Liberal Forum

You Hate "Right To Work" Laws More Than You Know. Here's Why"From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call brother or lose their jobs." Vance Muse, founder of the "right to work" anti-labor campaign...The Michigan GOP apparently blindsided everyone with the union-busting "right to work" laws they just rammed through the state. Certainly my labor friends were caught off-guard tactically by the Republicans speed and choice of battleground.For most of the county, though, the confusion has to do with what "right to work laws" are and why theyre so bad. You can see it written on the faces of the morning cable news hosts on CNN and even MSNBC trying to pretend like they know what "right-to-work" laws actually mean, flummoxed by the brazen Orwellian neologism of the phrase and sweating over the possibility that they might have to explain it. Lucky for them, and for most of the media establishment (and for the Koch brothers), few people even know what questions to ask about "right to work laws." All they know kinda is that theyre bad for unions, and that those unions seem to know exactly how bad things are about to get.Today, in most of America, unions have it bad. And part of the reason its bad is because we no longer know how to organize. Imagine trying to organize workers in your call center or warehouse, or your software gaming firm or your human rights NGO, as theyre doing at Amnesty International. The pressures against you from worker cynicism and colleagues fear of losing their jobs, to personal relations with your boss and superiors, the bills you have to pay, and simple questions like "how do I organize" and "how do I know I wont be screwed" not to mention the inevitable appearance of company snitches, provocateurs, and just run-of-the-mill [butt openings] and idiots... Im not even talking here about your companys ability to fire you, demote you, abolish your department, slash your pay, pretty much whatever the Hell they want ever since Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union... This is the lot of American labor organizers in 2012 , except for in a few remaining pockets of America where union power and memory is still strong and tightly woven into the local cultural DNA.Michigan is one of those places, which is why crushing labor power there would be as inspiring to the rightwing oligarchs who just got creamed at the polls as, say, the rise of the Tea Party was in early 2009.So yesterday, as Michigan Republicans pushed the bill into law, labor groups converged on the capital in Lansing. According to the BBC, "police in riot gear used tear gas to control tensions among a crowd [outside the Michigan statehouse] of more than 10,000 protesters." For a lot of (once)-middle-class Americans, its hard to reconcile that level of anger with something as dull-sounding as "right to work laws.""Austerity measures" are easier to fear: "austerity" is meant to sound scary and sadomasochistic. But "right to work" sounds dreary and almost redundant, like "right to pay bills."Thats until you start to understand the history of the "right to work" movement, the racist human hagfish who brought "right to work" into our lexicon and made it happen, and the far-right fascist oligarchs who made it worth their while. Once you meet a few of these cretins specifically, Vance Muse, the Karl Rove-meets-David Duke brains behind the whole "Right-to-Work" movement whom Ill introduce you to a little later in this piece youll understand why those thousands who converged on Lansing were acting like their state legislators just invited Count Dracula into everyones homes.In terms of understanding what just happened, it would help if we were back in the 1940s and 50s, when most liberals and establishment media used and understood the antonym, "union security" a descriptive phrase for the New Deal labor laws which finally gave union organizers a fighting chance, and saw the percentage of unionized workers in the US soar from single digits in the early 1930s to around 35% of the workforce by the mid-late 1940s.The "right-to-work" movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers "union security" as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West child labor wasnt even outlawed here until 1938.But nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers, massacres that are all but censored from the official history of this country. Maybe youve heard something about the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefellers mines in Colorado in 1913 but you probably dont know many of the details, like how Rockefellers private armed goons patrolled the miners miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as "enforcement of Colorados laws," the eight hour work day, and pay for time spent working. Or how the terrorized women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners.In the end, anywhere from several dozen to 200 were left dead. We dont know exactly and there hasnt been much effort on the part of our culture to find out. This "we dont know the death toll" marks just about all of the many killings and massacres of labor organizers and strikers in the pre-New Deal era.The same goes with the West Virginia mine wars: whether the massacre of tent city workers in 1913 by coal miner thugs firing from armored trains passing through the tent cities, or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when the company raised the largest private standing army in the US, and attacked strikers with gas shells fired from artillery and dropped from bombers. President Harding followed that up by sending in federal troops and the US Air Force led by Brig. General Billy Mitchell, and when it was over, the miners unionization drive was dead. Along with well over 100 workers and family members again, the exact number is "in dispute" as they say.The "Red Scare" of 1919-20 was aimed at breaking labor unions, and specifically at equating union security the "closed shop" where unionized companies and factories could require all workers to pay dues to the unions since they all benefited from union contracts with Bolshevism. In contrast stood the "open shop"where union membership was merely a "choice" strongly discouraged by employers with "Americanism." In fact thats what they called "right to work" back then: the "American Plan."The Palmer Raids of those years (where J. Edgar Hoover first distinguished himself) resulted in tens of thousands of Americans illegally rounded up, beaten, tortured, imprisoned without any due process, and deported by the thousands, citizens included. Big business coordinated their PR offensive with the Palmer Raids by labeling anti-union open shop laws "American Plan."After the 1929 crash, that euphemism became associated in peoples minds with the brutal pre-New Deal culture. So corporate America went back to their PR flaks to brand "open shop" with a new, less toxic-sounding euphemism. The phrase they came up with was "right to work," as if they were actually empowering workers with "individual liberty" by going after their unions.History shows us whats at stake here, and how far big business was willing to go to keep "right to work" or "American Plan" the national standard. Big business in America regarded the rest of the population and its labor pool much the same way colonial powers viewed the local Natives as inherently hostile, alien savages whose purpose was to enrich their masters, and who must not be given even the slightest concessions, such as child labor laws, lest it put ideas in their heads about "rights"...It was in this atmosphere that the ACLU really began as a defender of labor rights, when the ACLU equated civil liberties and Constitutional liberties with union organizing rights. Contrast that with todays ACLU, which supports Citizens United and corporate "free speech" in exchange for massive donations from tobacco firms and the Koch brothers, while focusing on high-profile culture war cases at the expense of labor.By 1930, labor unions were practically dead, considered a relic of the past by the media and academic elites. The Great Depression changed all that, in part because unlike today, back then Americans had no food stamps, no unemployment insurance, no state pensions, and of course, no child labor laws and no labor protections to speak of all the things labor unions are responsible for giving us today.From the Ford Motors massacre in Michigan in 1932, which left four workers killed and up to 50 wounded through the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre of striking Republic Steel workers in 1937, in which company thugs and cops killed 10 peaceful marchers nearly all of whom were shot in the back, and wounded 60 more, billyclubbing the wounded as they crouched in the dirt America was a savage and violent place to work if you werent rich.Hearings were held in the Senate, and the LaFollette Committee Report discovered that corporations not only operated armies of spies in the tens of thousands, but that "Republic Steel Corporation [responsible 1937 for the massacre] has a uniformed police force of nearly 400 men whom it was equipped not only with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, but also with more tear and sickening gas and gas equipment than has been purchased...by any law-enforcement body, local, State or Federal in the country. It has loosed its guards, thus armed, to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways," the Senate report observed.That was the arsenal controlled by just a single steel company.FDR leveled the workplace playing field some with the Wagner Act, for the first time making union security (closed shop) a reality. Labor union power and membership soared, as did wages and benefits; America suddenly had Social Security and unemployment insurance, child labor laws, a minimum wage, five day/40 hour work week, and within a few years, a powerful middle class.To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. They lost their full spectrum political dominance over their workers and over the political and judicial direction of the country, and all that essentially because FDR brought to an end Americas "open shop" culture and empowered unions with "closed shop" union security.But business vowed that one day it would have its revenge. And that revenge would be "right to work" laws.Read More at the link in the title.