[Guess what happens when the government and power structure
forsake labor peace? Labor war. ] [[link removed]]

GUESS WHAT HAPPENS?  
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Hamilton Nolan
August 30, 2019
Splinter
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_ Guess what happens when the government and power structure forsake
labor peace? Labor war. _

, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

 

Inherent in the ridiculous human condition is the necessity that we
continually relearn lessons of the past, the hard way. Such is the
case today. Guess what happens when the government and power structure
forsake labor peace? Labor war.

Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board—the governmental body
charged with protecting workers’ rights—ruled that “Employers
don’t violate federal labor law
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misclassifying their workers as independent contractors instead of
employees.” Which is to say, they ruled that breaking law is not a
violation of labor law. This is only the most recent and most absurd
manifestation of what the NLRB has become under the Trump
administration: a body charged not with protecting the rights of
workers and unions, but with systematically dismantling the labor laws
that protect workers and unions.

That is not an exaggeration. This Republican-controlled NLRB, chaired
by a career anti-union lawyer
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sees its task as tearing down as many rules that help unions as
possible, and putting in place as many rules that hurt unions and
workers as possible. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. They
have made it easier for employers to kick unions out
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of their workplaces; they have gone after
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the rule that might allow fast food employees to bargain collectively;
they want to roll back
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the rule that allows grad students to unionize; they even want to
eliminate the right to use balloon rats
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They want to turn back time on labor law. The only thing that unions
can do is try to wait
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until the next election and hope that this NLRB gets kicked out.
Everyone, on all sides, knows that there is no fairness to be had in
the meantime.

There is no mystery as to why this is happening. It is happening
simply because moneyed interests are playing power politics. The Trump
administrations works for business interests and against workers; they
currently sit in the seat that controls the NLRB; therefore they use
their time trying to inflict the maximum amount of damage on organized
labor, because they imagine this will help them keep down labor costs
and increase profits. This is the entire calculation.

There is no thought of operating the NLRB honestly, and trying to rule
on cases based on the fairest interpretation of laws and precedents.
That is a fairy tale, and if you believe that this government operates
like that, they will laugh heartily at you behind your back. But even
if you understand power politics, and cutthroat capitalism, and
robotic profit-seeking with no regard for humanity, there is still an
argument to be made not to treat organized labor like shit. That
argument stems from wisdom, and history.  Two things the Trump
administration has not demonstrated much interest in.

The history of organized labor in America is bloody. It goes back more
than a century. It’s full of strife. Millions of workers on strike
in a year, the most dire forms of persecution, industries brought to a
standstill, private armies of strikebreakers, broken heads, murders,
lynchings, oppression. Over a period of many decades, what developed
was very tense sort of compromise. There never stopped being pro-labor
radicals, and there never stopped being pro-business radicals, but
what developed for millions of unionized workers and their
employers—particularly during the period from WW2 until the 1980s,
the very period that conservatives today hearken back to as a golden
age—was a sort of grand bargain in which prosperity was shared
widely, in exchange for labor peace. Employees would agree not to
strike during the length of their contracts, and in exchange,
companies shared the proceeds of their labor much more fairly,
providing them with the sort of lifestyles that quite literally built
the American middle class. That was the deal. The very, very short
version of labor history in America goes: utter oppression, then labor
wars, then labor peace in exchange for shared prosperity. Up until the
Reagan era, at which time right wing politicians and business
interests decided to start dismantling that grand bargain in earnest.
The war on organized labor resumed. And with it, economic inequality
again began climbing. And now it is just as high as it was before the
years of labor peace. And the dismantling of the overarching agreement
between business and workers continues.

More enlightened countries—including the European countries with the
world’s highest standards of living—have, in essence, arrived at
the conclusion that there will be organized labor, and it will be
granted power, and it will operate in concert with business and
government, and prosperity will be shared by all. Alas, this is not
the American version of capitalism. The American version of capitalism
is: class war that is being won by capital. Moneyed interests in
America do not want shared prosperity. They want everything for
themselves. This is the road they have been pushing us down for
decades. They found the bargain for labor peace to be too expensive
for their tastes. So they tore it up.

And here we are. It is nice to imagine that we live in a world where
we can come together as working people and fight for our rights on a
fair playing field, and the government will enforce fair laws to
protect us should they need to. But that is not the reality. The
reality is that the bosses have bought the umpires, and they’ve
rewritten the rules, and all of the above are now set against you, the
regular working person. That’s the state of play today. There’s no
use deceiving yourself, or pretending that things are better than they
are. Being ruthlessly realistic is the first step towards making
things better.

The things that we were given in exchange for labor peace—workplace
rights, wages that kept up with productivity, a fairer piece of the
pie—have been taken away. We are asked now for labor peace in
exchange for nothing. That’s not a very fair bargain. Why did the
labor wars of a century ago happen in the first place? Because it was
the only way. There was no fair outlet enshrined in law to deal with
the issues, so the issues were taken to the streets. That’s nothing
more than flowing water finding a path. Even the Gilded Age plutocrats
came to realize that peace is better than war, and that shared
prosperity is, all things considered, a cheaper proposition than the
alternative. Today, moneyed interests and the politicians they own
have forgotten that, or forsaken it by choice. Unions, and working
people, and you and me are losing, and every avenue for legitimate
redress of our grievances is being cut off, as part of a very
deliberate strategy.

Guess what happens when you forsake labor peace, in order to get
richer? You force the alternative. And everyone, everyone, has to get
more hardcore. Think about that on Labor Day. The government is not
coming to save us. There’s only us.

_Hamilton Nolan is Senior Writer at SplinterNews.com..
[email protected]_

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