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A Defense of Organized Labor in a Time of Crisis
By Becky Moeller
Becky Moeller has served as president of the Texas AFL-CIO since her election in 2007 made her the first woman to head the state labor federation. The federation represents approximately 215,000 unionized workers in the Lone Star State.
As the U.S. staggers out of a new and unimproved economic era presided over by George W. Bush and elements of the business community mass against organized labor as the next (or retro) great bugbear, this seems like a good time to take stock of the role of labor unions in our democracy.
As Barack Obama assumes the presidency, hundreds of thousands of American workers have lost their jobs in the current economic swoon. Life savings have been decimated in the 401(k), IRA, and remaining pension plans that Congress assured us would build a comfortable retirement. Economists of different stripes project that matters will get worse in 2009.
Unions in the United States are all too used to a different kind of adversity. Since the election of President Ronald Reagan, membership in labor unions has slid dramatically. In the 1950s and 1960s, about one in three American workers belonged to a union. In 2009, unions can’t even claim one in six.
Some would have you believe that union membership dropped because unions are no longer right for the times, but the relationship between labor and capital does not change simply because we have moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. What changed are the alternatives available to anti-union employers, coupled with a federal labor laws that they flout as a cost of doing business. American manufacturing workers have been laid off, outsourced and “off-shored” in favor of foreign operations that use sweatshop or forced labor. Workers who seek to organize in the U.S. are routinely threatened or fired.
The desire to improve one’s livelihood through concerted action has never disappeared. One of my predecessors, an outstanding union organizer, used to say, “I never organized a union in my life. It took employers to do it for me.” Many employers still do what it takes to organize workers. Polls consistently show that millions of workers would join a union if given the chance. Congress needs to address imbalances that have made it cheaper for anti-union employers to violate the law than to give workers a fair chance to organize. When that happens, a new part of the historical cycle for labor unions will arrive.
Union activists have been called everything from spongers to Commies, but one statistic about unions that never changes earns us the right to call ourselves effective: if you have a union contract, your pay and benefits will most probably be one-quarter to one-third higher than if you have the same job without union benefits. That is the one real reason why some employers consider us Public Enemy No. 1 and it is the one real reason that employees willingly pay dues (usually 1 to 2 percent of a paycheck) to bargain collectively.
The battles at the onset of the Obama Administration are being defined on a day-to-day basis, and the Employee Free Choice Act is at the top of the list of union-specific issues.
FULL story at link.
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