Anti-Union = Anti-Worker

The essential fact of every economy, from slave-based through feudalism to capitalism and communism is this:

Labor versus management.

Always has been, always will be.

As long as we had a manufacturing economy, that was easy to remember. Management, by exploiting workers and fighting unions who defended workers, made it impossible to forget.

But a service economy - especially a white-collar professional service economy - makes it easy to forget that the number one goal of management is to exploit workers and destroy unions.

We professionals - even those of us who support unions - don't think of ourselves as "labor." We have college degrees. Graduate degrees. Post-graduate professional degrees. We work in offices. We hold meetings. With PowerPoint presentations. Our professional opinions are eagerly sought and respectfully received. We're not labor.

And that self-destructive mindset is precisely why we earn less than we did 35 years ago, have none of the benefits we had 25 years ago, and have lost the job security we had 15 years ago.

While management - Wall Street - earns 100, 1,000 times what they earned 35 years ago, has gold-plated benefits no one imagined 25 years ago, and not only can't be fired but when is rewarded for failure by trillions in tax dollars paid by the very white-collar professionals Wall Street ass-fucks daily.

Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest explains how companies turn people against unions:

If you had a company and could make people work for free, keeping all the proceeds just for yourself, you might do that. If you could. What’s stopping you? There are plenty of unemployed people in the country and in the world – more every day thanks to population growth, and computers and machines doing more of the work that needs to be done. So if someone complains, you can just replace them with someone who doesn’t complain. You have the power. So what’s stopping you?

As a working person, how do you negotiate for fair pay, benefits and rights where you work? People in a job can be on their own against a lot of power, taking whatever the employer is willing to trade for their work. Or they can join with the rest of the employees at the workplace and negotiate as a group. Banding together to fight for a fair share is called organizing into a union.

People who own companies think that the company is their “private property” and they can do what they want with it, regardless of the effect on the people who work there or the surrouding community. Their goal is to make as much money as possible and to do that you lower costs as much as possible. Those costs include the cost of disposing of harmful waste products, the quality and safety of the products produced, and the pay and benefits you provide workers. In this equation unions are a problem. They have the power to make you pay more and provide safety and benefits, so they are in the way of keeping as much as you can just for yourself.

Obviously the greater society -- the people who make the rules that companies are supposed to follow -- has very different interests from the people who own companies. Society wants to avoid being exposed to harmful waste products, and wants the people in the society to be paid well and have good benefits. Society wants healthy communities. Society wants good and safe products that don't use up our resources. The people in the society are generally going to want rules that lead to better results for the greater number of people. Unless they can be convinced otherwise.

So the owners of companies try to convince us that unions are bad. They form and fund "business groups" like the Chamber of Commerce, to fight to keep unions from having the right and power to organize their workers. We hear it repeated over and over in our corporate-dominated society, a drumbeat that labor unions are sinister, shady, harmful, corrupt, violent, “raise prices,” ”cost jobs,” and generally hurt the economy and country. We hear they force workers to pay dues (never mind that unionized workers pay the dues from higher pay and benefits.) We hear that "union bosses" tell workers what to do and "union thugs" make them do it. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The owners of companies have a lot of money to spend on convincing the public to let them have free reign, and they know from selling products how to sell things to the public. Repetition, repetition and repetition. Marketing works.

This Labor Day weekend we can expect to hear even more of this. Business groups plan Labor Day blitz against Senate Dems and candidates.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Crooks and Liars.