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| Union leaders will have this all be for nought; don't let this happen |
Having dealt with the autoworkers with the help of the leaders of the UAW, the capitalist class is now quite confident they will repeat the process with the public sector and the big issue with us is job security and benefits. I remember visiting a friend who was in the Carpenter’s Union on his lunch half hour one time. I was a heavy equipment operator and my backhoe took me all across town so I stopped by his building site.
As we sat there with his co-workers I started talking about the Unions and the bosses and stuff like that. The workers, including my friend, said next to nothing. At the end of the half hour I mentioned to him that folks were really quiet and wondered if it was a matter of trust. He reminded me that this was not the public sector. Too much talk like that and a few days later you might get laid off. Not for talking about Unions of course as that would be illegal; all the boss would have to do would be to say he’s short of work and that’s it. In the building trades, especially the mechanical trades like plumbers and electricians where the wage rates are higher, you are simply temporary workers; you have very little security.
In the public sector, or most of it, there are all these rules and regulations that make it much harder to fire us. In addition, we do have, or have had, a more humane, less competitive environment in which to work and many of my co-workers would say to me that we are not here to make money like in the private sector. This started to change significantly in the late eighties and throughout the nineties with the Team Concept really picking up steam. We were told we had to work smarter in order to prevent the boss form contracting out our work and AFSCME pushed the idea of “competitive bidding”, competing with outside contractors for bids on work like a janitorial firm or landscaping outfit or pipeline company or something like that. Naturally, this is a disaster for workers as it pits us against each other as we work harder, faster, and give up obstacles to productivity like safety rules in order to help our boss drive his rivals from the marketplace.
Some years ago I wrote a piece for my Union newsletter I think it was but I quoted Gerald McEntee, AFSCME’s millionaire president, speaking to a business group. It was the nineties when Clinton and Gore were boasting about restructuring government and making it smaller. "...People who work on Wall Street are good citizens who want their country to change.” Clinton told Business week in 1992, “I want to generate a lot of millionaires...” and generate them he did. In a question and answer piece in Business Week Gore, not to be outdone by the Republicans said to the business world in response to being questioned about the Republican’s program for slashing government, “Cabinet departments don't get created by accident. Below that level, there are many agencies that we have eliminated. In one year, we downsized by 100,000 employees. We have locked in place plans to eliminate another 200,000 workers. That's a bold start.” * In the same vein, McEntee was reassuring these employers that rules that made it very difficult and a drawn out process to fire and employee needed to change.
So the issue is flexibility. I am not saying that wages aren’t an important issue for the bosses. But capitalists don’t appreciate being told when they can or cannot sell a commodity, and Labor power is a commodity. And public sector expenditure is money out for them; it is their money as far as they are concerned.
The point is that in the public sector lower wages were traded for better benefits, including job security, and it is this cost in the immediate term that the bosses want to bring down. The Economic Policy Institute points out in a statement published February 15th that public sector workers wages are less than our private sector counterparts and this is particularly so in Wisconsin. The EPI finds:
“Nationally, 54% of full-time state and local public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 35% of full-time private sector workers. In Wisconsin, the difference is even greater: 59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers.
...Public employees receive substantially lower wages, but much better benefits than their private sector counterparts. Wisconsin state and local governments pay public employees 14.2% lower annual wages than comparable private sector employees. On an hourly basis, they earn 10.7% less in wages. College-educated employees earn on average 28% less in wages and 25% less in total compensation in the public sector than in the private sector. **
So for the white-collar public employees in particular, they accepted less pay for better benefits but now the benefits are on the chopping block as the capitalists shift the burden of their crisis on to the backs of workers and the middle class.
Compared to nonunion of course, we are all better paid with unionized workers pay an benefits around 35% higher than non-Union; and in most cases, even a bad Union is better than no Union, at least workers have some vehicle through which to fight the boss. As pay and benefits and in particular job security all get whittled down to nothing, Unions become less attractive. Many workers fall prey to right wing propaganda as they find themselves paying Union dues as their top officers draw obscene salaries, telling them they have to tighten their belts and make sacrifices and force concessionary contracts down their throats when they resist. The right wing is tapping in to the anger that workers feel and the heads of organized labor and their allies in the Democratic party are trying to temper and suppress it.
The quotes (and video) of public statements Union officials have made about the situation in Wisconsin that we have included in earlier blogs are disgusting. But they are carefully chosen. Capitalism is in crisis; they support capitalism and believe there is no alternative to it so any movement of the working class that threatens it must be suppressed, rendered harmless.
This view and the strategy that flows from it, one of capitulation and betrayal, cannot survive forever; it is a catastrophe for unionized workers but also for youth and the unorganized as it delays a movement that can drive back this offensive of capitalism. Whenever young people in the streets of Oakland where I worked or other low waged or even Unionized workers discovered I was a public sector worker they responded with envy. “How can I get a job like that?” they would always ask. Or they would make some comment about how lucky I was.This shows how easily the Union leaders could win these workers and youth if they wished.
When unionized workers go on strike, the officials always talk about how good people don’t cross picket lines and stuff like that. But I remember one worker who a picketer urged not to cross the grocery workers’ information picket line during their strike in 2003 because they were taking benefits away who responded, “They’re taking away benefits. What are benefits? I don’t have any benefits. Where have the Unions been for me?” He walked on in the store, where, by the way, the workers of another local in the same Union were working. But I couldn’t disagree with what he said.
The Union leaders are preparing the ground for a further defeat in Wisconsin. They may keep their seat at the table but only to give more of our hard earned gains away. The struggle to change the leadership of our Unions is harder than the fight against the boss as it is an internal struggle.
But it is one we cannot avoid if we want a future for our children.
* Getting Smaller With Al: BW 1-23-95
** Wisconsin Public Versus Private Employee Costs EPI Memo 2-15-11 This Document can also be reached through the Economist Magazine
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