Pat Political

Labor and the Corporate Elite - Part Four

So how do we defeat the Bush Republicans in the next election and can the Democrats do it.

Bush Republicans are easy to define. They are first and foremost the Business Community, which tells us all that it has no obligation to any of us who are workers and who are part of the community from which it makes its money. Its only concern is to make a profit.

But who are the Democrats.

The most vocal nowadays are the so-called Centrists and organized labor.

The Centrists are actually closet Republicans, since they are as business-oriented as any Bush Republican. A few prominent examples are Bill Clinton, Senators Clinton, Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, and our own state Senators Leddy and Welch. And we have seen already how the business orientation of Leddy and Welch has frustrated the attempts of the Democratic majority in the House to move Vermont toward a state-wide health care system.

The AFL/CIO unions have been very much the voice of the Democratic Party. But out-sourcing is making serious inroads on union manufacturing jobs in America.

And why the out-sourcing? Because. business tells us. it cannot manufacture goods in this country and give consumers the low prices they demand.

We all got caught up in the biggest marketing sell job that the Business Community has ever pulled when it persuaded the general public that CHEAP is GOOD.

The first union casualty of what was at first called ‘discount’ stores was the Ladies’ International Garment Workers Union. My mother and I looked for their label for as long as we could find it. But unfortunately it is obvious that good union wives were also buying their underwear at discount and not supporting the union label. Nowadays to find US manufactured goods in any big store or internet outlet is almost impossible.

It’s pretty obvious that Democrats need a new way to unite the grass roots of the country, and big money donors, of which there seem to be plenty, are not going to do it.

Howard Dean found the right words to say while he was still a candidate for the presidency.

He was the only one in either party to talk about the Declaration of Independence and its statement that we are all equal and that we have a right to a government which can provide us with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. He was bringing in a lot of small grass roots donations and many promises of support. And even though I always regarded him as the most Republican Democrat I knew, I was ready to vote for him and to contribute to his campaign if he had continued to speak in this way.

The other big uniter is our opposition to the war. The Iraq invasion was sold to us on lies. And we should never let this administration forget that we know this..

We who are labor union oriented need to join with everyone else for whom the enemy is the Business Community-- small local business owners, family farmers, old time Republicans, anti-racist groups-- and together we can do it! .

Labor and the Corporate Elite - Part Three

So, where are we today....

There is no one over forty who has been or is still a wage earner, who is not dependent on the Bush Republican big corporation stock market economy in some way for pensions, retirement income, savings, etc.

People under forty are not so likely to be involved, and I believe that Bush’s effort to set up private accounts into which young workers could divert some of their social security payroll taxes was aimed at trapping them in the same way we elders are caught. These private accounts are to be stock market accounts administered by a manager, not truly under the control of the “owner” of the account.

And we are trapped, whether we call ourselves pro-business or union.

My union is now the SEIU although I came in when it was still 1199. I joined somewhat reluctantly when I went to work as a research technician for the pharmacology department of a small medical school for my last ten working years. But when I learned of the abuses which had been perpetrated against us before the union, I became an ardent worker and even sat at the negotiating table. And I helped negotiate for more of the benefits I have today-- a pension based on how many years I worked and a prescriptions package. The money from which these benefits is paid to me is tied up in the corporate stock market economy.

In this country whatever union we belong to, to keep our benefits, we have to continue our support of this economy.

And in this country each of the unions to which we belong is tied in eternal confrontation to a particular business or trade, having to negotiate new contracts every few years. To continue as they are, our unions must also continue to support American Business as it declares itself to be-- totally without responsibility either to its workers or to the community from which it makes its profits.

The union movement in Western European countries achieved change in the business community itself. These countries are now regarded by American Business as being nastily “socialist”. It is anathema that they provide retirement and universal health care paid for by the community/government instead of benefits which are conferred by business. Think of how often we are told how awful any sort of universal heath care system would be

Mother Jones’ IWW, with its goal of uniting all workers into one union still offers the chance to confront and force change in the Business Community itself. This is the enemy of us all.

(And there will be another blog dealing with how to fight the enemy...!)

Labor and the Corporate Elite - Part Two

After the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves men from both the south and the north joined together as the Knights of Labor and became the first major movement to fight what they called the new civil war against industrial slavery.

The autobiography of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, her recollection of her part in this struggle, is the principle source of what I know about it. Her chronology may not always be accurate but she makes one feel the terrible conditions of the workers’ lives. For, as she said, it is slavery when the working day is twelve long hours and the pay a pittance so that many families found it necessary to send their small children to work in the mills for those few extra pennies which meant family survival. It is slavery when workers’ pay is not in good US dollars but in company script, when workers must live in company owned houses for which they pay rent to the company and must buy their supplies from the company store. It is slavery when a man can be fired at will by the company and be thrust out into the world with his family without one cent of real US money in his pocket.

She makes vividly clear the savagery of the owners’ efforts to keep their workers under control, the brutal beatings and killings by their hired thugs.

Mother Jones may well be one of the most important factors in the success of the union movement in our country. She was a brilliant orator. She was the one who was always sent whenever strikers were losing their will to continue the fight. And she was always in the center of the most vicious fights, doing whatever she could to relieve the misery and to encourage the strikers.

Her feelings towards the wives of owners also add to the picture. It was these middle and upper class women who began the woman’s movement, who began to agitate for the vote. When one group told Mother Jones they couldn’t be active in seeking reform without the vote, her reply was that she didn’t have a vote and still was plenty active. She was also bothered by the ’charity’ work of so many of these women, feeling that if people had decent working and living conditions, charity wouldn’t be needed. But most of all she was painfully aware of the fact that most of these women, no matter what charitable works they might be doing, were being supported by child labor. She deplored their acceptance of their husbands’ and ministers’ dictum that it was better for the children of the working poor to be gainfully employed rather than running free in the streets.

Violence in the union fight lasted from the end of the Civil War through the 1920’s. It was during this same period that the elitist owners established most clearly themselves as a class apart. They sent their wealthy sons and daughters abroad to marry Europe’s impoverished royalty and nobility. Winston Churchill’s mother was the daughter of one of these families. Their very exclusive social events were much publicized. In my childhood the social life of their debutante daughters was as newsworthy as any Hollywood star‘s doings. But the clearest statement of their elitism came from Rockefeller, who was one of the most brutal mine owners, when he talked about education. The Ivy League universities of the East were to educate business and political leaders. The Midwestern universities were to produce the country’s engineers and technical people. High schools were to provide the clerical workers business always needed while the lower grades should concentrate on turning out a disciplined and productive work force. Only last week I heard someone refer to Vermont’s highly disciplined work force. Do you feel you are part of a work force or are you an individual trying to live a life that has meaning for you.

And it’s going to take another blog to look at where we are today.....

Labor and the Corporate Elite

On Saturday July 30th I had the great pleasure of doing my Mother Jones monologue as part of a month long celebration of the IWW and the old Socialist Labor Party Hall in Barre. A wonderful group of people has been working to restore this historical building so that it can be an active part of our community once again. Saturday night was billed as an evening at the Dil Pickle Club and a goodly number of our exciting local musicians and poets contributed their talents as well as myself. This old woman enjoyed every minute of the evening and didn’t get home until midnight! Avery rare happening in my life these days, I can assure you.

And not surprisingly the evening got me to thinking about the history of labor generally.

Isn’t it ironic that the British have produced both the strongest statement of personal liberty and the absolute worst labor relations. For it is straight from our British forbears that we in this country have received the notion generally held by business that it has no responsibility toward its workers, that workers can be treated like a commodity, to be hired and fired at will..

I wonder how many people know that this is not a universal attitude among business owners. I’ll give you two contrasting employers in our world today.

Shaw’s is either American owned or British owned. I can’t stand to go in there because the atmosphere is so unpleasant. And everyone I know who works there tells me that management is completely disrespectful of its employees.

But go into a Hannaford’s and you will find people working there cheerful, friendly, and eager to be helpful. Hannaford’s is owned by a Belgian firm with the European tradition of responsibility toward its workers.

I wonder how many people are aware of a very real struggle presently going on between the Continental European and the English/American business philosophy..

The European attitude is that business has to be responsible to the community from which it makes its money. Two examples: Drug companies must charge reasonable prices for their drugs. A company has to demonstrate that its product is safe before it can be marketed.

We are all painfully aware that we allow business to charge whatever it thinks the market will bear for our drugs. And the attitude of American business is that a product can be freely sold unless it can be proved unsafe.

The fight over Monsanto’s genetically modified seed is a good example of the American attitude. The resistance in Europe is based on Monsanto not being able to prove that its seed is not ecologically harmful. But Monsanto has been scientifically inept. It has totally lost any capacity to prove the safety of its seed through controlled plantings because it never made sure that this seed could not cross-pollinate other crops.

How did a country which began with such highly idealistic concepts as ours end up with such an elitist corporate ruling class?

From its very beginnings there were people who found the notion of equality abhorrent. They were generally well to do property and business owners, and therefore had more influence in the workings of the new government. Their motto has always been “What’s good for business is good for the country.” Elections were seen not as public debate on policy but a way to gain more power. They found that public opinion could be easily manipulated by spending lots of money and this increased their contempt for the “common man.”

And the egregious greed of this elitist business oriented group created the labor movement which came into being after the Civil War.

More to come in my next blog.

US Historypart five

Addendum

I have had three encounters with the union movement over my lifetime. The first was when I was about ten years old. I had gone with my father who was delivering an oil burner he had sold to this company. When we arrived, there were three or four men sitting out on the receiving dock, and my father asked if one of them would help him heave the burner up onto the dock. Each of the men refused on the grounds that it wasn‘t his job, and I, who happened to be big and sturdy enough, had to help my father with the burner. After all these years I can still recall my shock and indignation at their unwillingness to help us. We were workers also. weren’t we?

My second came when I followed my first boss into a change of jobs for him I was told I would have to join the union in this company. When I protested that I was part of management because I was his secretary, I was visited by two very unpleasant men from the union office. I didn’t like being threatened, but I needed the job.

My third was in my final job as a research technician in a small medical college. I accepted having to join the union but grumbled about it to one of my co-workers. He had been one of the principles in bringing the union to the college. When he told me what technicians had suffered before the union, I became an ardent participator, walking a picket line and sitting at the bargaining table.

But in my gut I still resent the need for any union, that in my country no other way has ever been found to prevent and correct management abuse of people whom it hires to do the work of the company..

US History-part four

For it was indeed slavery when miners were paid in company scrip which could only be spent at the company owned store, when the pay was so little that their small children had to be sent to work in the mills for those few extra pennies the family needed to survive, when the family could be thrown out of job and home at the whim of the owner without one cent of real US money in its pockets.

The egregious greed of mill and mine owners made the union movement inevitable. In a country devoted to equality and democracy this sort of class warfare should not have had to happen. And from 1870 until 1920 it was active, ugly, brutal warfare. Mill and mine owners used hired goons to attack the strikers and their families killing and wounding randomly. In states like Colorado where owners’ influence in state government was strong enough, the state’s own militia was used. And in the steel strike of 1919 even the federal government became involved, sending in troops to fight the strikers, veterans of WWI clubbing down in the streets the veterans of WWI who were striking.

The Knights of Labor established a headquarters in Chicago and there men were constantly coming and going, making plans for unionizing and starting strikes. Right after the Great Fire of 1871, which had destroyed her business, they were joined by one of this country’s most remarkable and most under sung women, the widow Mary Harris, who became known by the name “Mother Jones.,” She was called “the most dangerous woman in America.”

She may well be the single most important person in the success of the labor movement in this county. She has to be one of this country’s greatest orators. Over and over again she was sent to places where strikers were tiring and spirits lowered, and simply by talking she would reenergize them and send them back to their picket lines. She was, as she said. able as a woman to find other ways to fight than by using guns, knives, and clubs. Her weapon of choice was her `armies of women’ totally peaceful but very effective, resulting in many of labor’s victories.

Why, then, is she not widely heralded either in labor history or by the women’s movement. I believe that she has been ignored by the women’s movement because she thoroughly disapproved of middle class women who were agitating for the vote but who were ignoring the horrors of the child labor that was supporting so many of them. I suspect that labor ignores her because she felt that the labor movement had abandoned its earliest ideals of democratic union government. By 1902 the miners’ unions were already organized into a national union with a president whom she felt was too close to the mine owners. And when he negotiated a settlement for one part of the striking Western Miners, leaving the Colorado miners to fight on alone in what may be the ugliest strike in union history, she felt he and his organization were traitors to the whole union movement. She may be right about unions as they have developed their corporate structures in which administration is by career people rather than by actual union members. This is certainly true of the two unions to which I have belonged. And there is the very Republican woman who met John L. Lewis on a cruise and declared “Why, he’s just like one of us!”

The class warfare between the union movement and big business is the dominant theme in our country’s history from after the Civil War until the Roosevelt administration and WWII. But at the same time the federal government was becoming increasingly dominated by big business interests. I would estimate that from 60 to 80% of all federal legislation enacted from the middle of the 19th century to the Democratic victory in 1932 was for the benefit of business at home and overseas.

The most blatant expression of class consciousness was the development of a Social Register of 400 Families in the second half of the 19th century. And the very public display of their activities continued well into the 20th century. I grew up knowing as much about the activities of New York debutantes as I did about Hollywood’s stars.

We Idealistic Republicans existed in an uneasy tandem yoke with the Republicans who emphasized their wealth and privilege. The difference between us can be clearly expressed in how we viewed people who worked for us. They had `servants.’ We had `hired help.’ The `hired help’ may have put the meal on the table, but they also sat down at the table to eat it right along with the family.

While we sympathized completely with the unions’ work to correct the ugly abuse of the working man, at the same time union insistence on group power and group unanimity was deeply disturbing to us who held our individuality to be of paramount importance. In a way we have been and continue to be in a political limbo, not able to identify with those who wear the Republican party label today and not recognized by the Democrats as being other than those unreliable independent voters.

For Continental Europe and Britain WWI marked the loss of the old and the start of `modern times.’ For us this break with the past did not happen until after WWII.

Everything that has happened since belongs to our immediate history-- ’how the bad things happened” and the terrible problems we face today, both as a country and as part of the world.

US History- part 3

During the first half of the nineteenth century rising sentiment against slavery and the gradual expansion of the male electorate made the country appear to be moving in the direction of its founding ideals. (However, women, even those women of property were totally excluded from voting early in the nineteenth century.)

At the same time northern businessmen were building mills and operating them in a brutal manner. Looms for these mills were deliberately manufactured so that only children could get under the web to repair broken threads and oil machinery. (Isn’t it ironic that we have inherited both the worst employer/employee relations and the strongest expression of human freedom from our English forebears...)

The importance that organized religion has played throughout our history cannot be overemphasized. At one point of time or another every Christian church in the country, with the sole exception of the Quakers, has endorsed slavery, child labor, and segregation. And most recently we see Churches dividing themselves on issues of marriage and homosexuality. During the first half of the nineteenth century many Churches endorsed slavery and during the second half, many endorsed child labor by taking the position that it was better for children of the poor to be gainfully employed rather than running loose in the streets perhaps to become hoodlums.

The Quakers alone, from the beginning of our country, have been the only Christian group always concerned with justice. They were in the forefront of the fight against slavery in the first half of the century and took an active part in the so-called Underground Railroad though which so many runaway slaves found their way to Canada and legal freedom. And they continue today to fight for justice for the individual.

The Civil War was a nightmare from which our country still has not recovered. The destruction of lives and property and lifestyles was catastrophic for what had been its basic structure. In the south the strong moderate cultural life based on the leisure provided by slavery was totally eliminated. In the north small self sustaining farms were abandoned by the hundreds in favor of migration to the west and to larger mono-crop farms. And in what may well be one of the ugliest periods of our history, far too many northerners migrated south in an attempt to get rich quick in the chaos created by the southerners’ economic destruction.

Northern mill owners were quick to see the advantages offered by the south’s desperate need for economic survival. In what in this country was probably the first out-sourcing from a community of its jobs , many businessmen relocated their mills into southern states and when they did, also insisted on having children work the looms as they did in the north. Southerners had no problem with children laboring in agriculture, either on family farms or as slaves. But southern states which protested against this industrial use of child labor were threatened with the loss of a now desperately needed source of income for their people.

Hardly had the guns of war been silence when the Knights of Labor were formed by men from both the north and south “to fight the new civil war against industrial slavery.“

US History-part two

The men who were the organizers of our Revolution and the framers of our Federal Constitution, were men of property, well educated in the classical tradition of the time, and strongly Masonic. It has become the fashion to present them as petty, more consumed with their personal interests than with national policy. Of course they all had personal interests. But they were also very aware that what they had established as the philosophical basis of the Revolution and their determination to create a government for their new country that should never be a tyranny over its citizens represented something new in their world. And they did indeed create an anti-tyranny governmental mechanism to protect the states each of them represented and, once they added the first ten amendments, every individual citizen. The House of Representatives was based on population numbers to satisfy their very strong desire for no taxation without representation. Elections for Representatives every two years were to provide a fast change-over of representation, a means of peaceful change, without the need for the violence of another Revolution. The establishment of the Senate and the Electoral College was to prevent the big population states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania dictating law and policy to states with smaller populations. Both the Masonic connection of so many of these men, which made them deeply concerned to maintain religious diversity, and the persecution which their forebears had experienced resulted in their very strong prohibition against a state sponsored religion in our country. Although it was not written into the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence is the spiritual foundation of our country with its powerful statement both of the equality of all people and the importance of the life of each individual. The one flaw in this new government mechanism was the narrow base of participation. One had to be an owner of property to be a voter. The country should have been off to a splendid start. But from its very beginning there was a deep schism in our country. There were those men who believed in their extraordinary achievement and wanted to see us move into a truly classless society. I am proud that I am a descendent of people who have continued to hold this ideal. But there were also people who strongly resented this notion of universal equality, who felt that what had become the traditional hierarchical society was either godly or natural. Not surprisingly these were people of wealth. Until very recent times the Republican Party managed to contain both these groups.

US History-part one

I was taught in school that the Puritans came here for religious freedom. What happened was this.

North and south this country was populated by a number of hell-fire and damnation fundamentalist theocracies. They were not interested in freedom of religion for anyone but themselves and would not accept anyone into their communities who did not embrace their beliefs. They would pretty much have agreed with the Taliban’s religious precepts.

The middle colonies of New York and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were far more moderate in their public religious life. Maryland was chartered as the only Roman Catholic colony in the New World. Pennsylvania was settled by the Quakers, who have been a gentling influence in this country from the very beginning. New York and New Jersey inherited a less restrictive Protestantism from their earlier Dutch rulers.

All of these groups were either immigrants or invaders, depending on your take, because they came to a land already inhabited by a large indigenous population..

The Puritans, who are my ancestors, not only practiced an extremely rigid religion but were capable of great cruelty. For example, they gave Indians blankets that small pox sufferers had used, and apparently felt no twinge of conscience when the Indians fell sick and died.. And they suffered no dissent. Rhode Island was settled by the forced migration of a dissenting pastor and his parish.

But gradually eking out a livelihood became less precarious in the colony and life became more settled, These Puritans were farmers only of necessity. In England they had been middle class tradesmen, and their tradesmen genes began to surface. Trade with England was weighted too much to England’s advantage to be attractive. But there were all their fellow colonists to the south as a tempting market.

Only you couldn’t very well go into another territory and say “You people are all wrong about God. but I’d like to sell you something.”

You have heard the old New England maxim “What’s good for business is good for the country.”

This willingness to put `principle’ after trade brought about the loosening of the tight bonds of their religion and became the basis for the growth of a diverse New England culture. There were many prosperous traders who were able to pursue a classical education as good as any in Europe and who became Masons as a result. .

The moderate central colonies moved even more easily into prosperity and its accompanying development of a classically educated group of men than their neighbors to the north and south.

In the southern part of the country as slavery became more entrenched and large prosperous plantations became the economic unit, there also arose a group of highly educated men, many of whom became Masons.

These men were the organizers of our Revolution and the framers of our Federal Constitution. .