The Closed Shop: Opening Doors
There's a great deal of discussion in the news these days about the "closed shop" versus the "open shop," and the supposedly onerous requirement of all workers in a company being compelled to join a union if the majority votes to join--or signs up by card check, which is easier for unions to arrange than elections. (Both are permitted by the NLRB.). Management, of course, thinks this is bad.
Some of us suspect it leads to democracy and prosperity. Let's think about it a little bit....
A body of workers in a business is a community, and as such has a right to form a polity, a system of governance--a universally acknowledged right of all peoples today, and one championed by the United States for over two hundred years. As in any enlightened, law-based polity, a vote taken by the majority of the workers to join a union should apply to all, just as the risks and benefits of that decision will apply to all. That is democracy. Otherwise, you will have either workers who are not protected by the union--a second class of citizenry, expressly forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, or a class of de facto privileged workers who are freeloading on the union.
Furthermore, business owners and managers retain for themselves the right to form associations, including cartels, to protect their interests; productive workers, the actual creators of wealth, also have, in this post-feudal era, what we consider the inherent and legal right to form associations to protect their own interests. Those interests, because of the transfer of the majority of the wealth productive workers create to the controlling class, are far more tender and exposed to injury than the interests of owners and managers.
Rights, of course, are not given; they are taken, as history shows. It is impossible to ignore the inevitability of conflict in the establishment of rights for productive workers in the face of opposition by owners and managers, who have seemingly evolved but little in spirit since the times when they were lords and stewards. In our own country, owners and managers have in the not too distant past (1910 to 1940) resorted to physical violence, casual murder, and even assassination in their efforts to prevent productive workers from forming associations that would rebalance even slightly the vast skewing of power to management. Indeed, the company towns of the early 20th century resemble nothing so much as the feudal manor estates of the justly-named Dark Ages.
At the same time, the shortsighted management practices of that era led us into the Great Depression of 1929, as similar (but glossier) practices have led us into the present Great Recession. It was the ascension of labor power, aided and protected by a semi-progressive government, that established the brilliant and pervasive American prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, when well-paid workers created the middle class and had enough money to churn the economy to a degree theretofore unknown in human annals--benefitting all.
But power corrupts, and owners and managers began, with the ascent of Ronald Reagan, the long-running Global War on Labor. Among their weapons are outsourcing, union-busting, open shops, and just plain propagandizing. The latter campaign includes, among other things, the repeated claims that unions inveitably exploitt workers (an astounding claim coming from management!), and the endlessly reiterated company rules--illegal under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935--that workers are prohibited from discussing their salaries with their colleagues, even off the job. (In America! What a travesty!)
In any case, according to ourdocuments.gov, the NLRB defines unfair practices as "such things as interference, coercion, or restraint in labor's self-organizing rights; interference with the formation of labor unions; encouragement or discouragement of union membership; and the refusal to bargain collectively with a duly chosen employee representatives." Management actions in all these categories are a common feature of the labor landscape today.
It would be comical, if it weren't so appalling, that businessmen constantly parade the spectacle of "corrupt labor bosses" as a red flag, when a Jimmy Hoffa is a veritable midget of corruption next to a Kenneth Lay, and the Teamsters union seems absolutely saintly when contrasted with Halliburton.
And the fact remains that labor power built the middle-class prosperity of the 'Fifties for which we are so nostalgic, while management power led us into a morass of debt, bankruptcy, worldwide recession--and a socialism for the rich, in which money was taken from hard-working wage-earners and given to billionaire brats who flushed it down the toilet playing God. The current Great Recession was brought about in part by forty years' suppression of wages--the value created by labor being thereby shifted to management. This was tempered only by an intemperate diffusion of credit, with the average person effectively prohibited from living off work, and consequently coerced into living in eternal debt.
I have perhaps been unjust in accusing businesses of tasting the forbidden fruit of "socialism," which in reality is founded on public ownership of the means of production--there are other systems that redistribute wealth. In fact, capitalism does so, redistributing it from those who create it to those who have connections, that is, the owning and managing classes. But the system the modern American corporation most resembles is Stalin's version of communism: for is not the typical corporation a centrally-planned top-down bureaucracy, with a supreme leader, a (usually) rubber-stamping Politburo, and a strict hierarchy through which orders trickle down, never up? And after all, if you don't do what you're told and dress in the uniform, you will be exiled to the Siberia of actually working for a living.
Dissent is not permitted, and vocal deviation from the political liturgy of Capital is a punishable offense. The corporation has nothing to say against even the most venal of labor unions, whose leaders are, after all, still elected, not appointed.
Add to that the environmental horrors corporate activities are imposing on the world--with the failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, which would have destroyed labor and environmental protections worldwide, the corporate cabal has had to address its "concerns" piecemeal, country by country lobbying to ensure that the poorest of the world stay sufficiently poor, and the dirtiest manufacturing practices sufficiently dirty, to keep their income-redistribution plan operating at fever pitch, padding their already bursting pockets with other peoples' earnings at the expense of an entire planet's posterity.
Not so long ago, here in the US, it was a literal cabal, National City Lines, that spent twenty years and millions of dollars buying up and destroying rail-based urban transit systems, to make sure "free" Americans had no choice but to buy cars and redirect their tax dollars from community (libraries, schools, and so forth) to the roads on which GM's cars could burn Standard's oil, both polluting the air. Not incidentally, this also destroyed the commons where citizens once met and determined among themselves the life they wished to build--the square, the train, the bus, the sidewalk, all often gone nowadays.
In a land of drive-time hate radio beamed directly to isolated motorists alone in their metal cells, the union, imperfect as it may be, may be the last bastion of American democracy and traditional community.
Indeed, if the presence of occasional corruption among union leaders were an argument against permitting labor organization, then the corporate structure, which nourishes far more pervasive and far profounder corruption, would have to be outlawed first.
How does any of this support the concept of the closed shop, where even those who voted against unionization may be compelled to join a union at their workplace? Is that not an abrogation of freedom?
Indeed it is, and a necessary one, one that forms the underpinning of democracy.
All polities, of whatever stripe (except some libertarian structures) conclude that with acceptance comes obligation--even anarchists (real anarchists, not the theatrical mask-wearing fellows who throw bottles at cops during demonstrations and manage to get the guy next to them arrested) agree that a vote is binding upon all members of the community. What makes democratist polities different is that the choice is made by the people, after discussion, and not imposed upon others by self-appointed leaders. In a democracy, leaders are elected by the people, after proving themselves against open challenge; thus it is as well with regulations and procedures. This is accepted (if often superficially) almost everywhere.
In Los Angeles, for example, the people recently approved, after it faced open challenge, a proposal to increase the sales tax slightly and use the money to augment mass transit service in the county. Now that the proposal has been approved by the people, anyone making a purchase in the county must pay this tax, including those who voted against it. That is the agreement of democracy. And the mass transit improvements benefit all, even those who never step on a bus or train, even those who are only visiting the county from elsewhere, since those who do step on the bus or train are not jamming the roadways with their cars, fouling the air with their exhausts, or requiring expensive roadbuilding and road maintenance projects to support their cars. (One bus at average loading replaces 33 cars; one of LA's Red Line trains at average loading replaces over 500 cars.)
In fact, cities that have made mass transit free have seen such increases in ridership, and such consequent decreases in the need to spend public money on road construction and congestion mitigation, that they have made an overall profit on the free ride programs, though of course the transit system in isolation showed a loss.
In the bigger picture, laws promulgated through the people's representatives are to be obeyed even by those who disagree with them, whether they be a requirement to pay income taxes or a proscription against robbery or murder, and are to be changed through the normal processes of democratic governance.
Likewise, union membership benefits all workers in a company; therefore, once the population of workers has voted for a union, all should be required to join, so that the burdens of union membership, like the obligations of democracy, are spread among all the beneficiaries of union struggle. (When it's not beneficial, workers of course have the right to vote again and throw the bums out.)
In other words, in the United States, the workplace is not exempt from democracy; the Constitution's strictures apply to all who stand within our borders. If we are ever, in this country, to remake our cities large and small into the communities they once were, instead of the agglomerations of powerless suburban serfs most of them have become, we will need labor democracy to lead the way for us. Unions can bring back to the people the power we once had to choose and to direct our own real lives, and power to gain the fullest value possible from our own work and our own actions, on and off the clock.
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