If you know anything about politics, it is a
game changer. It is a total game changer for the next 40 to 50 years if the
Democrats are able to get this legislation.
—Sen. John Ensign (R-Nevada)
We like
driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody
but us.
—Lee Scott, former Wal-Mart CEO
I once worked
professionally in the labor movement, and I often say that I have never felt
the slightest discontinuity in moving from labor organizing and labor
strategizing to ordained ministry. To me all of it has been the Lord’s
work—and here is why.
All the people straining at the
gnats in biblical interpretation—namely, what God may or may not think about
various forms of sexual expression—consistently miss the big theme within
the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. That theme is deliverance from bondage
and God’s call to build just community, to resist Egyptian ways of
oppression and sweated labor. As many have pointed out, the Bible has far
more to say about economic justice than any other subject, to the point that
right worship of God is
directly equated with dealing justly with one’s fellow humans (witness the
Isaiah 58 text used by Sharon Watkins, who preached at the national prayer
service held on the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration). The biblical
Sabbath and Jubilee keynotes—keynotes also struck by Jesus right at the
start of his public ministry—contain within them God’s main message to us
about maintaining just community. And what “proclaim liberty throughout the
land” means, in practical terms, is abolish debt peonage and correct
corrosive imbalances in wealth and social power.
Does this land of ours suffer from
debt peonage and corrosive wealth imbalance? Is that even a
question??
I was moved beyond measure to see
the inauguration-related concert at the Lincoln Memorial open with Bruce
Springsteen’s “Come On Up To The Rising” and end with Pete Seeger leading
the multitude in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Bringing
Seeger up there wasn’t corny. It connected this moment to the last great
economic crisis of 75 years ago. And I was glad that Pete made sure to
include this little-known verse of Guthrie’s anthem:
In the squares of
the city, in the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
It’s not 1934, and we’re not at the
point of mass hunger quite yet. But to pretend that working families haven’t
been hit really hard—and with many more blows to come—is delusional.
The Employee Free Choice Act
For more than three decades US policy
actively facilitated the corporate/conservative agenda of concentrating
wealth at the top. We’ve seen where that got us. And there is no better
engine than the power of workplace democracy and collective bargaining to
put more money into the hands of regular people—and also to restore some of
the dignity that creation theology says rightly belongs to those who labor
honestly. That is why progressive religious leaders need to get behind the
Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which will come before the new Congress
within the next few months.
EFCA would strengthen the labor
movement, and I should acknowledge from the get-go that religious
progressives historically have had mixed feelings about trade unions.
Catholics and Jews have generally had much more favorable views of
unionization than white Protestants, in part because of the vast number of
Catholic immigrants to the
United States who benefited significantly
from their union membership but also because of the impact of Catholic and
Jewish social teaching. White Protestants (my peeps) have too often tended
to cling to a by-your-bootstraps ethic of individual achievement, joined to
a suspicion that there is something slightly sinister and foreign about
union leaders and about the union concept of class solidarity.
I grew up ten miles from the Kohler
Company’s sprawling furnaces and factories in eastern
Wisconsin
during the seemingly endless and ultimately victorious struggle by the UAW
to unionize those facilities. The Dutch Calvinists I grew up among—those who
worked at Kohler—were mostly strikebreakers. It was a religious conviction
among many that the owners should be able to operate their works without
union interference.
But I am here to argue that at this
moment in American life, all
clear-thinking people of faith should be rallying around the union banner.
If we’re going to draw analogies between Obama’s challenge and FDR’s
challenge, we would do well to recall that what drove the New Deal and
significantly remade American politics during the Roosevelt years was the
tripling of US union membership
that took place over the ten years following 1935—the year that workers
first got real bargaining rights under the Wagner Act.
Led by the United Steelworkers,
United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers, United Rubber Workers, and United
Electrical Workers, the Depression-era labor movement raised wage standards
and working conditions for a vast swath of the workforce, but it did much
more than that. The CIO—Congress of Industrial Organizations—used its
considerable political muscle to back the full range of New Deal reforms:
close to home matters like workplace safety and wage/hour laws, obviously;
but also banking reform, food and drug safety, Social Security expansion,
interstate commerce regulation, the Works Progress Administration, the
Civilian Conservation Corps—a very long list of changes that built the
social house we still live in, despite all the Republican efforts from 1980
onward to tear that house down.
And although this dimension is
still little understood or appreciated, industrial unionism also nurtured
the seeds of the nascent civil rights revolution. Let it be said that it was
the Communist element within the CIO that took the most advanced positions
on civil rights—an aspect of the movement that J. Edgar Hoover had a lot of
fun with during his overly long career, but something I feel should be
celebrated today as a badge of honor for the old American Communist Party,
despite any other nefarious designs it entertained.
The revived
US labor movement thereafter made a
signal contribution to the fight against Hitler and Tojo by means of a grand
compact struck with the government regarding war production. The government
got labor peace (for the most part) and an incredible output of planes,
ships, and tanks; the unions got to keep their representation rights along
with a voice in production councils. Union density—the percentage of
private-sector workers represented under collective bargaining
agreements—continued its steady rise into the 1950s and 1960s, creating
something new on the face of the earth: a working class capable of enjoying
a middle-class living standard.
As late as 1973—also the peak year
for real worker income in the United States—union
density hovered at around 25% in the private sector. Today that number is
just 7.4%. The bargaining power and the political clout of organized labor
have been effectively eviscerated.
Why the drastic fall-off in union
density? The standard explanations offered by corporate propagandists and
neoliberal economists—technology, globalization, and outsourcing—tell part
of the story but only part.
The story that
doesn’t get told is a bit
uglier; it is the story of brutal union suppression by employers who figured
out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for
labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to
allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair
representation elections.
By the Numbers
The cold, hard facts are these:
Polls consistently report that 60
million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearly
suggests that there’s something wrong with the current system for allowing
workers to decide this question.
Just going by official National
Labor Relations Board numbers (which surely underestimate the magnitude of
violation), 27,000 workers had their workplace rights violated in 2006; many
of these were fired outright for union activity.
44% of workers who do win union
representation never get to a first contract because of employer stalling
and other chicanery.
According to a Cornell University
study, 92 percent of private-sector employers use closed-door “captive
audience” meetings to snuff out union organizing efforts; 80% require line
supervisors to assist in union-avoidance activities; 75% hire outside
consultants (union-prevention specialists) who set up command centers within
the company to wage all-out war on the union; 50% threaten to shut down
operations to scare workers; and 25% illegally fire union supporters.
These aren’t just economic issues
or labor abuses; they are human rights issues, and they were recognized as
such in a Human Rights Watch report issued in 2000. In the years since that
report came out, the odds against American workers trying to organize have
only gotten worse.
The proposed Employee Free Choice
Act will fix this fatal imbalance in straightforward ways. First, it will
impose real penalties for labor law violations so that employers would no
longer find it cheaper to take the penalty than to obey the law. Second, it
will provide for impartial arbitration of first contract terms if no
agreement has been reached within 120 days of union recognition, thus
preventing the common employer practice of dragging out negotiations so that
workers lose faith in the union—sometimes even decertifying it. Third, EFCA
will simplify the recognition and certification process by enabling unions
to gain legal recognition upon producing a majority of valid worker
signatures on union authorization cards: i.e., the “card-check” method,
against the more traditional practice of petitioning for an NLRB-supervised
secret ballot election.
This, needless to say, is the
provision that has the employers foaming at the mouth. They have already
spent millions—and will spend millions more—on misleading print and TV ads
asserting that if secret ballots were good enough to elect Obama, they
should be good enough for union supporters as well. The slick kill-EFCA
misinformation campaign is being coordinated by Mark McKinnon, the former
media advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain.
The reality is that the card-check
method is already widely used—accepted by employers as diverse as AT&T and
Kaiser Permanente—and there is absolutely no evidence that it is any less
democratic than voting by ballot: a method that often allows bosses to use
every trick in their book to turn workers against the union. For employers
to assert that it will be absurdly easy for unions to collect a majority of
worker signatures, or that unions will browbeat workers into signing
authorization cards, is not only a fantasy but is also fantastically
hypocritical in view of the
well-documented intimidation that employers themselves routinely bring to
bear to defeat unionization drives.
A Game-Changer
But enough about the technical
aspects; here is the bottom line: conservatives who call EFCA a “game
changer” are absolutely right. Whether you think the game needs changing
depends on whose side you are on, to quote the venerable labor anthem.
Imagine what a doubling or tripling of union membership during the hoped-for
eight years of Obama time could mean for progressive advancement in this new
century!
Because make no mistake: the new
labor movement is solidly progressive. It has been the biggest single force
promoting universal, government-supported health care coverage, protecting
Social Security from Wall Street privatizers, and advancing a green
jobs/green energy future. But that’s not all. The racist, jingoist,
homophobic, misogynistic movement of American labor’s worst years—the George
Meany/Lane Kirkland years—is long dead and buried. Today’s labor leadership
is solidly aligned behind LGBT equality, comprehensive immigration reform,
and much more within the broad human rights and civil rights agendas.
Labor’s near-death experience in recent years taught it to be much better at
alliance-building than the movement of 40 years ago—much better at
practicing an ethic of genuine reciprocation in relation to other social
movements.
In other words, progressive clergy
and lay folk have no excuse for hanging back from lending their full support
to EFCA at this crucial hour.
For a long time we’ve been hearing
that the religious right played the same role in maintaining nearly 30 years
of Republican hegemony that the labor movement once played in maintaining
Democratic hegemony. The religious right is now in some considerable
disarray, though by no means disabled. What better time, and what better
way, for religious progressives to help spur a big turn in our politics than
to lend some help right now in restoring the central role of a progressive
labor movement in advancing social justice?
Preachers, start your engines!
Peter Laarman is executive director of
Progressive Christians Uniting, a network of activist individuals and
congregations headquartered in Los
Angeles. He served as the senior minister of New York’s Judson Memorial Church from 1994 to 2004. Ordained in the
United
Church of Christ, Peter
spent 15 years as a labor movement strategist and communications specialist
prior to training for the ministry.
