POWER PLAY - "You have a job but you kind of don't. You have to be available 5 days a week -- you get dressed and go to work each of those five days, but you never get paid for a 40 hour week. In a way, you work at the business but you don't really feel a part of it." That's what one American worker told me. She is a member of that ever-growing class of permanent part time workers. They are subject to being fired without notice and without appeal, they are subject to abuse in the workplace, and most of the time they do not receive medical benefits. When they do find a job that provides health insurance, they put up with the irritations and outrages because the alternatives are worse.
They are white collar workers in a system that no longer provides what it once did. They often bring education and experience to their jobs, but are treated as chattel, without rights, without perks, and without that one thing that would make other good things possible -- collective bargaining.
The following discussion involves a certain amount of speculation and perhaps even a little wishful thinking, but it represents a possibility that the nation should think about.
What if all of us who work in traditionally white collar jobs were to form one big national union? We would include account managers and secretaries working in cubicles at thousands of major corporations, sales clerks at big box stores, and employees of nonprofits. Practically anyone who is not now represented by a union would be eligible to join.
The political and legislative road to such a goal would be tough, but the advantages would be enormous.
Better salaries would be one of the goals to be sure, but there is actually a lot more. The routine abuse of American workers by mid-level management is a national scandal. It includes everything from ridiculous scheduling to verbal nastiness to retaliatory firings. Managers' threats to "write up" employees for imagined or minimal offenses is by now a part of the national culture.
The advantages to unionization are so obvious and overwhelming that the right wing has made anti-union propaganda one of its chief activities. How we could get past the political resistance and achieve our goal will be considered below. I don't think it's impossible, but it would involve some consensus building among at least 55% of the electorate. Perhaps the idea of substantial wage increases and the provision of benefits to part time employees would be the first element we could push.
But first, let's recognize some of the aspects of the problem.
Working for a living is not always an easy thing, but oftentimes the bastards go out of their way to make things nastier than they have to be. If we are to be honest about the reality in this modern America of ours, I should probably say that things are made nastier most of the time.
This isn't just an academic argument. Even in terms of my profession as a scientist with a postgraduate degree, stuff happens. I can remember being screamed at (and I mean that term quite literally) by a superior just as our research team were about to begin a complicated, demanding procedure. It was infuriating, to say the least. I had a perfect right to walk away from the situation, unpleasant as it was, but it would have resulted in months of lost work and thousands of dollars in wasted costs, so I kept my temper even as I endured the abuse. "Sometimes somebody has to be the grownup" is what I said to myself under my breath. Too bad it wasn't the group leader being the adult.
I've been abused verbally simply for being unwilling to be dragged into a political argument, and this with somebody who had influence over my appointment. At another time in my life, I watched a highly paid manager waste our time and budget because he was a little too chummy with a female employee. I was left to clean up his messes.
These may just be the modest social costs of working for a living, but for me, they represent the commonplace abuse of power in the workplace. But my frustrations were as nothing compared to the everyday experience of workers in the vast system of white collar employment in America. It is a system that ranges from the big box stores to boutique information technology firms and everything in between.
In recent weeks, the internet site Gawker invited American workers to tell their stories about their experiences working for the American corporate world. The Gawker series concentrated on Walmart, due to its threat to cancel store construction in Washington, D.C. if it doesn't get its way on workers' wages. But the accumulating testimony both in the storyline and in the comments section made clear that the problem is pervasive. Some writers argued that Walmart is particularly pernicious, but others had their own stories to tell about other big box retailers.
I don't think that any of this is much of a revelation. After all, this is the country that made the song Take This Job and Shove It into a number one single back in 1977. Resentment by workers against management crosses class and regional boundaries. It did back in 1977, and it does now.
There is actually a subgenre of working class humor that is personified in the internet video series Cube Farm, which is dressed up as a modern day advice column for the cubicle dweller, but includes a subtext involving the everyday irritations foisted on the workforce by management. In the technical realm, the long-running software and engineering discussion group The Daily WTF revolves around highly skilled computer programmers who have to deal with employers who, often enough, are everything from stupidly insensitive to stupidly incompetent. And of course there is the whole Dilbert universe including the moronic boss and the self destructive acts of corporate headquarters, nicely detailed in Scott Adams' book The Joy of Work. The only difference between the book and the comic strip is that the book gets into real life mismanagement, including anecdotes contributed by the Adams readership about some really abusive situations.
The problem is systemic. There seems to be a pretty strong consensus among working people, whether they come from Walmart's Arkansas or from upstate New York. It's not just the occasional personality clash between the guys on the loading dock and the assistant manager doing his best to make their lives miserable. It's a widespread problem that includes sub-living wages, lack of health insurance, and abusive working conditions. The story of Walmart employees being forced to rely on government programs for medical care and even nutrition has become the stuff of legend.
The question is what, if anything, to do about it.
There is a trope from the conservative wing of the country that says, in essence, that if you are caught in a dead end, low paying job, it's your own fault. You should have gotten that college education or been born rich. This argument implicitly accepts a multi-tiered world in which the majority of the populace works for little money and serves the wealthy. The right wing may not like to admit that this is the way they think, but as any economist or sociologist will tell you, there's only so much of anything to go around, and how it gets divided up is the critical question.
The other side (you might call us the liberals if you like) views the current system as impure. It requires some way of distributing things a little less unequally. Most of us don't demand equality of outcomes, but we would like to see at least a little less skewing of the distribution curve.
Beyond wages, there is the whole issue of the way people are treated. The Gawker series is just the latest in a long line of such stories. The problem is pervasive in, but not restricted to, the private sector. I've written previously about the way part time employees of the Los Angeles city government are subject to supervisorial pettiness, arbitrary loss of paid hours, and a collection of other indignities.
What is so special about unionization, anyway? The answer is obvious. In a contest between an incredibly powerful organization and you, the organization has the advantage. Absent government intervention, the management of Walmart can limit your salary to whatever they are willing to pay, and if you complain, they can fire you on the spot. But if Walmart has to negotiate with its entire workforce, the contest is a little more evenly balanced. To put it simply, they actually have something to lose by risking a strike, whereas it's easy to fire you and find your replacement that same day.
So why don't Walmart workers have a union, considering the obvious and unmistakable advantages to them? The answer is the crux of this discussion.
Here's the answer: The system is rigged.
It's that simple. Any organizing action that gets sniffed out by management will get you fired right then and there. It's not exactly legal -- in fact, you theoretically have legal rights guaranteed by federal law -- but enforcement of those rights has typically taken years, and the remedies for the would-be labor organizers are limited. Owners and management have access to a whole industry of union busters, including law firms and management consultant firms whose sole mission is to help American businesses stave off unionization.
What can we do?
This is where it gets a little more tricky and, to use a currently unpopular word, political. If it were not so political, we would already have a system in place that protects workers' rights, provides for rapid and honest unionization efforts, and punishes employers who violate the rights of workers. One halfway measure is still floating around in the congress, with no current chance of passage. Called "card check," it would have allowed union organizers to collect signatures from a simple majority of workers in a business, each card attesting to one worker's intent to join the union. The organizers would then be able to present the cards to the federal government, which would immediately certify the union as the collective bargaining agent. The idea is simple and elegant, because it provides for unionization while protecting the process from the union busting efforts of the owners. That's why it has had no chance of passage in the current congress. The major advantage to card check would have been that union organizing could be done in secret, thereby protecting organizers from retaliation.
The current congress is hopeless in terms of advancing unionization, which means that in order for progress to occur, the Democrats will need to take back the House of Representatives, hold onto the US Senate, and simultaneously become more friendly to the whole concept of unionization. Notice, by the way, that congress becoming more friendly to labor in general is not the same as congress being in the back pocket of the few remaining unions with any real influence. It goes a long way beyond that, to an overall commitment towards improving the lives of salaried workers in all industries.
So if we are going to imagine a labor-friendly congress, then let's also imagine one big compromise deal that would truly benefit the sales clerks at Petsmart and Office Depot. A deal that simply makes it marginally easier to carry on efforts at unionization in a system that allows businesses to do the same old dirty work is not enough. So what should we do?
Easy. The federal government should establish one or two or three new national unions by act of law, empower the National Labor Relations Board or its successor to oversee organizational efforts within the new unions, and thereby establish collective bargaining throughout the nation across most or all of the major industries. All of the currently underpaid and unrepresented white collar workers would have some place to go to protest, and some system of redress of grievances.
Maybe this is just a pipe dream. Perhaps nothing like this can ever happen in this country. But I can tell you how it could happen, which is to get about 55% of the American voters to support the idea. Why that number instead of a simple majority? Well, by rights it ought to be sufficient just to develop majority support for what should be considered a straightforward civil right, but that fails to deal with the reality of the gerrymandered congressional system. The Republicans have drawn enough districts in enough states that it will probably take about 55% of the vote to return the House of Representatives to the Democratic Party.
It may be unfair, but it's the current reality. As most of you probably know, the Democratic Party actually got more votes overall in House contests than the Republicans, but failed to take a majority of House seats due to the way redistricting was done after the 2010 census. That's the way it is. But it is not impossible for Democrats to become a new labor party and to develop that 55% of the vote. They only have to do two things: (1) Decide to represent the interests of working people who are currently without representation or influence and (2) sell the idea to the American people.
Maybe there is an easier way to bring the advantages of collective representation to the vast majority of Americans who currently do without it. Repealing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and replacing it with something more labor friendly would be a start, as would enactment of the card check law. But in either case, the right of workers to organize without retaliation, to enjoy rapid recognition of their new unions, and to gain the benefits of collective bargaining are the key elements. What is critical for the white collar part time workers, the walking wounded of our industrial system, is that there be a union for them to join.
To bring part time workers and cubicle folks into the system would generate all kinds of good results that are currently so far out of the box as to seem unimaginable.
For example, the current system creates a massive incentive for employers to keep people at part time because it allows the owners to avoid paying benefits. Once workers are allowed to stray over the line where they work enough hours to be considered "benefits eligible," the company has to offer them the same medical benefits it offers its other full timers. That is a huge jump in costs for most employers, so it's no wonder they try to avoid it. Economists refer to this as a disincentive, or more truthfully, as a perverse disincentive.
But suppose employers had to pay into a fund based on the number of hours you actually work, whether it's 10 hours a week or 40. Instead of paying full benefits to a 40 hour a week employee but no benefits at all to 4 people who each get 10 hours a week, the overall cost to the company would be the same for the one or the four. That would immediately remove the perverse disincentive. The 10 hour worker would admittedly get only a part of his or her health insurance premium from the employer, but it would be something, not nothing. And since the employer would have no reason to keep a part time employee at the artificially low level, it would be easier for part timers to get more working hours.
Curiously, the reason a system like this can now be imagined is Obama's Affordable Care Act. That's because the insurance exchanges now being created for individual coverage will provide a place for those employer payments to go.
There are a lot of things to think about, but the status quo shouldn't be one of them.
To finish on a bright note, here's one more video comedy from the Cube Farm describing a fantasy that most of us must have had at some time or another.
(Bob Gelfand is a founder and current Vice President of the Coastal San Pedro Neighborhood Council and former chair of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition. He can be reached at: [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 59
Pub: July 23, 2013