[lbo-talk] Solidarity for Sale: UNITE'S Garment Gulag

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Mar 9 22:30:28 PST 2006


Jim wrote:


> right. But it's up to the workers to decide such matter.

Those who write about unions -- there are academics and journalists who do so -- have an obligation to tell the truth about them: good, bad, and ugly. Otherwise, they do disservice to workers, too, albeit in an indirect way, by making facts unavailable to workers who need them. One of Robert Fitch's contentions is that labor writers tend to see and portray unions through the rose-colored glasses, filtering out facts that contradict their positive view.


> I don't know enough about the two cases to say anything. But the
> higher the minimum wage and the better the available public
> assistance, etc., the easier it is for a union to do its job. (I
> don't know how these differ between states.) Fitch's comparison
> should have been union vs. non-union (or union #1 vs. union #2) in
> the same general labor market, not in different markets. Maybe his
> book does have this kind of comparison.

Generally speaking, when and where union shops predominate, they can set the standard for the rest. i.e. non-union shops. The New York example that Fitch uses is one such case: "In Chinatown, where most shops had union contracts, 90 percent of the factories were in violation of federal wage and hour laws" (p. 191). In this case, the union is setting a standard, or more precisely. a bad standard for non-union shops by allowing factories to violate federal laws in union shops, which is the OPPOSITE of what unions are supposed to do (set a higher standard than the federal minimum).


> Doug:
> > Unions tend to reduce pay discrimination. I.e., they're not so
> > important to white men, but they do raise the relative wages of
> > nonwhite men and women of any hue.
>
> I haven't kept up with the literature, but I thought that
> conclusion applied to industrial-style unions, bot not to craft
> unions. However, things may have changed.

And then, there's a fundamental problem of touting "union difference" (at <http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/why/uniondifference/

>) uncritically, which Fitch attacks as well. As Sam Gindin notes, "[W]orkers and unions who get too far ahead of other workers when the situation favours them will inevitably get in trouble when the winds change. Workers in leading sectors will eventually be dragged down if other workers are being pushed to the margins. Progress for workers has to be generalized or those gains will be vulnerable to reversal" (at <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/gindin151105.html>). This becomes especially clear in the current round of employer demands for concessions in health care and pensions.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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