There are other ways for workers to fight for their interests. There are reasonable laws out there that protect the interests of workers, even without unionization.
And how do you think those laws came about in the first place? The political representatives of the bosses didn't give workers pensions, safety laws, collective bargaining rights, child labor laws, the 8-hour work day or the minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. All those things were historically fought for by the workers through unions.
Now under the pressure of the economic crisis the ruling class is trying to take back those wages and benefits. Weak unions won't be able to do much to stop it. That's why even if unions are weak now, they will have to either get stronger or perish.
The current union leadership is far too thick headed and far too concerned with their own interests (like keeping their golf courses) to change their ways. The only way to get organized labor in the right track is by completely changing the leadership.
I agree.
The system has become far too powerful against organized labor for major change to occur.
I think that's a pessimistic view. I prefer to take the optimistic viewpoint that things will get better. It's a glass half empty/half full kind of thing.
Seemingly invulnerable, monolithic systems can often crumble suddenly. Look at the Eastern Bloc in 1989, or Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. We can't predict the future.
You can thank the globalized economy and international corporations that will forever prevent the revitalization of organized labor. If a group of new factory workers want to unionize, the owners will just threaten to ship their jobs off to China.
As for lower end jobs like retail and fast food restaurants, they already have that covered by simply closing the place down. Take Wal-Mart for example, when the workers in Jonquiere, Quebec organized, were certified by the Quebec government, and were on the verge of victory, Wal-Mart responded by shutting that location down. After that fiasco, do you think that a government will recognize another union like that again? Hell no! They don't want to be responsible for a mass load of people suddenly losing their jobs. Do you think that McDonalds won't react in the same way?
This is a serious problem. But I think the way to fight this process is not to play the bosses' game and accept this global race to the bottom for cheap labor. Rather, it's for workers to fight back on a world scale. In a sense that's already happening as we speak - in the Arab world, in Greece and Europe, through populist movements in Latin America and the Occupy movement in North America.
We have to remember that the system of economic exploitation in the workplace is directly tied to political exploitation through the government under capitalism. To take a weak version of an alternative, government could regulate against businesses closing because of unionization drives. But that's just trying to compensate for the inherent drive of capitalists to keep wages low (especially in a low-skill industry like fast food). A far better, and in reality the only long-term solution, is for the working class to take companies like Wal-Mart or McDonald's into public ownership and run them democratically.
That and I think that lower end jobs like retail and fast food should not organize to begin with. Unions are really meant to prevent the unethical exploitation of skilled laborers and to provide them with a safe working environment when there are plenty of hazardous conditions.
I don't think we should limit collective bargaining rights only to skilled workers. Somebody's got to do these kinds of jobs and the workers there shouldn't be exploited the way they are now. I would support a unionization drive among fast food workers 100%, in context of the more large-scale, radical political demands I outlined above.
Groups like the AFL-CIO only want employees in Wal-Mart to organize just so they can get their union dues. They don't give a damn about those people and organized labor will just exploit them for their personal and political gain as opposed to genuinely representing them.
That's a cynical view. It is correct at some level. Of course groups like the AFL-CIO would like having more union dues. But I find it hard to believe that's all the union leaders are thinking. People believe their own inner narratives and they usually construct ones sympathetic to themselves. In reality, the union leaders likely want more dues AND want workers to be organized to improve their own lives. Why not? Everybody wins in that thinking (except the bosses).
Whether they would actually represent the workers is a different question altogether. The thing is, at some point even the corrupt union leadership is faced with a demand from management it can't accept without losing all legitimacy. If it does, you get mutiny from within the ranks, from which new leadership eventually emerges. You're thinking of these organizations in calcified, unchanging forms, when in fact the contradictions that exist beneath the surface during periods of calm can suddenly emerge and lead to drastic changes in periods of acute class struggle.
No it's not there's a reason why he wants union membership to be revitalized. An increase in union membership means that there will be a bigger pool of money for him to receive from union leadership.
You need to look at the amount of money Obama received. Check out this table of his
top 20 donors in the 2008 election; nowhere on the list do you see a union. The truth is that, while of course the Democrats will gladly accept the unions' money, the value of those contributions pales compared to the far larger amount garnered from wealthy donors, the big banks and other corporations.
Yes he did. The problem is that it was killed in Congress by the Republicans and conservative Democrats.
That's the Obama party line. I think we have different definitions of the word "fight". Obama may have nominally supported the Employee Free Choice Act, but he never spoke about it at great length, never made an issue out of it, never pushed for the legislation. In short, he totally failed to use the power of the "bully pulpit" that a president commands, and that was a conscious decision on his own part. Passing that law simply wasn't a priority for him - or, more to the point, to his biggest campaign donors.
Not to sound like a jackass, but well......duh. The Democrats take unions for granted because they know that even though they don't give a damn about blue collar white working class voters anymore, they know that union leadership will still donate heavily to them regardless of how union members feel.
Exactly, and that's the whole problem. The Democrats take the unions for granted, but the union leadership is too cozy and corrupt to question this arrangement. They'll only start to move when the anger from their rank-and-file members gets so loud that it becomes impossible to ignore and they desperately change tack at the last minute trying to save their own positions.
You know, breaking from the Democratic Party would be a great move politically for labor. However,a major hurdle for a labor party is that most blue collar workers in the United States now are turning more and more Republican. Republicans now dominate the governments in blue collar union states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The West Virginia Democratic Party, is more along the lines of the national Republican Party than the national Democratic Party. And if it weren't for Chicago and New York City, Republicans would probably have control of Illinois and New York as well.
I'm glad someone here is starting to see the potential benefits of a labor party. But certainly the situation you described is real. This is the fallout of the "Reagan Democrat" phenomenon. Many union members started voting against their own interests during the Reagan era, voting Republican because they were sick of the Democrats' inability to fix the economy, because Reagan offered a more appealing image, but also critically because the long postwar boom had dulled labor's militancy. People forgot how they had to struggle for the benefits they enjoyed: "Yeah, what do we need unions for? We've got good wages, don't we?"
30 years of right-wing propaganda, echoed by the mainstream media, has strengthened Reaganist ideology in the masses. But the Republicans' nakedly anti-worker policies will reveal themselves in people's day-to-day lives, just as the Democrats' will. Eventually, people will have to draw their own conclusions. Unions will become more militant, they might break from the Dems, or else voters will move frantically from one party to the other trying to find someone to solve their problems and anger will erupt in the streets when this fails to happen. In any case, there will be some kind of fight against austerity.
By union crony buddies, I mean more along the lines of union leadership like James P. Hoffa, Bob King, and Richard Trumka, not the actual union laborers. Obama rewards those guys with ownership of GM, trying to get the Employee Free Choice Act, etc. but he doesn't do anything for the actual laborers. It's exactly what you say, he just wants the money involved.
You know, I think we pretty much agree on the problem of the corrupt union leadership. We just disagree over how to get past this problem and obtain better conditions for workers overall.
