Changing the World

By BOB HERBERT, NY Times, October 27, 2009

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it says, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi — June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew’s brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.

Monday morning’s coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than 500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.

Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead. The government’s finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1 virus to the home foreclosure crisis.

The Times ran a Page A1 article on Monday that said layoffs, foreclosures and other problems associated with the recession had resulted in big increases in the number of runaway children, many of whom were living in dangerous conditions in the streets.

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you’d watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach’s strategy or a script for “Law & Order.”

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written “The Feminine Mystique.”

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

A War Against Organizing

Note from Greetings: Does anyone notice a pattern between this story and the following one on China's overtaking of the U.S. as a superpower? Perhaps maintaining a viable middle class... AND our own manufacturing.

By Kate Bronfenbrenner, washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Angel Warner, an employee at a Rite Aid distribution center, sat next to me recently in a congressional briefing room and described what happened when she and her fellow workers tried to form a union in their California workplace. She talked about the surveillance, constant threats and harassment they endured; how she and other workers were repeatedly taken aside and interrogated, one on one, about how they planned to vote; how two co-workers were fired; and how the rest lived in fear that any day they, too, might get a pink slip. The union filed numerous charges of unfair labor practices and eventually won the organizing election. But three years after the campaign began, Warner and her fellow Rite Aid workers still don't have a contract.

Like most U.S. companies, Rite Aid takes full advantage of current labor law to try to keep workers from exercising their full rights to organize and collectively bargain under the National Labor Relations Act. Far from an aberration, such behavior by U.S. companies during union organizing campaigns has become routine, and our nation's labor laws neither protect workers' rights nor provide disincentives for employers to stop disregarding those rights.

Late last month I published a study, "No Holds Barred," that was presented at the hearing at which Angel spoke. I looked at a random sample of more than 1,000 union elections over a five-year period to determine the parameters of employer behavior during union representation elections in the private sector and the limitations of the labor law system established to regulate that behavior.

In 34 percent of the elections I studied, companies fired employees for union activity. In 57 percent of elections, employers threatened to shut down all or part of their facilities, and in 47 percent, employers threatened to cut wages and benefits.

In 63 percent of campaigns, supervisors met with workers one on one and interrogated them about their union activity or whether they or others were supporting the union. In 54 percent of the elections, supervisors used these one-on-ones to threaten individual workers.

The bottom line is that there has been a steady decline of workers' rights in the past several decades. Colleagues and I have examined this issue in a series of studies over the past two decades. My new data show that employers are more than twice as likely as they were in the 1990s to use 10 or more tactics -- including threats and firings -- to thwart workers' organizing efforts, and they are more likely to use more punitive and aggressive tactics such as interrogations, discharges and threats of plant closings, while shifting away from softer tactics such as social events, promises of improvement and employee involvement programs.

For the vast majority of workers who want to join unions today, the right to organize and bargain collectively -- free from coercion, intimidation and retaliation -- is at best a promise indefinitely deferred. In election campaigns overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, it is now standard practice for companies to subject workers to threats, interrogation, harassment, surveillance and retaliation for union activity.

The failure of the system to defend workers' rights in a timely manner multiplies the obstacles workers face when seeking union representation, creating delays that favor employers. Employers appeal a high percentage of the cases to the NLRB, and in the most egregious instances, the employer can count on a final decision being held up by three to five years.

A key aspect of proposed labor law reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, concerns revisions to the rules surrounding arbitration of the first contract. My findings show that this provision may be among the most crucial of the legislation. Fifty-two percent of workers who form a union are still without a contract a year after they win an election, I found, and 37 percent remain without a contract two years after the election. For employers, labor law provides yet another means to indefinitely delay unionization.

It doesn't have to be this way. My survey data from the public sector portray an atmosphere in which workers may organize free from the kind of coercion, intimidation and retaliation that so taints the election process in the private sector. Most of the states in the public-sector sample have laws allowing workers to choose a union through card check or voluntary recognition. And more than a third of public-sector workers in the United States are members of unions.

Unless Congress passes serious labor law reform with real penalties, only a small fraction of the workers who seek union representation will succeed. If recent trends continue, there will no longer be a functioning legal mechanism to effectively protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and collectively bargain. Our country cannot afford to make workers defer their rights and aspirations for union representation any longer.

The writer is director of labor education research at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her paper "No Holds Barred -- The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing" was published last month by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.

Beijing's Favorite Capitalists

By Harold Meyerson, Washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Marx railed against "the idiocy of rural life," by which he meant its isolation and its lack of social differentiation, but 20 years ago, it was that very "idiocy" on which the Chinese Communist Party depended to maintain its hold on power. Once Deng Xiaoping decided to suppress the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square by force, the challenge for the Chinese leadership was to find army units that wouldn't shy from shooting unarmed Chinese students.

Deng's henchmen quickly despaired of finding such soldiers in the cities; they had been contaminated by too much contact with the very kinds of people they'd be called upon to kill. The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng's murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.

Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China's cities -- socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square. All it asks of them in return is that they not actively seek democratic rights. For their part, the hundreds of millions of beneficiaries of China's new prosperity have kept up their end of that bargain. Knowing that they'd face the brute wrath of the party and state if they did, they've made an understandable decision.

In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation's economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven't demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they'd be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth.

According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system -- in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian -- cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald's, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.

And yet, it hasn't. And this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has traveled there to assure its government that America won't permit China's massive investment in our government's notes to diminish in value, even if that means we have to cut back on needed public programs.

In explaining China's rise and America's decline, historians may well note that capitalism -- American capitalism, anyway -- far from spreading democracy, actually has played a key role in transforming China into an authoritarian superpower. The transfer of manufacturing from the United States to China -- driven by the rise of mega-retailers such as Wal-Mart that have been able to enforce a regime of low wages all along their global supply chains -- has diminished our middle class and expanded theirs. American companies such as Wal-Mart have not been deterred in the slightest by China's authoritarian practices; indeed, before China enacted a law that infinitesimally increased workers' rights last year, the American chambers of commerce in China joined with communist hard-liners in opposing the statute.

The attraction of authoritarian regimes to America's more authoritarian business executives is long established, if seldom noted. Henry Ford, who routinely spied on and abused his employees until the United Auto Workers came along, built and owned factories in Stalin's Soviet Union. Wal-Mart, which used to lock its night-shift stock clerks and janitors inside a number of its stores until the morning managers arrived, prefers production in Guangdong to manufacturing in the Midwest. Indeed, the director of purchasing for Wal-Mart is based in China.

As historian Nelson Lichtenstein and others have documented, Wal-Mart inspires in its managers an almost fanatical allegiance to the company's cause. In Wal-Mart world, the provincialism (if not "idiocy") of rural life is fused with a brilliance in the art of low-cost, low-wage logistics to create a company that is both authoritarian in its inner workings and a friend of authoritarian regimes abroad. The butchers of Beijing could not have found any more compatible capitalists.

meyersonh@washpost.com