Harry Targ : Thousands Brave Cold Rain to Support Indiana Workers

On a cold, rainy day thousands rallied against anti-worker legislation March 10 in front of the Indiana Statehouse. Image from Fox59.
In bitter cold rain:
Thousands rally at Indianapolis State House

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 12, 2011

INDIANAPOLIS --On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House.

The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).

The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.

The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.

Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:

1. The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.


2. The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.


3. The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.


4. Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.


5. The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.


6. Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.


7. The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.


8. The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.


9. The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.


10. The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.

Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:

We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students --whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products -- we stand together!

There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.

One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.

Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.

Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.

The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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In a Changing World : Workers on the Move

Workers in Paris join in massive May Day demonstration. Photo from AFP.
As the nature of work evolves...
A week of worker militancy

Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / May 4, 2010

This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. [See "Austin Construction Workers: No los Vamos a Olvidar'" by Alice Embree.] This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.

And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Austin, and many other cities.

I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.

We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called "Real World Labor." By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last 60 years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week, are so desperately needed.

The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.

Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced, shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States 200 years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.

Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”

For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.

Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.

Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s.

It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were 50 years ago.

And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs -- as a percentage of all the work in the world -- are declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is, employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.

State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives, occurs from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.

In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law.

Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.

So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.

In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “...understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions... the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”

Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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Austin Construction Workers : 'No los Vamos a Olvidar'

Tom VandeStadt, pastor at the Congregational Church of Austin, addresses crowd during Austin protest. Flanking him are Cristina Tzintzún, director of the Workers Defense Project, and construction worker Gumercindo Rodriquez. Photo by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

Remembering fallen comrades:
Workers demand better wages, safer conditions

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 29, 2010

AUSTIN -- Luxury condos were the backdrop for two protests yesterday, April 28, in Austin. The Workers Defense Project, also known as Proyecto Defensa Laboral, brought 120 workers and supporters into the streets at two different sites demanding wages and safe working conditions.

“Three of my co-workers were killed, and the rest of us are still owed our money. When is it enough?” said Gumercindo Rodriquez, who performed plaster work at 21 Rio and Gables Park Plaza. Gumercindo, along with two dozen other workers are owed over $120,000 in wages by a Dallas-based contractor, GMI (Greater Metroplex Interiors).

Protesters focused attention on Gables Park Plaza, a high-end condo on the north side of Town Lake in Austin. At that site, wages have gone unpaid. Later, demonstrators moved into the West Campus where 21 Rio has also refused to pay final wages. It was at this luxury high rise that three workers died last summer when faulty scaffolding collapsed.

A recent study by the Workers Defense Project and the University of Texas found that workers who are denied payment are most likely not to receive appropriate safety training or equipment. The report also found that Texas leads the nation in construction deaths, with a worker dying every 2.5 days in the state and that Austin construction workers have a one in five chance of not being paid their wages.

The issue of immigrant rights has once again captured media attention as debate heats up over Arizona’s recent draconian legislation. “Show me your papers or go to jail” is an approach that collapses civil liberties.

In this atmosphere, the organizing work of the Workers Defense Project brings humanity back into the discourse. The plaster and stucco of luxury condos depended on immigrant labor. For the workers who toiled 70-hour work weeks, six days a week, without rest breaks or overtime pay, the human issue is simply to be paid for their work. For the three men who lost their lives at 21 Rio, the human issue is a safe working environment.

The protestors remembered those who died at 21 Rio by calling out their names.

Wilson, Presente!
Raudel, Presente!
Jesus Angel, Presente!
No los vamos a olvidar.
We will not forget.

Want an antidote to the Arizona law? Here are three things you can do:

1. Support the Workers Defense Project (WPD) with donations.
2. Join the Immigrant Rights March in Austin -- Saturday, May 1 at 4 p.m. at the Capitol.
3. Attend the grand opening of the progressive community center where WDP has offices. It's from 6:30-9 p.m. on May 6 at 5604 Manor Road. Live music, refreshments. And, of course, they also welcome donations.
   

Workers Defense League demonstrators honor three fallen construction workers at Austin demonstration. Photos by Alice Embree / The Rag Blog.

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Michael Meeropol : Business Unites to Fight Workers' Rights

Virtually the entire organized business lobbying apparatus is united in attempting to convince the public that the Employee Free Choice Act is a terrible blow against workers' rights.

By Michael Meeropol / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2009

The US is facing its gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Last Fall, Congress was stampeded into giving $700 billion to the financial sector with virtually no strings attached. Then Congress refused to authorize less than $20 billion to help two of the US automobile giants stay afloat. One of the reasons advanced was that autoworkers' wages were too high.

This argument is part of a general campaign that suggests that in the modern era of globalization, union negotiated wage and benefits packages are out of date and counter-productive. This campaign is also aimed at convincing Congress not to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Virtually the entire organized business lobbying apparatus is united in attempting to convince the public that the Employee Free Choice Act is a terrible blow against workers' rights. To hear these individuals (usually lawyers working for firms dedicated to helping employers defeat union organizing efforts) tell it, they and their corporate employers are just sick at heart at the prospect that workers will be denied their rights to a secret ballot election to determine if they want to be represented by a union.

So what is the Employee Free Choice Act? Its major section says, if the majority of workers in a particular company covered by the National Labor Relations Act show that they want to join a union by signing membership cards, then the company must recognize and bargain collectively with that union. Currently, if the majority sign up, then the company may choose whether to recognize and bargain or, as is most common, to require the National Labor Relations Board to conduct a secret ballot election.

Why would such a law be necessary? Why aren't secret ballots enough? The answer is that employers have proven extremely adept at delaying the vote once the cards are signed and using the time before the vote to intimidate pro-union workers and mislead others by controlling the terms of the debate.

The election campaign with secret ballots is not enough to ensure a democratic process. When people run from Congress or the Presidency, voters have relatively equal access to their positions and the people running have equal access to the voters. Not so in union representation elections. Under the current election process, management has almost unlimited and mandatory access to employees, while union supporters have almost none. This would be the equivalent, in a congressional election, of one candidate owning all the local media outlets and denying the candidate's opponent any access. In addition, management knows who the employees are, obviously, but union supporters have access very late in the process to a list of their potential constituents.

The argument that absent the secret ballot, "labor goons" will intimidate workers into signing cards even though they do not want to join a union fails the laugh test because management has much more power, the power to deprive employees of their livelihood and to control their pay, hours, and working conditions.

And they use that power. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University conducted a survey of 400 NLRB election campaigns in 1998 and 1999 for the United States Trade Deficit Review Commission. Her research team found numerous examples of explicit and implicit threats to close the plant if the union won the election. The report (Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages, and Union Organizing, p43) notes that "one in every four employers in our sample discharged workers for union activity." A major study covering the Chicago area found that 30% of the companies targeted for union organizing fired pro-union workers.

Firing and harassment are against the law but the sanctions are relatively mild (and it takes years to win those cases). Thus, employers routinely employ this tactic and if they do get sanctioned by the NLRB, the fine and back wages become a cost of doing business – well worth the investment because they have kept the union out of their plants.

According to survey after survey, a very high percentage of American workers would like to join unions but they have to this date been defeated by the ability of management to "win" the organizing campaigns in a decidedly unlevel playing field. The Employee Free Choice Act would redress that imbalance.

The great American middle class was built after World War II when a high percentage of the workforce was covered by union-negotiated contracts. As the percentage of the workforce covered by union contracts has declined, workers' wages have stagnated. In the context of our current efforts to prevent a re-run of the 1930s, we must remember that the key to a prosperous business is a prosperous group of workers who can then buy the products of business.

Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act and we must resist the siren song that suggests wage cutting in places like Detroit will solve our economic problems. These are two important steps towards recreating an America where the middle class can rise again.

[Michael Meeropol was Professor of Economics at Western New England College, 1970-2008.]

The Secret Big Business Doesn't Want You to Know



Learn more about the Employee Free Choice Act here and here.

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