MEDIA WOULD BE WELL ADVISED TO
TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY"
This is what the mainstream media is starting to
say about the OWS movement. The comments from the reader at the end are
possibly the most telling. Please accept my apologies for the appearance of
Wolf Blitzer….
How many stockbrokers,
lawyers, bankers, accountants, aluminum siding salesmen or rodeo clowns would
turn down a big, fat pay raise if it came with strings attached?
What if accepting that
pay raise was contingent upon all future new-hires being denied the opportunity
to earn those same wages?
Would they make a
personal sacrifice for these unsuspecting, future employees ~ reject a pay raise
as a matter of principle ~ or would they take the money without giving it a
second thought?
My guess is that most
would accept the money.
And yet we hear the
pejorative term “sell-out” applied to union negotiators who agree to two-tier
arrangements. Under a two-tier wage/benefit schedule, new-hires can never
receive the same compensation as those employees already on the payroll.
We hear “sell-out”
applied to the UAW. And, unfortunately, we hear it applied with little or
no understanding of how ferociously the union resisted it, or how forcefully
the two-tier configuration was crammed down their throats.
Look at the record.
1. First
of all, no one but organized labor categorically opposes the two-tier
system. That’s because no one but organized labor has the ideological and
institutional solidarity to generate that opposition.
2. Second,
the record will show that many union locals have risked their own economic
well-being by designating the two-tier as a “strike issue.”
3. And
third, even a cursory look at the history of collective bargaining will show
that those unions who’ve accepted two-tier arrangements have been dragged to
that decision, pissing and moaning, kicking and screaming.
I’ve sat at the
bargaining table when the two-tier was broached. It’s an insidious
negotiating device.
To begin with, the
company comes at you with a steamroller. They paint a dreadful economic
picture, one colored with dire scenarios of massive takeaways, lay-offs, even
plant closures.
In the case of the UAW,
the companies’ woes were already public knowledge. Everyone knew Detroit
was getting creamed by Japan, and that the UAW had lost over a million members,
reducing it to a shell of its former self.
Management tells you that
they’re sinking, that they need help, that they need a lifeline.
It’s terrible news.
The picture is dark;
prospects are dark; the meeting room itself seems to grow palpably
darker.
Then, suddenly, a ray of
light….when they announce that there’s a way out of this mess, a way that won’t
require pay cuts, or furloughs, or layoffs, or increased medical premiums.
If the union will allow
the company to low-ball all future employees, the company will promise not to
penalize any existing employees.
Simple as that.
Everyone not only gets to
keep all the goodies they currently have, but there might even be a modest pay
raise in the piece.
All they have to do is
allow the company to change the way they compensate new-hires.
But the company also
somberly warns the union: If we reject this two-tier proposal, those
necessary cost savings will have to come out of our own hide.
When we present our
standard objections ~ that these draconian steps aren’t necessary, that they
aren’t fair, that they’re un-American, that they’ll be resented and despised,
etc. ~ the company reminds us that no one presently on the payroll, not one
single person, will be affected by this arrangement, that it only applies to
hypothetical workers, to fictional workers, to workers who don’t technically
even “exist.”
They make it sound
eminently reasonable.
For example, if any
potential new-hire examines the contract and doesn’t like what he sees in the
two-tier arrangement, he’s free to walk away and find work elsewhere. No
one’s going to be forced to do anything that doesn’t make absolute sense to
them. In other words, it’s your classic win-win situation.
But make no
mistake. By acknowledging that the beleaguered UAW had its back against
the wall, we’re not suggesting the two-tier is defensible, because it’s
not. Indeed, it’s unfair, it’s extortionate, it kills morale, it erodes
solidarity, and, ultimately, it betrays you, because even after you agree to it
(against your better judgment), the company continues to chip away at your
wages and benefits ~ as if you never agreed to anything.
The two-tier is an
abomination. The problem isn’t how to identify it; the problem is
how to stop it from finding its way into a union contract.
The job declension that
exists today resembles something like this (listed in declining order):
~ Full-time, fully paid
and fully benefited workers
~ Two-tier workers
(lesser pay, lesser benefits)
~ Common jobs (mediocre
pay, occasional benefits; Walmart)
~ Perma-temps (sufficient
hours, no benefits)
~ Temps (spotty work, no
benefits)
~ Undocumented workers
(less than federal min. wage, no benefits, victimization)
~ Part-time workers
(supplemental income, no bennies)
~ Day-laborers (low pay,
no bennies, no guaranteed work)
~ Panhandlers
Clearly, those who have
it best are the men and women employed in full-time jobs at decent pay with
good benefits (e.g., union workers in a big-time manufacturing plant).
Correspondingly, those
who have it the worst are the guys, usually Spanish-speakers, who hang out at
Home Depot looking for pick-up jobs.
That top category, where
people make decent wages and enjoy good benefits, used to be considered
standard procedure in America.
No one really felt it was
that big a deal. After all, good jobs were what this country was supposed
to be all about.
Today those “regular”
jobs are considered a luxury.
Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from
people who had just read this New York Times article
(though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest.
Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees,
depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline-psychotic transients.
Bellafante, who is not a
reporter but a columnist for the Times, offered a representation of the
protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists’ motives she presents
in the span of the article.
She first claims a Joni
Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement.
In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as
“leaderless.”
Either the people at
Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way).
So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph
favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl
dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight. .
. The more serious aspect
of the protest ~ the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend
including the arrests of more than eighty people, several of whom the police first
penned and then maced ~ is offered as an aside
in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way,
none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.
Bellafante goes on to
(rightfully) wonder why the response to the widening class divide hasn’t come
in the form of a more serious movement. A proposed hypothesis never emerges,
even though Bellafante almost stumbles across one when she describes a young
man who is stopping by only in “fits and spurts” because his mother fears he’ll
be tear-gassed by the police.
It sounds as though
Bellafante is on the cusp of critiquing the US police state that has completely
terrified the activist community into submission, but then she retreats.
The main bone the article
wishes to pick is the scattered ideologies of the attendees a fair point.
However, Bellafante never
attempts to do the job of real journalism here, which is to use this slice of
life to help her readers understand the world around them. Instead, she comes
across as a rubbernecker leering at a particularly bloody wreck.
Okay, she managed to
interview a few strange and inarticulate individuals, but I could do that at
any protest. No meeting of this kind is a monolith, and you can always find a
couple people who are there simply because the cause is fashionable, or their
friends dragged them along, or they’re tripping balls and just stumbled
across the thing and are desperately looking for a safe place to ride out the
terrible journey.
Gawking at these people
doesn’t help us understand, say, why a million other people haven’t joined them
in the streets, demanding an end to the corporate hijacking of their country.
Now, in Bellafante’s
defense, the protesters described in her article do exist, and they’re
super-loud and eye-catching. But in my experience, the quiet people who mingle
on the edge of the crowd are the ones you want to speak to ~ the sort of
half-in activist who will probably have to go back to work on Monday, if
they’re lucky enough to have a job.
I’m reminded of Matthew
Prowless, a 40-year-old father of two, who attended the Occupy Wall Street
protest, and who is as unassuming of a man as I’ve ever seen ~ not someone who
would have caught Bellafante’s gaze. He wore a baseball cap and stood with his
friend by a group of black bloc protesters, whom Matthew was eyeing curiously
like they were exotic fish in an aquarium.
When I spoke with him,
Matthew called the louder aspects of the protest (the black bloc, the “protest
yoga,” etc.) distractions from the far more serious cause.
“My home has been seized,
I’m unemployed, there’s no job prospects on the horizon. I have two children
and I don’t see a future for them. This is the only way I see to effect change.
This isn’t a progressive issue. This is an American issue. We’re here to take
our country back from the corporations,” he said, adding he fears for the
future of the United States where corporations can now spend unlimited,
anonymous dollars to elect the candidates of their choices.
After the protest ended
for the day, Matthew couldn’t occupy the park because he had to go care for his
two children.
I also spoke with a young
man named Kevin Stanley, a nurse who made the trek to the protest filled with
optimism and left feeling simultaneously elated and disappointed. He was
alarmed that the protesters (he calls them “kids”) are held up in Zuccotti Park
without the presence of medical professionals. During his time there, he
treated three cases of hypothermia and a person going through withdrawal as
well as infected wounds from not being able to care for open blisters.
It’s a shame Bellafante
didn’t run into Kevin, because they actually agree on the poor organization
aspects of the event.
“Many times the communal
nature of things will get the actual task done quickly, but all the competing
views with no defined hierarchy just reminds me of Lord of The Flies,”
he said.
For every batshit-crazy
quote Bellafante presents, I can match it with a calm, articulate response from
another attendee. I guarantee that. However, that’s not the point. I’m not a
believer in the “perfect objectivity” goal for journalists because it’s
impossible to ever obtain.
Human beings inherently possess
prejudices and biases that blind them to aspects of reality. Bellafante is less
likely to see the Matthews. I’m less likely to see the black bloc.
Yet we risk much when we
traipse into this false-equivalency territory. The two approaches I’ve described
above aren’t given level platforms in our society. Bellafante reaches a far,
far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because
their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving,
stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only
people on your side, why get off the couch at all?
This rubbernecking style
of journalism is particularly dangerous right now because it amounts to
criticizing a burning house for the color of its curtains. The curtains might
be brash, ostentatious and completely unhelpful in maintaining the overall flow
of the home’s ambiance, but it’s perhaps not the most pertinent detail of the
moment.
Here’s a more pressing
question: Why are the people Bellafante described in her article the ones left
behind?
The teargas aside starts
to tap into something important: how the police state and its domestic weaponry
and bureaucratic assist with the needs for permits to do anything in
protests have successfully crippled the activism community.
Activists are afraid.
You can smell it in their
midst.
They talk about the
constant presence of agent provocateurs and undercovers at every protest.
They share battle stories
of being abused by the police, like being tazed or held so long in makeshift
police pens that they had to defecate in their clothing. And these are the
brave ones that still show up to the protests.
It’s not mere paranoia.
We know for a fact that the FBI monitors activism groups, and
this practice reached a frenzied level during the Bush administration years.
These intimidation practices continue under President Obama in the form of raids.
Now, imagine you have a
job you can’t get time off from, or kids. Are you going to risk that precious
job security, or the safety of your children, to go protest in an event that
may ~ if you’re really lucky ~ get some dismissive coverage in the New York
Times?
There was a time when
individuals cast aside those fears because they had union-protected jobs, and
unions organized events with tens of thousands of confidence-inspiring fellow
members in attendance.
While those events do still occur, they’re a rarity these
days as union membership dwindles, the privatization of the country continues
and the establishment media still don’t grant them fair coverage when
they do occur. Not one of the young people I spoke to at the Occupy Wall Street
protest said they were union members. Bellafante is right in the sense that
they are scattered, lost and leaderless, but she never explores why that’s
the case.
While the left loses the
valuable organizational mechanism of unions, the right has gained corporate
masters like the Koch brothers to disseminate millions of dollars into
astroturfing campaigns to organize and destroy on their behalf. While the left
makes signs, the right has already deployed troupes to scream at town hall
events.
These are the kinds of
massive oppositional forces activists find themselves facing these days: an
incredibly oppressive police state and a corporate cash monster bearing down on
them from the right.
Meanwhile, their union
support army is either in retreat or preoccupied fighting other battles on
other fronts in Wisconsin or Ohio, or one of the other forty-eight states where
anti-union legislation was introduced this year courtesy of ALEC, a front group
that serves as proxy for corporate interests.
Instead of bemoaning the
fact that protesters haven’t arrived in matching uniforms with a coherent
PowerPoint presentation, these are the issues we should be addressing.
Of course the majority of Zuccotti Park
occupiers are young, brash and lost. They’d have to be to do something like
this, and risk getting hypothermia for the chance to be ignored and belittled
by the media.
Young people are always
the first ones willing to risk comfort and security for the romantic vision of
a better tomorrow.
No, a movement can’t be
supported on a shaky foundation, nor do I expect journalists to also serve as
activism advisers, but Bellafante’s piece does nothing to help us understand
why Zuni Tikka is the last woman standing.
The scam of austerity. The following is a collection of union oriented cartoons I thought I had posted a few weeks ago ~ but apparently I had forgotten to. So, better late than never, (sometimes), here they are.
Some things have been going on forever it seems.
Joe Hill was a man of inspiration
Sally Fields in Norma Rae
Part one
Part two
Please enlarge this thumb regarding child labour.
Just too cute.
THE SCAM OF AUSTERITY
Look around America today and you see a war zone. A war against the middle class ! A covert war that has been going on for years ~ A war with a battle plan. It is a plan to finance politicians who have an agenda to give the final death blow against labor and the middle class and take over government.
WHAT WE SEE IS... A war to steal the money out of the hands and pockets of hard working families. A war that takes food from children's mouths. A war that sucks the heat from our furnaces on the coldest winter's days.
THIS IS TODAY'SREALITY.... THIS IS WHAT IS GOING... HERE AND NOW!
I ASK THEN... Where is all that money going? Money doesn't disappear nor does it dematerialize; it had to go somewhere.
It went into the huge bank vaults of the bankers and, the 2% of the population who intentionally sucked all the money from North America and created the job losses and home foreclosures in the first place.
The same bankers and, the 2% of the population who were bailed-out by the US tax payers with over $700 Billion dollars from hard working people.
These same 2% and same Wall Street bankers who took American bail-out money on threat of martial law did not re-invest it in the people to create jobs as they had promised. They kept the money and continued to foreclose against families and then rewarded themselves with lavish million dollar bonuses as "job well done".
~ Proving again that: "TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS" was a Scam.!
These bankers and, the 2% who now sit comfortably on piles money, now have all the time in the world to wait... Wait and watch as the citizens, families and workers squirm in pain and misery fighting poverty just for the basics in life... as they continue to lose their homes and jobs.
IT IS TIME WE ALL ~ FOLLOW THE MONEY!
What we are seeing is a process leading this country down the same economic path as Turkey, Mexico, Greece. "A country with NO middle class!"
A country with only the VERY RICH and The VERY POOR.
What we are witnessing is the resurgence economic principals dating back to the "PRE-INDUSTRIAL ERA"!
HENRY FORD CREATED THE MIDDLE CLASS IN AMERICA
Henry Ford in 1914 set an example for all of us to follow. breaking with the long on-going "Industrial Era" mentality when he broke the greedy on-going practice of rich industrialists: of paying their workers (a pittance!) ~ as little as possible...
Henry Ford made a bold deliberate move
to "think outside the box" !
To pay twice the going labor rate to his workers.
With an Idea so that this workers could then afford
to buy his automobiles...
His workers bought automobiles and more...
houses and refrigerators
and life got better for everyone...
It was then...
The middle class was born.
Henry Ford's one bold act changed the world forever...
And today has proven one very important economic principal
for all us to follow into the future.
BUT TODAY:
We see that there is a plan in the works to turn back the clock! To reverted back again to those old failed economic principals of the Industrial Age ~ Once again paying people as little as possible... (a pittance!) while "The New Industrialists" once again horde huge profits on the backs of poor exploited labor.
These are greedy people, this slash and burn industrial age thinking is destructive to the global economy as it is to our families our neighbors and to the fabric of our society.
** The Future is before us: **
But before we can move forward... We must learn from the past.
We must act,,, to plant the seeds of the future and stimulate growth to grow a strong "global economy" an economy that gives "all workers" a fair "World Wage" and basic global worker's rights; rights, that regulate and protect the global work force. We need to level the playing field world-wide for long-term global growth and stability. To put and end to the greedy destructive short-term profits and exploitation of labor that is destroying the world around us.
THE LESSON LEARNED:
Henry Ford's proved by example that in order for a populous to contribute to the economy they must be paid a fair living wage. It is in everyones best interest! A fair " Wage" globally expands the market place for all goods stimulates all commerce allows all people to be better their lives and contribute to a healthy economy and future for all of us everywhere.
After the protest ended
for the day, Matthew couldn’t occupy the park because he had to go care for his
two children.
