Taki's Mag

My maternal great-grandfather owned a large dry-goods concern which still exists. He was a decent man who took care of his employees, one of whom was Eugene V. Debs. (Though Debs later gained notoriety on behalf of workingmen, he remembered my relation fondly.) Grandfather continued to treat his laborers well. A tender recollection was his funeral procession passing the company grounds. It wasn’t a workday, but hundreds of the men stood in pouring rain to remove their hats as his hearse passed by.

My paternal grandmother experienced the other side of the labor coin. She was a line worker in a food factory for more than twenty years. She lost her hearing in one ear from working aside a thunderous processor and had her pension stolen after the operation closed shop.

My point is that nothing is one thing or the other. While many laws now seem irrelevant or redundant, there are often valid reasons why they were originally put into place.

School tenure has many problems, but it prevented legions of petty tyrants from extracting bribes from public servants. OSHA often goes overboard, but it is definitely within living memory when people suffered lifelong debilitations without such oversight. And while some industry leaders view their workers as charges or friends, more than enough regard them as chattel and subhuman.

This causes the appearance of “Right to Work” laws in multiple legislatures to give one pause.

Wisconsin last year hosted some of the most dramatic battles in decades as Republican Governor Scott Walker acrimoniously pushed through his version of Right to Work. Democratic lawmakers fled the state for weeks to avoid passage as a hundred thousand protestors descended upon the capital. Ultimately it was enacted, then struck down by judicial writ, and reinstated by the state Supreme Court. Union dues dropped precipitously, leaving several in multiple fields either to de-certify or not re-certify. State congressional recall efforts were a disappointment to union efforts with limited success, though this month one million signatures were collected toward recalling the governor.

In New Hampshire ahead of that presidential primary, candidates unanimously agreed that Right to Work should be implemented. The state House passed such a bill days earlier for the second time. Last November the legislation came within one dozen votes (out of 400) from overriding gubernatorial veto. New Hampshire Republican leadership has made passage a priority, with Republican legislators already reporting they’d been threatened with loss of committee assignments, redistricting out of electability, and blackballing of donors.

In Indiana last week the Republican-dominated House bullied through a Right to Work bill on a party-line vote which barred amendments not filed twenty-four hours prior to passage, despite the fact the hearing had been scheduled less than twenty-four hours prior to passage. They similarly prohibited debate, denied union officials their right to testify, and disallowed public comment. Earlier this month the Republican governor (who as Director of OMB for the Bush Administration swindled the country into war by grossly underestimating Iraq’s costs) endeavored to dramatically restrict citizens’ access to the Statehouse, coincidentally ahead of this divisive legislation. As a result, it now appears Democrats may walk out of the session in protest as they did last year in Wisconsin.

A cogent description of “Right to Work” laws is they make it illegal for unions to negotiate contracts requiring contributions from workers who do not, or choose not to, belong to such associations. These laws do not forbid unions or restrict negotiating on behalf of membership. They codify that those who do not wish to pay union fees are not forced to do so.

“Right to Work” proponents argue that states see increased economic vitality and that the laws are vital to liberty. Opponents rejoin that unions are protective bulwarks and that weakening their influence means lower wages, more hazardous conditions, and removing the last remaining obstacle to industrial domination of civil society.

The moniker of “union-busting” or “anti-unionism” arises because when such prohibitions are enacted, they weaken labor’s contracting position. As a consequence, union power is often greatly diminished and the union inevitably disbands. The end result is no membership and therefore no union.

Without any unions, even weakened ones, there is little to prevent age-old indifference to workers from resurging. In an age of largely open borders coupled with “free trade” and unfettered corporate campaign contributions, they prevent such indifference from roaring in as never before. There are currently labor laws to defend against the more obvious abuses of old, but absent a unified voice (and consolidated money to make it heard), how long can it be before the legislative trickery used in New Hampshire and Indiana is employed to demolish these protections? Once gone, can they be resurrected?

It is one thing to decry unions’ overreach, but how many of us can openly compete with the grasping hand of a poor Chinese person or a slave worker in Haiti? In an overpopulated world of seven billion scrambling souls, many individuals will work for food and nothing else. Are Americans beyond the point of these concerns, or with the relentless influx of desperate Mexicans, Indians, and Arabs, are Americans at the tipping point?

There is good reason for the opinion it is fundamentally unfair to extract union dues from unwilling participants. In this, almost all “reasonable people” agree, and I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with the majority—which always gives me good reason to worry.

Still, it is questionable why a recognized union is forced by law to negotiate on behalf of even those workers who choose not to join. Freedom from being forced to join is no more noble than freedom from being forced to represent.

Frankly, I do not favor unions. Too often they are overly restrictive, irrational in their demands, and corrupt in their leadership. I dislike “professional associations” (the store-bought name for unions) even more. These are almost universally created to exclude otherwise capable people who refuse or cannot afford to jump through the “officially sanctioned” series of hoops. This is often coupled with the sanctimonious smirk that such organizations are for the public’s protection rather than an extortive method of artificially raising fees for a variety of services. Thus, no one should mistake me for a labor advocate in the traditional sense.

Yet this country largely seems to be uniting behind the belief that unionism as an organized lobby is anachronistic and serves no good purpose in modern society. This notion seems particularly ill-timed. As the economic crisis in which America finds itself becomes more apparent, the realization breaks that those “good jobs” gone overseas are never “coming back,” and those positions which remain will be ever more contested, leading to lower wages and higher sacrifices. As we may be moments from a very rude awakening, perhaps this is not the best hour to assess whether the nation needs to de-legislate the one effective counterbalance to corporatism.

This is all too reminiscent of the “housing bubble.” It was obvious a crash was imminent when Congress became frantic to immediately alter a theretofore largely unchanged 200-year-old bankruptcy law. That urgent “reform” was the canary in the coal mine indicating that soon millions would be unable to pay their mortgages. The present legislation is apt to preface another break in our social contract.

One price of liberty is eternal vigilance. So too the price of decency. It may be that some potential abuses go unrecognized and unrealized only because we have been protected from them for so long. We should not be too eager to revert to laissez-faire capitalism. There are times when restrictions against which one would personally rebel actually serve the greater good.

This current mania of dismantling durable protections is one such movement I cannot in good conscience join. Long experience should have taught us by now that society is far better safeguarded in even the most mediocre law than when abandoned to the whims of ostensibly good intentions.