labor bureaucracy, “the AFL-CIO pockets
$25 million a year from the deal with Households Bank.”
How do
we get the Presidential candidates to start taking about the nearly $3
TRILLION dollars in consumer debt, and the mounting trap that this
leads to for so many families? Common Dreams just ran a report
explaining that thousands of liberal young people can’t take time off
to get involved in politics because they are working overtime at lousy
jobs to pay off their student loans and debts. We can’t allow this
issue to fly below the radar.
And what about the millions of
Americans who have turned their homes into ATM machines through equity
loans in order to pay bills? When those loans run out after the equity
is gone, what do they do? Two million families face the foreclosure of
their homes this year from practices like this and predatory sub-prime
lending abuses. And what about those Americans relying on pricey payday
lenders and check cashing joints?
In the name of economic
justice, we must add the demand for debt relief to all of our other
concerns. We need a moratorium on foreclosures. We need to start to
talking about this problem as an issue. If Bono can win debt relief for
many African countries, we can do the same in America. We can’t just
take America back from the Republicans without also taking it back from
the banks, Hedge funds and predatory lenders.
Throughout
American history debt has been a key issue. It was one of the problems
that led the colonists to revolt against the British. Main Street has
been struggling for liberation from Wall Street for decades with waves
of populist movements that won many reforms and a better life for
millions. Just as there are business cycles, there are cycles of
protest. Why are our political parties submerging this issue?
Conferences
in hotels may help promote political focus, but it is in the streets
outside the beltway, not in the suites within it, where change has to
happen first. Political races matter but they are not the only road to
transforming a society in which economic inequality is deepening.
News Dissector Danny Schechter edits MediaChannel.org. His film IN DEBT
WE TRUST (Indebtwetrust.org) has launched Americans for Debt Relief Now
(stopthesqueeze.org). Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org
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