When I read articles in the serious journals of capitalism, Martin Wolf or Gillian Tett in the Financial Times for example or writers in Business Week or the Wall Street Journal, it is hard not to admire and respect the tenacity and unwavering loyalty they have to their class. They are clear about their class interests and make no apologies for their defense of them no matter what. I watched a You Tube clip of Bill Clinton tearing in to one of Fox TV’s right wing hacks, he was powerful and committed, and unlike George Bush, is intelligent.
The reports I read from writers (if you can call them that) in the publications of organized Labor or on the AFL-CIO’s website on the other hand are enough to drive many a worker to a Tea Party meeting.
Yesterday, the White House hosted an event to honor bosses in the retail industry. Among the attendees were representatives from Wal Mart stores, the largest retailer in the world and probably the richest family in the world. The thanks were for those retailers that have “expanded their businesses in to underserved areas.”
Reporting on the event, Mike Hall, an AFL-CIO correspondent says that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and UFCW President Joe Hansen are angry at the Obama administration for including Wal Mart whose ,“low waged jobs are not worthy of praise”. Including Wal Mart in the event, “undercuts the message of the need for good jobs that can rebuild our middle class.”, Trumka and Hansen say in an issued statement. There’s goes that “middle class jobs” nonsense again.
That the other retailers, with the support of the likes of Trumka and Hansen have savaged their members’ wages and benefits mind you and introduced union busting, solidarity destroying wage tiers that create hostility in the workplace and animosity towards Unions goes unmentioned by Hall. After all, he needs that job.
Both these Labor bureaucrats sit on the Presidents’ Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that I believe originated under Bill Cllinton. Here they absorb the ideology of the bourgeois like a sponge. This makes them feel very important and socially useful and they get to meet important people including liberal academics whose economic ideas they take as their own. They also learn great skills about squeezing more production out of fewer workers and what US workers can do to help undermine workers in other countries in order to make us more attractive to capital.
Wal Mart doesn’t build “good jobs” say the Labor brokers, “When Wal-Mart opens in a community, it regularly displaces existing jobs with poverty-level jobs.” Wal Mart doesn’t have to do that. The heads of organized Labor have cooperated with the bosses’ in general in destroying wages and benefits, won over generations in order to make us more competitive and bail these thugs out. Both Trumka and Hansen and the entire leadership of organized Labor have agreed to layoffs, wage reductions, cuts in pensions and other concessions in order to help the employers. When 100,000 workers were in the streets of Madison, these officials were pleading with the bosses to be fair, do the right thing, keep a seat at the table for them and take all the concessions they were asking for. The UAW leadership have been willing partners in the destruction of the auto workers living standards.
It is sickening to read their whining, ingratiating pleas to a president and political party in the pocket of Wall Street and the corporations. “The administration’s focus” says Trumka and Hansen, "should be on the importance of a strong middle class and protecting and creating good jobs on a scale big enough to right the economy.”
“We ask the administration to stand with communities that have called on Wal-Mart to strengthen the communities it enters rather than drive standards and wages down.”, they add. It’s childish and would be comical were the consequences not so tragic. They claim that because its workers’ qualify for welfare and food stamps that Wal Mart’s business model is “subsidized on the backs of American taxpayers”. What’s new? The entire system is subsidized not only by the US taxpayer but on the backs of the workers’ of the world.
“There is no economic justification that our nation’s largest private employer should pay wages so low that any of its employees qualify for public assistance.” Say the Labor brokers. But there is: profit. It’s good business. There’s no justification for public services to be cut or wages to decline or 30 million people to be without productive Labor or any of these things but the these very same Labor leaders justify that.
Wal Mart is a nasty employer, but it is no different in that regard than all the corporate employers. The fact that the Unionized employers are somewhat better is exactly because they are organized and that came about through heroic and violent struggles and against their will. Instead of whining about Wal Mart coming in to town and trying to appeal to the capitalist parties to prevent it, the alternative is unionizing them and linking that drive to a more generalized offensive.
Joe Hansen of the UFCW earns almost $300,000 a year. He is not interested in fighting for the average worker. His interests are in another camp. The Union hierarchy successfully blocked any serious movement arising out of the Madison events derailing it in to the electoral recall process and the Democratic party. It is my view that given the stifling control the bureaucracy has over the organized Labor apparatus, that it is most likely the mass movement that will develop at some point will begin initially outside these traditional bodies although they will obviously be convulsed by such a development.
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