The Right to Unionize

It is pretty obvious to every reasonable person living in this country that we need a dramatic change in labor laws. Take my parents for example. They have worked in a factory, which produces air-filters, for the past 13 years and have had a stellar record of performance and attendance. Despite having held long-term white collar jobs in Yugoslavia (my father worked as a mechanical engineer in an aluminum factory and my mother as a bank consultant at a Yugo-bank), the arduous process it takes for people at their age to reinvent themselves in the US and the need to provide for my brother and me, forced them to take the first job they were offered. And they have been there ever since. In their 13 years of employment at this factory they have never (ever!) been late nor have they ever missed a day of work without medical excuse. And what do they get for this? I will list a few benefits they get for working hard for the so-called American dream:

1) Their wages have been effectively frozen until further notice. Once the American economy started hitting the recession speed bump a few years ago, the management immediately fired all of their recent hires and froze all the wages for the senior employees.

2) They no longer have sick days--period! If they end up getting sick they have to call 24 hours ahead but they still get a minus written down next to their name. This includes emergency room visits. If they get 64 of these minuses in one year--regardless of the fact they are medically justified--they are automatically fired, no exceptions, and no right of appeal.

3) They are constantly harassed by their supervisors (there are a few notable exceptions here) who use their workers to work through their own inferiority complexes. Most of these supervisors are white, rural people with very little education who see their assembly line as their own little fiefdom. Just the other day, my father had to go see a specialist (an appointment for which he had been waiting for for over a month), and the supervisor refused to give him a leave arguing that they did not have enough people that day. My dad went to complain to the human resource person who, of course, stood by the supervisor. It was only after my dad's doctor sent them a personal plea that he be let out of work for few hours that day, that they agreed.

Most of my parents' coworkers that I met seem like truly nice people. But they are also bitterly divided among themselves by a myriad of prejudices not the least the racial line. They feud with one another and often work to get one another fired. There have been a number of instances when a coworker would report a joke from another coworker as an instance of sexual harassment (despite the fact that the two had previously both used the similar jokes with one another), a charge that will get you fired without any questions being asked and again, no right of appeal.

The root cause of this is the inability of these workers to unionize. There needs to be a federal law that severely punishes anyone who intimidates or prevents workers from unionizing. The story of unions in this country is truly a sad one. It is estimated that in recent years, the American union membership has fallen below 9% below the level in 1930s. If these workers were unionized and through grassroots organizing connected with their peers across the country, the supervisors would not only be much more hesitant in abusing their employees, but they would not want to since they would be imbued with a higher level of camaraderie.

A central piece of Barack Obama's economic plan is his support for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) that he cosponsored and which mandates the right of every employee to choose whether or not to join the union without being intimated by their employer. He has also fought the Bush National Labor Relations Board's efforts to strip workers of their right to unionize. In this, he opposed the efforts of the Bush administration to classify hundreds of thousands of professional workers and nurses and other categories as "supervisors" and as such exempt from federal labor laws.

Socialist Yugoslavia was governed by the so-called "workers' self-management" principle. Firms were organized as collectivities of workers with workers councils who, after consulting with firms' directors, made all decisions for that particular firm. The initial attempt of Yugoslav self-management was to show how different Yugoslavia was from the "state capitalism" of Stalin's Soviet Union and in the beginning, it was just a formality. But starting in the late 1950s and especially through the 1960s, the Yugoslav regime genuinely attempted to make the law reality. Of course many firms were still ruled by corrupt state-appointed directors, but workers were truly empowered. The workers councils served as watchdogs which protected their fellow workers. Thus if an employee was to be fired, his case would immediately go in front of the council of his peers who would decide if the case was legitimate. It was very very rare that the council would uphold the decision to fire. In this case, the company had to retroactively pay all the wages and damages to the worker. Of course this system, a true dictatorship of the proleteriat, caused many problems not the least of which was the declining productivity. So I am not advocating a wholesale adoption of workers' self-management in this country.

But while hearing my parents' horror stories from their factory, which reminds me of Dickens' England, I am sure nostalgic for the days of Yugoslav workers' self-management.