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Fred Glass: How Much Longer Will Unions Survive?

[Fred Glass is an instructor in the Labor and Community Studies Department at San Francisco City College, and the communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. Reach him at cftoakland@igc.org.]

... Under attack by the very federal agencies put in place 70 years ago to ensure free collective bargaining and facing political assaults in several states - including California - AFL-CIO unions have split into two groups, threatening to undermine the solidarity that historically made workers' advances possible.

For anyone who cares about maintaining such rights as freedom of speech and association, adequate health coverage, safe workplaces and a living wage, trends are disturbing:

* As union membership has declined to 12.5 percent of the work force, coerced labor has crept back into restaurants, garment factories, agriculture and other industries that demand cheap labor. More than 10,000 workers in America are employed under conditions resembling slavery, according to the report "Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States." ...

* Up to 20,000 workers are fired every year for attempting to organize unions, judging by back-pay orders issued by the National Labor Relations Board. The firings are illegal, but the slight penalties for companies are more than balanced by financial benefits to shareholders.

With such successes, you'd think anti-union forces might be satisfied with raising their champagne glasses as unions sail into the setting sun. Instead, they're by the side of the boat, drilling holes while proclaiming their intent to help workers float.

No better example can be found than Proposition 75, on California's November ballot.

The measure would require public employee unions to get the consent of members every year before using their dues for political purposes. Ostensibly to "protect the paychecks" of workers who might disagree with their unions' political activities, Proposition 75 has a hidden agenda: to defund public schools, cut health care and roll back retirement security.

If its extreme right-wing sponsors (former John Birch Society member Lew Uhler and free market ideologue Milton Friedman) can succeed in silencing the political voice of public sector workers by wrapping that voice up in vast quantities of red tape, the main defense for government programs serving the working class will be gone. The most well organized opposition to right-wing legislative pressure to cut public education, health care and retirement systems is precisely those same public employee unions.

Proposition 75's advocates draw on a long history of deception that has supported their anti-worker agenda. ...

We've seen Proposition 75 before. It first appeared in the early 1900s, when, responding to a surge of union organizing, employers devised a strategy called the "open shop." Proclaiming concern for workers' interests against "union coercion," bosses sought to ban the union shop, a workplace where all employees would receive union representation and all belong to the union.

Is a union shop coercion? On the contrary, a union shop comes into existence when a majority of workers votes for it....

Following World War I, the open shop received a makeover. The new, improved version featured blacklists of unionists who were refused employment, and anti-union spies and thugs who were hired on to company payrolls. This version, called the American Plan, implied that anyone who favored unions was unpatriotic and disreputable. Now the open shop brought us the company town, with corporation-controlled stores, police, housing and money. Crocodiles flourished.

The greatest period of union organizing in America occurred during the 1930s and 1940s. In response, a conservative Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, allowing states to pass "right-to-work" laws. These laws gave no worker any right to any job. This was just the crocodiles' deceptive way of expanding the open shop concept. Why bar union shops one at a time when it could be accomplished across an entire state?

In California, voters faced right-to-work Proposition 18 on the 1958 ballot. Its arch-conservative banner carrier was Oakland Tribune owner William Knowland, who was running against Pat Brown for governor. Knowland, who was at the time U.S. Senate Republican leader, lost the gubernatorial race and Proposition 18. Brown won the race by more than 1 million votes. Judging from the outcome, many Republicans voted for Brown or sat out the race.

By 1998 the anti-union concept morphed into Proposition 226's "paycheck protection." Rivers of crocodile tears flowed from wealthy right-wing ideologues who "loved" California workers' rights - well, one right: to withhold union dues used by labor for politics. Despite a huge initial lead, the crocodiles lost as the electorate realized the real purpose of Proposition 226 was to silence the workers' political voice.
Read entire article at Sacramento Bee