Tennessee Flat-Top Box, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld
February 15, 2014 Martha Thomases 9 Comments
It is a tenet of the conservative movement that the government should not interfere in the marketplace. Businesses should be run the way the owners want to run them, and the people will decide which best suit their needs. Businesses that do things badly will be rejected by consumers and fail. Successful businesses will be the ones that give the people what they want.
As an abstract idea, I get this. To an extent, I even practice it. I won’t buy products made by corporations that offend me and seem to be working against my best interests, whether this means Revlon cosmetics when Ron Perelman was messing with Marvel or Chick-Fil-A when the owner was being actively homophobic. My actions make no difference, alas, but I feel like I’m shopping mindfully, and, as in the abstract, I can live with myself.
However, once one leaves the abstract and gets into reality, the logic falls apart. Most of us want there to be some kind of government interference, whether that means consumer protection agencies, environmental protection agencies, and the Securities Exchange Commission. I suppose if a company poisons its customers, it will ultimately fail because no one will be left to buy its products, but most of us agree that we don’t want to get to that point.
However, conservatives and progressives disagree about how much regulation they want to see in the marketplace. For example, there are conservatives living in West Virginia who feel that, even with the recent disasters (and yes, that’s deliberately plural) to the water supply, they should not strengthen the environmental laws. Free enterprise, to them, is more important than safe drinking water. The government isn’t going to tell them how to run their coal industry.
So I guess I won’t be spending my vacation money going to West Virginia. Thanks for the warning.
In neighboring Tennessee, they have a different attitude. There is a Volkswagen plant there whose management wants its workers to unionize so that the factory can have a “work council” similar to what they have in Germany. The workers will vote on whether or not they want to be part of union, the first foreign-owned plant in the South, or if they want to maintain the status quo.
Workers and management, working things out. One would think that the conservative view would be stay out of it and let them proceed, as long as no laws are broken. And one would be wrong.
The local Republicans are so anti-labor that they are interfering with the way Volkswagon runs its business and threatening to treat the company differently from every other company that wants to build a factory and create jobs in the state.
I guess Volkswagen should have poisoned the water, and then the Tennessee GOP would defend their right to do things the way they please.
Media Goddess Martha Thomases received no chocolates yesterday, which is probably for the best.
Frank Joyce
February 15, 2014 - 9:30 am
Thanks Martha for calling attention to this. We now know that the interference of the anti-union forces was successful. Workers voted against having a union 712-626. At the risk of getting even more abstract I think the basis of this is often overlooked or covered up. I call the economic system we have in the US raced-based-capitalism. It is built on a foundation of slavery and land acquisition by genocide. When you have that kind of economy you need all sorts of structures and attitudes to support it. So for example, I and some others view the US constitution as establishing the first ever apartheid state.
The point of that vis a vis unions in general and VW in particular is when your starting point for labor management relations is chattel slavery the bar is pretty low to begin with. Put another way, those who are vigorously hostile to unions, north and south are the direct descendants of the practioners and defenders of slavery. They think employers should have 100% of the power and workers zero percent. Part of this tradition is the evolution of a culture in which even whites who never had a prayer of becoming plantation owners nevertheless were willing to give their lives to defend the slavery system—in large numbers. (I’ve always thought of this the “mother of all workers voting against their own interests.”) Add in the protestant work ethic of subservience and gratitude to employers and it’s a wonder any unions ever got organized in the US in the first place. That they did was the product of a freakish time in our history. It peaked between @1930-1980. The capitalism we had then was a fluke. (It’s always fascinated me that the left and the right both claim to “want our America back.) In any case, the capitalism we have now is the real thing. Some think it can be fixed again. I don’t. I think we can and should and already are evolving to a different system of economic organization altogether. But that’s a whole other conversation.
Martha Thomases
February 15, 2014 - 9:41 am
Frank, do you have an opinion about the VW work councils? Do they work in Germany and other places? Are workers actually treated better because of them?
Frank Joyce
February 15, 2014 - 9:59 am
The short answer is that works councils are an asset to workers and companies in Germany. In part that’s a reflection of the stronger social contract(s) in place in Europe. (Why stronger? Lots of reasons and a long discussion. But one is that the racism that justified European slave trading and colonialism is somewhat less virulent than the US version.) Health care is kind of exhibit A for that but there are plenty of other examples. As we see though, as global capital has consolidated its power “austerity” policies threaten European social contracts too. It remains to be seen whether works councils can survive long term. At least some of their strength is a function of the power of German capital to offload problems to weaker states in Europe and elsewhere. Should that change it will be “game on” for the German unions too.
Rene
February 15, 2014 - 10:00 am
Free market forces can’t do anything about the environment. In economics, that is called “The Tragedy of the Commons”. To protect the environment we do need a central authority.
And that is the only reason why conservatives dispute man-made global warming. Since it exposes one of the (many) flaws in their mighty and sacred free market, then it can’t exist. So they try to wish it away.
George Haberberger
February 17, 2014 - 9:55 am
Just as a point of clarification, I noticed the typo in the billboard but none of my teachers, the nuns or the lay teachers, were unionized.
Doug Abramson
February 17, 2014 - 10:08 am
George,
I’ve never heard this about a Catholic school, so it doesn’t apply to you; but many church schools (at least in California) not only aren’t unionized, they don’t employ accredited teachers either.
George Haberberger
February 17, 2014 - 11:08 am
The education that I received at Immaculate Conception School from 1958 to 1966 and then from 1966 to 1970 at St. Pius X High School, was considered superior by any standard to the local public schools.
From the Archdiocese website:
“All of the high schools in the Archdiocese are accredited by a regional, national, or international accrediting association. These include AdvancED (the parent organization of the the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI), Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC), and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI), the Independent Schools Association of the Central States (ISACS); and the Missouri Non-Public Schools Accrediting Association (MNPAA). These accrediting associations establish standards which must be met by member schools.”
Two public school districts is St. Louis, Normandy and Riverview, lost their state accreditation recently. The St. Louis City Public Schools lost their accreditation in 2007. The teachers are unionized.
A lot of this is not the teacher’s fault. Parents are not involved in their kids’ eduction and the tax base for schools, especially in Normandy and Riverview has been shrinking for some time.
My point was, unionized teachers are not the reason someone would notice that typo.
The statement started with: “IF you noticed…”. That implies that not everyone educated by a unionized teacher did notice it.
Douglass Abramson
February 17, 2014 - 12:13 pm
I understood your point George. My point was EXCLUDING most Catholic schools, there are areas where church schools are inferior to the unionized public ones.
George Haberberger
February 17, 2014 - 4:16 pm
Besides Catholic schools, the only other church schools that I am aware of in this area are Lutheran schools and I am told that they are very good also. I don’t know of any other denominations that run their own school system. Must be many others in California.
An interesting bit of trivia is that the Catholic eduction system was established in 1884 by the archbishop of New York, John Hughes, because at that time the King James version of the Bible was being used in public schools.
R. Maheras
February 20, 2014 - 9:35 am
Frank wrote: “We now know that the interference of the anti-union forces was successful.”
That’s nonsense. The unions also “interfered” — to the tune of a two-year campaign costing millions of dollars.
The bottom line is that in this case, the majority of employees felt comfortable with management, financial compensation, and benefits, and saw no need for a union.
The fact is, there are now a myriad of laws in place protecting workers rights — laws that did not exist in the late 1800s and first half of the 20th Century, when unions were far more relevant.
By the 1960s, unions had been thoroughly corrupted by the mob, and became so flush with power they became unreasonably adversarial.
My four-year stint in a Chicago union from 1974-1978 exposed me first-hand to some of those excesses — including coercion, deliberate disinformation, and even physical threats anyone who made any noise about union policies.
If the pendulum swings too far in the other direction against workers at some future date, unions may again become relevant. But there’s a reason people no longer flock to unions — as this latest Volkswagen plant vote made abundantly clear.
Martha Thomases
February 20, 2014 - 9:46 am
Russ, this column isn’t about whether or not unions are good or necessary. I think they are, but it’s not the point.
The point is that the Republican politicians used the legislative process to interfere with a private business, something that they claim to oppose.
R. Maheas
February 20, 2014 - 11:38 am
Martha — We agree on that point. The Republicans shouldn’t meddle.
I was responding to Frank’s quote.
George Haberberger
February 20, 2014 - 12:05 pm
I thought it was interesting that in Chip Kidd’s and Dave Taylor’s Batman graphic novel, Death by Design. published in 2012, a union boss was portrayed as the villain. It was refreshingly politically incorrect.
R. Maheras
February 20, 2014 - 12:21 pm
I agree that it’s hypocritical for Republicans who believe in an unfettered free market to meddle in such things.
In this case, there was plenty of “interference” — political and private — from both sides, but the reality is that the workers in the plant made he ultimate decision.
My feelings about unions is that in certain instances they can be useful, but in others, they are not useful at all.
Frank Joyce
February 23, 2014 - 5:35 am
There’s a lot to unpack here. The topic of unions has become like race or Israel/Palestine. It’s an emotional hot button. Among other things, that means people are quite adamant in their views and it’s not easy to get past that.
That said, I agree that unions bear considerable responsibility for the damage they have done to their own “brand.” The what, why and how of that alone is a very long discussion.
In some ways the UAW, which arguably once had the “best” union brand, has fallen the farthest. Certainly that was a factor at the VW plant as it is in any UAW election. But it’s not the only one. By way of illustration the UAW recently won a vote to represent graduate student workers at NYU. The vote was 620-10 in favor.
Both votes had in common that the employer had agreed to and did observe true neutrality. What was different—among other things—is that at NYU, no Grover Norquist and no Bob Corker and no state legislators with the power to back up their threats, was telling the voters there would be dire results to their employment if they voted in favor of UAW representation.
Which brings me to a more important point. With the exception of chattel slavery itself, since feudalism—and arguably including feudalism—the power of workers vis a vis capital has never been weaker than it is right now. I’m sorry but one can cite all the “labor laws” they like. They were never very strong especially in the US and they are pathetically inadequate in the face of the 2014 model employer juggernaut.
If you keep an eye open for these things you will occasionally see reports of worker abuse of all kinds that gets the attention of an ever smaller segment of the mass media. The struggles of fast food workers has garnered some attention. It is pointed out sometimes that the current minimum wage adjusted for inflation is the lowest it has ever been and the disparity between worker pay and executive pay the greatest. On Friday Feb 21, the NYT reported an employer paying $6.8 million for violating wage laws. But for every case that gets prosecuted there are many more that do not. The Interfaith Center for Worker Justice website is a good source for information about rampant wage theft.
The nature of the global J-O-B system is that the overwhelming majority of workers worldwide live in constant fear of losing whatever employment they have. Often, the better the job, as in being an autoworker versus a fast food worker, the greater the fear. The power this alone gives employers cannot be overstated. (A book by British author Guy Standing titled The Precariat is helpful in understanding this global dynamic in detail.) Interestingly enough, the economic life-or-death power of employers is recognized when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace but not when it comes to ordinary worker rights. Employers have lots of other disproportionate powers too, but this is getting too long already.
So, do I think the UAW lost a “fair” fight as R Maheras does. No, I don’t. Do I think that Grover Norquist and Bob Corker et al swung at least 44 votes in Chattanooga? Yes I do. Does the UAW have to figure out how to overcome all of the obstacles they face or deal with the consequences—including the ones they inflict on themselves. Yup.
For the sake of workers everywhere, I hope they do. Others obviously don’t. Finally it occurs to be that some disclosure is in order here. I am a UAW member. For 18 years I was on the headquarters staff of the UAW and I have worked for other unions as well. I have been involved with many organizing campaigns both in the auto and non-auto sector. Yes, unions have some resources. But the playing field is anything but level.
R. Maheras
February 24, 2014 - 1:47 pm
They unionized graduate student workers???
Two observations.
First, when one examines the demographics of academia, poll after poll has shown that it is overwhelmingly liberal.
Second, when one looks at the incredible exploitation graduate student workers traditionally have endured, one is struck by just how hypocritical liberals are because, in this case at least, they were eating their young. In fact, from what I’ve seen, I’d say that the closest thing to indentured servitude that still exists in this country is your typical graduate student.
Frank Joyce
February 24, 2014 - 7:15 pm
1) I am not now nor have I ever been a liberal. I would agree that many liberals are hypocrites. As best as I can tell conservatives mostly aren’t because they really don’t have any principles they consistently support whatsoever. Ergo they can’t betray them. 2) The whole liberal/conservative frame for political conversation is obsolete. 3) That said, it’s mixing apples and oranges to say “liberal” college administrators exploit college workers. Why? An employer is an employer is an employer. Organizing work vis a vis the employer/employee relationship puts workers at a structural disadvantage. Some employers are more benevolent than others. (So were some slave owners.) That’s why workers need unions. Or a different system altogether. 4) The UAW represents thousands of college workers both academic and non-academic and has for many years. So do other unions. The UAW has never been just an autoworker union. 5) I agree that in the hierarchy of worker “victimology” grad students are pretty high on the list. But most of them are still white so they have some offsetting privileges. Among other things that makes them less vulnerable than workers at auto plants to threats from either their employer or the Bob Corkers of the world.