Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Labor Day IroniesFrom Logos: a journal of modern society & culture; hat-tip to Danny Postel of Interfaith Worker Justice.Labor Day Ironies By John G. Rodwan, Jr. Appreciation of Labor Day requires an active sense of irony. Local celebrations of workers' collective strength in the United States predated the declaration of May Day, its international equivalent. While May Day never took root in the United States, the day's selection for a global event resulted from the earlier scheduling of an American one. The president who made Labor Day a national holiday did so soon after sending federal forces to end a major strike, precisely the maneuver he'd opposed while campaigning for office around the time of another labor action with a bloody ending. The leader whose union that president decimated had initially backed his electoral campaign. For his involvement in the strike, the unionist ended up in jail, from which he emerged as a national figure who became one of the most prominent third party presidential candidates in the nation's history. May Day and Labor Day share decidedly secular origins, but workers grafted religious elements to their holidays. Unions in the city that first celebrated Labor Day eventually saw it members preferring to use the day off from work that their efforts have won for activities other than a parade, which they eventually held on another day, if at all. The convocation of socialist parties and unions known as the Second International in 1889 passed a resolution calling for a simultaneous, worldwide demonstration in favor of law limiting the working day to eight hours and since such a rally had already been planned in the United States for the following May 1, the body decided to use that date. As it fell on a Thursday, unions in various countries found themselves having to decide whether members should go on strike in support of the cause. Cautious parties and unions opted to demonstrate on the first Sunday of the month instead. However, historian Eric Hobsbawm insists that refusing to work made May Day meaningful. In a paper on it in Uncommon People, he writes: It was the act of symbolically stopping work which turned May Day into more than just another demonstration, or even another commemorative occasion…. For refraining from work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power – in fact, the quintessential assertion of this power – and the essence of freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one's brow, but choosing what to do in the company of family and friends. It was thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday: a sort of trailer for the good life to come after the emancipation of labour. The call for this symbolically potent event did not specify it as a recurring one, but with the day's success, in the form of unexpectedly high levels of participation in many cities, the Brussels International Socialist Congress of 1891 pledged that May Day should be celebrated every year. By the time of its centenary, May Day qualified as an official holiday in more than 100 countries. The holiday's symbolism extends beyond the act of stopping work. "Spring holidays are profoundly rooted in the ritual cycle of the year in the temperate northern hemisphere," observes Hobsbawm, "and indeed the month of May itself symbolizes the renewal of nature." Flowers figured prominently in celebrations from the very start. Indeed, May Day celebrations of seasonal renewal happened long before an organized labor movement seized the day. Even then the day involved symbolism involving both economic class and seasonal renewal. For example, during Shakespeare's lifetime, according to scholar Stephen Greenblatt, "on May Day people had long celebrated the legend of Robin Hood, with raucous, often bawdy rituals" involving dancing around a Maypole "decked with ribbons and garlands" and a young Queen of the May also decorated with flowers. One of the most popular May Day icons depicts a Phrygian bonnet-wearing girl amid garlands. Before May Day blossomed internationally, Labor Day celebrations started in New York City, gradually spreading to other areas. "Ironically, in the USA itself May Day was never to establish itself as it did elsewhere, if only because an increasingly official holiday of labour, Labor Day, the first Monday in September, was already in existence," explains Hobsbawm. At that time, however, it did not exist as a holiday throughout the country. The Central Labor Union organized the first Labor Day in New York on September 5, 1882. After celebrating it again on the same date the next year, the union picked the first weekday of the month as the time for the "workingmen's holiday" in subsequent years and urged other cities to do so as well. Although the New York unionists' creation effectively kept May Day from catching on in the United States, holiday imagery connects the city with the international festival: A German plaque commemorating the first May Day represents the Statue of Liberty on one side and Karl Marx on the other. Early local Labor Day events included calls for the establishment of a national holiday, which happened in 1894, immediately after the movement suffered a shattering defeat. President Glover Cleveland signed the bill just days after the end of a massive strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois. He was responding to protests against his aggressive tactics to suppress what became called the "Debs Rebellion." Eugene Debs led the American Railway Union, which had come into being less than a year before Pullman workers, angered both by severe wage cuts and by the firing of three men who had presented management with a list of grievances, put down their tools. Not only did they stop building Pullman sleeping cars; they and railroad workers around the country (against Debs's advice) began a boycott of any railroad that continued to pull them, refusing to run any train with one attached. The boycott went into effect on June 25 and by the end of the month almost 125,000 workers joined it, affecting twenty railroads. "Across the nation the American Railway Union was so successful during the first week that the old Knights of Labor slogan, 'An injury to one is the concern of all,' seemed fulfilled, as yet another impressive display of labor unity spread throughout the country," writes Nick Salvatore in Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. Union members' muscle-flexing aggravated and worried management, which aimed to dismantle Debs's young union and its brand of militancy. The railroad corporations' General Managers Association persuaded the federal government that the strike disrupted mail delivery and impeded interstate commerce. Judges issued an injunction against Debs and the union on these grounds and Cleveland (against Governor John Altgeld's advice) agreed to send troops to enforce it. The troops arrived the evening before Independence Day. Read the rest of the article. Labels: Eugene V. Debs, Grover Cleveland, Labor Day, May Day, Pullman Strike, socialism Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Starbucks Cited for Worker ViolationsFrom the Starbucks Workers Union (happy May Day!)Yet Another Federal Labor Complaint Against Starbucks, Emblematic of a Company in Decline 17-count Charge Latest in a String of Setbacks for Brand Minneapolis– The Starbucks Workers Union announced today that the National Labor Relations Board has found merit with 17 counts of labor rights violations at Starbucks in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The fresh charges come on the heels of a “guilty” verdict in New York Federal Court on nearly 30 similar charges last December. Once seen as a paragon of social responsibility and entrepreneurial innovation, the coffee giant’s image has recently been tarnished with mounting evidence of rampant labor violations, on top of sliding profits, increased market competition, and declining consumer demand. Mall of America Starbucks barista Erik Forman commented, “Since the recession began, Starbucks has been slashing benefits, laying off workers, reducing hours, and increasing the workload on Baristas in a quixotic effort to maintain boom-era profitability. As our standard of living comes under attack, the need for a union has never been greater. Starbucks must respect our right to association.” The charges stem from an Unfair Labor Practice charge filed by the Starbucks Workers Union in January alleging a wide range of violations, from forbidding workers from discussion the union to kicking union sympathizers out of stores. Background Since the launch of the IWW campaign at Starbucks on May 17, 2004, the company has been cited multiple times for illegal union-busting by the National Labor Relations Board. The company settled two complaints against it and was recently found guilty by a federal judge in New York of nearly 30 rights' violations. Starbucks' large anti-union operation is carried out in conjunction with the Akin Gump law firm and the Edelman public relations firm. The IWW Starbucks Workers Union is a grassroots organization of over 300 current and former employees at the world's largest coffee chain united for secure work hours and a living wage. The union has members throughout the United States fighting for systemic change at the company and remedying individual grievances with management. Labels: May Day, Starbucks, Starbucks Union Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). CEOs of America Unite!Kiwitobes has put together an interesting visual representation of overlapping membership on corporate boards among the largest U.S. corporations. This helps provide one explanation for the astronomical sums paid to CEOs and their lackeys (we get to talk like this on May Day). But as economist Arthur MacEwan explained in our magazine a few years back, the gap in pay between those who own the corporations and those who do the work is much greater in the United States than it is in many other countries that similarly have interlocking corporate boards. The rest of the answer, he concludes, has to do with the relative lack of power of U.S. workers.Over many decades, U.S. companies have created a highly unequal corporate structure that relies heavily on management control while limiting workers' authority. Large numbers of bureaucrats work to maintain the U.S. system. While in the United States about 13% of nonfarm employees are managers and administrators, that figure is about 4% in Japan and Germany. So U.S. companies rely on lots of well-paid managers to keep poorly paid workers in line, and the huge salaries of the top executives are simply the tip of an iceberg.Read the full article here. Labels: Arthur MacEwan, ceo pay, Corporate Boards, May Day, wealth inequality, worker rights Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). Up against the charros and the changarros  Mexico's independent unions confront a wave of lousy jobs Chris Tilly and Marie Kennedy May 9, 2007 This is the fourth in a series of posts by D&S comrades Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly, who are spending six months in Tlaxcala in central Mexico. Their first posting was about the recent increases in the price of tortillas in Mexico. [Photo captions: Lower/right-hand photo: Authentic Labor Front (FAT) protesters call for union autonomy, an end to government interference in unions' internal affairs, and support for immigrant workers. (Photo credit: Marie Kennedy.) Upper/left-hand photo: Independent unions and their allies fill the Zócalo, the huge public square in the heart of Mexico City. (Photo credit: Chris Tilly.)] "We have the best bosses in the world," trumpeted the headlines in the Mexican press upon the release of an international survey earlier this year. Mexicans responding to the survey, carried out by the Kelly Services temp agency, rated their bosses 7.6 out of 10—higher than in any of the other 28 countries in the survey. Mexico came in second (after Denmark) in the level of job satisfaction. Few satisfied workers were in evidence among the thousands flooding Mexico's cities on May 1st (Labor Day in Mexico and everywhere in the world except the United States, despite the holiday's Chicago origin). In days past, unionists would file politely through Mexico City's Zócalo, holding signs saying "Thank you, Mr. President." In 2007, for the first time in more than 80 years, Mexico's president decided not to attend. Felipe Calderón claimed he didn't want to steal the spotlight away from the workers, but many speculated that his main motivation was to avoid angry labor leaders like Valdemar Gutiérrez. "He has no basis for continuing to call his administration ‘the employment administration'," thundered Gutiérrez, leader of the National Social Security Workers' Union, "when unemployment is rising, the cost of living is going up, the social safety net is being abandoned, and inequality and poverty are exploding!" Mexican workers have much to be angry about. Despite labor laws that look great on paper and two-plus decades of presidents extolling the virtues of trade liberalization and anti-inflationary measures, job quality has stagnated and in some ways worsened. The charro (cowboy) unions, as critics dub the "official," government-linked labor associations, are trapped in a model left over from Mexico's former one-party state, and deliver little for workers. Independent unions like Gutierrez's seek to chart a different course, but so far their numbers remain small and their impact limited. May 1st in Mexico may have shifted from a ceremonial parade to a cry of protest; it is still far indeed from a celebration of working-class victories. Laws and realities On May 1st, we joined up with the contingent of the Authentic Labor Front (FAT), a small (they claim about 1/18 the membership of the charro Mexican Confederation of Labor) but feisty independent union confederation. A sea of union militants in tan t-shirts and red baseball caps converged on the gathering point, near the corner of Lázaro Cárdenas and Articulo 123 in the center of Mexico City. The symbolism of the intersection was potent. Cárdenas was the fiery populist leader of the 1930s who nationalized key industries (notably oil) and fused workers and peasants with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) via labor law and land reform. Article 123 is Mexico's basic statement of labor rights, enshrined as an article of the Constitution; it opens by stating, "Every person has the right to decent and socially useful work…." The scope of Mexican labor law can be startling to the casual US observer. Left-wing legal scholar Néstor de Buen recently described the law's requirement of six days of paid vacation after one year as "a miserable amount"; in the United States, of course, the amount required by law is zero. Mexico's labor law also restricts firing and requires a holiday bonus of two weeks' pay, a dozen official holidays, overtime pay, the right to form unions, profit-sharing, provisions for worker health and safety and labor-management committees to address issues of mutual concern such as training. In fact, the law is so strong—on paper—that previous president Vicente Fox (2000-2006) tried unsuccessfully to gut it, and Calderón has promised business he will finish the job. But two problems prevent this legislation from turning Mexico into a workers' paradise. First, the law is barely enforced. Workers commonly work extra hours, not only without an overtime premium, but without any pay at all; one convenience store employee told us he works an average of four unpaid extra hours a week. Companies dodge the profit-sharing rule by using accounting tricks to declare zero profits, as Volkswagen's extremely successful Mexico division did this year. From chambas to changarros An even bigger problem is that increasing numbers of Mexicans fall outside the scope of the law altogether, because instead of having chambas (jobs), they have changarros (self-employment or marginal employment in a kaleidoscopic range of microbusinesses and hustles). Unemployment proper has drifted up from 3.6 to 4 percent since Calderón has taken office. But outright unemployment is not a viable option for most, given that Mexico has no unemployment insurance system. Instead, Mexicans join the ranks of those heading north to the United States (about 500,000 a year) or, in even larger numbers, join the informal economy of changarros. Experts estimate that today about 26 million of Mexico's 41 million workers labor without legally required benefits (including social security) or an employment contract. Even in the industrial powerhouse city of Puebla, Rita Amador, head of the union of vendors at the informal Hidalgo Market, reports that unemployed job seekers have increased the group's ranks by ten percent in the last year alone. Over the last four presidential terms, the percentage of workers without benefits soared from 25 percent to 63 percent. The benefits gap offers one window on how appallingly bad most Mexican jobs are. There are many others. Even among benefited workers the percentage who are temporary has leaped from 8 percent in 1997 to 18 percent in 2006. Prominent labor lawyer Arturo Alcalde states that of workers fired or laid off in Mexico, four out of ten had been compelled to sign a blank sheet upon being hired, allowing the employer to compose a letter of resignation that voids any complaint about the firing. In the case of Mexico's new budget airlines (such as Azteca, which just went bankrupt), according to Alcalde, the company goes one better and requires pilots to sign a paper acknowledging receipt of a fictitious "loan"—insuring the company against severance claims. A March UN report pronounced Mexican child labor laws a "dead letter" in Mexico. Pint-sized street vendors, cashiers in family markets, and grocery baggers working only for tips, can be seen in every Mexican city. Recent press reports have spotlighted large numbers of children among miners in Guerrero (working 12-hour days for about $7 a day), melon harvesters in Michoacán (where kids reportedly make up more than half of the crews), coffee pickers in Puebla, and clothing maquiladoras in the Puebla maquila center of Tehuacán. The mayor of coffee-producing Xicotepec, Puebla commented, "Lately I've seen commercials saying it's against the law, but here work comes very naturally to the children, because it's their daily bread Children have accompanied their elders to the harvest here all their lives." Natural or not, such work has consequences. In the dusty rural community of Analco, Tlaxcala where we are working on a community project, large numbers of children—especially boys—drop out after primary school to devote full-time to farming. Mexico, where the median level of education falls between 7th and 8th grade, can ill afford these dropout rates. David Salgado, a nine-year old Mixtec boy from Guerero, paid an even higher price when he was crushed to death last January by a tractor while working the tomato harvest with his family in the fields of Sinaloa. Safety and health is another area where Mexican laws look better on paper than in reality. The most dramatic recent incident was the explosion and cave-in at the Pasta de Conchos coal mine, where 65 miners perished in 2006. A church-sponosored investigative commission found a history of negligence at the mine dating back to 2000 and continuing up to the time the investigation wrapped up more than a year after the tragedy. The deindustrialization of Mexico? Globalization and trade liberalization (a concerted government policy since the early 1980s) have had mixed effects on Mexican jobs. The influx of (often subsidized) U.S. agricultural goods and the spread of supermarkets that crave large-scale suppiers able to guarantee uniform quality have hammered small farmers. Mexico has become a net food importer. The textile industry, likewise, is in free-fall, shedding nearly 50,000 jobs a year during the Fox sexenio (presidential term). Southern Tlaxcala state, where we are living, is ground zero for textile job losses. Numerous factories are shuttered or entangled in prolonged "strikes" that have devolved into desperate struggles to extract some amount of severance pay. When we admired finely made wool rebozos at a local shop, the shopkeeper said, "Better buy them while you can. There used to be six factories here that made these; now there are none left." He shrugged, "We can't compete with the Chinese." Apparel maquiladoras, once a huge growth industry are slipping away to Central America and the Far East as well. Even in Mexico's "Silicon Valley" in the western state of Jalisco, 60 percent of transnational companies have reportedly begun outsourcing, and Hitachi recently announced a plant closing that will idle 4,500 workers. Still, Mexico does continue to briskly export oil, autos and parts, and mano de obra in the form of migrants. Overall, the country's impressive $80 billion trade surplus with the United States is offset by trade deficits with every other major trading partner (a $62 billion deficit with Asia alone), leaving Mexico billions of dollars in the hole each year. While workers struggle to cope with the resulting layoffs and stagnating wages, Mexico's wealthy—like Carlos Slim, owner of the privatized TelMex phone company and recently declared the world's second-richest man—are doing just fine, thank you. According to an Economic Policy Institute study, Mexico's corporate profits grew 18 times as fast as the economy as a whole over the just-ended sexenio. For decades, public employees were relatively protected from the economic ravages that rocked other Mexicans. But no longer. In mid-2006, when Oaxaca teachers mobilized their annual strike for higher wages, Governor Ulises Ruiz chose to forego the customary negotiation and instead unleashed savage repression that over the next six months escalated to mass arrests, disappearances and killings. In March 2007, ignoring worker protests, Mexico's Congress enacted a law to privatize government workers'pensions and convert them from guaranteed payouts to "defined contribution" plans dependent on investment returns. Paper unions, charros, and independents Mexican labor laws also codify workers' right to join a union. But only about ten percent of Mexican workers are unionized (around the same rate as in the United States). Even worse, as the former CEO of a supermarket chain explained to Chris, "In Mexico, it's very easy to have a union that's a paper union." Labor lawyer Alcalde estimates that over 90 percent of unioin contracts are contratos de protección, designed to shield the company from authentic labor representation in return for a dues rakeoff for union officials. Workers are often unaware they even have a union. Government control of whether unions get a registro permitting them to recruit workers in a given sector impedes independent organizing. When that fails, according to the Center for Labor Research and Union Advising (CILAS), the "official" unions often unleash armed goons to smack down opposition. (We spoke with a CILAS researcher the day his report on "union terrorism" hit the media; "I'm glad they didn't mention my name," he remarked wryly. Napoleon Gómez, president of the "official" Miners' Union, refused to play the game and led a militant strike last year. The federal government twisted arms and managed to get him removed. This year it was discovered that some of the union officials' signatures on the document used to replace Gómez were forged, and he was reinstated. Advocates of union democracy rejoiced in the victory over government meddling, but the triumph was bittersweet. Gómez's militancy does not translate into a commitment to democracy or transparency. In fact, "Napoleon II" inherited his post from his father, and appears to have siphoned off tens of millions of dollars from the union's pension fund. (His temporary replacement has also been accused of looting the fund.) Gómez is currently running the union from Vancouver, where he is fighting extradition on embezzlement charges. Moreover, as a knowledgeable observer of the Mexican labor scene commented to us, "Even the independent unions are not doing much to organize workers who aren't already unionized. They're fighting to divide a shrinking pool." And with a few exceptions (most notoriously Elba Esther Gordillo, the charro leader of the teacher's union who cut a political deal to accept the pension reform that puts her members' retirement at risk), both the official and the independent unions remain male-led despite the growing numbers of women in the workforce. Two, three, many May Days? The fractured and weakened state of Mexican labor was much in eveidence on May 1st. Gone are the days when hundreds of thousands of workers marched in lockstep with each other and with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico for over 70 years. Mexico City saw four separate commemorations of the workers' holiday. The Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM), the largest and most charro of the labor groupings, organized a small, half-hour long, and low-energy rally featuring mainstream political leaders like Beatriz Paredes, the current chair of the PRI (and perhaps the only woman speaker heard at any of the union-sponsored events that day). Independent unions, including the FAT, but also telephone and electrical workers, miners, firefighters, teachers, and many others, rocked the Zócalo with angry speeches, guerilla-theater, and a burning in effigy of teachers' union chief Gordillo and Calderón, arm in arm. Spirits were high and the turnout overshadowed the official celebration, but the numbers appeared to be in the thousands, not the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC) and a number of other unions derided by some independents as "neo-charros" chose to boycott both marches and hold their own demonstration, where they naturally called for labor unity. Supporters of the Zapatista rebels followed yet another route, promoting the demands of indigenous and poor people, single mothers, prostitutes, and street vendors. In state capitals in Chihuahua, Guerrero, and our own Tlaxcala, pro- and anti-charro teachers' factions traded shoves and punches. Nonetheless, May 1st brought hopeful signs as well. The independent unions massed alongside organizations of peasant (including one historically linked with the PRI) and migrants, plus leftists from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Mexico's second-largest party, reflecting new alliances that grew out of the tortilla price crisis of January-February. Slogans included food sovereignty as well as labor rights. Winning better wages and working conditions depends on much more than the number of co-sponsors of a May Day demonstration. It will take local organizing, mobilizing for this fall's gubernatorial elections, creation of cooperatives and other "solidarity economy" outposts, and direct action. The scope of the problem is huge—even megabillionaire Carlos Slim acknowledges that widening inequality marks one of Mexico's greatest challenges. But the flowering of independent unionism is an important step toward a solution. Labels: Calderón, labor law, May Day, Mexico, unions Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
