Unions provide the American Dream

For decades the unions and the right of American workers to get a fair living wage and benefits has been under organized attack.

Right wing radio conmen routinely condemn unions and workers for trying to get enough in wages to support their families. During the grocery strike a few years ago KFI afternoon drive hosts John and Ken spent four hours each afternoon for weeks condemning the strikers and trying to get their listeners to break the strike and cross the picket lines. John and Ken told lies about union members to inflame their audience.

Yet when the strike was over and lost, the only violations found were by the owners.There were MANAGEMENT VIOLATIONS on a MASSIVE SCALE done in secret and contrary to both state and federal labor law. False social security numbers and names were used under the table to "hire" groups unscupulous striking workers to break the strike at different sites from where they normally worked so as not to be recognized. Just enough of these under the table workers were hired to keep the stores shelves stocked and the stores in operation.

Management was fined after the strike but the fines were just a cost of doing business. Pennies on the dollar that real living wages would have cost had the strike not failed. Management was only too happy to pay small fines to break a strike.

Did con men John and Ken of KFLie spend weeks ragging on these management violations of the law? NO! Did they even mention it once? NO! Why because radio con men are PAID by advertisers. The more advertisers, the more the con men make. Management decides where advertising dollars should go. The ads only go on the stations of con men who will say what they are told to say by the advertisers. Radio con men ALL work for management and are paid to be "opinion makers" to convince the public of whatever management wants the public to believe.

In our district good honest hardworking teachers are routinely called "union thugs" by the hatemongers in the ANTI crowd who listen to Con men on the radio and believe the lies they are told by Rush et. al. The lies the ANTIs tell about us only reflect the lies they here on the radio and Fox News. They repeat those lies to win votes and support among some in the community who do not know better. Without unions there is no American middle class. No American middle class and the American economy suffers as we have seen recently. Unions are a good thing for America.

Here is an excerpt from today's Tim Rutten's column in the LATimes describing what has happened to us in America as we have lost unions:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten18-2009mar18,0,3290633.column

Think back for a second to the beginnings of the financial crisis last year. When the auto companies went to the Bush administration asking for help, the first conditions imposed on them were executive pay cuts and renegotiation of their union contracts to bring down labor costs. The United Auto Workers went along because it wanted to save the firms and the jobs of the workers they employ.

What we're essentially being asked to believe is that employment contracts involving hardworking men and women on Detroit's assembly lines are somehow less legally binding -- less "sacred" in the current rhetorical argot -- than those protecting a bunch of cowboy securities traders living in Connecticut. When Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, piously tells us that the administration's hands are tied because we all must abide "by the rule of law," perhaps it's time to ask: What rule and for whom?

For years, the smart guys on Wall Street have convinced a growing number of Americans that organized labor is an impediment to economic progress, an unacceptable "cost" in a globalized system of production, a quaint social fossil from the era of mills and smokestacks. If there's a lesson to be gleaned from the current crisis, however, it's that when the chips are down, organized labor is a far more responsible social actor than the snatch-and-run characters who fancy themselves financiers.

The implications of this are wider than most of us imagine, and they deserve to be considered. Today, slightly less than 8% of all American workers belong to a union. Half a century ago, when more than one in three American workers were unionized, the middle class was growing -- not simply because organized labor won better wages and benefits for its members but because the presence of a vigorous labor movement pulled everybody else's compensation up as well.

As union membership dropped, middle-class incomes -- and average families' share of the nation's wealth -- stagnated and then fell. Families compensated for their reduced opportunity at first by sending both parents into the workplace, then by working more hours and, more recently, by simply going deeper and deeper into debt. At the same time, the incomes and share of the national wealth held by people like the AIG securities traders grew exponentially.

The Employee Free Choice Act, currently pending in both houses of Congress, would give unions the tools they need to reorganize a reasonable share of the American workplace. Whatever the howls of opposition from Wall Street's mandarins and their lackeys, the House and Senate ought to pass the bill and Obama ought to sign it as quickly as possible. We may have to swallow the outrage and injustice of AIG's and Goldman Sachs' venality and social irresponsibility for the moment, but we ought to spare our children that bitter taste.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com