Advancing Workers' Interests

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 2, 2012

All across the country, organized labor has become the whipping-boy for business groups and their political allies.  Wisconsin rolled back the rights of public employee unions while Indiana has passed a "right-to-work" law severely limiting unions' bargaining power.  Wisconsin's governor, Scott Walker, recently came to Springfield to deliver the message that Illinois’ financial problems are the fault of workers and their unions, receiving a rousing ovation from business groups.
              In contrast, business interests endorse the economics of the free market, arguing that businesses will grow and create jobs once they are freed from the restrictions of government regulations and the cost inefficiencies of unionized labor.

But to see how a free market works in reality, one need only look back a century.  In the early 1900s, American business operated largely unfettered by legal restrictions while governments and courts at all levels--federal, state and local--were dominated by pro-business politicians.

So what type of economy did this free market system create? To begin with, the typical work day in 1908 was nine and a half hours over a six-day week. Child labor also was commonplace, with children as young as six working in such industries as textiles and mining.

Moreover, the United States had the world’s worst industrial accident rate while no workers in the country were protected by effective workmen’s compensation laws. Over a twenty-year period in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, to cite one example, there was a monthly average of 328 railroad workers killed on the job.

Large-scale disasters occurred with frightening regularity. In Illinois coal mining, for example, 50 miners were killed in a 1905 explosion in Ziegler and 259 in a 1909 fire in Cherry. Or in New York City, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 women workers, some as young as 14, when employees were prevented from fleeing a burning clothing factory on the top floors of a ten-story building because management had locked the exits.

In such industries as lumber and mining, many workers were forced to live in company towns, in which a single company owned all the real estate, utilities, hospitals and businesses. Workers often were paid in company scrip, redeemable only in the company-owned stores.

The improvement of labor conditions in the last century directly reflects the growing power of unions to collectively bargain such issues as wages, hours and safety, and pressure government to pass laws protecting workers’ rights. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the U.S. Coal Commission reported, regarding conditions in southern Illinois mines:

When mining began . . . it was upon a ruinously competitive basis. . . . The life and health of the employees was of no moment. Men worked in water half-way up to their knees, in gas-filled rooms, in unventilated mines where the air was so foul that that no man could work long without seriously impairing his health. There was no workmen’s compensation law; accidents were frequent.

After the miners were unionized, the report continued, wages increased significantly, a workmen’s compensation law was passed and the “improvement in the working conditions was reflected in the appearance of the workmen, their families, their manner of life and their growing cities and public improvements.”

              Far from dragging the economy down, the growing prosperity of the American working class served as the basis of the consumerism that marked American life in the twentieth century. But it was prosperity borne of struggle. As historian George Rawick commented, “To the extent that American workers share in the goods produced by this society, it is the result of massive battles and continuous wars, going back over a hundred years, marked by violence, looting, destruction, strikes large and small, on a level that puts the record of any other major industrial country to shame.”

              But the deindustrialization that has accompanied the growing globalization of American corporations in the last 35 years has gutted the collective power of the American working class and created labor conditions overseas reminiscent of American conditions a century ago. Thus a 2010 fire in a 9^th-floor Bangladeshi garment factory making clothes for such American chains as Wal-Mart killed 24 workers, tragically echoing the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster.

              The American system is one of interest groups. It works largely for those who have some organization pushing their particular interests. Businesses constantly bring all sorts of organized pressure on government. Without unions, workers are left with no organization to advance their interests. And a brief survey of history shows how well that works.