Why America still needs labor unions.

            “The only way Ford’s gonna be competitive globally is if it crushes that damn labor union,”

            I sat bolt upright, hardly believing my ears. 

            “what?! You blame the unions for the failures of the ailing American corporatocr—,” I started to responded, but was quickly silenced by my father’s swift kick at my leg under the table. 

I had already had misgivings about attending such a self-congratulatory, elitist function, but my parents had convinced me that it would be unpalatably disrespectful for me to turn down the Optimist Club Youth Award.  As such, I found myself, at the ungodly hour of 7:30 in the morning, sitting with several other winners and some representatives of the Optimist Club, vainly trying to keep from nodding off as their conversation languidly moved from golfing to the “Optimist Creed” and to which were the nicest restaurants in the Birmingham area (a rich suburb of Detroit).  The rabidly anti-labor comment that had finally pulled me from my stupor came from a particularly botox-ed Optimist Clubber and fulfilled my stereotype of the bourgeois “liberal” more than even the most biting DRUM Black Power anti-capitalist cartoon.  Needless to say, last fall when I was surprisingly given the same award again, I politely turned it down and have had no encounters with the Optimist Club since.

Sadly, however, I could not avoid Botox-man’s venomous comment quite as easily.  As offhand and absurd as this undisguised condemnation of one of the nation’s largest labor unions was, it seems indicative of the method of the contemporary anti-union discourse.  The ignorant Trust-Fund man who happened to present this opinion was hardly the first to do so; simply the most blatant and un-circumspect in a long series of anti-union pro-corporate globalization pundits.  Indeed it seems that American unions have been figured as isolationist, reactionary entities attempting to block the inexorable motion of corporate globalization; selfish organizations that prevent further development and job creation in the poorest parts of the world.  This, of course, could not be further from the truth.

As Co-president of my school’s Amnesty International chapter, I chose to focus on “Human Rights and Economic Globalization” as our human rights topic for this year.  Throughout the year we have tried to educate our teachers and fellow classmates about the oft-brutal realities of a globalization that takes no account of worker’s safety, living wages or human rights.  In our first newsletter of the year, I wrote:

Economic globalization is basically the increasing trend towards economic interdependence across national boundaries- it is a term that describes investment by wealthy foreign companies in under-developed or developing countries in order for the companies to develop and exploit the cheap labor markets and untapped natural resources of such countries- it is a term that explains why the white undershirt you’re wearing right now was made in Honduras or why your pants were made in Cambodia.  Economic globalization and foreign investment can bring new jobs and capital to the poorest of countries, but it can also undermine the fledgling local economies of such developing nations while circumventing the hard-won labor and environmental rights in place in late capitalist nations.  In fact the entire concept of a foreign owned corporation- a corporation run by fabulously rich white men who are only investing in a given community because they believe they can turn an often short term profit there- a corporation with very little accountability and with influence and power matching its vast wealth- seems to lend itself to the dehumanization of local peoples and the violation of their basic human rights.

So, our group tried to educate our community about the awful consequences of economic globalization both to our own local Detroit economy—an economy highly dependant on the jobs that are now being lost by the rapidly outsourcing automobile industry—and the developing nations who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of globalization.  Indeed, we concluded that the current model of economic globalization was designed by and for a corporate elite and the most effective counterweight to these greedy corporations were unions. 

            American unions are on the front line of the battle against the outsourcing that throws decent workers out of jobs they’ve worked much of their life.  Unions channel the power and protest of workers in the face of a vicious free market ideology that places the capital accumulation by the super-rich above all other considerations.  Unions educate workers about the reasons corporations give for outsourcing, and expose these reasons for what they really are—hollow excuses for more corporate pocket-lining.  Even beyond the context of economic globalization, labor unions continue to be a bastion of workers rights.  Unions fight for workplace safety, good health care, pensions, and respect at the workplace.

            However, America, and the world, also needs labor unions to fulfill a purpose that they have largely failed in thus far.  Labor unions must understand that corporate globalization will continue unless they are able to organize effectively in a transnational setting.  American labor unions must look over the Mexican-U.S. border and see that maquiladora border factories, the terrible offspring of NAFTA, exploit cheap labor and offer only unbearable working conditions; they must recognize that the conditions in Mexico and elsewhere around the world are rife for unionization and must support grassroots efforts at labor organization in such places.  Only if the workers of the world can unite in unions can the current model of economic globalization be replaced with a more egalitarian and humanist model of global development.