Dictatorship Over the Proletariat

DICTATORSHIP OVER THE PROLETARIAT:Deprivations of Work and Labor in the United StatesRick Fantasia Department of Sociology Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts USA 01063This paper was published under the title, “Dictature Sur le Proletariat: Strategies de repression et travail aux Etats-Unis” in the June 2001 issue of the French journal, ACTES de la recherché en sciences sociales 138: 3-18. It was awarded the 2004 prize for "best scholarly article" from the 2Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association (for articles published between 2001 and 2003). The US economy has been proclaimed as a model for its low levels of unemployment, its high productivity, high living standards, and its remarkable ability to generate jobs. To achieve this success, other countries are informed, they must be prepared to emulate US economic, political, and social arrangements. But just how successful is the US economy, and what exactly would be the costs of replicating it? It might well be argued that what is truly exceptional about the United States is less any of its specific institutional arrangements or even its cultural artifacts, than it is the ease and the extent to which neo-liberal practices and the ideas associated with those practices have been able to circulate without significant opposition. Neo-liberalism has been blessed with a veritable social laboratory in American society, which is why those in Europe seeking to advance market-centered reforms in their own societies have pointed to it as an exemplar, as the model for business de-regulation, for the privatization of public services, for the rapid growth of the service sector and technological innovation within it, as well as for a broad configuration of practices designed to substitute the profit motive for the public interest. What is often unappreciated at an analytical level, however, is the degree to which the entire neo- liberal edifice rests on the situation of labor, including its material conditions, its forms of social organization, and its symbolic life. Instead, there is a tendency is to focus on selective statistical trends and currents that have been detached from the specifically social context of labor, and this has the effect of lending the American economy a certain charismatic charm as being the great generator of productivity, of employment, and of entrepreneurial freedom. But without wishing to do too much violence to the statistical arts, even a cursory look at cross-national productivity rates indicate that, a) although 3 the U.S. started out well ahead in the postwar productivity contest, by the decade of the 1990’s a number of countries (including France) had actually overtaken the U.S.; and that b) between 1960 and 1997, the average annual productivity growth of the United States was exceeded by at least five other countries (including France).1 Though notoriously difficult to measure or to standardize, the level of productivity and its rate of growth have traditionally been considered key determinants of current and prospective material standards of living across societies. Whether or not productivity is a reasonable indicator, however, to the extent that it serves as the principal basis for U.S. criticism of Europe for struggling to sustain broad social welfare and collective bargaining systems, the fact that European countries have now surpassed U.S. productivity levels suggests that the condition of “Eurosclerosis” has been misdiagnosed.Similarly, although the United States has done rather well in terms of job creation over the past several decades, relative to Europe, it is a characterization to which several important qualifications must be added. The first proviso is a simple temporal one, for had we only considered the period from 1975-1985, when most of Western Europe was experiencing slow economic growth, rising levels of unemployment, and falling employment, while at the same time some 20 million jobs were being created in the U.S., we might think that we had indeed discovered a miraculous “jobs machine”.2 However, if we shift to consider the annual rate of employment growth for the period 1979-1989, we see that while the U.S. rate of employment growth was indeed quite strong (an annual rate of 1.7%) and stronger than most OECD 1 An analysis of OECD data conducted by the Economic Policy Institute show that from 1960-1997 the U.S. productivity growth rate (1.4%) was exceeded by Japan (4.5%), Italy (3.6%), France (3.4%), Germany (3.1%), UK (2.6%) and Canada (1.5%); and they also show that while US productivity was double that of most European countries in 1960, all European countries (as well as Japan) have steadily narrowed the productivity gap, and so by 1997 the countries of Belgium, France, western Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway had overtaken U.S. productivity levels. See Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, THE STATE OF WORKING AMERICA 2000/2001 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001) pp.375-377. 2 In the Common Market employment was falling during these years, while in the OECD countries overall, employment rose slightly by 2.5 million, according to Richard B. Freeman, “How Labor Fares in Advanced Economies” in R.B. Freeman (ed.) WORKING UNDER DIFFERENT RULES (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994) pp.2-3. 4 countries, it was not quite as strong as Australia (2.4%), Canada (2.0%), or Switzerland (1.8%); while in a more recent period (1989-1998) as the U.S. rate of growth of employment slowed to 1.3%, Ireland (3.7%), the Netherlands ( 2.0%), New Zealand (2.1%), Norway (1.4%), and Australia (1.4%) all exceeded the U.S. rate.3 Furthermore, as many are aware, a high proportion of the jobs that have been created are contingent, or non-standard (part-time, temporary, on-call, sub-contracted, self-employed) jobs, and these tend to be less secure, less well paid, and to provide fewer non-cash “fringe benefits” than do regular full-time jobs. Beginning in the early 1980’s, wage declines drove large numbers of American workers to seek second and third jobs so that by 1999 5.9% of the workforce (8 million workers) held two or more jobs, many of them part-time and concentrated in low-paying industries and occupations. Fueling the expansion of the part-time labor force has been the rapid growth of service sector chain establishments, the most successful of which have been built upon a foundation of high sales volume, high technology, and low labor costs. The managerial imperative to seek increased labor “flexibility” is simply easier to achieve with part-time labor, as one supermarket manager admitted to a researcher: “the pluses of hiring part-time people are the [low] rate of pay that you’re able to pay them, the increased [schedule] flexibility that it will allow you, particularly if you have a varying business, varying volume”.4 Employers like McDonald’s, the fast food company, maintain a work force of which 80% are part-time (and 100% are non union), while some retail chains mask the size of their part-time labor force by the simple act of redefining the terms. For example, Wal-Mart is able to claim that 70% of its labor force is full-time only by defining full-time as 28 hours per week, and the Starbucks chain of 3 Mishel, Bernstein, & Schmitt, op. cit., p.403. Because the employment rate is partly built on the number of hours worked, per worker it can be a truly dubious distinction for an economy when a high rate of employment is built upon exceptionally short vacations and long weekly hours of work (as will be shown below). 4 Quoted in Chris Tilly, HALF A JOB: Bad and Good Part-Time Jobs in a Changing Labor Market (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996) p.47. 5 coffee shops claims 57% of its workers are full-time, but defines “full-time” as 20 hours per week.5 Add to this the fact that the “temporary help” industry in the United States has grown from .4 million workers in 1982 to 3.0 million in 1999, and we reach the situation where approximately one out of four workers in the U.S. is employed in some form of non-standard job arrangement, a circumstance that many may have chosen voluntarily, but that many others have not.6 In the same way that claims about job creation in the U.S. must be treated with a measure of skepticism, the same holds for claims about the unemployment level. Although it is true that the overall unemployment rate has tended to be impressively low in the United States for the past two decades, that is not so very exceptional, for it has actually been even lower in a number of other OECD countries. So that while the 1999 U.S. unemployment rate of 4.2% is indeed almost half of the 8.1% average of all OECD countries (and just over a third of the French rate of 11.3%) four European countries had unemployment rates in 1999 that were below the U.S. rate, namely Austria (3.7%), the Netherlands (3.3%), Norway (3.2%), and Switzerland (3.5%), while the same held true in 1989 (in 1979 the U.S. unemployment rate of 5.8%, exceeded the OECD average rate of 4.4%).7 Furthermore, it is estimated that the millions of poor males, predominantly racial and ethnic minorities caught up in the U.S. penal system, have contributed to a full two percent artificial reduction in the unemployment rate throughout the 1990’s.8 This 5 “The Gap” clothing company similarly redefines the terms to claim that 70% of its workers are “full-time”, while defining full-time status as 30 hours or more per week. Figures for these firms provided in Naomi Klein, NO LOGO: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (NY: Picador, 1999) p.476. 6 Drawing from Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data, Mishel, Bernstein, & Schmitt, (op.cit. pp. 244-253) report that the most recent data, from 1999, indicate that of the 17.1% of employees working part-time (as opposed to other forms of contingent work), 85% claim to have voluntarily chosen their part-time status, while 15% claim that they were forced to do so because they could not find a full-time job. However these researchers also cite previous data that show that the large increase in part-time work that occurred between 1973 and 1989 was primarily involuntary, rather than being a reflection of workers’ preferences for shorter hours (p. 250). 7 Mishel, Bernstein, & Schmitt, op. cit., p. 404. 8 See Loic Wacquant, LES PRISONS DE LA MISERE (Paris: Editions Raisons D’Agir, 1999), p.90; and also see Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, “How Unregulated is the US Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution”, in American Journal of Sociology, 104, January 1999, pp.1135-1172. 6 would seem to be an especially significant point if we are willing to consider the admittedly counterintuitive idea that youth incarceration in the U.S. essentially represents a perverse, though largely unintended “solution” to the problem of youth unemployment, for when adult unemployment rates are considered apart from those of youth, they appear to have been slightly lower in France than in the U.S. in recent years.9 Additionally, in its monthly household survey from which the U.S. unemployment rate is actually derived, the U.S. Census Bureau counts anyone over the age of sixteen who has worked just one hour in the previous week as “in the labor force and working”, a standard that would seem to represent a rather uncertain foundation for an edifice as grand as the “Great American Jobs Machine.” Besides, no matter how substantial a job is in the U.S. its occupant can always be discharged by an employer at a moment’s notice, without reason or warning and without severance compensation (with the exception of certain categories of school teachers, university professors, and civil servants with tenure and as well as senior executives in possession of a severance contract). Overall then, it can be said with some confidence that despite several decades of rhetoric and a host of questionable assumptions, when the rates of employment and unemployment are viewed in the social context in which labor is actually performed in the U.S., the situation does not appear nearly as distinctive or as exceptional as it has been made to out to be. With regard to the wages associated with these jobs, it must be said that if the thesis of working class embourgeoisement had been at all applicable to American society when it was issued in the 1960’s, it was soon reversed, for the average weekly earnings of eighty-percent of working Americans, adjusted for inflation, fell by 18% between the years 1973 and 1995.10 Thus,9 Although youth unemployment has been unusually intractable throughout Western Europe relative to the U.S., a respected British economist has told the Financial Times that “…between 1988 and 1994, 11% of men aged 25-55 were not in work in France, compared with 13 per cent in the UK, 14 per cent in the US, and 15 per cent in Germany” [emphasis added], quoted in John Gray, FALSE DAWN (NY: The New Press, 1998), p.113. 10 This point is made by John Gray in FALSE DAWN: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (New York: The New Press, 1998) p.111, 114. For a recapitulation of the thesis of working class embourgoisement, see the “Introduction” 7 the significant wage growth that has occurred in the very recent period (7.3% growth between 1995-1999) must be viewed against the backdrop of a much lengthier, steadier, and more substantial wage decline that transpired for over two decades among male “blue collar”, “service”, and most categories of “white collar” workers in the U.S.11 This was a period in which the share of workers earning poverty-level wages rose among all groups, and was particularly severe for Hispanic and Black men.12 Overall, that portion of the American workforce with less than a high school education earned $2.81 per hour less in 1999 than they earned in 1973, and those workers with a high school diploma earned $1.51 less per hour in 1999 than they had in 1973 (together these categories constituted a full 41% of all workers in 1999).13 This represented a decline in median annual income of approximately $4,500. While the education/wage differential is often portrayed in the media as a higher education “premium” that accrues to those who have successfully attained a university education (often implicitly posed as a shortcoming of those who have not) the data indicate that even those who attended university to John H. Goldethorpe, et.al., THE AFFLUENT WORKER IN THE CLASS STRUCTURE (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 11 All male workers, except for managers, professionals, and technicians saw substantial and steady declines in hourly wages between 1973 and 1999 (even when we include the substantial wage growth that occurred from 1995- 1999!). Wage declines were recorded for the “white collar” categories of sales workers, administrative workers, and clerks; for “service” workers (including police and firefighters); and for the range of “blue collar” occupations (skilled craftsmen, factory operatives, transportation operators, and laborers). Although women’s wages rose steadily across all of these occupational categories, this is largely because they had lagged so far behind the wages of men prior to 1973, and their wages continue to be substantially lower than those of men within the same occupational categories. See Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and John Schmitt, THE STATE OF WORKING AMERICA 2000/2001 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) pp.4-6, p.122. This is a reference book produced by the Economic Policy Institute that represents an outstanding source for current data on wealth, income, and a wide range of other indicators of social inequality in the U.S. 12 Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op. cit., pp.129-136, show that between 1973 and 1999, the percent of Hispanic men earning poverty-level wages rose from 25.1% to 40.3%; the percent of Black men 24.8% to 29.5%; and the percent of White men earning poverty-level wages rose from 10.7% to 16.1%. Except for Hispanic men, whose wages did not show any gains in the period, these figures take the 1995-1999 wage gains into account. A “poverty- level wage” is designated by “the hourly wage that a full-time, year-round worker must earn to sustain a family of four at the poverty threshold”, or $8.19 in the year 1999 (in 1999 dollars). While the official “poverty threshold” is a precise figure that carries great authority, the computational model from which it is derived is widely regarded as arbitrary and outdated, essentially understating by half the percent of the population that actually lives under conditions of material deprivation. 13 Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op.cit. p. 153. 8(but did not complete a degree) also saw their wages drop by a full dollar per hour, between 1973 and 1999.14 For workers in the U.S. there has not only been a decline in the monetary wage, but in what Americans call “fringe benefits”, a term that would appear to accurately reflect the institutional status of social provision in American society. In the absence of a universal health insurance system and in the context of a mostly private system of medical care, the employer provision of health insurance is a virtual necessity for most workers in the United States, but between 1979 and 1998 the share of workers covered by employer-provided health insurance in the private sector dropped from 70.2% to 62.9%, a reduction of 7.3%, while employer- provided retirement pensions declined by a rate of 1.9%, leaving in 1998 only 49.2% of the private sector workforce with the ability to depend upon one.15 Meanwhile, the United States is the only country (out of twenty OECD countries) where workers actually work more, on average, over the course of a year, than they worked twenty years ago.16 So while the rest of the industrialized world has seen their annual hours of work 14 Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op. cit. p. 152-53. It is important to mention that the primary reason for an increased wage gap between university-educated and other workers is less the strong growth of the university wage, and more the sharp decline of wages among non-university-educated workers, those with a four-year university degree saw only a modest 3.2% wage gain in the period between 1979 and 1999. Although those with an “advanced university degree” enjoyed 11.5% wage growth in this period, this happens to be a group that comprised only 9% of those employed in 1999. 15 The social security program, instituted in the 1930’s, provides a very modest national pension system to which all workers contribute, although for most workers it must be supplemented in order to avoid a retirement in poverty. And the preponderance of public sector workers receive some form of employer-provided health insurance (although like many private sector workers, they are increasingly forced to pay an ever larger portion of the monthly insurance premium and are otherwise made to absorb the increased costs of health care). It should be noted that the public sector comprises only about 16% of the total labor force in the U.S., well below that of France. It also should be noted that the decline in health and pension provisions have been substantially greater among lower wage workers than others. For example, of those in the lowest fifth of wage earners, only 29.6% of whom receive any employer-provided health insurance, there was an 11.1% decline between 1979 and 1998, which is also the period in which pension coverage was reduced by a rate of 1.6% (only 17.9% of low wage workers receive employer- provided pension). Generally, for workers within the bottom two-fifths of wage earners, both the cost of purchasing of health care coverage for themselves and their families, and investment in a private pension plan is prohibitively expensive, and it is among this group that the national estimate of 44 million uninsured are overwhelmingly drawn. All figures are drawn from Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op.cit. pp. 137-140. 16 This has not always been the case. Thirty years ago Americans worked fewer hours per year than either the French or the Germans, according to Richard B. Freeman, op. cit. 1994, p. 3. 9 reduced by an average of 163 hours over the past two decades, Americans are working 61 hours more now than they did then.17 An important reason for the difference has to do with the fact that the average annual vacation for a worker in the U.S. (where employers are not legally mandated to provide their employees with any vacation time, paid or unpaid) is only 16 days, a figure that is less than the statutory minimum vacation in every European country, and a full half of the amount of legally mandated vacation time in France, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Spain, and Sweden.18 Moreover, American workers are not only permitted less daily rest or break time at work than European workers are, but don’t actually have any statutory right to rest time or to bathroom breaks, for any length of time (in fact, managements have the right to require mandatory overtime of workers, without any fixed legal cap on the maximum number of hours).19 Certainly, French employers are fully capable of fining or disciplining workers for “faire (tros) pipi”, but when they do, if not their co-workers, then the state is likely to intervene in defense of this human imperative, whereas in the U.S. it is not even recognized as such, in statutory terms.20 In addition to there being no mandated rest time or vacation policy, the U.S. 17 Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op. cit., p. 400. While Sweden has actually been another country that has shown an increase in the average annual hours worked between 1979 and 1998, the increase has only brought Sweden’s average to 1,551 hours per year, which is third on the list of twenty (where France in 1998 was sixth, with 1, 634 hours annually, while the U.S. was twentieth, with 1,966 hours worked in 1998). The broad implications of overwork in the United States are examined in Juliet B. Schor, THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN (NY: Basic Books, 1991). 18 Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt op. cit., p. 401. Also see Juliet B. Schor, op. cit. Obviously, since sixteen represents the average annual paid vacation in the U.S., a very great many workers receive less, and some receive no annual paid vacation. Moreover, there are only 8-10 paid holidays for U.S. workers, while the mean number across Europe is 12, according to Richard B. Freeman, “How Labor Fares in Advanced Economies” in R.B. Freeman (ed.) WORKING UNDER DIFFERENT RULES NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994, p.22. 19 The exceptions are transportation employees—airline controllers, pilots, truck and bus drivers, etc. whose hours are regulated by both Federal and state governments. See the aptly titled book by Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, VOID WHERE PROHIBITED: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p.1and 9. They present data (p.174) indicating that one-third of workers employed in medium or large establishments (and approximately 50% of those working for small establishments or for government) do not receive paid rest periods in the U.S. 20 Linder and Nygaard (ibid ) note that in 1995 workers at a French meatpacking plant went on strike in reaction to an announcement by employers that they would fine workers for “faire pipi” outside of the three fixed five-minute breaks that were allowed (p.4) and in 1996 a French labor tribunal established, officially, that going to the toilet “meets a physiological need which only the individual is in a position to judge” and that “the right to go to the toilet cannot be subject to authorization by a third party” (p.159). 10 has no sickness leave policy, paid or unpaid, no paid maternity leave policy (although there are 13 weeks of unpaid maternity leave), and there is no child allowance policy to support parenthood.21 Of course even though there are so few social benefits mandated by the state, individual employers do provide a range of benefits in the United States. The crucial difference, though, is that whether or not American workers receive social benefits is a function of either the state of the labor market or the state of their collective power. In other words, one chief determinant of whether an employer offers specific benefits has to do with the relative tightness of the labor market at any given time or place, or in any given occupation (with regard to the ability to attract and retain employees with needed skills). The other is the organizational power of workers in relation to employers. The reason, therefore, why so many of the indicators with regard to the social conditions of labor seem so negative is not simply a matter of wishing to place U.S. society in an unflattering light, but it is that in the U.S. there is one problem that serves as a virtual pre-condition for all of the others: a system of labor relations that overwhelmingly favors employers. For the tens of millions of workers in the U.S. who lack professional or managerial status, a union membership card is the principal passport to social citizenship. Whereas in Europe a more or less full complement of social benefits is granted on the basis of simple citizenship status, in the U.S. most social benefits are granted largely on the basis of union membership status. Thus, through much of the post-war period American workers in the heavily-unionized core sectors of the industrial economy were able to maintain a menu of social benefits that were comparable with (though never fully equal to) those granted to most Europeans as a right of 21 While unemployment insurance covers American workers at 50% of their pay for six months, workers in Europe normally receive sixteen months of unemployment coverage at 47% of their pay according to R. B. Freeman, op. cit. p.22. There is no mandated provision with regard to severance pay in the U.S 11 citizenship. The problem is not simply the low percentage of workers who are union members in the U.S. (under 13%), but that it is almost as difficult to attain union membership status in the United States as it is to attain citizenship status in much of Europe, and once union status is attained it must be constantly defended against aggressive employer opposition.[Place the following in a Boxed Insert about here]One important difference that distinguishes the U.S. from France is that the U.S. maintains a highly decentralized system of collective bargaining and labor relations in which union representatives and employers negotiate at many thousands of unionized workplaces across the country in order to produce thousands of separate labor contracts that generally only apply and are only enforceable within each of these specific workplaces or firms alone.22 Similarly, trade union membership is a status that is attained (and maintained) workplace by workplace and firm by firm, through a process of quasi-self- organization in which groups of rank and file workers, aided by representatives of one of 66 autonomous national union organizations with rough jurisdiction over specific industries and occupations, mobilize an electoral campaign with the goal of convincing a majority of their co-workers to vote for union membership, on a collective basis, and through a government-supervised “union representation election”. If successful, a 22 For example, even though the UAW, the union of automobile workers, may negotiate a general labor contract with General Motors with the expectation that it will serve as a model agreement for the rest of the U.S. automobile industry (with Daimler-Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, etc.), it is largely a matter of the balance of forces between the UAW and the companies that determines whether or not the auto industry will agree to adhere to a nationally “coordinated” or “pattern” contract to maintain a comparable set of working conditions throughout the industry. Regardless of whether they do or not, and pattern bargaining is being eroded in every industry where it was once the rule, supplemental agreements covering “local” issues that are specific to a particular plant or region, are also negotiated between the union local and the managers at each of the auto plants owned by each of the auto companies. Thus, across the heavily unionized industries there are, literally, thousands of collective bargaining relationships. For a very basic overview of how unions operate in the U.S. see Michael D. Yates, WHY UNIONS MATTER NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998 12 relatively autonomous local branch of the national union organization will then be chartered as the officially-sanctioned bargaining agent for the workers in that establishment. ******************************************************************************Labor has long been at the heart of the debate over American exceptionalism.23 To the extent that labor movements are a fulcrum for social transformation, they can be seen as being that social formation whose situation is the condition for the transformation of all social formations. What this means with regard to the United States is that the peculiar situation of its labor movement can be seen as having been both cause and effect of those factors that have been represented as being characteristic of the society, from its putative “classlessness”, to its varied and celebrated “freedoms”, to its relentless ideological individualism. Indeed, when it comes to socio-economic arrangements, the collective actor has largely been replaced by the individual as the most basic unit of social perception in the U.S., a situation that permits a believable-sounding tale of classlessness to be spun in the face of material indicators that show the society to be increasingly “class-ful”.24 No doubt this has been accomplished, in part, by a cheerfully democratic cultural style and a constant flow of promotional hyperbole that always helps to obscure the harshest aspects of social life in the United States. It is also partly due to the sheer determination and effort of the 23 The absence of a durable socialist politics and an unusually pragmatic trade unionism in the United States have been the bases of the longstanding scholarly debate over American exceptionalism, with the anomaly surrounding these developments driving Werner Sombart’s century-old query, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1976). A not unreasonable response has been that there are as many exceptional cases as there are cases under consideration. See Aristide R. Zolberg, “How Many Exceptionalisms?” in I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg, Working Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 24 It is by now axiomatic that the U.S. sustains the highest levels of income inequality and wealth inequality of all of the OECD countries. We recognize, of course, that social classes are not solely constituted by their material dimensions, but may be best understood as group formations that are never fully formed, that exist both materially and allegorically, and that are subject to the predispositions as well as the historically contingent pushes and pulls of groups of social agents and those designated to speak on their behalf. Social class must therefore be conceptually located and comprehended at different levels simultaneously. 13 media, the political establishment, and legions of academic and technical “experts” who together have symbolically created what amounts to a perfectly lovely, but mostly fictional society (and the object of their own endless marvel.) So although a weak labor movement has typically been viewed as the product of the distinctive characteristics of American society, alternatively we might equally consider the extent to which a weakened and compliant labor movement has permitted American society to be reasonably represented as being classless, free, and comprised solely of sovereign individuals. There is no question but that this has proven to be an ideal, almost utopian situation for those on the winning side, designed to facilitate a maximum of manipulation with a minimal threat of social disruption, but not least because it has successfully obscured the labor relations practices upon which it rests. Labor Relations as a ‘Blood Sport’It is no exaggeration to say that the basic rights to form trade unions, to bargain collectively, and to strike have been so eroded in American society that for most workers, in practical terms, they have been rendered almost mute. Viewed retrospectively, a sustained employer offensive can be seen to have been set in motion as early as 1965 with the formation of the Labor Law Study Group, an organization comprising the top executives of fifty major private corporations and forty industry trade associations, whose stated goal was to “restore the balance to the collective bargaining process and the conduct of labor relations”.25 Working outside of the public spotlight throughout the decade of the 1970’s, the Labor Law Study Group (which was later to become known as the “Business Roundtable”) lobbied Congress, organized political action committees, and deployed considerable money and influence to manipulate public opinion.25 Quoted in Haynes Johnson and Nick Kotz, THE UNIONS (NY: Pocket Books, 1972) p. 112. 14The forty trade associations involved in the project were mobilized in a public opinion campaign that was led, behind the scenes, by the senior management of Hill & Knowlton, the world’s largest public relations firm and a company with a well-known reputation for anti- unionism and for shaping the images of many of the nation’s largest corporations. Hill & Knowlton reportedly informed the Labor Law Study Group that it’s effort would involve providing story lines to authors who were regular contributors to various national magazines, that it would meet with a number of well-known “liberal intellectuals” in order to arrange public interviews for those who might be “flexible and amenable” to the anti-union agenda, that it would work with newspaper editorial boards, radio and television producers and writers, as well as cartoonists, to encourage them to promote the theme of “union abuse” in their works, and it promised “to work with the publishers and authors of civics, history, and economics textbooks to persuade them to use the case materials Hill & Knowlton had prepared”.26 Although the evidence doesn’t indicate whether or not the public relations effort was fully implemented, the creation of public opinion was only a small portion of the activities of the Labor Law Study Group. With its members representing some of the largest private users of unionized construction labor, the organization directed its early efforts against the building trades unions in the construction industry. Working alongside the main industry trade group, the Associated Builders and Contractors, and aided by several non-union construction companies that specialized in replacing workers during strikes, by the early 1980’s the group had succeeded in slashing the unionization rate in the construction industry by half, an encouragement to the other, similar efforts that had already begun across various other industries.27 26 See James A. Gross, BROKEN PROMISES: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947-1994 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995) pp. 205-214. While he provides no evidence that this program was fully implemented, Gross notes that it was considered fully acceptable to members of the Labor law Study Group. 27 By 1984 the unionization rate in the construction industry had dropped to 23.4%, down from over 50% in the 1960’s; and coordinated efforts to systematically destroy unions were being mobilized by groups like the “Council 15By the late 1970’s an onslaught was underway in American industry, one that was being systematically waged on two fronts simultaneously: in a fierce struggle to de-unionize those workplaces where unions were already in place, and in an ongoing assault on the right of workers to organize firms and industries that were not yet unionized. Along both fronts were deployed a veritable army of union-busting consultants who were springing up in response to market demand. These consulting firms were made up of lawyers, security personnel, and industrial relations experts who hired themselves to corporations at exorbitant rates, lending strategic guidance in the messy process of union-busting.28 Seminars, manuals, guidebooks, and video cassettes explaining the proper techniques of union busting were widely marketed to the business community, and the diffusion of materials had the dual effect of legitimizing and assisting the sorts of activities that just two decades earlier had been declared impossible for a “mature system of industrial relations.”29 on a Union Free Environment” of the National Association of Manufacturers, the principal industrial trade group, as well as the American Hospital Association and the National Retail Merchants Association. See Michael Goldfield, THE DECLINE OF ORGANIZED LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) pp.190-192; and see Mike Davis’ PRISONERS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM (NY: Verso, 1986) pp.132- 133. 28 In testimony before the U.S. Congress, the Chairman of the Board of the West Coast Industrial Relations Association, a notorious union busting consulting firm, expressly noted that legal advice was only a small part of the business and that in addition to attorneys, “Our staff includes multidisciplined professionals with expertise in human resource areas….former employees of the National Labor Relations Board, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services, Department of Justice, and labor organizations.” From “PRESSURES IN TODAY’S WORKPLACE” vol. III, pp. 304-305 of the Oversight Hearings of the Committee on Education and Labor, US House of Representatives, Dec. 15, 1979, Feb. 26-27th, 1980. For a first-hand account of the activities of one union buster see, Martin Jay Levitt, CONFESSIONS OF A UNION BUSTER (NY: Crown Publishers, 1993); and for the range of strategies and tactics employed, see Herbert C. Meyer, “The Decline of Strikes” in Fortune magazine (November 2, 1981); Robert Georgine, “From Brass Knuckles to Briefcases: the Modern Art of Union Busting” in Mark Green (ed.) THE BIG BUSINESS READER (NY: Pilgrim Press, 1980); and Ron Chernow, “The New Pinkertons” in Mother Jones magazine, May 1980; 29 With titles like “De-Unionizing”, “Maintaining Non-Union Status, “Operating During Strikes”, and “How to De- Certify a Union” the practices that were encouraged in this burgeoning literature were a total negation of the views of scholars like Clark Kerr et. al., INDUSTRIALISM AND INDUSTRIAL MAN (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Daniel Bell, THE END OF IDEOLOGY (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960); and Arthur Ross and Paul Hartmann, CHANGING PATTERNS OF INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT (NY: Wiley, 1960) who dominated postwar discourse, advancing the view that as systems of industrial relations “matured”, routinized and bureaucratic forms of governance would replace class conflict. What they failed to recognize (and this has been especially evident in the U.S. as we illustrate below) was the extent to which the industrial bureaucracy had itself been turned into a weapon of industrial warfare. 16Insert the following boxed insert about here under the title: “The Business of Economic Terror”]***************************************************************************The Wackenhut Corp., Coral Gables, Fla., August 7, 1979Re: Strike Protection and Support Services.Dear______: When one of your clients faces the possibility of unsuccessful labor negotiations and an ensuing strike, it may prove helpful for you to be aware of the specialized physical security protection and support services provided by Wackenhut throughout the United States for a host of major corporations in many industries.These services are performed by professional teams whose experience enables them to defuse potentially explosive situations. Our people are sensitive to the provisions of the 17Fair labor Standards Act. They recognize actions that might constitute unfair labor procedures, and they know how to document such actions.The Strike Protection and Support Services include: 1. Site Security Surveys.—To review existing physical safeguards such as perimeter fencing, exterior lighting, access control and personnel identification systems; assess requirements; anticipate problem areas. 2. Uniformed Guards.—For the protection of facilities, equipment and personnel, specially trained guards with experienced supervision, interlinked by an advanced UHF communication system operated from its own portable base station. 3. Shipping Protection.—Vehicle and guard escorts for incoming and outgoing trucks plus over-the-road service. 4. Investigations.—Investigators and photographers experienced in gathering evidence of illegal acts. 5. Executive Protection.—Sophisticated protection for management and their families—minimum interference with normal lifestyles. 6. In-plant Living Support.—To maintain operations with supervisory personnel in safety and comfort, complete logistical service with portable equipment, including gourmet meals (so important for moral when plant- bound) beds, linens, laundry, housekeeping and recreation equipment.Arrangements should be made well in advance of any anticipated disturbance. The first step is a confidential facilities survey to determine specific requirements. The survey will enable us to prepare a proposal and cost estimate. I might mention that on more than one occasion, the timely arrival of one of our immense tractor-trailers with its load of mobile kitchens, et. al., has been instrumental in settling the threatened strike and preventing the work stoppage. I’d like you to have a set of brochures on Wackenhut’s unique Emergency Support and Emergency Protection Services. Just fill in the enclosed reply card and return it in the postage-paid envelop.Should there be an imminent work stoppage, call me at (305) 445-1481. You’ll be amazed by the speed of our response capability and the professionalism and smoothness of our support operations. I look forward to hearing from you.Sincerely,George R. Wackenhut 18Source: Business solicitation letter submitted into the record and reprinted in “Pressures in Today’s Workplace,” Oversight Hearings held on Oct. 16-18th, 1979 before the Subcommittee on Labor-management Relations of the Committee on Education and Labor of the House of Representatives, 96th Congress, Vol. I, pp.39-40.******************************************************************************After having lay dormant for decades, the art of strikebreaking was revived as a routine strategy in the assault on unions, and from the mid-1970’s through the 1980’s plant managers, personnel chiefs, and corporate executives learned the grisly methodology of strikebreaking under the tutelage of the consultants, and in this manner created a virtual formula for the practice: 30 1. At the negotiation for a new contract with the union, companies would demand that workers give back basic benefits that had been won in previous years, while refusing to discuss any issues of importance to the union, limiting discussion to the most trivial issues (a tactic called “bargaining to impasse”);2. The company would remain intransigent through the expiration of the old contract, forcing the union to either accede to all of management’s demands or respond with strike action (the workers would favor this response since they would be angered and insulted by the company’s uncompromising stance);3. Once the strike had been provoked and was underway, companies would move to hire permanent “replacement workers” to cross the picket lines to take the jobs of the strikers;4. After the strike was one year old, the company would discretely contrive to hold a government-supervised “decertification election” in which only the 30 Strikebreaking took on a formulaic character due to widespread success and because of the wide distribution of step-by-step manuals, like Charles R. Perry, et. al., OPERATING DURING STRIKES (a 1982 publication of the Industrial Research Unit of the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania); and Ted M. Yeiser, HOW TO DE-CERTIFY A UNION (Memphis, TN: Management Press, Inc., 1979. 19 replacement workers could vote, thus formally terminating the union’s charter and severing any responsibility the company might have had for bargaining with its workers.In a paradoxical twist then, the strike---or, rather, the ‘counterstrike’--- had increasingly turned into a weapon in the employer’s arsenal, and many of the hundreds of officially- sanctioned strikes that were occurring yearly, actions that had essentially developed into little more than ritualized expressions of “mock combat”, had suddenly become fierce battles “to the finish”, with the unions losing a good many more than they were winning. Although firmly in place since 1947, the legal machinery for breaking unions were not widely employed until the mid 1970’s, and its centerpiece has been a truly remarkable legal contortion in which workers in the U.S. are granted the right to strike, while employers have the right to permanently replace them (thus effectively nullifying the right!).31 Strikebreaking can be an extremely costly investment, both financially and in terms of corporate public relations, but what makes it particularly appealing to employers is that once strikers have been replaced, a legal mechanism is available for officially decertifying, or breaking, the union entirely. In a highly de-regulated economic environment that provides so few mandated benefits to employees, pursuit of this strategy can turn out to be a very sound long-31 Although U.S. law forbids permanent replacements in strikes deemed to be due to the illegal “unfair labor practices” of employers (as distinct from mere “economic strikes” aimed at improving the terms of the labor contract), their consultants are adept at helping employers conceal their unfair labor practices. Besides, full reinstatement for unfairly-replaced strikers can take many years. For example, in one case documented by Human Rights Watch, workers replaced during a strike at a Colorado steel mill that ended in 1997, were still waiting when the final Report was issued three years later, with their employer vowing “years and years of hearings before there’s any conclusion on this”, see UNFAIR ADVANTAGE: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the U.S. (NY: Human Rights Watch, 2000) p.31. A study of strikes occurring in 1985 and 1989 found that permanent replacements were hired in one-third of all strikes, while the threat to hire was invoked in many more. See John F. Schnell and Cynthia L. Gramm, “The Empirical Relations Between Employers’ Striker Replacement Strategies and Strike Duration”, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review vol.47, January 1994:189-206; and see Chapter One (“The Right to Strike: False Promises and Underlying Premises”) in James B. Atleson, VALUES AND ASSUMPTIONS IN AMERICAN LABOR LAW (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). 20 term investment for a company.32 Over the past quarter century there have been thousands of extremely bitter strikes that were provoked in this manner, including those waged by paper mill workers in Maine, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, by copper miners in Arizona and coal miners inVirginia, by machinists in Connecticut, tire makers and tool manufacturing workers in Illinois, electrical workers and radiator workers in Massachusetts, by food-processing workers in Iowa, Minnesota, and California, newspaper workers in New York, as well as flight attendants, air traffic controllers, airline pilots, airline mechanics, and bus drivers across the country.33 The steep rise in the number of decertification elections that were held, and the high percentage of elections lost by unions give a rough but unmistakable impression of the topography of this anti- union offensive (see Figure 1).3432 In the U.S., the only advanced industrial society to permit strikers to be permanently replaced, replacement workers are permitted to vote in the decertification election along with strikers, while in the twenty so-called “Right to Work” States that place even further limits on union security, strikers actually lose their right to vote in the election once the strike has lasted for a full year. See Kim S. Cornwell, POST-STRIKE JOB SECURITY OF STRIKERS AND REPLACEMENT WORKERS: A UNITED STATES-CANADA COMPARISON Research Essay Series no.27 (Kingston, Ontario: Industrial Relations Centre, Queens University, 1990), p. 7; and John C. Anderson, et. al., “Union Decertification in the U.S.: 1947-1977”, Industrial Relations 19, 1980: pp.100-107; and see William A. Krupman and Gregory I. Rasin, “Decertification: Removing the Shroud,”, Labor Law Journal, April 1979: pp.231-241 33 There is a substantial literature of case study material on many of these epic battles, as well as on other, less well- known “union busting strikes”. For an overview, see Jeremy Brecher, STRIKE! Revised and Updated Edition (Boston: South End Press, 1997). 34 Although it is impossible to know from this data exactly what proportion of decertification elections are the result of employer-provoked strikes or “counterstrikes,” the dramatic rise in such elections is a sure indicator of a sharp escalation in anti-union activity. Figure 1 shows that the number of elections began to fall off in the 1990’s, after a sustained and heightened employer offensive, but the numbers seem to have steadied at almost twice the rate that they were in 1968, at the outset of the escalation. Although the decertification election mechanism is sometimes employed by rank and file workers who are seeking to replace an ineffective or undemocratic union with a more effective or responsive one, the data shown here only report on those decertification elections where there was only one union on the ballot, and thus reflect employer-union conflict rather than inter-union disputes. 21FIGURE 1 Decertification Elections in the U.S. 1968-19981000922 902 Percentage of elections lost 900 869 875865 by unions 849 856 857 807 Percentage of elections won 800 777 755 by unions700 644 s 611 622 606 n o 587 i 600 573 t c 531 e 516 l 490 493 488 E 485 500 453 f 451 456 o r 405 e 401 b 400 m u N 300 293 301 239 2001000 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 YearSource: Annual Reports of the National Labor Relations BoardThe right to bargain collectively, the right to strike, and the right to organize are the three main pillars of what is considered the “freedom of association,” a widely accepted body of international norms whose standards are delineated in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in the conventions of the International Labor Organization. Although the United States has not ratified the two ILO conventions that deal explicitly with the freedom of association, it has readily acknowledged its obligation to abide by ILO principles concerning such fundamental rights.35 It is for this reason that one must be skeptical with regard to the moral 35 Conventions 87 and 98 are the relevant ILO Conventions. As the U.S. officially declared in 1998: “all Members, even if they have not ratified the Conventions in question, have an obligation, arising from the very fact of membership in the Organization, to respect, to promote and to realize, in good faith and in accordance with the Constitution [of the ILO], the principles concerning the fundamental rights which are the subject of those Conventions, namely: (a) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; …”. Quoted in Human Rights Watch Report, UNFAIR ADVANTAGE: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States (NY: Human Rights Watch, 2000). 22 and judicial standards of the ILO, for it has been the pliability of U.S. law and the flimsiness of the U.S. government’s regulatory and enforcement systems that have permitted business and industry to essentially rescind, in practice, the workers’ right to organize (despite all the standard statutory affirmations). Taken together, the efforts to maintain a “union free environment” have been broad in scope and strategically complex, ranging from what might be viewed as tactical forms of “institutional passive aggressiveness”, to what could only be considered “corporate “gangsterism”.36 An example of the former would include a union-prevention strategy developed by corporations feeling burdened by a unionized workforce, who increasingly operate under the terms of the dictum that “no plant which is unionized will be expanded on-site”.37 What this means, according to Thomas Kochan et al., is that over an extended period of time, unionized firms will only expand their operations to their non-union worksites, creating a strong non-union sector within the company that then acts like a magnet for the lion's share of capital investments, permitting the company to gradually phase out the unionized sector. Unlike France and other European countries, there are no works councils within U.S. industry, and so corporations have the power to exercise full control over investment decisions which, for the past three decades, have been made within a context of a pervasive anti-unionism. Another relatively “passive” anti-union practice that employers are often encouraged to use by their consultants is to maintain the hiring process as a means of screening out applicants with a trade union background or anyone who might show a “proclivity” toward unionism. Within the context of an employment interview this knowledge might be evidenced in an 36 The term “union-free environment” actually derives from the National Association of Manufacturers, a powerful cross-industry trade group, within which has been a “Committee for a Union-Free Environment”, charged with advancing the goal of union prevention. 37 Quoted in Dan and Mary Ann Clawson, “What Has Happened to the US Labor Movement?”, Annual Review of Sociology 25, 1999:p. 103, from research conducted by T. Kochan, H. Katz, and R. McKersie, THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS (NY: Basic Books, 1986). 23 expression of “sympathy for the underdog”, in support for progressive causes, by displaying an awareness of one’s rights or, as the audio tape of one consultant’s seminar revealed, simply in ones racial or ethnic group heritage:38“It is my strong finding that blacks tend to be more prone to unionization than whites. Now, you have the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] these days, and you have to follow the EEOC. But there is no reason for you to be heroes about this and interested in abstract justice or upraising the downtrodden. So, don’t be heroes about the whole goddam thing and fill up the workforce with blacks. If you can keep them at a minimum you are better off…..…I feel the same way about Indians that I do about blacks. Stay the hell away from Puerto Ricans. Mexicans are OK if they feel that their first-line supervisor is their friend and if he speaks Spanish. Cubans are Great.”Once on the job American workers are increasingly placed under the “passive”, but no less threatening, surveillance of their employer. The American Management Association reported that in 1999, two-thirds of major U.S. corporations had electronically monitored their workers by video-tape, by review of their e-mail and voice-mail messages, or by monitoring the Web sites that they visited over break times as well as during work time.39 While one might imagine many reasons why employers might wish to maintain surveillance over their employees, the potential for unionization is undoubtedly one of them. It is a genuine understatement to say that it does not require very much union activity at all to trigger an aggressive, even furious anti-union campaign in the American workplace. The slightest hint of collective action in a non-union work site will often prompt an employer to hire a consultant for assistance in the counter-campaign (unless anti-union specialists are already on staff, as they are at many of the largest non-union corporations). In Congressional testimony concerning the activities of 3M, a notorious anti-union consulting firm specializing in 38 Quoted by Alan Kistler, former Director of Organization and Field Services of the AFL-CIO, provided in testimony to US Congress Oversight Hearings entitled “Pressures In Today’s Workplace” op. cit. 1979, p.41. 39 Reported in Barbara Ehrenreich, “Warning: This is a Rights-Free Work Place”, The New York Times Magazine , March 5, 2000, pp.88-92. 24 unionization within the health care sector (and a firm that boasted of a 93% success rate in defeating hospital unions), one senior union organizer explained:“The conscious creation of an atmosphere of fear and pressure is the hallmark of a 3M campaign. Anyone who has worked in a hospital during such a campaign can testify to the upheaval that takes place. It seems that fighting the union has become the hospital’s primary business; patient care takes a back seat….the 3M strategy is a form of psychological warfare. The major weapon is fear. The 3M consultants concentrate on scaring the front line supervisors; then its up to them to scare the workers. Supervisors are taken off the floor for hours on end to participate in anti-union training sessions and meetings…Workers are cornered and lectured about the Union’s supposed evils….The daily pressure, the disruption of routine, the barrage of anti-union propaganda, the personal attacks on union supporters---I can tell you from my own experience as a ward secretary at Boston Hospital for Women as well as my experience with other hospital workers who are seeking to unionize in the face of a 3M onslaught, that going to work in the morning soon becomes something to dread….”.40In a study of the union election results that were held in 1986, 1987, and 1994, it was found that 87% of employers hired outside consultants to manage their anti-union campaign, and in 64% of the campaigns at least five “captive audience” meetings were held (mandatory meetings on company time in which an anti-union presentation was made) and 76% of employers used the tactic of “one-on-one” meetings in which supervisors, under the direction of the consultants, confronted every worker in their department about their views of unionization, while stressing the company’s anti-union position.41 In general, the sheer weight of the managerial presence is much greater in American industry than it is in other OECD countries, there being an average of 5.7 workers per manager in an American firm, to 17.9 in a French enterprise (based on 1980 data).42 Although forbidden by U.S. labor law to become union 40 Testimony from Congressional Oversight Hearings, “Pressures in Today’s Workplace”, op. cit. vol.I p. 102. This description closely conforms to what I learned in my own case study of a hospital workers union drive, published in R. Fantasia, op. cit. 1988, chapter 4. 41 Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravich, “It Takes More than House Calls: Organizing to Win with a Comprehensive Union-Building Strategy” in K. Bronfenbrenner, et. al. ORGANIZING TO WIN: New Research on Union Strategies (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1998). 42 British firms were found to have 6.5 workers per manager; German firms, 22.7; Italian 27.0; Swedish 25.0; with Switzerland, at 27.8 showing the highest worker to manager ratio. These are figures have been computed by Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, WORKING UNDER CAPITALISM (NY: Westview Press, 1998) p.205, and are based on data presented in David Gordon “Bosses of Different Stripes: A Cross-national Perspective on Monitoring and 25 members themselves, it is completely legal for supervisors to be required to join what is, in effect, a workplace counter-insurgency unit. For most rank and file workers without the experience of such brutal conflict, it is an extremely intimidating situation, especially since workers have so little protection on the job without a union, and any sympathetic supervisors who might be inclined to refuse to participate in the anti-union effort would likely be immediately fired for insubordination, with no mechanism of appeal.43 Meanwhile, in an election campaign representatives of the unions are allowed no access to the inside of the workplace proper, nor are they permitted to distribute union information to workers in otherwise publicly accessible spaces (such as the parking lots of shopping centers or industrial parks), and at the job site itself union militants are normally only allowed to distribute printed information at the entrance to the workplace by a public access road (or by visiting the homes of individual workers.)44With laws in place that appear to so heavily favor employers in the contest over unionization, it is difficult to imagine why they might have a need to evade the law in such circumstances, but they do so, frequently and systematically. The most egregious violations of the right to organize are expressed in the many thousands of illegal firings that occur annually in unionization campaigns, firings that represent one of the five forms of “unfair labor practice” that together constitute the legal protections supposedly afforded workers under U.S. labor law. Studies of the records of the National Labor Relations Board indicate that the charges leveled against employers increased by an incredible 750% between 1957 and 1980, while the number of union elections held during that same period (an indication of union organizing activity) Supervision,” in American Economic Review 84(2) (1994):pp.375-379. 43 Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers, WHAT WORKERS WANT (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), p.62. They report that fifty-three percent of managers said that they would oppose any unionization effort in their workplace (p.88) but this number would likely rise very substantially in the midst of an actual union drive, once the intensive pressure from the consultants and upper management were introduced. 44 See Human Rights Watch Report, op. cit. 2000, pp.18-21. 26 increased by less than 50%, and that in the period from 1990 to 1998, over 184,000 workers received back pay because they suffered reprisals for their union activity.45 FIGURE 2 Unfair Labor Practice Violations By Employers 1950-1998 32 30 28 e v 26 a h24 o t22 d e) 20 m s e d e 18 n " d t a i " s r 16 s u e n o 14 m o h i t t 12 a n l i ( o i 10 V f 8 o r 6 e b 4 m uN 2 0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 YearSection 8(a) cases (violations by employers) Section 8(a)(3) cases (violations by employers for illegal discharge of workers for union activities)Source: Annual Reports of the National Labor Relations BoardAs Figure 2 indicates (above), the number of Unfair Labor Practice violations against employers for impeding union activity (“Section 8(a)” cases) rose steadily through the 1960’s and 1970’s, and have remained high, with no less than 22,000 violations annually since 1975). Moreover, Figure 2 also shows the trajectory of “Section 8(a)(3)” cases, or violations by employers that are specifically for the illegal discharge of workers for their union activity, and in45 See Paul Weiler, “Promises to Keep: Securing Workers’ Right to Self-Organization Under the NLRA,” Harvard Law Review 96 (1983), pp.1769-1827; and see Human Rights Watch Report op. cit. 2000 p.73, footnote 134. 27 every year since 1975 over 10,000 cases of this particularly harsh form of “capital punishment” have occurred. Although the number of violations appear to have dropped after 1980, this is something of an illusion since the apparent drop actually represents a simple decline in the number of union elections that were held, rather than a discernable decline in employer anti- unionism. That is, since the number of elections fell by over 50% in 1981, and the rate of employer violations declined by much less than that, employer anti-unionism (as measured in the number of unfair labor practice violations) actually continued to rise throughout the rest of the 1980’s. Further, it should be noted that these numbers reflect only those cases that have been reported (and many more undoubtedly have not); and only those cases supported by sufficient evidence to attain a ruling (and the anti-union consultants are experts at deleting all such evidence). [Insert the following box about here]******************************************************************************Confessions of a Labor SpyThe following excerpt is drawn from the testimony of Rocci Pettigrew (alias Rocci West), presented before U.S. Congressional hearings investigating “Pressures in Today’s Workplace” in 1979. The witness, who was testifying “under penalty of perjury”, had been hired by the Anja Engineering Company of Monrovia California, under contract from a security firm by the name of West Coast Detectives. Mr. Pettigrew: My name is Rocci Pettigrew, also known as Rocci West. A brief background of my police experience: I was with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office for 8 years and the narcotics task force for 6 years prior to moving to the State of California. Upon arriving in California I went to work for West Coast Detectives as an undercover narcotics agent, and that is why I was first sent to Anja Engineering with the cover. That is why I was there, to seek out this drug traffic which they had. Approximately the third or fourth day that I was out there the union was trying to push an organizing move, and that is when I was called up by the president of West Coast Detectives to focus my operations and attentions to the people most active in trying to organize this union….A few of the things that we were involved with were observing the 28 employees during break periods, their own free periods, their lunch periods. Anybody we overheard talking pro union, we would write their names down. If their names appeared in more than one agent’s report, we would find ways to set them up, get them fired, or subsequently arrested by the Monrovia Police Department.Congressman Thompson: How many agents were involved?Mr. Pettigrew: I was the lead agent of 25 known agents that I am aware of.Congressman Ford: In what size work force? How many employees?Mr. Pettigrew: Before the union started their push, there were some 220 before they started and then that is when they fluctuated the employment up to 400.Congressman Thompson: Twenty five agents?Mr. Pettigrew: Yes, sir.Congressman Miller: In the detective agency or in the company?Mr. Pettigrew: From our detective agency. There were other private detectives there that I was aware of from other firms….And I was instrumental in having 46 employees terminated that were pro union and another 16, I was in on setting them up and they were subsequently also arrested by the Monrovia Police Department, one which was arrested and deported. These were all loyal, honest employees, as far as we know; until we arrived there, because we would coax them into stealing:….“just me and you here, why don’t you take these” and “there is no one watching”….. And prior to the union election which was supposed to have been on or around the 15th of January 1977, and we had a union meeting which all of the agents were required to make as many union meetings as possible, write down all of the employees’ names that were there, and try as diligently as we could to get them terminated and ways we would have them transferred to sections where they had a lesser amount of seniority. The layoff came due to lack of production. We laid off, including the agents that pulled out, it came to a total of about 105 employees [out] of the total of 400 that they had. They now operate at 216 employees.Congressman Thompson: Did they ever have the union election?Mr. Pettigrew: No; the union filed a withdrawal [of the petition to the National Labor Relations Board] because of the lack of support because of this big pullout. The pullout was 90 percent of all their pro-union people [whom] we had set up for them to be laid off.Source: “Pressures In Today’s Workplace”, Oversight Hearings held on Dec. 4th and 6th, 1979 before the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the Committee on Education and Labor of the House of Representatives, 96th Congress, volume II, pp. 35-36. ***************************************************************************** 29Although little interpretation is required of such testimony, what should not be overlooked, in addition to the obvious viciousness of the undercover effort unleashed against the workers, are the more subtle manipulations that it reveals. For the management had doubled the workforce prior to the union election (presumably in order to dilute the strength and concentration of union support) and then, just prior to the election, the company laid off over 100 workers, mainly pro-union, thus obliterating the core of the union’s strength. This had been made possible by having transferred them to sections of the workplace where they enjoyed no seniority protection. The union was forced to withdraw its petition for a union election because most of its supporters were suddenly gone, while the workforce as a whole had been substantially augmented. Because the workers were “laid off” (a supposed temporary condition) rather than discharged outright, the actions of the employer would most likely not have been detectable as “unfair labor practices”. Much more significantly still, when asked by the Los Angeles Times how many other detective agencies, like West Coast Detectives, might be active in similar anti- union efforts in the area, Pettigrew replied: “Offhand, in the greater Los Angeles area I know of ten…There are at least ten because I have friends who work at ten. They are undercover detectives assigned in various plants in the City of Commerce, Azusa, El Monte, Burbank, the city of Carson, and at various other plants where they were doing approximately the same type work that I was doing.”46 An important part of the reason why employers routinely break the law is that the penalties are so flimsy. Because labor law in the U.S. is “remedial” rather than “punitive”, there are neither criminal nor civil penalties associated with unfair labor practice cases, and so an employer who violates the law is simply ordered to stop doing so, must then post a notice in the workplace promising not to repeat the violation and, in the case of an illegal discharge, must also46 From the Los Angeles Times of November 18, 1979 and quoted in Congressional Oversight Hearings, “Pressures in Today’s Workplace”, op. cit. vol.II, p. 29. 30 reinstate the fired worker and provide him or her with back pay.47 For example, in a 1994 case in West Palm Beach in Florida, the management of a nursing home fired five key union supporters out of a small workforce of mostly Haitian immigrants, in the midst of an organizing campaign (a campaign that was eventually won by the nursing home workers).48 After an initial legal ruling that the employer had indeed fired the workers illegally, the employer was able to appeal the ruling, and appeal it, and appeal it again, for period of over five years. Finally, in August of 1999 the NLRB upheld the initial ruling and the amount that the employer was ordered to pay each of the union militants was $1,700 (including interest). The only thing particularly unusual about this case was that the workers actually won the union election. What this case illustrates though, is the extent to which it is perfectly “cost-effective” for an employer to violate the law with impunity, for in the more typical circumstance (when the union has lost the election) the employer will have saved the potentially substantial and ongoing costs of having a union to negotiate on behalf of an entire workforce, albeit minus the substantial, but relatively short term costs of the anti-union consultants and the negligible costs of back pay for the fired union activists. This case also reveals the folly of a legal framework in which the remedies (of reinstatement and back pay) are all aimed at the restoration of the individual actor, rather than of the group, since (again, when the election goes against the union) the workers lose their collective power and long-term well-being. Thirdly, the case illustrates the ability of employers to manipulate the legal system to their advantage by delaying resolution of issues, whether it be delay of the reinstatement of a union militant fired in the midst of a union election campaign, or delaying the union election itself, as one consultant directed a group of corporate executives: 47 Of course in a back pay award any amount of money earned by the worker in the interim is deducted from the back pay that must be provided by the employer. See Human Rights Watch Report, op. cit. 2000 pp. 54-55. 48 The details of the organizing drive at the King David Center is provided in the Human Rights Watch Report, op. cit. 2000, pp. 82-88. 31“Delay is crucial to your strategy. Delay in setting up a first conference. Dig up issues on appropriate units, supervisors, confidential employees, part-time workers. Don’t consent to an election until all issues are resolved. Then delay hearings. Delay briefs with excuses….Stall and delay wherever possible. When 30 percent of the employees have signed cards the union can file for an election. Can you stack the election? Yes--- hire new people. Time is on the side of the employer”.49In this context time can be used to break the momentum of the organizing drive, to sow fear, and to make promises, more or less veiled, about improvements in working conditions and “enhanced communication” that can be expected once employees reject the union interloper. American unions currently lose approximately 55% of the union representation elections, in contrast to mid-century when they lost less than 30% of the time.50 However, considering the scale of the anti-union practices that we have outlined, what is truly remarkable is that American unions are able to win as many elections as they do. This is especially so given that for decades the U.S. labor movement was dominated by a relentlessly pragmatic and conservative “business unionism” that seemed unable to even fathom the nature of the assault that was being visited upon it, much less mobilize an effective counteroffensive.51 Although there is a new leadership in place that is pushing hard to revitalize the U.S. labor movement and to reconfigure its strategies of mobilization, whether it will be able to significantly alter the balance of forces is not at all assured, nor is it particularly likely. Whatever its future prospects, however, when entering the domain of labor we would do well to discard the sorts of culturalist assumptions that cling to the idea of an essential American 49 Robert Georgine, op.cit. 1980, p.96. While bureaucratization was once viewed as an expression industrial “maturity” because it had supposedly supplanted the social conflict of an earlier era, here is another example of the ways in which industrial bureaucracy has actually become an important means of waging social conflict. 50 Michael Yates, op. cit. 1998, p. 34. 51 The social and institutional character of the U.S. labor movement is too complicated and contradictory to attempt to summarize here, but along with Kim Voss I am currently preparing a volume for the series, Raisons d’ Agir, that will attempt to do just that. Meanwhile, one might consult the following recent works: Paul Buhle, TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1999); Gregory Mantsios (ed.) A NEW LABOR MOVEMENT FOR THE NEW CENTURY (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998); Jo-Ann Mort (ed.) NOT YOUR FATHER’S UNION MOVEMENT (London: Verso, 1998); Ray M. Tillman and Michael S. Cummings, THE TRANSFORMATION OF U. S. UNIONS (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999) 32“national character,” for there is actually very little intrinsic about a situation that is the result of an identifiable social and historical trajectory, one that has afforded business the power to shape the terrain upon which labor and its various cultural and organizational forms are able to operate.In other words, it has primarily been business that has been exceptional in the U.S., and therefore it has only been the exceptional social power of business that has been able to bring about the distinctive social powerlessness of labor.52“The Customer Is Always Right”“Because workers are also consumers”, the neo-liberal chorus inevitably intones, “low wages make goods and services accessible to everyone.” To the extent that such reasoning is prevalent (and it would be treated as commonsensical in the U.S.) a society can be seen to have internalized the ideas of its domination, but this is because the institutional dominance of business has been accompanied by a seemingly impossible trick, at a symbolic level. At the same time as the real exploitation of workers has been greatly intensified in the workplace, the worker has been made to practically disappear from the public imagination as a socio-economic subject. In place of the worker has appeared the Consumer, who has largely taken over the role of the principal subject and object of economic practice and in whose name a host of traditional economic regulations have been systematically overturned. This is a process that essentially 52 A thesis of American business exceptionalism has been explicitly or implicitly advanced in various analyses of American labor, including Kim Voss’ THE MAKING OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Reeve Vanneman and Lynn W. Cannon, THE AMERICAN PERCEPTION OF CLASS (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987); and Rick Fantasia, CULTURES OF SOLIDARITY (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 33 enacts Adam Smith’s rebuke (of the mercantilists) when he insisted that “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”53In the U.S. this symbolic shift has been both reflected and accompanied, on one side, by a steady inflation of the social rights of the consumer (the “freedom to choose”, to obtain credit, to shop at all hours on any and every day, to have virtually anything and everything delivered directly to one’s door, with no wait, and to generally be granted what must appear to non-Americans as a ridiculous degree of “convenience” with respect to retail trade.) On the other side, the shift has been at the expense of the systematic dissolution of the social rights of the worker (the spread of contingency, of wage decline, of overwork and forced overtime, of job surveillance, few mandated social benefits, effective loss of the right to strike, state-sanctioned anti-unionism, etc.). The central point is that it is not a matter of the spheres of production and consumption standing in inverse proportion to one another, but that they are reciprocally- generating conditions.This relationship is most clearly revealed in the practices of the American retail giants, like K-Mart, Toys R Us, and Wal-Mart, enterprises that represent high volume, low cost “selling factories” that are driven by the ability to sell inexpensive goods produced by cheap international labor in the manufacturing phase, which are then sold by contingent, low-waged, and non-union domestic labor in the hyper-rationalized retail phase of the process. The situation of labor is central, for while the four main pillars of Wal-Mart’s success have been identified as 1) its successful application of advanced technologies; 2) its logistical flexibility; 3) its reliance on imported goods; and 4) the employment of non-union labor; in fact the conditions for the first 53 From Book 4, Chapter VIII (“Conclusion of Mercantile System”) in Adam Smith, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (1776) (New York: The Modern Library, 1937) p. 625. 34 three are essentially only made possible by the degree of manipulability that is facilitated by the fourth. Wal-Mart, a $200 billion empire whose annual sales are soon going to surpass those of General Motors, is a company that not only maintains a huge low-waged and non-union labor force of its own (some 900,000 workers in the U.S.) but is also capable of affecting the conditions for labor at the sixty-five thousand other companies that supply it.54 That is, by demanding that its suppliers meet specified low costs (and its gargantuan size certainly allows it to make such demands) Wal-Mart exerts powerful downward pressure on wages and benefits across entire industries and regions. Since low-waged workers require the availability of low cost goods, a company like Wal-Mart is essentially able to create the conditions (in production) that simultaneously generate the demand for itself (as a means of consumption).55It is the ready availability of relatively cheap goods, from clothing, to food, to housing, to transportation, that maintains the U.S. standard of living above that of the other, “more expensive”, OECD countries, when measured with what are termed “purchasing power parities” (a means of standardization allowing for reasonable comparison of the price of goods and services in all countries).56 So instead of a situation where well-organized workers might receive 54 Leslie Kaufman, “As Biggest Business, Wal-Mart Propels Changes Elsewhere”, The New York Times October 22, 2000, p. A1. For an analysis of the Wal-Mart empire see Bob Ortega, IN SAM WE TRUST: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart is Devouring America (NY: Random House, 1998); and Sandra S. Vance and Roy V. Scott, WAL-MART: A History of Sam Walton’s Retail Phenomenon (NY: Twayne Publishers, 1994). 55 Low-cost discount shopping has become a way of economic life for the working class in the U.S., with the rise of wholesale warehouses selling food and other household goods in bulk, one rapidly growing sector. And neighborhood “tag sales” are ubiquitous in all rural and suburban communities in the U.S. (informal markets, wherein families periodically collect their used and broken items, and display them on the front lawn, each item “tagged” with a price to be “haggled” over). The late 1980’s saw a proliferation of various forms of “fringe banking” in poor working class communities throughout the U.S., including store front “check cashing outlets” that charge interest rates four to ten times the rates of mainstream financial institutions to cash paychecks and government assistance checks; and “pawnshops” in which fixed term loans are made on the basis of the value of the goods that are left in the possession of the pawnbroker (annual interest rates exceed 200 percent in some states). In a study of the phenomenon Caskey reports that while there were less than 2,000 pawnshops in 1911, today there are 9,000 throughout urban American, and many of the check cashing outlets are increasingly chain establishments. See John P. Caskey, FRINGE BANKING (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994). 56 According to researchers from the Economic Policy Institute, the use of market exchange rates to convert the cost of goods and services across societies can give a misleading picture of relative standards of living, because prices vary so markedly across countries and fluctuate wildly and rapidly. They argue that while the “PPP” measure is a more reasonable measure, it also shows that in virtually all of the OECD countries, including the U.S., per capita 35 relatively high wages that allow them to pay a higher, and perhaps more reasonable price for goods and services (as well as facilitating more leisure time, more job security, more dignity at work, combined with a more or less extensive “social wage”) Americans are expected to constantly scramble to seek ever cheaper goods, made by ever cheaper labor, in order to “compensate” for a quarter-century of wage stagnation and broken unions. Meanwhile, household savings rates have dropped to zero, the annual rate of bankruptcy has risen sevenfold since 1980, while the credit card industry continues to mail 2.5 billion solicitations annually to American mailboxes that are already inundated with promotional mailings.57 The pressures to consume have become almost as fierce as the pressures faced at work, and in their actions AS CONSUMERS, Americans have little choice but to act against their own interests AS WORKERS. So when “the customer is always right” the worker is in deep trouble. income decelerated sharply in the 1980’s and in the 1990’s, and overall the US growth rate was consistently in the middle or the bottom of the group throughout the period 1960-1998. See Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, op. cit. 2001, pp. 373-374, Table 7.2. 57 See Julie Schor, DO AMERICANS SHOP TOO MUCH? (NY: The New Press, 2000).

Dictatorship Over the Proletariat

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