posted December 20, 2005 01:12 PM              

There are certain laws on the books that are designed not just to accomplish what they seem targeted for, but to actually undermine other things. Call them "superlaws" because they actually affect all sorts of other statutes and policies – and most often, these superlaws are designed to screw over workers.
Take America's "free" trade laws. Sure, we have minimum wage, environmental, workplace and human rights statutes on the books here at home. But because our trade policy provides no financial disincentive for companies to pick up and go to countries that don't have those laws, our trade policy serves to undermine all the protections workers thought they had here at home. Try to seriously improve or even minimally enforce the domestic protections, and companies can just pick up and leave with no consequences at all, thus severely weakening the existing domestic statutes over the long-haul.

Today in New York City, we are seeing another one of those superlaws in action – a superlaw that undermines all of the laws that we are led to believe protect the right of workers to organize, form unions, and more generally fight for their economic rights. Appropriately, it is Bloomberg News that tells us "New York City plans to use a 1967 law that bans public employee strikes to force bus and subway workers back to work" after the city's transit workers' union voted to go on strike.

I'm not saying a strike is a desirable outcome either in New York or anywhere else. And I am no expert in whether what the transit workers are asking for is "fair" or "unfair" to the city – and I'm sure neither are many New Yorkers, as the media have, in typical fashion, provided near-wholesale anti-union coverage, as if this is a story of just people being inconvenienced in their commute to work, rather than a battle between thousands of hard-working, blue collar workers who sweep subways and a billionaire mayor and bought-off governor who have clearly never cared about workers or their demands for decent wages. You have to really dig deep into the coverage to find out that New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is sitting on a $1 billion surplus, and yet the city is trying to reduce wages/benefits for future transit workers.

But whether the unions demands are "fair" or not is not the real point here – the point is that superlaws like the 1967 statute being used to break the workers' strike undermine the entire concept of unions and workers' rights. Ask yourself a question: what is the one tool that ordinary, blue-collar workers have that can really help them assert economic power in a way that can minimally compete with the massive economic institutions (corporate/government) that run our society? The answer is ultimately through the threat of a strike – whether a strike happens or not. Without a union having the power to strike, they cannot threaten to strike and that means there is no real reason an employer should listen to any union requests, because the employer knows the union can't back up its requests with any consequences.

Workers ask for better wages? Sorry, says the employer, there are laws on the books passed by bought off politicians that say their union can't strike whether the employer considers the wage request or not. Workers want better workplace conditions? Sorry, says the employer, the union can't strike anyway so why should we meet any demands?

Remember – the right of workers to strike has been the battering ram for social progress throughout American history. You like the weekend? Thank unions and the right to strike for helping put work-week laws on the books. You like that living in a country that doesn't exploit child labor? Thank unions and the right to strike for solidifying an end to that practice. And the list goes on.

That's what these strikebreaking superlaws at both the municipal and federal level are really all about: stopping that progress because that progress threatens the power Establishment that benefits from economic stratification. These superlaws are deliberately designed by Big Money-backed politicians to further weight our entire economy towards huge economic forces, and against ordinary people.

Think about it – the only economic commodity an ordinary worker owns is their own work. They don't own capital assets, like factories, machinery, etc. They don't have corporate treasuries built from stock offerings. All they have is their own blood, sweat and labor. That's why the power to strike – to not work - is so important: because it is the only way a worker can convert their one economic asset – work - into an economic commodity to be given or withheld. And just like you can't play blackjack at a casino without first converting your cash into chips, workers cannot really hope to play in the economic game without being permitted to convert their work into a commodity.

Remember - employers have all sorts of commodities at their disposal, and certainly many more than workers have. For instance, they have cash to pay wages/benefits and that can be given or withheld. They also have bought-off politicians who can deploy legal weapons. We see that now in New York and we saw it back in 2002, when the Bush administration consulted with corporate lobbyists and then invoked the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act to bar dock workers from striking. These superlaws deliberately prevent workers from commodifying the only economic assets they have (ie. their work) while allowing employers to do whatever they want. That means workers are put at an impossible disadvantage, totally stripped of their leverage to bargain not just for wages, but for everything.

For proof that this is the case, just look at New York City's own firefighters - the guys who politicians love to have photo-ops with after they went into the burning buildings on 9/11 to save people. But because these same politicians bar firefighters from any form of striking - even limited - the firefighters have been forced to go three years without a contract. That's three years where New York City's firefighters have been precluded from having any leverage to bargain for their basic economic rights.

Let me be clear - I'm not saying government should not have the power to very briefly break strikes in absolutely extreme emergencies. But what's going on now with transit workers - especially at a time when the MTA is sitting on $1 billion - is far from an "extreme emergency." The same can be said when Bush broke the dockworkers strike, and the same can be said for countless other examples of strikebreaking. Government is abusing a superlaw reserved for emergencies with the specific goal not of preventing an emergency, but of screwing over and squeezing workers.

posted December 22, 2005 03:34 PM              

Once again, jail term and a hefty fine trumps conviction.