http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray05082009.htmlWeekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
Recessions and Labor Unions
By DAVID MACARAY
It was reported Wednesday that in an attempt to save the 137-year old newspaper—and their jobs along with it—the Guild representing employees of the Boston Globe had agreed to dramatic wage and benefit concessions. The Guild members, including about 700 editorial, business and advertising employees, will begin voting on Thursday, May 7, and are expected to approve the contract.
Among the concessions are substantial cuts in base salaries, mandatory unpaid furloughs, discontinuation of company-matched pension funds, and the loss of job security clauses. It’s been reported that the New York Times, owner of the Globe, needs to slash expenses by $20 million annually. It’s also been rumored that the Times intends to sell the Globe and is requiring these cuts to entice a buyer.
With a world recession, the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, and twenty-five years of unsound, unscrupulous and unregulated financial policy coming home to roost, organized labor leaders knew they were going to be in for a bumpy ride. They weren’t wrong. Not only are labor unions being punished by the recession, in many instances they are, predictably, being blamed for it.
Oddly, in a country that prides itself on fighting for what it believes in, people who don’t make a decent wage or have company-supplied medical insurance or a company-supplied pension are often critical of labor unions for striving to obtain those things. It’s a confounding dynamic, one that can’t be explained away entirely as simple envy or resentment.
Rather than saying, “Gee, we should be like you guys, and fight to have a better standard of living,” they seem to think that because they never had those perks (or had them once, but saw them taken away), you shouldn’t have them either, and that your having them somehow causes an “imbalance.”
These people believe the propaganda that says society can’t afford a thriving middle-class, that we need a disproportionate number of victims at the bottom, people to prop up the rest of us, pyramid-style. They’re the same ones who object to a journeyman plumber making $30 an hour, but don’t blink an eye at a hedge fund manager making $3 billion in a single year by manipulating money.
Given that every manner of investment portfolio has tanked—from massive institutional pension funds, to credit unions, to individual stocks and personal 401(k) accounts—and given that the systemic apparatus that set the whole banking debacle in motion is still as squirrelly as Hogan’s goat, it’s unlikely (despite Wall Street’s rah-rah cheerleading) that things will look up anytime soon.
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright (“Americana,” “Larva Boy”) and writer, was a former labor rep. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net
FULL story at link.
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