Faculty Views: Unions Fight For Worker's Rights

I can hear the lilt of the nazm, the song of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, revolutionary Urdu poet: 'jab kabhi bazaar mein bikta hai'

Whenever the workman's flesh is sold in the market,
The blood of the poor flows in the streets, Something like a fire rises in my breast - do not ask! I have no control over my heart...

This is one of the songs that rises to my lips whenever I read of the conditions within which so much of our common humanity must live. And some of that lack of control over my heart comes from my implication in a system that seems to require poverty for the growth of corporate wealth. We live in a society in which the top 1% of the population owns 40% of all wealth, a sum that exceeds the wealth owned by the bottom 92% of the population. The exceptional growth of inequality happened for three reasons: changes in the tax code in the 1980s, speculation binges (in which capital went toward the financial sector rather than toward manufacturing), and vastly overpaid managers (the ratio between the highest and lowest worker is now 200 to 1). In the midst of this, we are incensed with the buying up of Washington, DC by what are called 'special interests.' A lazy population has not squandered democracy (just as poverty is not created by personal laziness). Democracy was assassinated by the plutocracy's assignation with wealth. My own position within the structure of US society seems to rest upon the poverty of many people. You are upset, some say. Give your salary away. Charity is the answer to our current social ills. Fine; give some money away. We all should do that. But to whom do we give our money? Should we give it to the panhandlers on the street, the homeless shelters, and the myriad social service agencies that barely stay above bankruptcy and that do the work once done by accountable institutions of the State? Doesn't charity, however, not deal with the fundamental problems of power relations, and doesn't it simply retain the unequal structures whilst allowing the poor to remain one step away from famine? Is this all our vast human imagination is capable of, especially given that we are endowed with centuries of wisdom on social justice?

'We live in a time when people are working too hard and are still in poverty, and communities and neighborhoods are crumbling because of it. We have to bring this into the daylight.' So says Father Gene Boyle who spends most of his time working alongside the United Farm Workers' campaign to improve the lot of California's strawberry workers. Charity is incomplete, since it does not disburse power to the masses, a hallmark of the democratic vision. Without an equitable distribution of power and resources, how can we expect to create the 'beloved community' of Martin Luther King, Jr., or else the kind of urban 'community' to which we, in Hartford, are pledged? Speaking of the struggles of workers at Sheperd Tissue in Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby County Commissioner Shep Wilburn argues that 'these workers' struggle is crucial to our efforts to preserve good, family-supporting jobs. The very future of our community as a good place to raise a family is at stake.' The very future, indeed, to live as democratic people.

In 1954, 35% of American workers belonged to a union. Today less than 14% of workers enjoy the benefits of a union. What are these benefits? The median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary work in 1998 were $659 (for union members) and $499 (for non-union workers). African American union members make 45% more than their non-union counterparts, and Latino workers find that the union difference is 54%. On the health care front, 85% of union workers enjoy benefits, whereas only 74% of non-union workers enjoy the same: the gap here is not as dramatic, a sign that unions must fight harder to win health care for their members. The advantage of a union cannot be questioned, except if one is prone to reduce reason and morality to the double entry account book. If money is everything, then perhaps we should cease our bad faith pretension that we are moral beings. With strong unions, perhaps the growth of inequality may have been resisted.

Given their lack of resources, those who belong to unions cannot get their message across to the rest of us. There are few that use e-mail and fewer whose words make their way into the mainstream media. We seem to bow down before the fatted calf of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and disregard the woes of the workers. The workers, to steal from Reverend King, 'write their most persuasive essays with the blunt pen of marching ranks. Nonviolent direct action will continue to be a significant source of power until it is made irrelevant by the presence of justice' (New York Times Magazine, 11 June 1967).

Faiz is back in my ear, with much to say. Does he say anything to you?