> On 3/10/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>> I have not finished reading Robert Fitch's Solidarity for Sale yet
>> (I have one more chapter to read), but one thing that the book
>> makes clear to me is that it is NOT true that even bad unions are
>> always better than no unions....
>
> yes, but it up to the workers themselves (with our help, if it's
> wanted) to fix this situation. Just as workers in Franco's Spain
> were able to use the existing system of government-run unions to
> improve their lot, worker here can and should use the existing
> structures to create real unions.
Turning to existing unions and trying to reform them from inside is not always the correct path. Sometimes, new organizations have to be created when the existing ones are not serving workers or even doing disservice to workers. Examples of such new structures that emerged in response to the existing unions' unresponsiveness are workers centers (for immigrant workers) and Farm Labor Organizing Committee (which would not have been necessary if United Farm Workers had been a functional union).
>> ... This point becomes clear in the chapter entitled "UNITE's
>> Garment Gulag," where Fitch compares union sweatshops in New York
>> (where workers' wages rarely rose to the federal minimum wage) and
>> non-union shops in California (e.g., American Apparel Co.) that
>> pay much higher wages ($13.00 an hour plus benefits on average in
>> the case of American Apparel Co.) than them.
>
> I haven't read Fitch (though I've ordered it for our library), but
> this comparison is quite fair. Labor-market conditions (including
> those outside of union control) differ between New York and
> California.
What conditions beyond the union's control exist in New York and California that should make sweatshops in the garment sector more numerous in New York -- the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour division showed that "UNITE shops in the city [of New York] were predominantly sweatshops -- three quarters of union shops were in violation of overtime, minimum wage, or safety regulations" (p. 192) -- than in California? What does it mean that many of the union shops do not even pay the minimum wage? What's the point of having a union in that case?
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>