Autoworkers at a Volkswagon plant in Tennessee voted down a proposal to unionize tonight. In doing so these workers just voted against their own interests and ceded even more power to the corporation they work for. What they get in return is a low paid, highly vulnerable job.
This was another example of a brilliantly executed strategy by the elites, together with government (yes, the Tennessee GOP, led by Senator Bob Corker) to further a relentless divide and conquer strategy that pits worker against worker and 99 percenter against 99 percenter.
It's sad but true that workers today are too scared to unionize because they fear losing their jobs. Ironically this makes them even more vulnerable. Corporations have unions: they're called lobbyists. So why do workers vote to have nothing? That is the height of foolishness.
Many of the protections and benefits that workers enjoy today, like the 40-hour work week, weekends off, child labor laws and other statutes that are on the books came out of the bloody labor struggles of the early 20th century. People sacrificed--and died--so that we could enjoy these little things.
In contrast, workers today are afraid to even metaphorically spill blood. They've been completely beaten into submission by a level of unbridled corporate power that is unprecedented and we've sat back and allowed it to grow over the past 40 years without any challenge whatsoever.
Now it's too late. And if you don't think it's too late then just consider the fact that after everything we've seen and experienced with respect to joblessness, income inequality, skyrocketing corporate profits, obscene executive compensation, corporate welfare and such, and workers STILL can't vote to demand a little tiny something for themselves, well, that says it all. We're done. We're slaves.
The TN autoworkers' vote tonight was a vote against workers everywhere. It was a vote against a decent society. No balls. We're all whipped.
16 comments:
The interesting thing about the Tennessee situation is that Volkswagen itself was actually neutral on the matter. They had no real problem with the workers unionizing since they're already unionized in virtually every VW plant in the world and it hasn't stopped them from being competitive. I imagine they're slightly dumbfounded by all of this. The labor movement in the southern US is not quite what it is in Germany, to say the least!
Quote: Corporations have unions: they're called lobbyists.
I'm sorry but the lobbyists are just hired guns. A corporation is a union of capitalists that demand protection from the full individual liability of their enterprise.
If you believe that corporations as state supported unions for capital investors have a right to exist then you must believe that worker should have the same rights.
Any attack on the right of unionization is an attack based purely on class hated.
We should all now know that any reference whatsoever to "free markets" is based on historical bigotry against those dispossessed of rights and property prior to establishment of the so-called "markets" in which the dispossessed are now forced to participate in under terms decided by their colonial capitalist conquistadors.
Unfortunately, votes like this on are proving that humanity is terminally servile species that is fundamentally lacking the capacity of creating non-rigid quickly adaptive hierarchies because of needed for long term survival because of our stupid egoistic need for external validation by wealth, power, influence etc....
Humanity has 2 centuries left at best and probably won't survive the through 2050s at rate we are fcking the place up.
Mike I think this is just "a southern thing..." or something... this is like the remnants of the Confederacy in Tennessee ... hard as it is to believe that rebellion happening 150 years ago...
Mike if you ever travel south on I-95 thru Virginia, get off for gas at the Cold Harbor exit on the Richmond bypass I-295 and head east... count the number of Confederate flags hanging from the front porches the numbers are not insignificant...
And last summer we drove west from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville thru Chancellorsville and The Wilderness areas and same thing... certainly far from everywhere but these flags were certainly there and in noticeable numbers (to me anyway...)
so this what ever you want to call it "rebellious individualism", a lack of solidarity, this thing is still with us...
I think if the vote was conducted in another area of the country it may have gone differently...
rsp,
Don't get me going on the South. Biggest mistake was not letting them secede but they we would probably have fought at least one war with them anyway. In their minds, the Civil War has never really been over. Their motto is, "The South shall rise again," and the current political dysfunction in the US can be viewed as an attempt to "Southernize" the country. These people are not democrats. They are republicans promoting the rule of a privileged elite and the resurrection of a de facto aristocracy. And if you listed closely some are Tories that still believe in the divine right of kings.
The interesting thing about the Tennessee situation is that Volkswagen itself was actually neutral on the matter.
My impression is that VW was more positive than neutral. I think that they toned it down, too, owing to the political opposition. Good management knows that good relations between management and labor yields a competitive advantage.
Well, the labor movement needs to do some serious soul searching and ask themselves why labor remains ambivalent about using their representation and services. I for one, would rather die than ever be "represented" by a union but that mostly has to do with a 300lb guy, who literally was named Guido that paid me a visit when I worked at a supermarket during high school and didn't join the union promptly. The real issue isn't between management and labor but a corrupt government and labor. The only way to make unions work is to apply them evenly to all companies, so that unionized companies aren't at a disadvantage. Workers aren't stupid and they know that as soon as they unionize, free trade and capital sets in, finds the path of least resistance and closes their plant within a few years and leaves them without a job. Unions represent joblessness and not employee interests in manufacturing. The Unionized american workers have done terribly with falling wages and less security and stability while the non-union plants in the south have expanded and raised wages. Workers use the threat of unions as a bargaining chip because the companies have to abandon their investment as soon as unionization occurs.
Good points Ryan....
How do you see Major League Baseball where the MLB ownership has been given a monopoly exemption by the govt and the players also have a union?
This seems to be working out well for both sides currently... where the ownership seems to be making money and the players also can make good money via arbitration/free agency... but both sides have the monopoly protection from the govt and HUGE govt welfare in the form of the infrastructure for it to be able to work as it currently is imo...
This would be like govt saying "NO imported auto anything!" and "100% made in USA!" and then the workforce would unionize but the different firms would still have to compete for market share of auto sales... might work...
Rsp,
The MLB is a decent example of how the government can work effectively to create public goods in a domestic market. They set a priority to provide circus for the population, created a monopoly and then required the booty from the monopoly be divided equitably between labor and capital. It mostly works. The teams can't move their production to Okinawa and retain viewers in Denver so the example is good but can't be extended to private sector unless it were for something like weapons where production must occur in the US. Foreign labor markets complicate matters because then a foreign government would provide a small subsidy to obtain the entire MLB industry. Which of course would make American's better off because we wouldn't have to produce it and could instead consume imported baseball which would make us all that much richer... messy.
Hit the nail on the head Mike. Southerners tend to have this crippling fatalism in their blood, which makes them somehow trust their corporate masters more than their neighbors. Chalk this up to centuries of racial animosity or income inequality, whatever, but at this point I'm just sick of it. If these damn people cant see whats good for them, I'm not inclined to give a damn anymore. How is self empowerment so hard to understand? I even heard one of the anti-union workers claiming that the UAW was just in it for themselves, and their fees. Yeah, and your publicly traded employer isnt? WTF???
Outgoing Senator Rockefeller expressed this frustration just last week:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/06/1275642/-Sen-Jay-Rockefeller-Slams-Capitalism-Tells-Stunning-Truth
"Southerners tend to have this crippling fatalism in their blood, which makes them somehow trust their corporate masters more than their neighbors"
The government isn't our "neighbors". Our neighbors don't send people to prison, they don't create the economic system, they don't create wars, laws and collect taxes.
With a company, you have a known quantity, the company is motivated by greed, pure and simple, you know how to negotiate with it. With the government, it is an unknown quantity, usually motivated by racism, populism, greed, and small minded power hungry people that get involved. Who knows what cruel trick they have planned next? I think Chris Christies little adventure in traffic management is what most people expect of government and is why it resonated with the public. (Especially people in 'The South' or "Appalachia" or "Okies" or "Natives" or whoever government elites are persecuting as being degenerate at the moment to make a political point about their righteousness.)
"The Unionized american workers have done terribly with falling wages and less security and stability while the non-union plants in the south have expanded and raised wages."
And watch what happens to those wages once the unions are completely wiped out. It will be as if those meager gains never happened at all. The only reason they were able to make any gains in the first place was because they were starting from so low.
What exactly do non-unionized factory workers negotiate with corporations, Ryan? Whether or not to accept paltry wages or be unemployed? Your non-unionized utopia has been slowly playing out over the last 35 years and labors share of the pie has steadily declined. Unemployment has had more to do with the size of private sector credit expansions/contractions than with the existence of unions.
"What exactly do non-unionized factory workers negotiate with corporations,"
I'm not against collective labor bargaining. I'm just pointing out the dynamics of the game we're engaged in. As in any economic system, people buy the goods with the lowest price. If we choose to continue with the current flawed system, we get this game where the unionized lose because they attempt to impose higher prices on a few participants in a marketplace. The only partial solution is to have national governments impose the same labor bargaining rights on all businesses. The only full solution is disallow trade and capital flows between countries that don't have the same system. Unfortunately unions don't want us to have labor boards on every company. And companies that write our trade agreements don't want it. It would be so simple to require all employees to meet a few times a year, just as the board of directors meet at each company, costs a couple hours a year, big deal.
If you think the Union system has worked well, then great, we don't need any changes to the system. I think it sucks and has done more damage than good for the last 50 years.
"Southerners tend to have this crippling fatalism in their blood"
If you haven't read it, I'd recommend a book called 'Albion's Seed', imo it provides a good explanation, of why the south may have developed with that type of mentality.
It's a great book for anyone interested in American history, it provides a history of those early settlers from the British Isles, they moved there in four separate groups, from East Anglia came the Puritans, settling in Massachusetts. From the midlands came the Quakers who settled in Delaware Valley, from Southern England you had the royalist cavaliers, basically the landed gentry, who settled in the tidewater region. And finally you had the people who settled the backcountry regions, this group was made up of the poorest and most violent people, they came from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, they were clannish people who were used to fighting for everything they had, and the only people they trusted were members of their own clan. This group is probably where the 'rugged individualist' in American culture was born.
Matt,
I happen to be a Civil War buff. I did that trip. You're correct.
For a more recent study on this subject see Colin Woodard's book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Published in 2012 , Woodard's book picks up where Fischer's book left off and expands his work to include Canadian and Southwestern US history. Also he shows three groups settling the South, the Scots-Irish in Appalachia, the Tidewater in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina and the Caribbean slave traders , Georgia convicts and exiles and African Americans who grew the Deep South . I recommend this book if you like Fischer's.
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