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War on Workers
By Kari Lydersen
Despite his pro-blue-collar veneer and down-home Texan
regular guy persona, President George W. Bush has been as much an
enemy to labor as Reagan or any other Republican before him. While
speaking at labor rallies and working class events, publicly offering
jobs, a strong economy and good old American family values, he is
savagely gutting labor rights and protections and carrying out conservative
reforms that hit working class and poor folks the hardest.
Surprisingly, large segments of organized labor
have backed Bush and been vocal proponents for his agenda. Last
summer, as longshoremen in South Carolina and around the country
were engaged in the "Charleston Five" battle, Bush spoke at a longshoremen's
rally in the South backed up by an agreeably nodding, fist-pumping,
interracial crowd of longshoremen. He did not mention the Charleston
Five case once.
The highly charged case was an international rallying
point for unions around the world. It pitted the white, Old South-type
Attorney General of South Carolina, Charles Condon, against a group
of black unions members who were angry not only about their situation
in the workplace but also about the general racism and poverty in
the state.
The Charleston Five were five longshoremen who
were arrested and charged with serious felonies after a riot broke
out when the Nordana shipping line tried to shift its business from
the union to non-union work. After months of media campaigns and
solidarity demonstrations, last year the men were released from
house arrest and had their charges dropped.
While events like Charleston Five rallies across
the country brought out thousands of union members for progressive
and social justice causes, as a whole large parts of the union membership,
from leadership to rank and file, have remained pro-Bush. Along
with his conscious effort to appeal to regular good old boys who
happen to be in unions, Bush's promises of oil drilling in Alaska
and other major development projects sit well with unions. Teamsters and Turtles
It was just over two years ago that the "Teamsters
and Turtles" alliance between union members and environmentalists
emerged at the anti-WTO protests in Seattle. While environmental
awareness, anti-globalization sentiment and progressivism continue
to grow in many unions, the Alaska drilling plan has been a big
backward step for the Teamster-Turtles alliance. With the economy
sliding downward fast, the promise of even a relatively small number
of short-lived drilling jobs in Alaska has been enough to win labor
support for the plan. Since the start of the war, progressive trends
in unions as in other movements have been stifled by the pressure
to be patriotic. Most unions and many union members are wholeheartedly
supporting the war effort and the government's wartime actions on
the home front.
A Stellar Anti-Labor Record
Bush's labor plans have got a nice boost from
the war-as have pro-big business economic reforms and increased
surveillance and repression against dissenters. On Jan. 7, Bush
issued an executive order barring union representation at US attorneys'
offices and four other agencies in the Justice Department, citing
security concerns that unionizing efforts could cause.
Although federal law already bans strikes by federal
employees, White House officials said Bush had issued his order
out of concern that union contracts could "restrict the ability
of workers in the Justice Department to protect Americans and national
security."
The order bars representation for more than 500
workers at the US attorneys' offices, the criminal division, the
National Drug Intelligence Center, the Office of Intelligence Policy
and Review, and the National Central Bureau of Interpol.
Although organized labor may have a good bit of
misplaced love for Bush, that hasn't stopped it from being critical.
On its Bush Watch website, the AFL-CIO catalogues a laundry list
of anti-labor moves Bush has made:
Lack of Media Coverage
Labor leaders complain there has been little media
coverage of Bush's attacks on organized labor, which have only increased
since the war on terror started and media became even less critical
of Bush. They note that the mainstream media often ignore labor,
or cover it in a way that is hostile toward unions.
"The Chicago Tribune would give you the
idea that unions are all criminals," said Eric Smith, who is working
with the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Labor Education
program on a large study of 10 years of Chicago Tribune
of labor. "There actually were fewer gangster stories than I expected,
but there is this subtle anti-union tone throughout."
Smith noted that while editorials seem to "always
be against labor," reporters' outlooks are more complex. "From reporters
there is sympathy for workers, but not for the unions," he said.
"They make it look like the unions and companies are two big bureaucracies
that both don't care about the workers."
He said that while the results of the study have
not been qualitatively analyzed yet, the actual number of labor
stories carried by the Tribune from July 1991 to June
2001 is telling: there were only 520 articles about labor in that
period. "That's less than one a week, including little 90-word briefs
in the business section," Smith said, adding that "this is the paper
that busted their own union."
Helena Worthen, a professor of labor education
at UIC, said a January Tribune story on a transportation
strike in England was a "perfect example" of how the media covers
labor. "It talked about how inconvenient the strike is for commuters,"
she said. "Instead of showing it as a problem that both management
and labor are trying to resolve, it treated the union as if all
by itself, out of context, it decided to behave this way. Like during
the UPS strike, you would just read about consumers not getting
their packages delivered."
Worthen, a member of the National Writers Union,
noted that there are various reasons for this skewed coverage. "There
is a need for people to write things fast at newspapers, so they
don't have the time to get into the story and see what's really
happening. Part of this is also the conglomeration of media."
Joe Iosbaker, a chief steward of Services Employees
International Union (SEIU) Local 73 representing clerical workers
at UIC Medical Center, recalled that when his union won a major
victory to increase wages to the level of workers at the Champaign
campus last year, mainstream media (except Spanish TV stations)
completely ignored the issue.
"This was a major, major story," he said of the
campaign, which resulted in $2 an hour wage increase for over 700
largely minority union members in Chicago. They had been paid far
less than the mostly white workers with equivalent jobs at the downstate
campus. "It was going to cost the university millions of dollars,
and it was a very hard-fought battle on both sides. It was a historic
victory against racial discrimination. But none of the mainstream
press picked it up."
Many people feel corporations and the government
sometimes play a direct role in shaping media coverage of labor
issues to fit their agendas. "You see how Bush was able to keep
stations from airing Al-Jazeera," said Worthen.
Alternative Press Fills the Void
Across the board, labor leaders say the dearth
of mainstream media coverage has made the alternative press extremely
important to their cause. This includes the "trade" publications
of individual unions and radio programs or print publications like
Labor Notes, Fight Back and Solidarity, as well as general alternative
media like weekly independent papers, "indymedia" web sites, and
even personal email newsletters and mailings.
Union members have often found that directly becoming
the media, rather than trying to pitch stories to the mainstream
media, is the way to go. CAN-TV, Chicago's cable public access station,
has served as a popular forum for dialogue on labor issues as well
as labor stories produced by union members themselves.
CAN-TV producer Greg Boozell joined with United
Mine Workers to produce a half-hour documentary on the de-industrialization
of southern Illinois, focusing on the collapse of the mining industry
and the union's role in fighting for workers' rights.
SEIU Local 46 and other unions also have their
members trained to produce segments for CAN-TV. Workers covered
a custodial strike at the Chicago Public Schools and other local
labor issues.
CAN-TV covers AFL-CIO events and press conferences,
including a recent story about the strike at V&V Supremo Foods in
Pilsen, one of the country's larger Mexican foods suppliers. The
strike had gone on for months as the company failed to negotiate
with the workers. Finally, after CAN-TV coverage including shots
of private security forces outside the building and on the roof,
workers with the Teamsters reached what they considered a reasonable
settlement.
CAN-TV has a partnership with the Day Labor Organizing Project,
filming and airing reports such as the project's Guerrilla Caroling
outside Day Labor agencies near Christmas. Back to The War in America
Kari Lydersen is Associate Editor of StreetWise
newspaper and writes for Punk
Planet , Clamor magazine,
In These Times and The
Washington Post.
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