At
Dissident Voice, David Macaray writes
On Profit-Taking and Yellow Dogs:
With Labor Day weekend upon us, it’s appropriate we take a moment and consider the status of the American worker. Given the unemployment figures, the devastating export of American jobs to foreign countries, and, accordingly, the paucity of full-time jobs that offer decent pay and good benefits, it’s not a very encouraging picture. In fact, it’s fairly bleak.
One doesn’t have to be a hardcore cynic to ask why we continue to celebrate Labor Day. Clearly, the patriotic aspect of this once-exalted holiday is long gone. No one is interested in glorifying the American worker—not John Q. Public, not the beleaguered workers themselves, and certainly not the companies employing them. In truth, the only purpose Labor Day now serves is providing the last 3-day weekend of summer.
David Macaray
Not surprisingly, U.S. companies continue to thrive. In November, 2010 (in the midst of a debilitating recession), the Department of Commerce reported that U.S. companies just had their best quarter . . . ever. That statement bears repeating. U.S. companies had their best quarter ever. Businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, which is the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted figures) since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago.
That statistic tends to confuse people. They naturally assume that when you have one of the worst recessions in American history, one that followed the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression, the fallout is going to affect everyone, not just the people on the bottom—the ones who lost their jobs or their homes or had their pay cut—but America’s corporations as well. But that didn’t happen.
Corporate America is doing amazingly well. And when you take a moment to consider it, you realize why. They have not only laid off millions of workers, they have cut or squeezed the wages of those who remained. That represents an enormous, unprecedented savings in overhead. With skeletal, understaffed, underpaid workforces looking just to hang on because they’re afraid of losing their jobs, these businesses are flush. The only thing they have left to bitch about is their taxes, which they do non-stop.
But just when you thought things couldn’t sink any lower, there are reports that some of these employers are engaging in the same anti-union mischief that was done way back in the 1870s and 1880s. American companies are now asking their non-union employees to sign documents promising that they will never join a labor union.
Such agreements, prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were called “yellow dog contracts,” and signing one was a condition of employment. They wouldn’t hire you unless you signed it. And if you signed a yellow dog contract, and were caught trying to organize or join a union, you could be fired on the spot. They played rough in those days. They hated unions and did anything in their power—legal or illegal—to keep them out.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:
In the 12 months that ended in June, the rate of nationwide union membership as a part of the work force fell from 12.4 percent to 12.1 percent, according to a new report from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, The State of the Unions in 2010: A Profile of Union Membership in Los Angeles, California and the Nation. For California, membership dropped from 18.3 percent to 17.6 percent over that year. In the five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area, unionization fell by a full point, from 17.5 percent to 16.5 percent.
California accounts for about 16 percent of the nation’s nearly 15 million union members. But the rate of unionization is higher in nine other states (New York, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, New Jersey, Michigan, Rhode Island, Illinois, and Connecticut).
Earlier in the recession, jobs were lost in great numbers, but these were mostly not union jobs. That dynamic has changed, according to Lauren Appelbaum, the report's lead author.
The report also noted another change:
Despite consistently lower unionization rates in the private sector than in the public sector, the much larger size of the private sector workforce has meant that there have traditionally been a larger number of union workers in the private sector. This has now changed. For the first time ever, the number of union members in the public sector is greater than the number of private sector union members.
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