The Champions of “Democracy”
The changed political landscape affords the labor movement opportunities to change laws that make us weaker. These opportunities afford right-wing politicians and management consultants new opportunities to couch their attacks on workers’ collective rights to organize in terms of “democracy.” We have to counter this rhetoric before it becomes standard Newspeak.
First up, Maryland’s House Republican leader Anthony O’Donnell attacking a bill for agency fee for state employee unions: “Forcing people to fund a service that they don’t desire to have is patently undemocratic.” To Mr. O’Donnell, I say, I don’t support the war in Iraq – or indeed any military spending – as a “service.” Am I free, in the name of democracy, to evade my taxes? Employees who are covered by a collective bargaining agreement benefit from the wages, benefits and protections that the union has won, and have available to them a grievance machinery in which the union is required to expend resources to represent all employees. A union is a democratic organization – a government – that all the employees in the bargaining unit belong to, and can take part in. Free riders who don’t pay their dues are benefitting from representation without taxation, a costly drain on union finances that holds us back from further organizing.
Next up, Dick Cheney, announcing the President’s intention to veto the Employee Free Choice Act, declared, “It’s important for everyone in the debate to remember that secret ballots protect workers from intimidation and ensure the integrity of the process.” It’s hard to know where to begin with this one. A comment on the Bush administrations track record on the sanctity of the ballot? How about the administration’s suspension of collective bargaining rights for Homeland Security employees? Or maybe the Bush-appointed NLRB’s decision to suspend union authorization elections for up to eight million workers who have neither the authority not compensation of management as exempt “supervisors.” No, let’s skip the ad hominems and debate the words. Where does intimidation arise in the organizing process? Is it from co-workers appealing to each other’s sense of solidarity to join together, or is it the reign of terror that management typically launches in anticipation of an NLRB election? As our friends at CEPR have pointed out, one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign. The remainder can have their jobs threatened, face “predictions” of plant closure or layoffs and generally have their lives made miserable while waiting for an election. Most of these actions – particularly terminations – are illegal, but the enforcement is so lax and the penalties so slight (a wrongfully terminated employee can expect, on average, $2000 in back pay from the employer) that most employers view the costs as well worth it to keep a union out.
Most unions file for authorization with 60 to 70 percent voting yes by signing union cards. The NLRB conducts a superfluous second election that provides management with a window of opportunity to conduct a reign of terror against its employees. Our oh-so-democratic proponents of the secret ballot while likely claim that this campaign merely provides “the other side” a chance to introduce new facts into the “debate.” The truth is the only new “fact” that management introduces into a union election campaign is the fact that a worker who supports the union is in danger of losing his or her job. It is precisely this kind of intimidation that the Employee Free Choice act will put an end to by allowing employees to vote just once to form a union, in an atmosphere free of intimidation.
The Two Barbaras
What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points.
This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine poses as a white collar corporate job seeker. That corporate downsizing can cause the lives of the white-collar unemployed to spiral right out of the middle class and out of control is, indeed, a story worth telling. But Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t tell it here. Instead, by going undercover as a PR executive on the job market seeking to enter the corporate world she was never a part of, Ehrenreich gives us 237 pages of a totally misguided job hunt. Parasitic image consultants and job hunt advisors sap her of thousands of dollars over the course of a fruitless year-long search. That says more about her poor choices and lack of support network as a corporate novice. Throughout, she trips over desperate, embittered job seekers – former corporate success stories who were thrown overboard by their employers in middle age – whose plight and occasionally populist gripes about modern capitalism who would be far more fascinating subject matter, but Ehrenreich’s self-indulgent format does not allow for interviews with them.
For some reason, Barbara Ehrenreich is inextricably linked in my mind with fellow socialist and author Barbara Garson. Like Ehrenreich, Garson is a humorist who attempts to grapple with major economic issues in an accessible manner. I recently re-read one of her earliest books, “All the Livelong Day,” which I am including in the theoretical syllabus of the Labor Studies 101 class I’d like to teach one day. Spurred on by curiosity about Big Concepts like Taylorism and “alienation of labor,” Garson innocently asks, “what about the workers?”
While she, too, poses as a worker in a 9 to 5 job to write about the effects of mind-numbing routine on her psyche, this is merely one short chapter. The rest of the book is full of wonderful interviews with workers (Barbara G. is a playwright first and has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for detail) about how they view themselves and their jobs and how they make the time go by. These details – like the woman who daydreams about sex while pulling red meat from white at the Bumble Bee tuna factory or the office pool secretary who amuses herself by typing in a rhythm with her coworkers – really make the text come alive and provoke the reader to think about his or her own private thoughts at work, all while illuminating fairly dense economic theory. Her books are far more deserving of best-seller status, and worth your attention.
Another Terrifying Labor Statistic
The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a report that finds that one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign under George Bush’s watch. Overall, a pro-union worker had a 1.4 percent chance of being illegally fired for his sympathies in 2005. An organizer’s gut reaction to authors John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer’s paper might well be, “Oh, great, just what my organizing committee needs to hear!” The fact is that workers already know that organizing is risky (and organizers don’t suger-coat the risk).
Combined with threatened and actual plant closures, terminations and employer animus are the greatest reasons why half of all union representation elections lose and so many more campaigns never even come to election as activists are fired as a chilling example to their coworkers not to step out of line. The report’s numbers are based on cases where the National Labor Relations Board found a termination to be illegally motivated by anti-union animus and ordered that the employee be reinstated with back pay. This remedy is hardly punitive, since the boss is not fined or jailed for willfully violating the law, and, indeed, the back-pay that he must make up are the wages he would have paid anyway minus any other wages that the employee earned from other employers in the meantime, which at an average of $2,749 per fired worker is a huge discount if the firing successfully discourages the rest of the workers from pursuing their organizing campaign.
The authors utilize NLRB data for their report, which ignores a world of activity beyond an increasingly archaic and anti-union process. Public sector employees, who are governed by state laws, are far less likely to face termination for their union activism, a fact that Kate Bronfenbrenner and Tom Juravitch cited in an earlier paper as a reason for the higher win percentage for unions in public versus private sector campaigns. And many innovative unions are bypassing the NLRB election procedure for pressure campaigns leading to card check recognition. Union activists are probably less likely to be terminated during such a campaign, but it’s impossible to gather numbers. Instead, the authors estimate the number of workers organized through such procedures and add them to the universe of their study, which produces a very conservative figure for the likelihood of a pro-union worker to be fired.
Schmitt and Zipperer perhaps should have ignored these cases entirely and focused on the NLRB process. What their paper would be then is yet another convincing argument that the National Labor Relations Act is broken; that, on the whole, it serves management’s interests and provides a legal roadmap for a campaign of terror to beat back most union organizing campaigns, and, as such, is in desperate need of reform or repeal.
Labor law reform is on the agenda, with the Democrats newly in control of Congress, although mostly as a wedge issue for the coming presidential contest since Bush is likely to veto anything that the Congress passes on labor (save, perhaps, for a narrow tweaking in response to Kentucky River). The prospect of a Democratic presidency coupled with the Democratic Congress, absent a groundswell of political pressure, should not inspire too much optimism. After all, labor law reform was on the agenda the last time the Democrats controlled Washington (and the situation was, in some ways, worse – a worker was more likely to be fired for union activity during the Reagan years), but two years of studies and commissions produced nothing.
Rise of the Loompa Proletariat
In the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Willy Wonka employs in his factory Oompa Loompas, strange little orange men who seemingly work for free. The Oompa Loompas, who sing while they work, seem to be charged with much manual labor.
They mix the chocolate and other confections, carry out Wonka’s orders, manually power his personal yacht and otherwise do his bidding-all at the beck and call of his whistle. After seeing just one minute of the movie with the Oompa Loompas on the screen, one obsesses about this work arangement. Are these Oompa Loompas slaves, or indentured servants? Are they salaried employees? Is this some Stalinist work camp?
Wonka answers this question himself early on when several visitors on a tour of his factory raise these troubling issues. The Oompa Loompas, he explains, come from a far off place called “Lumpaland,” where, because of their diminutive size, they were in constant danger of being gobbled up by assorted “fierce creatures.” And so, in what he would have us believe was an altruistic gesture, he “freed” them from their native land and had them brought to his factory in the “greatest of secrecy,” where they could live in “peace and safety”…and become his new source of labor.
Were the pint-sized immigrants scabs? It is explained earlier in the movie that years ago Wonka had fired all of his employees, charging them with industrial espionage; trading secrets with his chief competitor, Slugworth, Inc. Wonka closed his doors and ceased production. Three years later, the factory began production again, but, mysteriously to the public, without hiring workers and without opening its doors. At this point, it seems clear that Wonka brought in the Oompa Loompas to solve his labor problems, and kept his doors closed to keep nosy government investigators out in order to keep his little sweat shop running.
The Oompa Loompas certainly seem to be property. In fact, one of the guests on the tour of the plant, bratty Veruca Salt, demands that her father buy her one. He complies and actually haggles with Wonka to purchase one of the little orange men. But Willy Wonka strangely refuses! Is this mere greed, a desire to keep all the hard working Oompa Loompas to himself? The answer comes shortly when Wonka takes his guests to his top secret laboratory. On the door is a large sign, clearly stating, “Top Secret: No Unauthorized Oompa Loompas Allowed Inside.” Behind the door toil dozens of Oompa Loompas. Clearly not your average slaves, they’re actually busy mixing and inventing new candies! These Oompa Loompas are skilled artisans, setting their own hours and work loads.
Evil slave-driver?
How is it that Wonka trusts the Oompa Loompas with such trade secrets as the formula of the “Everlasting Gobstopper,” but fired his human workers out of mistrust. Wonka openly fears that Slugworth will learn his secret formulas. Either international patent and copyright laws don’t exist here, or they don’t apply to these candies. (A third possibility that Wonka never thought to patent his creations seems too far-fetched.) In any event, the result is clear: in order to maintain the massive rent on his products, the kind of rent that makes new products and marketing schemes t.v. news and causes panics in candy stores when the supply “Scrum Diddlyumptious” bars has run out, Wonka must rely on secrecy. He shows that he will go to any length to
maintain secrecy. He has already displaced hundreds of factory workers.
He uses fear and intimidation on his guests on the tour, as well as the general public. And yet he trusts the Oompa Loompas with his trade secrets.
Abused worker?
This was doubtless part of his arrangement with the Oompa Loompas when
he brought them to work for him. Freedom from fierce creatures in exchange for labor. Labor in exchange for housing. And since the Oompa Loompas remain within the Wonka factory and on the Wonka property at all times, there was no way they could trade secrets with the enemy. Wonka, a true capitalist, had fully exploited the immigrant workers!
Or had he? There is a clear dichotomy between the unskilled Oompa Loompas who mix the candy, power Wonka’s yacht and otherwise toil away, and the skilled artisan Oompa Loompas who invent the candy, set their own hours and have the run of the place. These Oompa Loompas are clearly the intellectual superiors of the unskilled variety. Surely, they must appreciate their own situation. They hold in their minds and hands the very information that could ruin Wonka. If they were displeased with the pay or treatment they got from him, they could easily find work elsewhere. Slugworth would, in Wonka’s own words, “give his false teeth” to learn Wonka’s trade secrets, as well as double the pay and benefits of the Oompa Loompas who could be the key to a greater market share.
It would seem that these Oompa Loompas had come to appreciate their fortunate situation and made a deal with Wonka, a little “partnership between labor and capital if you will. And all they had to do was sell out their brother workers, the unskilled Oompa Loompas to achieve it. So, the skilled Oompa Loompas got the best pay, hours, and, one would assume, choice lodging, while the unskilled variety got the shaft.
And yet, they seem so happy. They actually sing while they work. They sing, in fact, about how great it is to work for Wonka and how everyone should be like the “Oompa Loompa doopity doo.” (Okay, they’re not the best songwriters in the world.) This is what gave the impression at first that Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory was a Stalinist work camp, that the workers believe their exploitation to be freedom. The Oompa Loompa’s songs could be characterized as agit-prop.
It isn’t Stalinist propaganda, but something very similar. The workers are singing about labor’s goals being the same as management’s. That’s how Wonka and the skilled Oompa Loompas got them to go along with the
agreement! You’re job security depends on the success of this company, they must have been told. Sacrifices had to be made for profits. After all, if the company made no profits, the Oompa Loompas would be out of a job, and thrown back to Lumpaland. Now that’s motivation!
There seems to be one thing missing from this whole scenario. I used the term “brother worker” intentionally. All the Oompa Loompas we see in the film are males. Discounting the possibility that Oompa Loompas are radically different from us anatomically, there must be female Oompa Loompas. Where are they? It may be safe to assume that this is the final part of the arrangement between Wonka and the Oompa Loompa overseers. It is, by this point, clear that they are salaried workers, paid, albeit unequally, in food, shelter, clothing and protection. These payments for their work is not only for them, but their families. Wonka only puts the adult males to work. The women and children do not have to work.
Now, let’s put on our econimist hats and put this little arrangement into perspective. From the little we see of the world outside the Factory, using Charlie (who doesn’t seem to have a last name) and his family as an example of the typical family, women and children had to work as well. Charlie has a paper route, and his mother took in laundry. These two incomes had to provide for six people: Charlie, his mother, and four bedridden grandparents. (All four in the same bed. Kinky.) There is no father evident in this family. He presumably had to leave town when Wonka closed his factory and the job market soured. But, assuming that the father was in the picture three years prior and worked at the Wonka factory, his earnings would not have to provide for seven people alone. That burden was shared with his wife and son. So, previously, Wonka was paying his human workers enough money necessary to produce and reproduce just themselves for another day of labor.
Given the population density of this area and its presumed saturation of the job market, the existence of a labor union is doubtful, and the wages doubtlessly depressed, so Wonka could easily pay his workers that little. Let’s use as the sum of the wages paid ten Wonka dollars per worker per day. This labor afforded Wonka a commanding share of the chocolate market, however, it was beginning to cost him his rent. So Wonka downsized his entire workforce.
Now, with the Oompa Loompas employed as labor, Wonka had to pay enough money to produce and reproduce each Oompa Loompa and his family.
Assuming a typical Oompa Loompa family of husband, wife and 2.3 children, and assuming that an Oompa Loompa, being half the size of a human worker needs only half the food, shelter and clothing, Wonka would be paying each Oompa Loompa 21 and a half Wonka dollars per day, or, its equivalent in food, shelter and clothing. This is also assuming that Wonka employed an equivalent number of Oompa Loompas as humans. For this increase of $11.50W per worker per day, Wonka gets serious increases in productivity.
For the human worker, Wonka got ten hours work for $10W pay. This is
assuming that Wonka is a fairly liberal employer in a rather Dickensian
atmosphere. Given that the Oompa Loompa worker lives where he works, and also given that the Oompa Loompa sees a personal stake in the success of the company, he obviously works harder and longer than the human worker. At this point, any speculation as to the amount of the increase in productivity would go way beyond merely bordering on absurdity, but sufficed to say, it would be substantial. And it would give Wonka a permanent edge over competitor Slugworth, whose human workers could never keep up.
The other edge it would give Wonka is the aforementioned rent. With workers that can not only be counted on to create new candies but to keep the formulas for said candies top secret, Wonka can retain his huge market share and status as a popular icon of confectionery capitalism, and leave Slugworth permanently in a distant second. The benefits to Wonka are obvious.
For the Oompa Loompas, they get the leave a country where they would have died. For the Oompa Loompas in charge, it means freedom, respect and the necessities of life for them and their families. The unskilled Oompa Loompas are duped into believing that this labor is gratitude and payment for their very lives and the lives of their families. With that artificial outlook, it’s easy to see why they would be so happy. Maybe Oompa Loompa ignorance is bliss.
[This article originally appeared in Vol. 6, issue #11 (April 1998) of Lumpen.]