Seems to me that for all their whining about "bad Unions", the politicians who make statements accusing unions of Societal Malfeasance should read and remember this story...but I guess that's hard to do when soliciting for campaign dollars with a mattress strapped to your back. This looks like a bi-partisan crime to me.
Every one of their deaths was a potential crime. Workers decapitated on assembly lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried alive — all of them killed, investigators concluded, because their employers willfully violated workplace safety laws.
These deaths represent the very worst in the American workplace, acts of intentional wrongdoing or plain indifference that kill about 100 workers each year. They were not accidents. They happened because a boss removed a safety device to speed up production, or because a company ignored explicit safety warnings, or because a worker was denied proper protective gear.
...
Over a span of two decades, from 1982 to 2002, OSHA investigated 1,242 of these horror stories — instances in which the agency itself concluded that workers had died because of their employer's "willful" safety violations. Yet in 93 percent of those cases, OSHA declined to seek prosecution, an eight-month examination of workplace deaths by The New York Times has found.
What is more, having avoided prosecution once, at least 70 employers willfully violated safety laws again, resulting in scores of additional deaths. Even these repeat violators were rarely prosecuted.
Tack that on your wall, and make a copy to send to every politician of any party that blames the ills of America on unions. It may seem ridiculous to some, but one of the foundations of the unions was to help avoid these needless injuries and deaths. Now unions are targets for demogoging politicians looking to score easy points and that's a real tragedy.
posted by Jo Fish on 12.22.03 at 12:03 AM
Comments:
Unions like anything else vary in quality from the UFCW (weak) to the UAW (strong) over all we are much better off with them then without them especially in the case of work related injuries and death. I spent the late 80's/early 90's working as an advocate for a non profit "Michigan Injured Workers". Getting anything done via Lansing was like pulling teeth.
I can remember researching an article for our newsletter about the death benefit. At that time, it was the law that if you died in a work related accident, your employer only had to pay $1,500 to your family, which did not even cover a cremation with no ceremony according to a funeral home I called. It was MUCH cheaper for a company to kill you at work then to simply injure you.
Workers in Michigan and Ohio do have many more rights than workers in Indiana do...they don't even have the right to pick their own doctor. That's right, a company can send you to anyone they pay, not to fix your injury but to just get you back to work as soon as possible. Too often that is just with a pain medication script. :( Still a long way to go towards worker's rights.
Unions are part of capitalism. Without unions how can workers negotiate pay and benefits. If a company attempts to negotiate with individual workers too much time is wasted and payroll is a nightmare.
Companies that treat workers fairly and consistently don't have trouble with unions and can often get help from the unions in troubled times.
Most of the "problems" with unions are actually bad management. I'll never forget the contract my union won in 1977 that included "throw-away" items. "Throw-aways" are somewhat silly requests that we don't really want and are designed to be discarded during negotiations. When a union wins "throw-aways", management has failed.
posted by: Bryan on 12.22.03 at 01:05 AM [permalink]
Bryan,
I’m not trying to raise a ruckus with you but you said something I’ve just got to counter.
You say: “Unions are part of capitalism. Without unions how can workers negotiate pay and benefits. If a company attempts to negotiate with individual workers too much time is wasted and payroll is a nightmare.”
I’m not trying to be belligerent with you but that’s incorrect. The presence or need for union representation always, always, indicatives that a private enterprise is behaving as something other than a capitalist entity—always.
In the example you’ve given to back the initial claim, you essentially assert that management doesn’t have the time to do its rightful duty, so unions need to step in and advocate of your behalf. In this case, the union is a sanctioned redundancy—drawing on the resources of the company and its labor. Bad management (as in management that does not acknowledge its duty to speak for you—good and bad) is now costing labor and the company its valuable energy and profit, making the enterprise less competitive and further deteriorating the company’s capitalist integrity.
The problem that created this condition is that agents of the company, from the top down, have ceased to self-nourish the enterprise (which is precisely what capitalist entities do). If that company were still using net profit to nourish its own strength, throughout its structure, neither you, nor your management would be hard pressed to negotiate a fair wage for your contribution to its relative success. This company is dying.
The only time collective bargaining is truly appropriate is when market value simply cannot compensate you for the true cost of your labor—as in, your labor is killing you. I would argue that anything that dangerous and still necessary most likely has some critical import to our infrastructure and should not be a private enterprise at all—it should be state run. I should be taxed to sustain you over the long haul, because I know you’ve agreed to use your labor, which is pulling years off your life under the best of circumstances, to help our society at large.
In any case, I’m not anti-union and I’m certainly not anti-labor. Still, unions are not a healthy feature of any truly capitalist entity; they’re Band-Aids—delaying the inevitable bleed-out caused by bad capitalist ethic—always.
BTW, those “throw-aways” your union got for you… Those come at your expense, somewhere along the continuum.
Take a look at Paul Krugman's Nation article "The Death of Horatio Alger" in the 1/5/04 issue (on line). He points out as one of the ways government (read Republicans) provides the "haves" more distance from the "have-nots" is to "do everything possible to break the power of unions ...."
My parents were union members in the 1930s, '40s, early '50s. In my post law school career of just short of 50 years, I have been mostly self-employed and not in need of a union, at least directly. I have observed the decline of the blue collar working class that had reached the edges of the lower middle class over the past several decades. As Krugman points out, many of us had done much better than our fathers economically. But this has been changing such that I do not expect that my children (all adults) will do better than I did economically. Krugman does an excellent job pointing out how this has come about in recent years, in particular under George W.
Many of us did not need the unions directly as we got better educated than our parents. But let those of us who have not paid union dues not forget that those union dues had helped our parents provide us with better educations so that we could have a chance at the brass ring. We need the unions as a counter balance to unregulated capitalism. So look for the union label; it may better provide for future generations.
Kimberly, you have an interesting definition of "capitalism". I might agree with you that if most people defined "capitalism" the way you have, the system might work better and unions might be unnecessary. The fact is, they don't. Capitalism does now and always has seen the management/labor relationship as an adversarial one. Maybe it shouldn't, as you say, but it does. Unions are a necessary counter-balance to a capitalist system because such a system always favors owners.
However, I applaud your attempt to re-define what capitalism is by linking it to what it should be, and I will support your effort by referring to it in those terms every chance I get.
many times i have heard the question are unions fair. first, however, i would just like to share with u personal experience with unions. when i was younger, working my way through college, i worked for UPS. My wages were in fact relitively high for the work i was doing, but there was a downside to it also. at the "union meetings and union elections" they used force and threats to make me vote the way they wanted me to. then of course they made me pay my "union fees" which i could easily invision slipping into the pockets of the leaders. as a veteran of this system i can most assuredly say that i would rather work for a company where i am not forced to join a union and forced to think like them because i feel that is an invasion of my rights and i dont appreciate it. im also afraid that as a history teacher i have read through the constituion many times, and came up with the conclusion that it is a document attempting to protect individuals private property rights. now think about unions from the companies side. imagine that you have a big lawn and every saturday u pay the kid next door to mow your lawn for you, a job you pay him 4 dollars an hour for. now suppose one weekend you wake up to find that same kid demanding 8 dollars an hour, demanding that you buy a new lawnmower to prevent injury, and demanding you give him refreshments out of your own refirdgerator with you having no say of it yourself. on top of that, you are not allowed to fire this kid to hire a new one, or you have commited a crime. now i ask you again, are unions fair? now it is indeed true that people should be able to bond together in order to raise wages if they feel they are being unfairly treated. the problem with unions, however, is the governments regulations. suppose for a minute that there was no government laws against unions. what would most likely happen is that groups of people would go on stirike, but then start being fired by their employers, a completely just and fair act. soon, workers would be able to see that the strike is getting them nowhere, and they would go back to their job. because there is still a problem with their low wages, a new company ,wanting to make money, would sprout up and make their salaries higher. all the workers would then transfer to that company, and the old one would go out of business. now, workers have what they want : higher wages. businesses have what they want : happy productive workers. sometimes it boggles my mind how much better the american economy would be if people would just trust the free market..
thank you for your time.
posted by: brandon on 03.01.04 at 05:28 PM [permalink]
