Will American Anti-Labor Policies Infect Europe?
By Dave Johnson, Campaign for America\'s Future
Posted on February 16, 2012, Printed on February 18, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/789834/will_american_anti-labor_policies_infect_europe
I want to send a warning to working people in Europe: when you let your
businesses save money by mistreating workers in other countries, it might
teach them to think they can save money by mistreating you, too. Over here
in the US we have learned this the hard way. We entered into "free trade"
agreements that enabled our businesses to take advantage of exploited labor
in countries like China, and the plutocrats used that as a wedge against us
here to drive down our wages, get rid of our benefits and break our unions.
Now your own business leaders are taking advantage of eroded labor rights
here, and if you let them get away with this they will want to bring these
working conditions back to you.
Recently in the post Democracy V. Plutocracy, Unions V.
Servitude<
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012010426/work-hard-job-today-or-work-hard-find-job-tomorrow>
I
described how American companies use China as a wedge to drive down wages
and labor rights here,
The threat is in the air: "Shut up and take the wage cuts or we will move
your job to China."
... Workers in countries like China where people have no say have low
wages, terrible working conditions, long hours, and are told to shut up and
take it or they won't have any job at all. They are given no choice.
Increasingly workers here have their wages, hours, benefits, dignity cut
and are told to shut up and take it or their jobs will be moved to China.
Because we are pitted against exploited workers in countries where people
have no say, we have no choice.
The unions are weakened, the government doesn't enforce or weakly enforces
labor laws and regulations, age, gender or race discrimination laws, worker
safety laws, so workers are placed in a terrible squeeze. Workers who try
to organize unions are isolated, moved, smeared, fired, humiliated,
whatever it takes.
In countries like Germany workers are still paid fairly well and have
benefits and rights. Here our pay, benefits and labor rights have eroded
terribly. This is the result of American companies using exploited labor in
countries like China as a wedge to force concessions at home. Can the same
chain of events attack wages, benefits and unions in Europe? Last May,
Harold Meyerson’s LA Times op-ed, The U.S.: Where Europe comes to
slum<
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/15/opinion/la-oe-meyerson-europeans-20110515>,
described how European companies come here and behave like American
companies,
… slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of
Europe's leading companies, and they often do things here they would never
think of doing at home. These companies — not banks, primarily, but such
gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens,
and retailers such as IKEA — increasingly come to America (the South
particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their
eyes, we're becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher,
but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer
strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.
… The auto companies of Europe and Japan have opened factories in the
nonunion South over the last couple of decades. Not one of them has agreed
to refrain from waging a union-busting campaign should their workers wish
to organize. Their stance could not be more different from their attitude
toward workers and unions in their home countries.
Meyerson describes the kinds of anti-union, anti-worker things these
companies are learning how to do,
As a report released by Human Rights Watch late last year documents,
companies that routinely welcome unions, pay middle-class wages and have
workers' representatives on their corporate boards in Germany and
Scandinavia have threatened their U.S.-based employees with permanent
replacement by other workers as the penalty for protesting wage cuts (that
was the German manufacturer Robert Bosch), ordered workers to report on
fellow workers' pro-union activities (that was T-Mobile, a subsidiary of
Deutsche Telekom) and disciplined workers who couldn't show up for
unscheduled weekend shifts announced on Friday night (that was IKEA,
according to an L.A. Times story).
T-Mobile’s Anti-Union Efforts
Here is an example. Germany’s Deutsche Telkom is trying to turn their
wholly-owned subsidiary US company T-Mobile into a low-wage, low-benefit,
union-free dumping ground. Is this an effort to ultimately bring these
tactics back home to break Germany’s unions?
This is how T-Mobile is operating now: In May T-Mobile workers in upstate
New York filed a petition for a union election. Over the next three months
management used anti-union “isolate and pressure” tactics to erode support.
Instead of letting the workers decide for themselves if they wanted a
union, they contested the effort and brought in a “union avoidance”
specialist firm.
The company used excuses to delay the election, and launched a propaganda
campaign, making the workers hear a constant barrage of reasons to suspect
union motives, suspect the benefits the union promised, and other reasons
not to vote for a union. They were repeatedly required to leave their job
to attend meetings and conference calls, on company time, where they were
lectured, given misinformation, told they would lose benefits they current
had, that unions would make them pay $5,000 in dues every year, told again
and again that the union was lying, that union organizers were only telling
them things to get bonuses, told they must not ever talk to each other
about the union on company time and that if they voted for a union the
company would have to eliminate their jobs and contract out the work
instead. After enough of this the workers withdrew the election petition.
The Sheer Weight Of This Wears You Down
When regular people who are just doing their jobs, who work hard and get up
in the morning and go home tired and don’t make a lot have to face constant
tactics of daily pressure by management, constantly being told that unions
are evil and “unions bosses’ and “union thugs” are trying to trick them,
and they are put under tactics that isolate them from being able to discuss
what is true or not, finally the sheer weight of all of it together can be
too much.
Again and again when workers try to form a union they are up against these
tactics. Management repeatedly calls meetings where they give
professionally-crafted propaganda speeches about all the terrible things
that will happen if workers vote for a union. If a worker has the courage
to stand up and talk about the good reasons for a union, they are excluded
from future meetings and isolated from the other workers. (This is when a
company stays legal and doesn’t just fire people who favor a union – not an
uncommon tactic and it takes years for the company to be penalized for
illegal firings, if it ever is.) In these situations management completely
controls the message and keeps workers from hearing the other side.
Typical Here, Outrageous There
This all sounds normal to American workers, because this is what American
companies do. This is what workers regularly face when they try to organize
to make their workplace better and safer and get things like sick pay,
decent wages and some benefits. We have sort of become used to this kind of
treatment here. In America we have gone from 30% to 7% union membership
because companies are allowed to fight unions, and routinely do things like
this.
But T-Mobile is wholly owned by a German company. Germany respects workers
rights and German workers would be absolutely shocked if they understood
that a German company was doing this to workers. They would be shocked to
even see a company try to stop a union – why would a good company want to?
Will American Anti-Labor Policies Infect Europe?
So here is the question for European working people to ask. Will Europe let
the US be their China? American companies learned to use China as a weapon
against workers here. Will European companies bring American anti-labor
practices home as a weapon to break down European worker rights and living
standards?
Will European companies learn to use American anti-labor practices against
European workers? Or will European workers stop this in time? If you think
this sort of thing can’t happen in Europe, just look at what is happening
to Greek workers right now.
US workers are threatened with having to do things like China does them in
order to compete. Will German workers be threatened and told things have to
be like the US? Will they tell that German public that their policies need
to be more “Business
friendly?”<
http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012020715/china-very-business-friendly>
So this is a warning to European working people. Pay attention to what your
companies are doingin the US. You really don’t want them learning to
operate the way a lot of US companies operate, or your own wages, benefits
and even your jobs could be on the line – like ours are here.
**
© 2012 All rights reserved.
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Received on Sat Feb 18 2012 - 09:27:59 EST
