Unions & The Middle Class

I want to defer to those who know better than I about such things...

I keep hearing a mantra these days concerning unions and their being responsible for creating and sustaining a healthy and thriving middle class, and without them the economy and even capitalism itself will self-implode.

Now, I am very skeptical of capitalism most of the time, but when I hear claims such as these I begin to sense myself channeling Ebeneezer Scrooge (Allistair Sim's portrayal.... is there any other worth noting?).

I know quite a few people who are either members of unions or are sympathetic to them, and while I see unions as important in countries like India where regulatory mechanisms, if they exist at all, are grievously ineffective, I don't see them as the saviours of the capitalist world.

Thing is any rational arguments pro or con always seem to drown in the propaganda each side shovels.

Anecdotally, I do know what I see in my own city. I see a semi-annual hijacking of city services, some of which are very essential indeed, to strike for if not higher wages (which are already exorbitant beyond reason) and fatter pensions (ditto), but also all manner of other benefits. I resent paying these pseudo-socialists living like capitalists off the taxpayer's backs.

My step-father was a public transit worker years back. And while he generally supported his union, (which was very powerful indeed), he resented being borderline intimidated and bullied by what he perceived as unnecessary tactics to keep the union strong and in check when it came time to, er... negotiate a contract or simply declare enmasse their general unease at seeing another city's transit union members getting more than they get. He supported his union, but he often came home cursing them because he felt they undermined their own credibility and did serious damage to themselves as an organization. He just wanted to keep his job essentially. But he said more than once that unions tend to get just as out of control as corporations.

In my view they are annoyances and costly to taxpayers. I believe there is alot of abuse disguised as sanctimonious, "...without us we would have no middle class. You need us."

So this cynical-about-capitalism fellow here is wondering if both the capitalists and freemarketeers and the protect-my-wages-pensions-and-captialist-lifestyles via threat of service interruptions and all out strikers, aren't both in need of some serious self-examination here.

I don't think unionists, at least here in the west, are doing anyone any favours (other than themselves and their membership, but even that is a dubious claim) and I strongly doubt their assertions that they hold the economy and middle class together.

The middle class is such a relativistic and subjective notion, for one. The parameters of what constitutes middle class will vary from region to region, state to state, and country to country. That a group of disgruntled workers concerned with making as much as or more than their private counterparts, or a group justifiably enraged by deplorable working conditions who just want to live to work another day to feed themselves and their family's... are somehow saving the free world economies of industrialized nations, allowing the rest of us public and private workers luxuries we couldn't have otherwise without their sacrifices... seems to me to be a whole lot of bluster and nonsense.

Where is the truth here? (...somewhere in the middle I would suspect)

The unions in this country are pretty much dead, certainly broken. But there is a case for strengthening them. Consider the OWS movement. What do they want? Better treatment for workers and more accountability for management? That's what the unions used to be for. And from a historical perspective, organised labor did play a role in building the middle class.

The Real Reason the Middle Class Is Dead

Here in Seattle the Machinists Union at Boeing is big news. They just voted (barely) to give up some bennies in response to Boeing threatening them.

The mood in the country generally is very anti-union. With so much outsourcing over the past couple decades the union movement is in tatters.

Who won? CEO bonuses. Who lost? The middle class.

I don't know how we would have done certain things without them. Because what they were, in essence, was a way to group enough people together that you could accomplish something against someone like a company who had their own security and their own police force and their own lobbyists making anything those security people do legal.

These were not guilds formed to keep workers deemed "not compliant" in some manner from working. These were literally your friends and neighbors who were standing side by side with you because otherwise they'd just fucking shoot you. Companies owned the system back then. They could do whatever the hell they wanted to and then ask another man to step up and take the same treatment and you had no choice but to do it or starve. It was solidarity, it was for "they can't off all of us". They can't lock us all in. (Triangle fire) Sometimes they still did. But at least you had your friends backing you up a bit sharing some stew. (These days it's actual money.) Read about Pinkerton, and strike breaking, and the militarization of union busting.

Now, I believe that one thing we do in this social contract is we sort of agree to pretend to respect things like the fact that land is now claimed and sold so that in turn we get some safety and another opportunity to earn our food somehow. If you are going to take away communal ownership of land and the food production that comes with it you have to supply a system of barter where people can still obtain food. That's what "work" is. And we have a right to it. We have a non=negotiable right to earn a keep as as human being in some form. We have a right to seek, food, water, shelter. The acceptable way is through work. When your requirements to accomplish this reach a point where being a slave would be a better use of a person's time then you have reached a point where yes, it is time to change. That is where all corporations end up. It is their nature as a corporation, they are founded to get shareholders money. So the clash between the absolute nature of corporations goes against the absolute right of a human being to reasonable earn basic things for life and yes, you damn right, if my government is so lax that they will let me get fucked as a worker than yes, fully expect me and my buddies to organize and use our sheer mass of force to assert our rights to basic human sustenance. It doesn't need us to agree with it. The nature of that situation is going to occur and needs to whether we call it a "union" or not. It's not a big deal now because people are relatively comfortable and they've (they being those in charge) learned we will do it and therefore allowing us the appearance of unions and a situation that works for people. But gradually, as you see from the 15 an hour movement people are coming together. We are again realizing they've moved us too far from "actual people" and too close to "cannon fodder" and people are pissed about it.

Corporations will always hold power because they hold resources and access to them. We need to organize to do anything against that. One person, an individual worker cannot do anything alone. It's sort of like the difference between the Kobe Bryant case and that politician who had numerous women come forward and say he harassed them. One chick is a he said she said, but you get a group of them and all of a sudden a guy has to resign. Mass numbers count even though they shouldn't. That is the idea behind it. Now, if some do not do that well, that's on them. You surely have the common sense/awareness to understand that just because the spoiled goobers in your town don't have the perspective to understand how spoiled they are it does not mean that other unions elsewhere in time and place aren't doing exactly what they need to to help people out for real.

I also think they may be right. There is really no need for the upper crust to let us serfs have a damn thing if enough of us aren't willing to get together and demand it. Why would they? Fear of us in mass numbers is the only thing we have over them. And they've seen us use it. Russian Revolution, anyone? If we truly "see no point in unions" then they have nothing to fear and there's no need to keep the middle class as that carrot for if we behave and stick to societal rules. No union, no carrots, only sticks.

Make no mistake, people are not "civil". They are not going to just say well, I ought to act decent because it's the decent thing to do. If they did we'd have more decency in the world. Yes, I think ultimately fear is what keeps people in line. Fear of something.

SAI2 wrote:

But he said more than once that unions tend to get just as out of control as corporations.

This.

Jenni wrote:

There is really no need for the upper crust to let us serfs have a damn thing if enough of us aren't willing to get together and demand it.

And this.

In between is a happy medium -- well-run unions who protect workers' rights without hamstringing the employer -- and well-run employers who tolerate unions as necessary evils. Or the ideal, when corporations treat their employees fairly and there is no need for a collective bargaining unit.

If you like eight-hour work days, overtime pay, paid vacations, etc., you should be grateful to the union movement which gave them to us.

The unions did take actions which enabled the growth of the middle class. But at that time, the corporations needed a middle class to buy their products. With the horrid creation of globalization, the fat cats no longer have a need for a strong American middle class, so they are doing all they can to destroy it and acquire the wealth of the middle class - and they are being successful.

There's an American equity form called Blackstone which is currently spending about $100 million per week buying up financially-distressed homes which the current residents (many of them formerly middle class) can no longer afford. These homes are not being resold but are being turned into rental properties. Blackstone has also created a new type of financial instrument which is based on the rental income of bundles of these homes (can anyone say "derivative bubble"?). Having a large number of homes permanently removed from the sales market (along with much higher rentals costs) will deprive many families of ever having the opportunity to buy a home - one of the hallmarks of the middle class.

If there was still a strong union component in the economy, I don't believe the corporations would have gotten away with much of the abysmal actions that have become the norm in the current economy.