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Possibly the most important revelation from the National Alliance for Retired Americans' Legislative Conference September 4-7 in Washington DC came when AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard L Trumka and other speakers said that unions will challenge the conventional truths now propagated by right wing corporate spokespersons. Instead, the AFL-CIO and its retiree allies will fight back with a working people's ideology.
Since the Taft-Hartly anti-union bill was passed in 1947, or soon afterward, America's unions stopped challenging the way corporations run America and the excuses they use to cover their actions. Instead, unions have come to be seen as only interested in immediate wage and benefit gains. On broader topics such as the economy and international affairs, they have kept their peace. Challenges to the status quo have come from civil rights organizations, women, and community groups during 1947-2007, but not generally from unions. That time is past.
Long before Consultant Bob Muehlenkamp took the microphones, it was evident that the 600 seniors in the auditorium are ready to do something drastically different. More than half of the comments from the floor had to do with delegates' outrage over the continuing cost of the occupations of Iraq and Afganistan. Applause broke out virtually every time that any speaker mentioned drastic change in America's government.
Muehlenkamp said that unions were no longer going to content themselves by working in the areas of bargaining, organizing, and basic politics. These are the basis of the "3 legged stool" that has held up America's unions. Muehlenkamp said, "There's a fourth leg that has been missing for at least half a century. The AFL-CIO has not been engaged in the battle of ideas for half a century." He showed graphs such as the one above to demonstate that American corporations had changed radically since the mid 1970s. He said, "In the quarter century after WWII, almost everyone's income doubled. It was evenly distributed, except that the poorest got a little extra. But something very different happened in the last 30 years." The corporations' new attitude toward their workers was described as "YoYo," or "You're on your own!"
The AFL-CIO's new thinking is not only about what is happening, but why is happening. "What are the ideas that have justified all this?"
The political consultant used graphs and diagrams to show how the corporate message has "boxed in" our thinking. Later that evening, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka referred to the same approach. Here are some of the "sides of the box" that keeps us from seeing what is really going on while the corporations get rich:
The corporations want us to belive that outsourcing jobs to countries with lower wages and fewer environmental controls is a natural process that cannot be fought. In other words, it is a "force of nature" like rainfall, impossible to resist. In truth, the "gobblelization" pacts like NAFTA are secret deals between corporate representatives and sell-out politicians in our country and others. They conspire together deliberately against the workers and in favor of the corporations.
Someone somewhere came up with the ridiculous notion that government cannot do anything well, and that profit-hungry corporations can somehow do everything better. Like the "big lie" technique of the Nazis, it is necessary to repeat this nonsense many different times and many different ways to get anybody to believe it.
Under this restriction to our ability to think, it becomes the job of government to do everything for corporations and nothing for workers. Thus, the government takes action every time corporations might lose money, but never when workers are endangered. For example, the Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting apparatus is entirely at the service of corporations. They may even raise interest rates during an employment crisis, which would make it much worse, if corporate profits could benefit.
Perhaps the ugliest aspect of corporate ideology is that their drive for profits must always be encouraged, but our drive for decent livings should be treated with flexibility. Thus, the government tends to take actions that curtail the rights of organized workers, because only organized workers can successfully challenge corporate profits. What they call "flexibility" is nothing but fanatic anti-workerism!
The corporations have been so successful in putting their ideology into government policy that great shifts have taken place in the economy. The wealth that is produced by workers goes more and more toward the top elite. Corporate leaders make hundreds of times the salaries of their employees. So great has been the shift in incomes, Muelencamp said, that economists are now referring to America's workers as part of "the bottom 90%!"
AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka spelled out labor's responsibility toward the
corporate ideas that box in our thinking: "Our job is to tear down the
walls of that box!"
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