|
Hard-won labor rights are well worth protecting
Friday, August 23, 2002
By MICHAEL HONEY
PROFESSOR
Nothing is more fundamental to America's conception of itself than the
freedom of speech and assembly. Unions, declared illegal in the early years of
the republic, have fought for those rights for three centuries. But unionists
have still not entirely won the most basic right: to organize at the workplace
and to protest bad conditions by refusing to work.
Ever since President Reagan terminated 11,000 striking air traffic
controllers, existing unions have been under attack and workers organizing on
the job have faced harassment and firing. The worker's right to freedom of
speech and action, won in the Wagner Act of 1935, has been nearly shredded.
The new political context makes the weakening of labor rights even more
alarming. After 20 years of smashing unions and massive profit taking by CEOs,
followed by tax cutting that has turned government surpluses into deficits,
workers are fighting back. But we will now undoubtedly be told that some unions
are too strong and we can't afford their demands.
Most worrisome, the Bush administration seems to have the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, and perhaps other unions, in its sights. Not
since Reagan has anyone threatened such a bold attack on unions as we are
hearing about during ILWU negotiations for a new contract with shippers.
Abrogating the right to strike through federal intervention, breaking up the
unified bargaining pattern of ILWU contracts or simply making unionists work at
the point of a gun all seem to be government options if ILWU workers are locked
out by employers or go on strike.
The administration's threat to use the law or troops to abort a longshore
strike before it even happens -- justified, as is everything else, in the name
of "homeland security" -- effectively undercuts collective bargaining.
It comes in the wake of chilling police violence against people protesting the
programs of global economic elites in Seattle, Genoa, Washington, D.C., and
Toronto.
A successful attack on the ILWU, we can be sure, would be another heavy blow
to the entire American labor movement and add a frightening new element to the
president's increasingly anti-democratic "war on terror."
The struggles of this particular union are especially important. In the 1930s
civil war over the battle for worker rights, police shot down longshore workers
in San Francisco when they organized and went on strike.
Yet, under the leadership of Harry Bridges, the ILWU turned abused and
poverty-stricken workers considered "wharf rats" into proud, well-paid
workers.
Its success opened up the right of workers to organize throughout the West
Coast region. The ILWU subsequently helped employers modernize the waterfronts,
maintained an independent stance toward government and sustained worker
democracy within its own ranks. It is a powerful union, and its members do very
well as a result.
Those gains can be wiped out, however. The government and even the AFL-CIO
itself nearly destroyed the ILWU by persecuting it during the Communist scare
and trying for some 20 years to deport Bridges as a subversive. The ILWU not
only survived, but also became one of the strongest unions in America. It is too
strong for the taste of George Bush.
I don't speak for unions, only for myself. But I think people today will not
be silent in the face of attacks on union rights, as too many were when Reagan
destroyed the air controller's union. Already, thousands of us have joined in
demonstrations all over the West Coast to support the ILWU's right to free
collective bargaining without government interference.
In the Pacific Northwest -- home to the free-speech fights of the Industrial
Workers of the World ("Wobblies") in Spokane, Centralia and Everett,
to the Seattle General Strike of 1919 and to the massive WTO protest of 1999 --
people are especially aware that upholding labor rights is at the heart of
maintaining and expanding democracy.
What happens on the waterfront, at Boeing or at any number of other labor
hotspots is important to all of us. Whether one belongs to a union or agrees or
disagrees with a particular strike, it is in the interest of the great majority
of us to protect hard-won labor rights.
Martin Luther King Jr. explained that there is no such thing as partial
freedom: Either you have it or you don't. As he told us, the right to organize
is "the right to protest for right."
If the government undercuts that right by chopping down one individual or
group, the rest of us will ultimately pay the price in lost liberties. King died
to protect labor rights, in a worker's strike for union recognition and better
conditions in Memphis. As we approach Labor Day, we should remember that we
can't afford to lose our labor rights, for without them we may also lose our
freedom of thought, speech, political action and other democratic rights.
Michael Honey is the Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies at the
University of Washington and a professor of labor and ethnic studies and
American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma.
|
