Reclaiming Our Future

An Agenda For American Labor

William W Winpisinger, John Logue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book recounts the historic struggles of the American labor movement for safer workplaces, for a healthier environment, for corporate accountability, for equal rights for the majority who are women, and for civil rights for the minority who are not white.

One

on the threshold of the future

We are about to enter the last decade of the twentieth century hurtling through the cosmos on our fragile Spaceship Earth, wondering what the ride is all about. We wonder about that point on the navigator’s chart where space and time intersect to pinpoint our existence and to prove we are in the present tense. We wonder where we are in the historian’s unfinished textbook chronicling the adventures and misadventures of humankind’s trip. We wonder what our generation’s destination and destiny are. And we wonder, sometimes, if we’re even on board, or have been left behind at the docking station.

We look back to see where we came from. No genuine trade union movement—or nation—can have a sense of purpose or a clear-sighted vision of the future, without an appreciation of from whence it came, its roots, and its past.

My union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, or the IAM as we are popularly called, was born in Atlanta, on May 5, 1888. Our organizer was a young journeyman machinist who worked in the roundhouse for the Eastern Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad. His name was Thomas Wilson Talbot.

Railroads were the cutting edge of advanced technology in that era. And skilled machinists, who, then as now, worked with their minds as much as their hands, were an elite among the craftsmen of the era. Even so, employers abused, mistreated, and attempted to subjugate them to the “Iron Law of Wages,” that is, wages that would pay for a subsistence level of living, consisting of the primitive necessities for food and shelter, and nothing else.

The story is told that Talbot decided that machinists needed a union when he realized after twenty years as a highly skilled journeyman, he couldn’t afford to send his sons to high school. That was a hundred years ago. Today, there is still a sizable population of wage and salary earners, and, of course the long term unemployed, who can’t afford to send their children to high school. And in spite of educational opportunity being one of the keys to economic survival in the current world of technological displacement, unemployment and upheaval, there is a far larger population that cannot afford to send its children to advanced and technical colleges and public or private institutions of higher learning.

In any case, Talbot and eighteen other machinists met secretly on the evening of May 5, 1888, in an engine pit under locomotives being repaired and overhauled, where they were sheltered from company stooges and labor spies. At that first meeting, those eighteen machinists had no resources beyond their own ingenuity and skill, counted no friends in high places, no support in the press, and no sympathy in the courts of the land. If their meeting had been discovered or someone had informed the company, they would have been summarily fired.

Sounds like labor and trade union rights 100 years later, doesn’t it?

But when Mr. Talbot and the group came out of that meeting, they had formed the Order of United Machinists and Mechanical Engineers of America. Much of their terminology and ritual was adopted from the disintegrating Knights of Labor, since Talbot and some of his colleagues had been or were members of that organization, too. In fact, Terrence Powderly, head of the Knights, was himself a machinist.

With Local Lodge 1 established in Atlanta, itinerant machinists, called “boomers,” who rode the rails in search of work around the country, spread the word and the Machinists Union grew.

While things in our times may be different from those of the days when those dedicated mechanics rebelled in that roundhouse pit in Atlanta 100 years ago, our values remain the same; our objectives remain essentially the same; and, I suspect, the institutional, economic, political and social problems are the same as well.

This is not a book about history, although our history is prologue to our present. It is a book about today and tomorrow. It is a book about common problems, but uncommon answers.

The common answers—the answers promoted by the press, the professors, the politicians, and the corporations—have failed us.

We’ve had enough of economists, safely employed in their ivory tower universities, who preach to us that the way to restrain inflation is to throw people out of work. We’ve had enough of companies telling us that, if we don’t agree to having our wages cut to Brazilian or South Korean or Mexican standards, they’ll pack up our jobs and move them overseas. We’ve had enough mergers and acquisitions and corporate cannibalism which make a lot of money for a few but do not produce jobs for a single American. And we’ve had enough of politicians running errands for Big Business, promoting multi-billion dollar corporate tax giveaways.

It’s time for a little common sense.

This book isn’t going to look like what you read in the morning paper or sound like what you hear on the evening news. The media don’t spend a lot of time talking about plant shutdowns and lost jobs and disinvestment and declining income and how corporations rig prices and invest overseas and buy your congressman. A free press is a wonderful thing, especially for those who have enough money to own a newspaper or to buy a television station.

This book is different because I don’t work for a big corporation. I don’t have a lot of myths to promote or reputations to protect.

I’m a machinist, a high school drop out. I never drew supply and demand curves at the Harvard Business School. I never put together an auto company, but I sure can put together an auto engine. I learned my economics in the real world: the hard school of bargaining contracts for my fellow machinists.

I’ve learned a lot while doing that. I’ve learned about the collusion of one company with its competitor to try to beat down their employees’ already low wages. I’ve learned about the collusion between corporations and the government to give the corporations billion dollar tax rebate handouts while the unemployed are stripped of their benefits, widows of their Social Security, and orphans of their school lunches. And when you tell the truth about them, I’ve seen those politicians wrap themselves in our flag while justifying the most outrageous acts of corporate avarice against us. Show me a reactionary zealot who is raising hell about foreign policy, morality and patriotism, I’ll show you a crook damned near every time.

I have also learned that the future isn’t somewhere ahead of us. It starts right now as you read this.

We can claim it for our own.

We do make a difference. We are on board and participants in humankind’s long journey called progress.

Understanding where we are

Where we are in the universe inevitably begins with a description of the political economy.

Economics today is characterized by globalization of the factors of production. Production of goods and services alike is organized into an integrated system of globe-spanning units. For the first time in history the men and moguls who run global corporations and enterprise are able to combine organization, technology, money and ideology in a way that permits them to manage—or mismanage—the world’s commerce as an integrated economic unit.

Here at home, it is imperative that we understand what those self-appointed Corporate Rambos in league with business barons in other lands are demanding. It is nothing less than the right to operate outside the rules of, and transcend the sovereignty of, the nation state and to cast the global economy in their own narrow and lustful image.

Fortune magazine (September 26, 1988, pp. 45 ff.) tells us that “globalization will continue to be an inescapable buzzword.” With continuing advances in computers and speed-of-light communications, world financial markets will meld. Manufacturing prowess will suddenly appear all over the undeveloped areas of the globe. There will be new Taiwans and new Koreas.

A shrinking world will mean an expanding clock. Electronic fund transfers, financial services and manufacturing production schedules will be spread across global time zones so that, while the United States and Canada sleep, work will go on on the sunny side of the globe. When the sun sets in the Orient, the work will be transferred back to the Western hemisphere, whether that work be in financial services and trade or in manufacturing. For those corporations and firms that have highly developed and integrated global communications and computer integrated production systems, it is possible to get 48 hours of work out of a 24-hour day!

As point-of-sale marketing and supply information becomes available at the speed of light to corporate planners, there will be more decentralization of production. According to Fortune, one forecaster predicts that by the year 2000, industrial countries, on average, will be importing nearly 40 percent of the parts used in domestic manufacturing.

The corporate balance sheet and income statement inflate. The national income and balance sheet deflate. So do worker incomes, living standards, and economic and political rights.

By the year 2000, the world will consist of three mega-economic blocs. The first mega-economy will consist of China, Japan and the Asian Rim countries, after Hong Kong is returned to the Chinese in 1997. The second mega-economy will be created on the European continent after the European Community unites in 1992. Increased trade within the European Community and its economic ties with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations will dwarf the home markets of Japan and the United States. And the third mega-economic bloc is being established in North America consisting of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

The real significance of the Canada-U.S. “free trade” treaty is to enable private capital to integrate our two economies. And now that the Canada-U.S. trade deal seems safe, the Washington Post reports (11/23/88, p. E-1) that President-elect Bush is preparing a free trade treaty with Mexico “with the pact with Canada as a model.”

This, in a nutshell is what is happening: the global economy is being restructured into three mega-economies. These are the oceans that the big sharks want the little fish to swim in.

Some observers have suggested that it is perestroika without glastnost!

Private capital is super mobile and, therefore, super sovereign. Multinational corporate enterprise is shedding all pretense of economic nationalism and economic patriotism. Japanese, German, French, Swedish, Italian and British firms are buying into the North American economy to secure and develop their markets here. Canadian and U.S. firms that have not already gained a foothold in the European mega-economy are moving to do so. The same is true in the Asian mega-economy. And Japanese, Australian and Chinese (especially Hong Kong capitalists) are buying into the North American bloc, too.

All this may seem exciting to the Big Faces with hair on their brains up there in the International Business Roundtable Board Rooms. But we in the trade unions are locked out of the loop. What does globalization mean to us?

It means the Corporate State political agenda, of course.

It means pitting workers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico against each other and against the least common denominator in terms of global wages, labor standards and economic, political, and social equality. Exploited labor overseas cannot buy or consume that which it produces and unemployed labor here at home cannot buy it either.

Globalization means more corporate “downsizing”: more personnel slashing and lay offs; more high-tech and new-tech quick fixes; more end runs around trade unions; more erosion of collective bargaining agreements; more weakening of our labor and social laws and legislation.

“Efficiency” and “productivity” are the war cries. “Quality control,” “labor cooperation,” and “teamwork” are the tactical slogans.

When U.S. companies move capital and technology overseas and produce over there, they become our foreign competitors! What’s good for their balance sheets and income statements is not good for America’s. This system of unlicensed global mobility of capital is not working in the national interest. It is not increasing the nation’s wealth or the people’s prosperity. It is a zero-sum game.

It is not winning the international trade war. We in the United States are losing the trade war to the tune of $150 billion a year. Each $1 billion in lost trade costs us 25,000 jobs. We’ve lost 4.5 to 5 million jobs over the past five years to imports and to the flight of capital.

Foreign interests now own and control more of this nation’s private and public wealth and resources, including the federal budget, than at any time in history.

There is very little that is democratic about this global restructuring. Certainly there is not in the United States. Nor is there in Japan or other Asian nations. Those West European and NATO countries that do have economic and social clauses in their national legislation and/or have co-determination laws and political parties based on trade union membership are also apt to have an industrial policy that gives national economic goals and the public good equal priority with private profit and shareholder dividends.

Even so, except in cases where national legislatures must approve or ratify economic and trade treaties, there is no democratic way to control, direct or otherwise significantly influence those global capital flows.

At this point in time, the most we can do is to press our respective national governments to write into our laws and treaties concerning trade certain defined labor and human rights—economic and social rights—which will prevent exploitation and establish uniform minimum standards with respect to wages, hours, working conditions, freedom of association, and protecting the environment. Through monetary penalties and abrogation of trade deals that violate such labor rights clauses, nations can unilaterally influence the social conduct of private capital, but not its mobility.

I see little difference between today’s global private corporate sovereigns and the monarchies and colonial powers of yesteryear. If we are going to cope successfully with this international mobility of capital, then we’re going to have to look beyond the niches and holes for worker participation in conduct of the individual corporate enterprise and larger political process, toward something much more universal and powerful.

In that context economic nationalism and economic patriotism still have a definite role to play.

Here at home, one out of nine white Americans is poor; one out of three blacks is poor; and one out of four Hispanics is poor. Poverty is on the rise while the middle class is in decline. Real, after-tax income for individuals is at the same level it was in 1967. There has been no real gain for two decades. Household income after taxes and inflation may have risen, but that’s because more wives and other family members are working to make ends meet. When two people are required to maintain a standard of living formerly supported by one person, that is not progress.

Nearly 15 percent of the American people live below the government’s artificially low poverty line. That’s not progress either. Another 15 percent live on the marginal edge of poverty. That means nearly one-third of our people are ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad, and have little or no access to decent health and dental care. Inflation in the basic necessities of life—energy, utilities, transportation, food, housing and health care—is twice the inflation rate for non-necessity items. That cruelly compounds inflation’s impact on those Americans.

At the top of the pyramid, just 1 percent of the people own and control 35 percent of the nation’s wealth. At the bottom, 60 percent of the people own only 8 percent of the wealth, and that primarily consists of consumer durables, such as cars and refrigerators. In terms of financial assets, such as stocks, and bonds, the maldistribution of wealth is even more skewed.

These inequities in income and wealth distribution constitute a social stratification that seriously impairs the functioning of democracy. Wealth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: William Winpisinger and the American Labor Movement
• 1 On the Threshold of the Future
• 2 Mismanaging America’s Economy: Paper Entrepreneurs and Corporate Cannibals
• 3 America in the Global Economy
• 4 Beyond the Warfare State
• 5 Science, Technology, and the Corporate State
• 6 Labor Relations Today: Cooperation or a New Class War?
• 7 Labor and Politics
• 8 American Labor in the Twenty-First Century
• Sources