I'm Stickin' To The Union

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
6/26/15

 

The might and main of corporate America and its sky-high stacks of dollars are presently arrayed against one of the pillars of democracy: collective bargaining, otherwise known as unions.

The Koch Brothers are pouring money into the presidential campaign of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in recognition of his success in the battle to emasculate public workers unions. Other tycoons are piling on as well.

Collective bargaining along with the graduated income tax, Social Security and Medicare are together a critical part of American democracy's foundation. Each has a leveling influence, the desired effect being that those with much should not have too much at the expense of those who have too little.

A little Marxist, you say? Der alte Karl, were he still drawing breath, might not have recognized the application of his theories by the likes of Lenin and Mao. Marx had inhaled some of the first toxic fumes of the Industrial Revolution and understood how badly workers were then treated. He was a socialist, and so what?

We are, for the most part, all socialists. Any of us who has a Social Security number and is accruing retirement benefits from contributions by employers and through FICA deductions from wages is a socialist. Any one of us with a Medicare card is a socialist.

Along with unions, both Social Security and Medicare are under attack by devious disinformation. Social Security would never come within light years of bankruptcy if those who make more than $118,500 in a year -- the current ceiling at which every dollar thereafter is exempt from FICA deductions -- were required to pay the tax on all income however gained. And it would be more than fair and surely just for them to be so required if, indeed, the United States aspires to the ideals of democracy.

The Affordable Care Act has brought some semblance of equality to the delivery of health care to the previously uninsured, just as Medicare has done for retirees over half a century. More democracy. Two-thirds of the Congress opposes all three.

At the base of it all is the theory and practice of collective bargaining that, to be honest, has its roots in Marxism. If the manufacture of framistans requires human beings to craft, assemble and deliver them, then such human beings deserve to have some real interest in the means of their production and delivery.

It has not been in the makeup of most corporations to yield control of so much as a wrench to the worker. That was made clear long ago. Thus over time the idea of collective bargaining arose, eventually forcing business to negotiate with labor over wages and work rules. Of this process Walter Reuther is the patron saint.

Through the efforts of Reuther and others, a middle class was created in this country with certain rights and expectations. Yet industry has set back the middle class by moving manufacturing to Southern states where unions were, like anything resembling commonsense, unpopular. Then as unions began to take root in the Sunbelt, all of a sudden we are driving American cars made in Mexico. And so it has gone.

The two-tiered wage system that was stuffed down the throat of the UAW at a time when the automotive industry was in real trouble was a serious blow to the gut of collective bargaining. The theory was: Sow the seeds of discontent among the workers, not between labor and management. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

A good many Americans look to Scott Walker as a contemporary hero as he has put the unions in their place -- which, by the way, is what? They do not understand that collective bargaining is the cornerstone of the economics of American democracy.

Here's about one set of unions that made America much safer: In the latter decade or two of the 19th century, railroad workers began agitating for better wages, work rules and safer operation of railways -- for themselves and rail passengers. In one well-known case, a locomotive engineer was fired because, after 52 straight hours at the throttle, he refused on the grounds of safety for himself and others to go on another run without sleep.

Such working conditions are what moved Eugene V. Debs to fight for the rights and safety of rail workers and their trains. He was beaten, jailed and turned into a pariah by the same kind of disinformation in which Gov. Walker and others have trafficked. That war of words is not all that far from the 1937 Battle of the Overpass during which Reuther and other UAW members were brutally attacked from behind by Henry Ford's goons.

I spent a decade as a member of Local 22 of the Newspaper Guild that represented reporters, some editors, photographers and others in the employ of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News. Twenty years ago next month, long gone from the paper, I saw that union, like Byron's "might of the Gentile ... melted like snow in the glance of the Lord," as its members meekly left their desks in what was soon to become seen as a lockout, "the lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown."*

Journalism in Detroit hasn't been the same since. The papers' corporate owners got their way and proceeded to ruin what had become two pretty good if not great newspapers, along with the lives and livelihood of their faithful employees.

I grew up in a religious tradition that prized the na�ve hymnody of Protestantism and have never forgotten the perverse Calvinistic sentiment of this lyric: Be strong! We have hard work to do And loads to lift. Shun not the struggle! 'Tis God's gift. Be strong!

Neither Debs nor Reuther nor my comrades in journalism thought their struggles with corporate America to be the gift of any god, save a demented one. Solidarity forever.

*The Destruction of Sennacherib. Lines 20, 23,24

POSTSCRIPT

The New York Times op-ed page is the biggest pulpit in the country. David Brooks occupies it twice a week, and Russ Douthat appears on Sundays. In his June 21 column, Douthat, a devout Catholic, cast aspersions on Pope Francis and his recent encyclical on the environment, calling him a catastrophist. Brooks was right back on the 23rd with his critique of the pope as "relentlessly negative" and anti-technology.

Brooks writes: "... qualities that do harm can often, when carefully directed, do enormous good. Within marriage, lust can lead to childbearing. With a regulated market, greed can lead to entrepreneurship and economic innovation." Perhaps Brooks should sit with Francis and hear what His Holiness thinks about lust and greed.

Brooks' worst misreading of Francis is in this paragraph: "Hardest to accept ... is the moral premise implied throughout the encyclical: that the only legitimate human relationships are based on compassion, harmony and love, and that arrangements based on self-interest and competition are inherently destructive." That sentence represents quite an abysmal ignorance of the scriptural basis of the Holy Father's teaching.

Brooks -- and Douthat -- might choose to review the prophet Amos' excoriation of Jeroboam II and his 1% �ber alles economy: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" (Amos 5: 24). Or St. Paul's admonition that his contemporaries in Judaism, and, by extension his eventual Christian following, should seek economic equality when "whoever had much did not have more, and whoever had little did not have less" (II Corinthians 2:15).

Or, speaking of relationships based on love: "Even if I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing."

Thereof does Francis speak to those with ears to hear.