The Hypnotized Never Lie
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.
- Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Morrison R. Waite, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, May 10, 1886
Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
- Lord Edward Coke
This administration is not sympathetic to corporations. It is indentured to corporations.
- Ralph Nader
So, for all my semifiery rhetorical flourishes about rights for workers and the threat of corporations (private, unaccountable tyrannies, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) and blah blah blah, it turns out that I actually work for a pretty horrible corporation that abuses its workers. Well. Back up. We're not necessarily talking about International Telephone and Telegraph overthrowing Allende to protect their Chilean holdings, here, or de Beers sending in platoons of ex-SAS mercs to stamp out tribal flare-ups threatening access to their diamond mines, or Chevron flying in Nigerian death-squads on corporate helicopters to gun down a bunch of folk-singers protesting their despoilment of the Niger Delta, or anything quite so Machiavellian. To my knowledge the company which employs me [a rather large motion picture exhibition company which I think it would behoove me to refrain from naming here...a tip of the hypothetical fedora to my friend Frank, whose paranoia regarding Paramount's Star Trek division is apparently communicable, thanks a lot Frank *] has never turned people out of their homes, had them arrested or had them shot. However. At least in the area of the country where I work, we're pretty strongly anti-union, we pay our employees shit in comparison to other local jobs [supplemented by concession commissions which aren't guaranteed as no one works that position every day, are subject to the vagaries of local attendance and the appeal of that week's film releases, and are constantly being reformulated so as to somehow scrape a few dollars here and there from their bonus at a slowly but inexorably increasing rate], and we tend to either work their asses off or else starve them for hours, depending on what our overlords tell us is this week's most important priority.
Now, in all fairness, this is a "free country" and no one forces anyone to get a job with us, and we do throw them a few perks to entice them to stay with us like a tuition assistance program, a rudimentary health care deal [bare bones, really], schedule flexibility, etc. But still. Every now and then I feel a twinge or three of hypocrisy. What right do I have to listen to the lectures of or read the books of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Tariq Ali, Doug Henwood, Joseph Stieglitz, and other anti-globalists too varied to mention, and nod my head knowingly and gnash my teeth metaphorically at the litany of corporation outrages they recount? I'm Management. The lowest rung on the management ladder, but still, Management. I'm one of the Bosses. I've actually fired people before. That's still quite a boggle when I think about it. But the fastest growing sector of our economy [which apparently is booming like it's never boomed before in the history of mankind, according to renowned economists like Newt Gingrich, Bill "Slots" Bennett, and Sean Hannity] is service industry jobs. I know, I know...that's pretty embarrassing for us as a nation, isn't it. But there we have it. We're transmogrifying from a nation of steelworkers, lumberjacks, and carmakers into one of fry technicians and donut glazers. Which I think suits corporations and the Republican and Democratic wings of the Property Party just fine. They get their manufacturing done in Mexico and Malaysia and their cars washed and their food cooked here by low-paid Americans. Subsequently, the old lions of organized labor, unions like the United Steel Workers of America and the United Auto Workers, and the big granddaddy super-union, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the venerable AFL-CIO, find themselves crumbling.
John J. Sweeney has been a part of the labor movement for about 50 years. He made his union bones working for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Alright, I admit it: that sounds kinda gay. But the ILGWU wasn't sitting around playing with dollies, they were fighting and striking to shut down sweatshops. Later on, Sweeney joined the Service Employees International Union, probably the most important union of the AFL-CIO, and rose to become its president. The SEIU was his power base in winning the presidency of the AFL-CIO itself, which he's held since 1995. Well, Sweeney seems like a dedicated union leader [undoubtedly at least a little corrupt, as many of their highest tier of American labor are these days, sadly], but to his discredit, he's not been able to parlay his success at the SEIU into a broader success for the AFL-CIO and for American organized labor in general. [The President of the AFL-CIO is sort of like the Archbishop of Canterbury for North American labor leaders, a "first among equals," even though many big unions like the UAW aren't a part of that organization.] While Sweeney was head of the SEIU, that union almost doubled in membership, which may be more a testament to the rapid transformation of the American job market than to Sweeney's skills at recruitment. But his assumption of power with the AFL-CIO has not seen similar spikes in union membership across the board. Fifty years ago 1 in 3 private sector jobs was a union job, today that's dwindled down to less than 10 percent. The biggest areas of union growth are the service industry and the public sector [the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees was the single largest donor to the Democratic Party this past election cycle]. This is not reassuring to workers in the Rust Belt and farmhands in the Grain Belt.
Recently, the growing, semi-private schism in the ranks of organized labor has exploded into a public power struggle. It's been coming for years, but it really began to build steam following John Kerry's loss last November. The AFL-CIO, to no one's surprise, had backed Kerry, but Sweeney had really pulled out all the stops this time, sensing blood in the water from the Iraq debacle and postulating that maybe the Republicans had overextended themselves and could be caught in the flank and rolled up. [As it turns out, middle America hates faggots and Ay-rabs, so Bush was safely re-elected, or elected, I should say.] And when Kerry lost it was a major blow to Sweeney's prestige. Voices of discontent began to be heard, the loudest of which belonged to his former protege and successor as head of the SEIU, Andy Stern. Sweeney has long been an advocate for electoral activism; let's try and get as many Democrats elected, and they'll help out the unions. Stern feels that this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should Democrats, to whom we've tied our fortunes inextricably, have to cater to an ever-shrinking base of support? They know unions don't have friends in to-day's GOP, they're not going anywhere in their present condition. So they'll gladly cash contribution checks from unions, make a few speeches, and then do 80 or 90 percent of what Republicans would have done anyway. Stern feels that unions need to spend more money on growing themselves - finding new membership, the lifeblood of all union coffers - and then deal with both political parties from a position of strength.
It was all a lot of hot air, with outside observers calling it a power play, a son turning on his father figure, etc. Stern and others formed a "Change to Win" coalition which most assumed was just a way for him to air his complaints publically.
Then last week, the SEIU, along with James P. Hoffa's International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that they'd boycott the annual AFL-CIO convention. A few days later, both unions said they were leaving the organization. Now, most of you probably haven't heard about this, because to-day unions aren't newsmakers most of the time. But this is big news. Potentially the biggest thing to hit organized labor in decades, something that will reinvigorate labor or kill it. Millions of workers just walked out of the largest labor group in the Western hemisphere. [And I'm including the Communist Party of Cuba, which rules an entire fucking country. The PCC has less than a million members I think.] Now, the SEIU and the Teamsters have been joined by the Laborers' Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and a quirkily named hybrid union called UNITE HERE [the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union - isn't that clever? - one of whose component unions, if you go back far enough, is Sweeney's old ILGWU]. This is a major, major realignment of labor power. I guess the question is, which faction is right, the Old Guard Sweeneyists or the Young Turk Sternists. Suppose Stern is right. They start to funnel exponentially more funds into recruitment drives and breaking into non-union jobs. Five years down the road, the Change to Win coalition [or whatever the new group calls itself] could be four or five times more powerful than the AFL-CIO is to-day. And that could mean that both parties have to take them seriously from now on. And labor policy affects foreign policy, don't kid yourself otherwise.
Will the rump AFL-CIO drift towards the center and right now? Maybe after Sweeney they'll become the GOP union, an increasingly irrelevant labor aristocracy trotted out to make speeches endorsing candidates and doing little else. Some feel that this is all they're doing now for the Democrats anyway, so what does it matter if they throw in with the Republicans...
Or maybe this schism is going to really hurt labor in the long run. I hope not. But who knows. A lot of people to-day bitch and moan about lazy, corrupt union workers, who get paid to sit on their asses and do nothing and blah blah blah. Yes, of course there's corruption in unions. Like there isn't corruption in major corporations and in government? Unions at least are there looking out for workers' rights, while corporations do everything they can to subvert and whittle away those rights paid for with sweat and blood generations ago, and the government only cares about employees when it's forced to by its constituents. Fine, construction workers are bums, okay, sure. Take a trip back 100 years ago, when these people routinely worked 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, taking years off of their life expectancy with highly hazardous work conditions for low pay and no health care, and when an accident clipped off a leg or a hand or seared their lungs they were kicked out on their asses with nothing. Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and then tell me about how unions impede capitalism. You know, capitalism ain't all that great. Spend about 15 minutes studying current affairs in Latin America or Africa and you'll find fifty reasons why these people love communism a lot of the time.
I guess we [we, the people of Earth...that's idealistic and naive, I admit it, just deal with it] need to find a way to harmonize and unite the best traits of market capitalism and progressive communitarianism. I used to be a capitalist. I'm not quite a communist. Somewhere in the middle is where we need to be going.
* Just kidding, of course. I've been paranoid for as long as I can remember.
- Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Morrison R. Waite, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, May 10, 1886
Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
- Lord Edward Coke
This administration is not sympathetic to corporations. It is indentured to corporations.
- Ralph Nader
So, for all my semifiery rhetorical flourishes about rights for workers and the threat of corporations (private, unaccountable tyrannies, to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) and blah blah blah, it turns out that I actually work for a pretty horrible corporation that abuses its workers. Well. Back up. We're not necessarily talking about International Telephone and Telegraph overthrowing Allende to protect their Chilean holdings, here, or de Beers sending in platoons of ex-SAS mercs to stamp out tribal flare-ups threatening access to their diamond mines, or Chevron flying in Nigerian death-squads on corporate helicopters to gun down a bunch of folk-singers protesting their despoilment of the Niger Delta, or anything quite so Machiavellian. To my knowledge the company which employs me [a rather large motion picture exhibition company which I think it would behoove me to refrain from naming here...a tip of the hypothetical fedora to my friend Frank, whose paranoia regarding Paramount's Star Trek division is apparently communicable, thanks a lot Frank *] has never turned people out of their homes, had them arrested or had them shot. However. At least in the area of the country where I work, we're pretty strongly anti-union, we pay our employees shit in comparison to other local jobs [supplemented by concession commissions which aren't guaranteed as no one works that position every day, are subject to the vagaries of local attendance and the appeal of that week's film releases, and are constantly being reformulated so as to somehow scrape a few dollars here and there from their bonus at a slowly but inexorably increasing rate], and we tend to either work their asses off or else starve them for hours, depending on what our overlords tell us is this week's most important priority.
Now, in all fairness, this is a "free country" and no one forces anyone to get a job with us, and we do throw them a few perks to entice them to stay with us like a tuition assistance program, a rudimentary health care deal [bare bones, really], schedule flexibility, etc. But still. Every now and then I feel a twinge or three of hypocrisy. What right do I have to listen to the lectures of or read the books of Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Tariq Ali, Doug Henwood, Joseph Stieglitz, and other anti-globalists too varied to mention, and nod my head knowingly and gnash my teeth metaphorically at the litany of corporation outrages they recount? I'm Management. The lowest rung on the management ladder, but still, Management. I'm one of the Bosses. I've actually fired people before. That's still quite a boggle when I think about it. But the fastest growing sector of our economy [which apparently is booming like it's never boomed before in the history of mankind, according to renowned economists like Newt Gingrich, Bill "Slots" Bennett, and Sean Hannity] is service industry jobs. I know, I know...that's pretty embarrassing for us as a nation, isn't it. But there we have it. We're transmogrifying from a nation of steelworkers, lumberjacks, and carmakers into one of fry technicians and donut glazers. Which I think suits corporations and the Republican and Democratic wings of the Property Party just fine. They get their manufacturing done in Mexico and Malaysia and their cars washed and their food cooked here by low-paid Americans. Subsequently, the old lions of organized labor, unions like the United Steel Workers of America and the United Auto Workers, and the big granddaddy super-union, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the venerable AFL-CIO, find themselves crumbling.
John J. Sweeney has been a part of the labor movement for about 50 years. He made his union bones working for the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Alright, I admit it: that sounds kinda gay. But the ILGWU wasn't sitting around playing with dollies, they were fighting and striking to shut down sweatshops. Later on, Sweeney joined the Service Employees International Union, probably the most important union of the AFL-CIO, and rose to become its president. The SEIU was his power base in winning the presidency of the AFL-CIO itself, which he's held since 1995. Well, Sweeney seems like a dedicated union leader [undoubtedly at least a little corrupt, as many of their highest tier of American labor are these days, sadly], but to his discredit, he's not been able to parlay his success at the SEIU into a broader success for the AFL-CIO and for American organized labor in general. [The President of the AFL-CIO is sort of like the Archbishop of Canterbury for North American labor leaders, a "first among equals," even though many big unions like the UAW aren't a part of that organization.] While Sweeney was head of the SEIU, that union almost doubled in membership, which may be more a testament to the rapid transformation of the American job market than to Sweeney's skills at recruitment. But his assumption of power with the AFL-CIO has not seen similar spikes in union membership across the board. Fifty years ago 1 in 3 private sector jobs was a union job, today that's dwindled down to less than 10 percent. The biggest areas of union growth are the service industry and the public sector [the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees was the single largest donor to the Democratic Party this past election cycle]. This is not reassuring to workers in the Rust Belt and farmhands in the Grain Belt.
Recently, the growing, semi-private schism in the ranks of organized labor has exploded into a public power struggle. It's been coming for years, but it really began to build steam following John Kerry's loss last November. The AFL-CIO, to no one's surprise, had backed Kerry, but Sweeney had really pulled out all the stops this time, sensing blood in the water from the Iraq debacle and postulating that maybe the Republicans had overextended themselves and could be caught in the flank and rolled up. [As it turns out, middle America hates faggots and Ay-rabs, so Bush was safely re-elected, or elected, I should say.] And when Kerry lost it was a major blow to Sweeney's prestige. Voices of discontent began to be heard, the loudest of which belonged to his former protege and successor as head of the SEIU, Andy Stern. Sweeney has long been an advocate for electoral activism; let's try and get as many Democrats elected, and they'll help out the unions. Stern feels that this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should Democrats, to whom we've tied our fortunes inextricably, have to cater to an ever-shrinking base of support? They know unions don't have friends in to-day's GOP, they're not going anywhere in their present condition. So they'll gladly cash contribution checks from unions, make a few speeches, and then do 80 or 90 percent of what Republicans would have done anyway. Stern feels that unions need to spend more money on growing themselves - finding new membership, the lifeblood of all union coffers - and then deal with both political parties from a position of strength.
It was all a lot of hot air, with outside observers calling it a power play, a son turning on his father figure, etc. Stern and others formed a "Change to Win" coalition which most assumed was just a way for him to air his complaints publically.
Then last week, the SEIU, along with James P. Hoffa's International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced that they'd boycott the annual AFL-CIO convention. A few days later, both unions said they were leaving the organization. Now, most of you probably haven't heard about this, because to-day unions aren't newsmakers most of the time. But this is big news. Potentially the biggest thing to hit organized labor in decades, something that will reinvigorate labor or kill it. Millions of workers just walked out of the largest labor group in the Western hemisphere. [And I'm including the Communist Party of Cuba, which rules an entire fucking country. The PCC has less than a million members I think.] Now, the SEIU and the Teamsters have been joined by the Laborers' Union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, the United Farm Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and a quirkily named hybrid union called UNITE HERE [the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union - isn't that clever? - one of whose component unions, if you go back far enough, is Sweeney's old ILGWU]. This is a major, major realignment of labor power. I guess the question is, which faction is right, the Old Guard Sweeneyists or the Young Turk Sternists. Suppose Stern is right. They start to funnel exponentially more funds into recruitment drives and breaking into non-union jobs. Five years down the road, the Change to Win coalition [or whatever the new group calls itself] could be four or five times more powerful than the AFL-CIO is to-day. And that could mean that both parties have to take them seriously from now on. And labor policy affects foreign policy, don't kid yourself otherwise.
Will the rump AFL-CIO drift towards the center and right now? Maybe after Sweeney they'll become the GOP union, an increasingly irrelevant labor aristocracy trotted out to make speeches endorsing candidates and doing little else. Some feel that this is all they're doing now for the Democrats anyway, so what does it matter if they throw in with the Republicans...
Or maybe this schism is going to really hurt labor in the long run. I hope not. But who knows. A lot of people to-day bitch and moan about lazy, corrupt union workers, who get paid to sit on their asses and do nothing and blah blah blah. Yes, of course there's corruption in unions. Like there isn't corruption in major corporations and in government? Unions at least are there looking out for workers' rights, while corporations do everything they can to subvert and whittle away those rights paid for with sweat and blood generations ago, and the government only cares about employees when it's forced to by its constituents. Fine, construction workers are bums, okay, sure. Take a trip back 100 years ago, when these people routinely worked 7 days a week, 15 hours a day, taking years off of their life expectancy with highly hazardous work conditions for low pay and no health care, and when an accident clipped off a leg or a hand or seared their lungs they were kicked out on their asses with nothing. Read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and then tell me about how unions impede capitalism. You know, capitalism ain't all that great. Spend about 15 minutes studying current affairs in Latin America or Africa and you'll find fifty reasons why these people love communism a lot of the time.
I guess we [we, the people of Earth...that's idealistic and naive, I admit it, just deal with it] need to find a way to harmonize and unite the best traits of market capitalism and progressive communitarianism. I used to be a capitalist. I'm not quite a communist. Somewhere in the middle is where we need to be going.
* Just kidding, of course. I've been paranoid for as long as I can remember.
posted by Patrick at 8:15 PM
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