*Worker Power* By Robert Reich
'Worker Power,' By Robert Reich, July 21, 2021.
Imagine a world where workers have real power. In this world, workers are paid a living wage, are protected by a strong union, and wield enough political clout to ensure Congress passes pro-worker laws. Corporations can’t treat them like robots and abandon communities to find cheaper labor elsewhere. It is a world of low inequality, where workers have a bigger share of the fruits of their labor. This world is America in the 1950s. This world was far from perfect. Black people and women were still second-class citizens. Windows of opportunity were still small or shuttered. That’s why it’s not enough to just go back in time. We must build upon it and expand it.
For the past 40 years, this world has been dismantled. The voice of workers has been steadily drowned out in both the workplace and on the national political stage by the voice of big corporations. This massive power shift wasn’t the result of “free market forces” but of political choices. Now, it’s time to make the political choice to strengthen the voice of all workers. Start with one of the biggest sources of worker power: unions. Every worker in America has a legal right to join a union free from interference from their employer – a hard-fought victory that workers shed blood to secure. But corporate America has been busting unions to prevent workers from organizing.
In Bessemer, Alabama, for instance, Amazon used every trick in the anti-union playbook to prevent its predominantly Black workforce from forming the first Amazon union. Most union-busting tactics are illegal, but the punishment is so laughably small that it’s simply the cost of doing business for a multi-billion dollar company like Amazon. In addition, 28 states now have so-called “right-to-work” laws. These laws ban unions from requiring dues from non-union workers, although non-union workers still benefit from these union contracts. This obviously makes it much harder for workers to unionize.
Corporations are also misclassifying employees as independent contractors and part-time workers, so workers don’t qualify for unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or the minimum wage, and don’t have the right to form a union. And corporations are waging political fights to keep employees off the books: Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies shelled out $200 million to get Proposition 22 passed in CA, exempting them from a state labor law cracking down on misclassification. It’s a vicious cycle: corporations crush their workers to protect corporate bottom lines, then use their enlarged profits to lobby for policies that allow them to keep crushing their workers – preventing workers from having a voice in the workplace and in our democracy...
Continued, https://robertreich.org/
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- Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric Was A Bitter Foe of Workers, HNN, 2020,
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/174491
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