INCREASING BURDENS ON THE WORKING CLASS
It's been a dismal three decades for working people in the United States. With big corporations displaying an ever-heightening degree of ruthlessness, business has seen its profits rise dramatically relative to wages.
In the face of aggressive employer demands for concessions, the downward pull of international competition, an overvalued dollar, weak and barely enforced labor and workplace safety laws, relatively high unemployment rates, and a sclerotic labor movement, most workers have seen wage rates stay practically flat over the past several decades -- even as CEO salaries and profitability have skyrocketed.
The executive class has captured almost all of the gains in wealth from the growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in recent decades. And George W. Bush's recession and jobless recovery has only worsened the problem.
Here's what a Wall Street analyst said in March 2004: "We'd thought that the labor share of national income was in the process of bottoming out, but whether we're talking outsourcing or just old-style downsizing, the effort by U.S. business to pare costs (and extract productivity gains in services) continues apace."
Meanwhile, employers have slashed benefits for those workers lucky enough to retain a job. And workplaces remain far more hazardous than necessary.
There are glimmers of hope that the situation can be improved. Some unions and communities have won important victories that have made a difference in workers' lives, but they remain a rarity.
Wages
Here's the basic story of wages in this country over the past thirty years: Most people earn no more an hour than they did three decades ago (adjusting for inflation), but those at the top have enjoyed substantial increases in salary and those at the very top -- the CEOs and top company executives -- have seen their compensation go through the roof.
Most people struggle to get by with rock bottom net worth. They're working more and more -- either working longer hours or picking up a second or third job-to pay the bills and meet rent or mortgage payments. (Americans worked on average two hundred hours a year more from 1973 to 2000 -- the equivalent of five fulltime weeks.) In two-parent families, increasingly both parents are in the workforce. Just to meet everyday expenses, they're borrowing. more and more from credit .cards, home equity loans, or second mortgages, or from legal loan sharks at check-cashing operations. If someone in the family gets sick and lacks health insurance -- forty-five million Americans are in that boat -- the family is in a jam. Even if they have insurance, the extravagant price of medicine may not be covered, or covered entirely, and paying for the pills can drive a family into despair.
Meanwhile, the executive class rakes in more money than ever before, and indulges new forms of conspicuous consumption. We have competition among CEOs over who has the bigger yacht. If an executive has to go to the hospital, they can check into platinum class luxury suites offered by leading medical institutions -- for $10,000 a night. The New York Times recently reported on a new convenience for rich New Yorkers: private indoor pools, with start-up costs of $500,000.
Any way you slice the numbers, you get the same result: a deeply divided America with a struggling majority and a super-rich clique. It's a story of a gap between haves and have-nots more severe than anything this country has witnessed for a century, since the start of the Manufacturing Age:
• For the private production and nonsupervisory workers who make up 80 percent of the workforce, it took until the late 1990s to return to the real earnings levels of 1979.
• CEOs at large corporations now make about three hundred times more than the average worker at their firms. In 1982, they made just forty-two times more; in 1965, twenty-six times more.
• The top fifth of households own more than 83 percent of the nation's wealth, the bottom 80 percent less than 17 percent.
• The top 1 percent owns over 38 percent of the nation's wealth, more than double the amount of wealth controlled by the bottom 80 percent. The top 1 percent's financial wealth is equal to that of the bottom 95 percent.
• In 1979, the top 5 percent had eleven times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. By 2000, the top 5 percent had nineteen times the income of the bottom 20 percent.
• Whatever the data examined, it's worse for women and people of color, who receive lower wages and have much less accumulated wealth than White men. Women and minority males earn 70 percent to 80 percent of what White men make. More than a third of single mothers with children live in poverty.
Thanks to low levels of unemployment in the late 1990s, worker wages started rising, eventually catching up to the levels of twenty years earlier. But the recession and high rates of unemployment that have persisted into the new millennium have almost surely ended that trend.
The effective stagnation in worker wages for three decades occurred even though productivity rose steadily. Productivity is the amount of output per person hour worked. In other words, workers were making and producing more, but not receiving any share of the increased wealth. Virtually all of it was captured by increased corporate profit taking.
CEO pay grew at a much faster rate even than corporate profitability. From 1990 to 2003, inflation rose 41 percent. Average worker pay rose 49 percent. Corporate profits jumped 128 percent. CEO compensation rose 313 percent.
If the federal minimum wage had increased as quickly as CEO pay since 1990, it would today be $15.71 per hour, more than three times the actual minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, as calculated by Boston-based United for a Fair Economy.
Reasons for Stagnant Wages
There are many reasons why wages have remained stagnant, although ultimately it comes down to reduced worker power.
Corporate globalization has created a system where workers in the United States must compete with their desperately poor brothers and sisters in countries like China and Mexico. Many manufacturing companies that would like to maintain factories in the United States find they cannot compete with lower cost plants overseas. That has led to the massive outflow of well-paying manufacturing jobs from the United States, and forced many workers who are able to hold on to factory jobs to accept lower wages and benefits. Even employers who operate profitably in the United States frequently move overseas in search of greater profits, or threaten workers with plant closings to extract more concessions.
The U.S. steel industry has shed thousands of jobs in the face of low-wage competition. Warren Dillon, a fifty-five-year-old with thirty-seven years at Bethlehem Steel, is one of the victims, having lost his white-collar job at a Maryland steel plant in April 2003. "I figured it was a stable position," Dillon told the Daily Record of Baltimore, Maryland, about his decision to take a job with the steel company decades earlier. "You go down to Bethlehem Steel and just stay there. They stay there until they want to retire. And then they retire and you have a pension and medical coverage and your days are done."
After he'd lost his job, the Daily Record reported, Dillon enrolled in resume-writing and job search classes. He thought he might become a computer technician. His career counselors instead suggested courses in truck driving or nursing assistance, areas he wasn't interested in pursuing. Dillon sent out dozens of resumes, with no success. Thirty-seven years experience at the steel plant didn't seem to mean much. He did receive an invitation to interview for a store manager position, with a salary of $36,000 to $42,000. But he was told he was overqualified.
Eventually, he landed a job as an airport screener with the Transportation Security Administration at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Salary: $28,000. After looking so hard, Dillon was happy to get anything.
The competitive pressure from corporate globalization is just one component of an economy that has been bad for workers over most of the past three decades. Especially when unemployment rates are high -- as they have been for the past several years -- people take jobs at whatever wage they can find. Many aren't in a position to hold out for ,a better job or bargain for a better salary.
When workers try to act collectively, they confront a host of union-busting tactics, including physical intimidation. These actions are often illegal, but legal protections are so flaccid, and the labor rights police so weak, underfunded, compromised, and embattled, that employers can act with virtual impunity.
Unions
Globalization and union-busting reinforce one another. In a 2000 study sponsored by the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission, Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner found that more than half of all employers facing union-organizing drives threaten to close all or part of their plant, even though such threats are generally illegal. For mobile industries -- companies that can more plausibly threaten to move, like auto plants, as opposed to hotels -- the plant-closing threat rate approached two-thirds. This study, the most comprehensive ever undertaken, concluded that the "threats are even more pervasive than they were in 1993-1995, and the threat of capital mobility has discernibly affected union organizing strategies."
Bronfenbrenner proved what every worker knows: the threat to move a plant is among an employer's most potent tactics. "The data suggests that most workers take even the most veiled employer plant-closing threats very seriously," she writes. "When combined with other anti-union tactics of employers, as they are in the overwhelming majority of employer campaigns, plant-closing threats are extremely effective in undermining union organizing efforts, even in a context where the majority of workers in the unit seem predisposed to support the union at the onset of the organizing campaign." Bronfenbrenner found that "union election win rates were significantly lower in units where plant-closing threats occurred (38 percent) than in units without plant-closing threats (51 percent). Win rates were especially low (24 percent) in those campaigns where employers made specific threats to move to another country."
Threatening to close the plant is only one device in the employers' toolbox. In at least one out of four union-organizing campaigns, union supporters are illegally fired. Employers facing a union drive frequently give unscheduled wage increases, and make unilateral changes in benefits and working conditions, according to Bronfenbrenner. Many promote union activists out of the bargaining unit. More than a third give bribes or special favors to those who oppose the union, and more than a third assist an anti-union committee. A significant number put union activists under electronic surveillance.
Three quarters of employers facing a union drive hire management consultants and security firms to run anti-union campaigns and intimidate workers. In more than nine out often cases, employers facing a union drive require employees to attend captive meetings, where they are forced to listen to anti-union propaganda. In most cases, workers are forced to attend one-on-one meetings with their supervisors. These and other legal and illegal tactics make a huge difference. According to Bronfenbrenner, the union election win rate drops precipitously when employers use more than ten tactics.
There is little to deter corporations from employing these tactics, even when they are illegal. Employers found to have illegally discharged an employee in connection with union organizing are required only to give the employee backpay minus whatever the employee earned in replacement jobs. There are no criminal charges, no civil penalties, no fines. In short, it pays for employers to violate the labor laws.
At its giant meat-packing facility in North Carolina, Smithfield Foods has pulled out all the stops and defeated organizing efforts by the United Food and Commercial Workers. The National Labor Relations Board has cited the company for egregious violations of the law -- including conspiring with the local sheriff's department to physically intimidate and assault union supporters -- but violating the law pays off. In June, 2002, one manager at the plant told a U.S. Senate committee how she fired workers for supporting the union. "Smithfield Foods ordered me to fire employees who supported the union, telling me it was either my job or theirs."
The plant manager, Sherri Buffkin, said the company promoted racial tension to undermine the union-organizing effort. "Smithfield keeps Black and Latino employees virtually separated in the plant, with the Black workers on the kill floor and Latinos in the cut and conversion departments. The word was that Black workers were going to be replaced with Latino workers because Blacks were more favorable toward unions."
LaTasha Peterson, a former Smithfield worker, told the Senate committee how the company paid her to be part of a group of workers who spied on coworkers and campaigned against the union. "I earned twice as much money campaigning against the union and I didn't have to do any work," she said.
The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions issues periodic reports on countries' respect for labor rights. It regularly rates the United States as a terrible labor rights violator. "There is insufficient protection against anti-union discrimination" in the United States, the Confederation concludes. "The right to strike and the right to collective bargaining are severely restricted."
Assessing the pathetic enforcement of weak labor laws in the United States, the Confederation states, "Remedies for intimidation and coercion are both limited and ineffective. A backlog of some 25,000 cases of unfair labor practices by employers existed in 2002 and it takes an average of 557 days for the National Labor Relations Board to resolve a case, discouraging many workers from using them."
The Confederation points to Wal-Mart to illustrate the point. In 2002, some 43 charges were brought against Wal-Mart in twenty-five states by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), alleging, among other things, illegal surveillance, threats, and intimidation against union workers. Wal-Mart, the giant global retailer based in the United States, has repeatedly stated that it will not bargain with any union and has taken drastic steps to prevent workers from organizing in stores across North America. Wal-Mart stores routinely, violate the legal rights of their employees who try to unionize. Since 1995, the government has issued at least sixty complaints of antiunion activities. However, the maximum penalty Wal-Mart has incurred has been a requirement to post notices in various stores that it will no longer threaten, discipline, or fire employees who engage in "concerted activity" or require employees to report their contacts with unions.
Whether workers unionize makes a big difference in their compensation and treatment. The Economics Policy Institute reports that unionization provides a 28 percent wage premium to workers -- meaning the same person in the same job, on average, will earn 11.5 percent more if the job is unionized -- and a much larger edge in the area of benefits (more than 100 percent for insurance, nearly 200 percent for pensions).
Given the major economic benefits, not to mention other advantages of union membership, it is not surprising that, unobstructed and unintimidated, workers overwhelmingly choose to join unions. In the government employee sector, for example, where the employer generally does not contest unionization efforts and workers do not fear punishment, unions win approximately 85 percent of elections.
Unfortunately, the story is entirely different in the private sector. Where organized labor once made up about 35 percent of the working population in the United States, the figure has plummeted to below 15 percent -- and below 10 percent of private employment.
When workers do manage to unionize, in the face of overwhelming odds, they confront still more employer stubbornness and resistance. In 40 percent of cases, employers refuse to enter into a first contract with a new union.
Even where unions are firmly rooted, their bargaining power has been severely eroded. The factors that have made it harder to organize -- corporate globalization, contract labor, high levels of unemployment -- have also made it harder for unions to bargain effectively. Declining rates of unionization make it much more complicated; in industries with low unionization rates, unionized firms can plausibly argue that they cannot afford to pay higher wages or benefits because of market pressure from nonunion competitors. Call this the WalMart factor.
Most unions have also practically lost the use of their most powerful tool, the strike. Since 1939, the United States has been burdened by a bizarre Supreme Court decision. While acknowledging that labor laws prohibited firing workers for exercising their protected right to strike, the Court held that employers could "permanently replace" them. To everyone but the Supreme Court, that appeared to be a distinction without a difference.
For decades, employers declined to exercise their right to permanently replace their workers. But things changed in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan's decision to fire striking air traffic controllers (members of the PATCO union) ushered in a new era of strike-breaking. Strike activity diminished dramatically in the 1980s, with labor suffering a series of bitter defeats (and a very occasional victory, such as the coal miners at Pittston, in West Virginia, who used uncommonly aggressive tactics and successfully conveyed their message to the public).
Today, large-scale labor strikes are exceedingly rare. In every year but two in the 1960s and 1970s, there were more than two hundred work stoppages (inclusive of both strikes and lockouts) involving 1,000 or more workers. In the 1980s, the numbers dropped into the dozens, and the past few years have witnessed very few strikes. In 2003, there were only fourteen work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers. The overwhelming number of missed work days due to stoppages involved the supermarket strike/lockout in Southern California, and that was entirely provoked by Safeway and other area supermarkets.
The Southern California supermarket situation was an unfortunate bellwether. Safeway provoked a strike, and in a show of corporate solidarity, the other major supermarkets locked out their employees. Citing. the competitive threat from Wal-Mart -- which had not yet entered the region -- the grocery chains demanded major givebacks from their employees. After a long time off the job, the workers capitulated, accepting a two-tier setup that provides for dramatically inferior wages and health benefits for new workers. Over time, as current employees retire and new ones join the workforce, this contract will help drive wage and benefit rates down toward the Wal-Mart goliath's lowest common denominator.
Health Care and Pensions
The slash in health benefits for the Southern California grocery workers is typical. With health care costs skyrocketing, private employers have demanded that their employees pay more and more of their insurance costs -- and in many cases, they just don't provide insurance at all.
Pension benefits have also been slashed, often through sleight-of-hand maneuvers that trick employees into thinking they'll have an opportunity to turn a guaranteed steady income stream into a pile of riches upon retirement. Have any doubts what this involves? Just ask former Enron employees.
The key corporate deception was to switch employees from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pension plans. Defined-benefit plans are the traditional plan that guarantees workers a certain monthly payment upon retirement. It's the kind of deal that lets people who worked at solid companies know they would be secure in retirement. It's the kind of commitment that helped define a good job.
In the 1980s, corporations came up with something new. They started switching to defined-contribution plans, which set aside a certain amount of money for employees' retirement accounts (in 401(k)s or similar accounts) which the employees would be able to manage -- with some notable restrictions. This became very popular in the 1990s when it seemed to many that they could get rich in the booming stock market.
But a key feature of the defined contribution plan is it shifts risk to employees. When the stock market bubble burst, millions of employees saw their retirement nest egg go up in flames. Under the old system, the burden would have been borne by the employers. But no more.
Another feature of the defined contribution plan is it enables employers to NY employees in their own stock, which has tremendous tax and accounting advantages for the companies. Often, however, that stock comes with limitations, so that employees are not freely able to sell it. Even when employees retain the right to diversify, many corporations urge them to concentrate their share holdings in their employers' stock. CEOs and top executives, however, labor under no such restrictions. In many cases, they sell their stock while it is peaking.
In his book Perfectly Legal, David Cay Johnston relates the representative story of John Patrick Pusloskie Jr. A college graduate, Pusloskie decided to follow in his father's footsteps as a telephone repairman for Rochester Telephone Company. He liked the work, and knew it would deliver a decent salary and retirement package that would enable him to raise a family and retire comfortably. He started working for the company in 1989. Then, under an ambitious CEO, Ronald L. Bittner, Rochester Telephone morphed into Frontier, a company that wanted to be a national player. On the last day of 1996, Frontier froze its pension plan and announced it would switch to a defined-contribution plan. The CEO promised workers the sky. The company's contribution was made in Frontier stock, with the condition that it could not be sold for five years. In 1999, Frontier was sold to a high- flying telecom company on the make, Global Crossing. Although Global Crossing never earned a profit, Wall Street mavens sent its stock value soaring. But it was a short-lived flight. In 2002, the company declared bankruptcy. The Global Crossing share of Pusloskie's retirement account, which had peaked at $100,000, was worth nothing. But Global Crossing's executive insiders hadn't been so unlucky. They managed to unload $5.2 billion in stock between August 1998 and the company's bankruptcy in January 2002. So much for secure retirement.
Safe Workplaces
Of course, working is about more than wages and benefits. Work should be organized to give employees some control and influence, so they derive a sense of meaning and fulfillment from their jobs. And no workplace issue is more important than ensuring job sites are safe and devoid of preventable hazards.
The mission of safe and healthful workplaces should be highly visible and backed by an adequately funded and enforced program. Far more Americans have lost their lives due to trauma and toxins in places of employment -- especially factories, farms, construction sites, and mines -- than in all the nation's wars. Nonetheless, for generations it has been a reluctant push and a strained pull to eke out minimal governmental safety initiatives in these arenas. Until 1970, the states had this jurisdiction to themselves and their expenditures and resolve were minuscule. Only high-profile fatal tragedies nudged their feeble efforts along until customary lethargy reasserted itself.
My associates and I worked to draft and secure passage of the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, that established the Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA), along with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Along the way, we encountered various syndromes of disinterest among the relevant professions and among many trade union leaders. Of course, there was always active opposition among industry and commerce groups and their corporate law firms. Fortunately, the OSHA legislation passed and President Nixon signed it into law. But it was not long before OSHA became a favorite whipping boy for reactionary politicians on the industry take. With its tiny budget, and surrounded by hostile elements in Congress and the business world, OSHA could scarcely begin fulfilling its charge. Still, with the occasional leadership of people like Eula Bingham, OSHA helped steer the country toward significant successes in reducing mortality and morbidity on the job.
Despite an unconscionable number of opportunities lost, OSHA stands as an example of successful government regulation even discounting automation-reducing exposures to risk. Workplace fatalities from trauma have been halved since passage of the OSHA, even though the total workforce has increased by almost 60 percent. In the mining sector, regulated by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the fatality rate is approximately one quarter of that during the preregulatory era. In construction, fatalities are down 80 percent and injuries have decreased by 40 percent.
These improvements are a testament to how even a modest degree of political will can translate into thousands of lives saved every year.
Nearly 6,000 workers still die in the United States every year from traumatic injuries. The death toll from occupational diseases, easier for industry to ignore because the diseases frequently manifest after a worker has left the job voluntarily or involuntarily and because causation from the silent violence of toxins is less obvious, is far higher. At least 50,000 to 60,000 American workers, as many as 100,000 by some respectable estimates, die from occupational disease every year. Millions suffer every year from serious workplace injuries. The cost to the nation, the financial burden upon bereaved families, and the societal losses associated with workers dying early in their productive lives -- totals well over $100 billion annually, according to the National Safety Council. This doesn't even count the pain and suffering involved.
Human costs cannot be reduced to numbers. Mike Cade, who continues to work at Equilon's Puget Sound refinery, where his brother Ted was killed, is still haunted by the explosion that took his brother's life.
"In the morning, it's kind of that depression, you don't want to get up. It's a fight to leave the bed; it's a fight to leave the room; it's a fight to leave the house," Mike Cade told the Seattle Times. "At night, I still have the nightmares. It's a lot of waking up with the bed moved a couple feet and me all drenched," Cade said. "Luckily, I don't remember most of them."
Since the explosion, equipment was installed allowing workers to stand two hundred feet away when performing the dangerous operation that led to Ted Cade's death. That and other safety reforms following the disaster may prevent other families from suffering the horrors that Mike Cade and Ted's widow and children must now endure.
As this example highlights, much of the national toll of work-related death, disease, and suffering could be prevented, if only employers were forced to take preventative action -- to follow the basic nostrum, "Better Safe Than Sorry." OSHA has not been given the requisite funding, authority, and political backing to protect American workers, and things have gotten progressively worse over time. This includes during the Clinton administration, which through cowardice rather than hostility, diminished enforcement levels even from the preceding Bush administration. The current Bush administration takes a hostile approach toward OSHA, seeking, through a variety of means, to weaken the lifesaving agency even further.
The agency's tiny budget -- less than $500 million a year -- is far less than it needs to do its job. One former agency chief, Charles Jeffress, estimates that, for the agency to adequately monitor the American workplace, it would need a budget at least 20 times as much as Congress has allotted it.
There are six million workplaces in the United States. There are 2,000 job safety inspectors. In some states where a state agency rather than the feds has responsibility for workplace inspection, an average job site will be visited less than once every two hundred years.
When an employer is caught violating workplace safety rules -- often as a result of a retrospective review following an accident -- the penalties are shamefully trivial. The average OSHA penalty for a willful violation of the workplace safety laws (an instance where an employer had knowledge of a hazard likely to cause death or serious harm but failed to comply with the law) is $27,000. The maximum penalty is $70,000. That's for knowingly putting an employee's life at risk.
Compare that penalty to the proposed $500,000 fine for each time a radio or television station broadcasts an indecency. That tells you a little about the lack of priority placed on saving workers' lives.
According to Drs. Sidney Wolfe and Peter Lurie, for over ten years, there has been no new occupational health standard for a toxic chemical issued by OSHA.
About a million people in the United States annually lose time from work due to repetitive motion, or musculoskeletal, injuries. These are the kind of injuries that come from typing on computer keyboards, jumping on and off a delivery truck many times a day, or running goods over scanners as a check-out clerk. If you've ever suffered one of these injuries, or know someone who has, you know they can be excruciating.
OSHA first promised to develop a rule to address repetitive stress in 1990, when Elizabeth Dole was Secretary of Labor. Under Bill Clinton, OSHA was slow to move on the rule. By the mid-1990s, Republicans in Congress blocked OSHA from adopting a rule. Clinton finally put a rule into effect in post-election November 2000, but it was rescinded by President Bush. Fifteen years after being promised relief, workers are still without a regulatory rule to protect them from repetitive motion injuries.
The modest rule that was briefly in place required employers to identify hazards and fix them to reduce -- not eliminate -- the problem. It's what any responsible employer would do anyway. If the rule were in place, it would probably spare a half million such injuries a year.
Or, consider the government's failure to limit exposure to hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic chemical used in producing stainless steel, chrome plating, and pigments. For more than two decades, the government has known of the chemical's toxicity, which roughly doubles the lung cancer risk of the hundreds of thousands of workers exposed to it over time. In 1993, Public Citizen's Health Research Group and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union petitioned OSHA to issue a regulatory standard to reduce permissible exposure levels. More than a decade later, and despite a lawsuit, OSHA has done nothing. Thousands of hexavalent chromium-exposed workers will die as a result.
The story is the same for other life-saving and harm-reduction regulations that OSHA refuses to issue.
Progress in the Workplace
Despite the overall record of retreat and defeat, there have been some positive gains by unions and community groups in recent years.
With the minimum wage falling in real terms and unionization rates declining steadily, ACORN and other groups have led communities around the country to rally behind living wage ordinances. These ordinances require employers to pay not just the minimum wage, but a living wage -- often defined as enough for a family of four to get by on. The ordinances typically apply to employers receiving government contracts, but sometimes require all employers in the jurisdiction to satisfy living wage requirements. More than seventy communities have adopted such laws, which get to the heart of what an economy is supposed to be: a means to enable people to support themselves at an acceptable standard of living.
While most unions still do not invest sufficient resources in organizing, an increasing number are doing so. One of the most impressive organizing efforts in recent years was the Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This campaign organized almost entirely immigrants, traditionally a difficult group to organize because of their vulnerability to employer pressure and fear of government repression. Over the past several decades, the janitorial services industry has grown rapidly. Most large building owners outsource their work. When unions tried to organize workers at a particular company -- a difficult challenge, because they would be spread among many different buildings -- the firms would frequently fire and intimidate the workers leading the effort. If the unions succeeded, the firms would go out of business and reopen as a nonunion shop. The innovation of the Justice for Janitors campaign was to switch attention from the janitorial firms and simply demand that major buildings employ unionized janitors. With this change in focus and an aggressive worker-community coalition campaign that featured colorful protests and civil disobedience, tens of thousands of janitors were able to join unions.
The AFL-CIO has brought some new blood and energy into the labor movement through its union summer and college intern programs. These internship programs have been a synergistic success. As much as the students have helped the programs with organizing and research efforts, the internships have been of benefit to the students. Many have graduated from these programs and gone on to full-time work for some of the more progressive unions. Hundreds of college students have been involved in the nitty-gritty of union organizing campaigns. They come to see the challenges posed by oppressive employers who intimidate their vulnerable workforce as a matter of course. Many bridge class divides as students (many from relatively privileged backgrounds) and have witnessed and learned about everyday hardships experienced by working families. Inspired by their summer work, students have offered critical solidarity to union campaigns on their own campuses and led campaigns to demand that their universities stop using sweatshops to make official university apparel.
Some smaller unions have also demonstrated how to effectively represent workers. The United Electrical Workers has a long tradition of engaging and educating their workers and have become real advocates for progressive change both in and out of the workplace. The union's leadership leads by example, turning over frequently and accepting modest salaries commensurate with what their members earn.
The California Nurses Association (CNA) has strengthened their bargaining leverage and improved health care by advocating for patient rights. In recent years it has successfully lobbied several California bills into laws to protect consumers. The nurses' union highlights the abuses of HMOs and does careful analysis of the health care industry's profiteering and its pay packages for top bosses. CNA refuses to accept workplace changes that will compromise care, demanding adequate staffing ratios for patients in hospitals. In defending the general principle of patient care as well as nurses' particular interests, the CNA has shown nurses that they can best uphold their professional ethics by supporting the union. As a result, the union's membership has grown rapidly.
What these examples show is that, for all the immense power corporations have accumulated, for all their success in tilting the playing field of employer-employee relations, creative and aggressive campaigning can still yield results-improving wages and benefits, making jobs and workplaces more fulfilling, and directing the economy in a more humane direction. Corporations have succeeded in holding workers down by creating more levers of power. Organized labor has tapped the surface of a deep well of potential new tools to empower workers. To take just one example, it's past time for organized labor to invest in radio, television, and cable communications properties.
"American workers aren't going to sit still if things continue to come apart," prophesized the late Tony Mazzocchi, founder of the Labor Party and a former top official in the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers. "If you look at the history of American workers, you'd think they're in a sleepy lagoon, and then all of a sudden there is an explosion."