Solidarity: Preserving Dignity for American Workers
By Julie Taylor
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In today’s
political climate, where capitalism is revered as “God’s will” and CEOs are the
new high priests, the rights and dignity of the workingman are eroding
daily. It seems that every time you open
a newspaper there is another example of faith being broken with the
worker. Benefits are cut, salaries are
frozen and even long-standing pension agreements are revoked. This news is hard enough to swallow, but when
combined with the knowledge that top corporate officials’ salaries and benefit
packages are skyrocketing, it is like rubbing salt into the wound.
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According
to the AFL-CIO web site, Executive PayWatch, CEO greed is a great threat to
working families’ and their retirement security. The web site lists incredible examples of
corporate greed in salaries, and benefit and retirement packages. The CEO
with perhaps the most outrageous retirement package is Henry McKinnell, CEO of
pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which has a non-unionized work force and who leads
the Business Roundtable—a major backer of efforts to privatize Social Security. With a
$6.5 million annual retirement deal, he will not have to depend on Social
Security when he retires.
PayWatch points out that in 2005,
the average CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 top companies received $11.75
million in total compensation and there’s little if any connection between CEO
pay and CEO performance. A good example is Pfizer’s McKinnell. Pfizer’s stock price has dropped nearly 45
percent in the six years he has been in charge.
PayWatch has a database
of 1,500 CEOs and is searchable by company name, ticker symbol, industry
or total compensation. Here it becomes
obvious how the gap between the working man and top executives, who reap the
benefits of their labor, is widening at an unprecedented rate. We are now at
the point where thousand of workers could get health or retirement coverage for
what companies pay many CEOs.
To
see the good our labor unions do for all in this country and the need for them
in the future, all you have to do is look at their history and everything they
have made possible. Unions have been
instrumental in American history from the very beginning. Workers have always been the backbone of this
nation. Workers formed primitive unions, or guilds, in many cities in colonial
Worker’s rights, which
seem to be eroding, are not just rights we assume through common sense, they
are legislated legal rights. In 1914 Congress passed The Clayton Act which stated that "the labor of a human
being is not a commodity or article of commerce". This was a big step because it made workers
not subject to Sherman Act provisions.
The Sherman Act had been the legal basis for injunctions against union
organization. The Clayton Act legalized strikes and boycotts and peaceful
picketing. It dramatically limited the
use of injunctions in labor disputes. It was the "magna carta" of
labor law and the doorway to all the advances made since. However, in today’s political climate, due to
powerful corporate lobbying, injunctions are being more frequently used as
politicians interfere in labor disputes.
Therefore, labor unions are needed, and they need to be strong, to fight
this trend, or all the advances made over the last 200 years will be lost.
A
civilization is judged by the health, wellbeing and rights of the common
man. It doesn’t matter what the gross
national product of a nation is if that wealth is only distributed among the
top one percent of its citizens. The
whole concept of our
