Blog

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Kosher abuse
In May, when immigration officials raided the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and hauled out 389 undocumented workers, the news was all about immigration violations, but now the focus is on the employer, Agriprocessors Inc.
That’s because it turns out that while purportedly giving ritual consideration to the animals to be slaughtered, Agriprocessors failed to treat with dignity, or legality, the teenagers, and children, some as young as 13, in its employ. The 57 adolescents, some working 17-hour shifts, six days a week, testified to wielding knives and other dangerous tools prohibited for young workers.
The Agriprocessors incident raises difficult questions in the Jewish community. If meat is denied the kosher label because the animal does not die within seconds of precise slitting, is it kosher when the 13-year-old child who processed it was illegally hired, worked a 17 hour day and was refused overtime pay? What if a 16-year-old undocumented youth, who put in 17-hour shifts, six days a week, leaving no time for anything but work and sleep, said in an affidavit, “I felt like I was a slave?”
These violations happened in Iowa, but they occur elsewhere as well, for a simple reason: the Wal-Mart mentality. 

Soulless corporate mindset

We have allowed that soulless, unpatriotic global-corporate mindset to control government policy. As a result, the rich have gotten richer while the middle class has paid the bill and gone bankrupt. The great builder and protector of the middle class, collective bargaining, has been eroded by deliberate corporate actions over the past quarter century. Meanwhile, the national debt has increased; inflation and unemployment are up, and foreclosure signs mar every neighborhood.
Corporate lobbyists secured from compliant politicians so-called free trade agreements that have resulted in the loss of millions of good paying, often unionized manufacturing jobs. Those jobs have gone to third-world countries where investigations have shown workers often labor long, grueling hours and are not even paid their own countries’ minimum wage. Then their products are shipped back to the U.S. to be sold at cheap prices at Wal-Mart by workers who are paid less than a living wage and are denied full-time status and health insurance.
What comes around, goes around in the Wal-Mart world. When uninsured Wal-Mart workers get sick, American taxpayers foot the bill. They pay for coverage through Medicaid, the health insurance plan for the poor. That’s what the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, banks on. Literally banks on. When American taxpayers step up and pay for half of all Wal-Mart employees’ health care, that certainly helps the Waltons stay among the 25 wealthiest families in the world.
Wal-Mart workers would benefit tremendously from forming a union. Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers, and they are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance. The same goes for those workers at Agriprocessors. If they had a union, it could file grievances over the hiring of children, against unpaid overtime and about unsafe working conditions.
In surveys, more than half of U.S. workers, nearly 60 million, say they would join a union immediately if they could. But they don’t get that opportunity under the current Wal-Mart mentality global-corporate system. The political system has been stacked against collective bargaining. Global corporations hire “union busters” to intimidate, harass and fire workers who try to organize unions. Workers are fired in a quarter of the campaigns where workers try to organize unions at private companies. Even when workers successfully form unions, they can’t get a first contract 44 percent of the time because companies refuse to bargain meaningfully. 

Employee Free Choice

There is a solution for this problem. It’s called the Employee Free Choice Act. It would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain. It would allow workers to create unions by collecting signatures from a majority of workers. As it is now, a company can demand an election for a union. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers may have an election if they want one, but the signatures are sufficient in most cases. This puts the workers in control of their union instead of the company.
The Employee Free Choice Act also would increase penalties for companies that intimidate and fire employees trying to form unions. And it would establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and the workers cannot agree on a first contract.
The Employee Free Choice Act has bipartisan support in Congress and polls show it is backed by two-thirds of the American public, including Republicans. It passed easily in the House last year, but in the Senate got only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to stop a Republican filibuster.
Fearing the Employee Free Choice Act could win in the Senate if a few more Democrats secure seats there in the fall elections, Wal-Mart took action in recent weeks. Obviously, Wal-Mart fears that Employee Free Choice means less money for the Waltons, and more free choice for its employees.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Wal-Mart executives began indoctrinating thousands of store managers and department heads about what the company claims are the evils of unionization in an attempt to get them to vote Republican. These managers told reporters that the executives informed them that workers would be forced to pay large amounts of union dues and get nothing in return and be obliged to go on strike and get no compensation.

Contracts like CEOs

Apparently the nation’s largest private employer failed to mention that a portion of union dues goes into a strike fund to provide money for workers who vote to strike. In addition, what workers get for union dues is a contract, guaranteeing them certain salaries and benefits – like the contracts CEOs demand when they are hired by boards of directors.
All of this from a company that flies rapid response teams out to any of its more than 5,000 Wal-Mart stores worldwide to quash brewing union activity.
Global corporations like Wal-Mart have hired the likes of Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and Employee Freedom Action Committee, run by former tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman, to blockade the Employee Free Choice Act. They are trying to make big business out to be David in this David and Goliath struggle, although it is union membership that has shrunk to David size over the past half century. Since its height in 1953, when 35 percent of workers belonged to unions, membership has now fallen to 12.1 percent.
A big part of the reason for that is constant harassment by big business. Let’s go back to Agriprocessors. Three years ago, Human Rights Watch investigated working conditions in the meatpacking business and found, among other things, that companies often use illegal tactics to crush union organizing efforts. The report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” says that when workers tried to defend themselves against harsh working conditions by forming unions, employers used fear and intimidation to stop them. “U.S. law does little to protect workers who try to organize. Enforcement efforts drag on for years, and even decisions that favor workers are usually too little, too late,” report author Lance Compa wrote.
He offered this example: At the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., management fired union supporters, threatened plant closure, stationed police at plant gates to intimidate workers and orchestrated an assault on union activists. When the National Labor Relations Board ordered a new election, Smithfield immediately appealed. In 2000, Smithfield created a company security force that under North Carolina law had public police powers. In 2003, it used trumped-up charges, Compa said, to arrest workers who were active union supporters.

Human rights

The meatpacking industry chooses to use undocumented workers, Human Watch found, because they are easily intimidated. As in Agriprocessor, immigration officials will swoop in and take away a large chunk of a meat packing work force at the drop of a quarter in a pay phone. Human Rights Watch found that some employers use this ability as a threat against undocumented workers who are trying to organize unions.
In addition, what employers like Smithfield and Agriprocessor have up their sleeve is a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying that undocumented workers who are illegally fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay for lost wages.  
Despite all of Wal-Mart’s money and conniving, on rare occasions, a union organizing effort wins. And then, the global giant responds by shutting them down.
In 2000, when the United Food and Commercial Workers finally organized a small number of butchers in East Texas, Wal-Mart immediately phased out butchers at all of its stores and stocked prepackaged meat. Similarly, when a store in Canada voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed the whole store, contending it had been unprofitable.
This really comes down to a moral issue, just like it does for Jews who question whether meat processed by child laborers in abusive, illegal conditions is really kosher. The question for this country is whether it is moral to allow continued rule by Wal-Mart mentality, with its cheap imported wares of dubious safety manufactured under questionable conditions in foreign countries, then imported and sold in stores by American workers paid less than a living wage and denied health care and the right to organize a union.
Restoring workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively would protect them against the kinds of abuses alleged Agriprocessors. And it would begin to rebuild America’s great middle class as well as re-establish one of our country’s fundamental liberties: the right of free association. 

By Leo W. Gerard

International President

Lies, traderous lies and statistics

In the free for all Twenty-First Century, it all sounds terrific – free markets, free trade and free commerce. But really, it’s lies, traderous lies and statistics.

The d in trader is deliberate. This is about the sleight of hand billed as free trade.

We’re constantly told it’s a win-win. In 2000, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, for example, a former president said that exports to China already supported hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and this figure would grow substantially with the new access to Chinese markets that the WTO agreement would create. Politicians also promised the U.S. would benefit from exports to the rapidly growing consumer market in China.

The opposite, however, has occurred: China has exploited the U.S. consumer market while U.S. companies have been restricted to selling to China bulk goods such as grains, scrap, and chemicals, some intermediate products such as semiconductors and some durable products such as aircraft.

The China trade promises were snake oil.

The Economic Policy Institute released a study Wednesday revealing what happened to American jobs since China was admitted to the WTO. Between 2001 and 2007, 2.3 million workers lost their jobs or were displaced because of trade deficits with China.

Annual earnings lower

Annual earnings for all U.S. workers without a college degree are $1,400 lower because of competition with China’s low-wage workers and because China now accounts for such a huge percent of all of our imports. Displaced American workers, who did find new jobs, lost an average of $8,146 a year in earnings each. That is $156 less each week to use to feed the kids, to pay the mortgage, to meet the car payments.

Coincidentally, on the very same day EPI released its report, talks in Geneva, Switzerland to open global markets even further collapsed as China and India refused to allow free trade when it came to their own agricultural products. Both countries wanted to impose or raise tariffs on imported agricultural goods to protect their indigenous farmers.

Remember, it is for the most part, bulk goods, such as agricultural products, that the U.S. is exporting to China. A sticking point in the negotiations, for example, was soybeans. U.S. trade representative Susan C. Schwab had agreed that China could increase tariffs on soybeans in 8 of every 10 years, and still China walked away from the Geneva talks.

So here is the question: how can this relationship possibly be called free trade when China wanted to impose tariffs on our soybeans in 8 of 10 years, when it is manipulating its currency, when it is subsidizing its manufacturing, when it is failing to enforce even the most basic environmental and labor regulations?

That is snake oil.

We need fair trade. And so do Chinese workers and families, who are being abused by this so-called free trade system that benefits only CEOs and major shareholders of global corporations.

Unfair trade kills

What do Americans workers and families get out of so called free trade? A report, “The Toxic Truth: Unfair Trade Kills” issued recently by the United Steelworkers details the gross destruction, including a four-year-old who died after swallowing a lead pendant that was attached to his shoe imported from China; two Philadelphia carpenters killed when their van crashed while they were traveling home from work on defective tires manufactured in China, and 81 patients from across the country poisoned by contaminated heparin, a blood thinner imported from China.

In addition, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission recalled 30 million toys made in China last year because they were doused with dangerous leaded paint; Chinese-made pet food sickened and killed untold numbers of American cats and dogs because it contained tainted wheat protein; officials pulled off the market poisonous Chinese toothpaste; children were sickened by Aqua Dots toy kits made in China with a substitute chemical that turned into the “date rape” drug when swallowed, and the U.S. blocked import of Chinese fish containing banned antibiotics.

That’s just the consumer viewpoint. The EPI study dispelled the myth that a good education is insurance against job displacement. EPI found that 31 percent of the jobs lost since China entered the WTO were among workers with college degrees and more than half – 55.6 percent — of the displaced were in the top half of American wage earners. The China trade deficits have contributed to the loss of 200,000 scientist and engineer jobs within this nation’s manufacturing base, a 10.7 percent drop.

This is what free trade has given the U.S. Poisonous products. Lost jobs. Lower earning power.

It’s not just us though. Think about this: One effect of free trade is polluted air wafting all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the shores of California, a state that enforces environmental standards higher than the national ones. Twenty-five percent of the pollutants in the Los Angeles basin come from China. That’s tragic for Californians who try so hard.

Tragic for China too

That’s also tragic for the Chinese people who live with befouled air every day. (Well, except during the brief period of the Olympic Games when the country is attempting to impress the world. After that, the cars, trucks and industrial pollution will return full force.) More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water – often because of untreated pollution pouring into them from factories.

An investigative report issued earlier this month by the National Labor Committee describes conditions in the Kai Da Toy factory in Shenzhen, China where the Sesame Street’s Kid K’Nex Ernie construction toys are made. In violation of local and national laws, the factory’s employees are forced to work 13 to 15 hours a day, 7 days a week without health care. After deductions for room and board, they are paid 28 cents an hour, far below the requisite minimum wage. The 600 workers include 100 16-year-olds, and earlier this year, included numerous children who “disappeared” after an investigation by a Chinese newspaper.

NLC inquiries have repeatedly uncovered violations of Chinese labor law. Chinese firms don’t have to pay U.S. minimum wage. But they need to follow their own rules and not make virtual slaves of their country’s own adolescents.

Adult American factory workers trying to support families cannot compete with Chinese teenagers living four to a dormitory room on the factory site without any health or other benefits, working sweatshop hours, seven days a week.

What kind of “free trade” system is this? Those Chinese adolescents aren’t free. The American factory workers who have lost their jobs have forfeited financial freedom.

Still, the Kai Da factory will make big money. And the American corporations selling the Ernie construction toys will make big profits. Free trade works just fine for them.

If so-called free trade is ever to be replaced with fair trade, workers and families in China and America and every other trading country must demand it. Fair trade means that at the very least, labor and environmental regulations must be respected and enforced, so that people are not enslaved and the environment destroyed in the name of global corporate profit.

Really, at some point, when politicians claim these free trade deals are a win-win, and the actual result is 16-year-old Chinese youngsters working 16 hour days and American workers idled while their youngsters play with toxic imported toys, aren’t the lies traitorous?

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Toxic Toys
Over the past year, American parents rebuffed foreign-made toys when they contained leaded paint, poisonous cadmium beads or the “date rape” drug.
These toxic toys created a scandal as it became clear that the Bush administration’s deliberately stripped down Consumer Product Safety Commission was not protecting American children and families from dangerous imports. Republicans eschew government regulation, but its absence has allowed our supermarkets to sell us imported tainted toothpaste and deadly dog food.
Now, the National Labor Committee (NLC), which often works with the United Steelworkers to combat sweatshop labor conditions internationally, has released an investigation of the Kai Da Toy Factory in Shenzhen City, China, where the Sesame Street Kid K’Nex Ernie construction kits are assembled, that raises a moral question for American parents: Are they willing to rebuff toys that are toxic to other people’s children?
In this case, it’s the children of Chinese parents who the National Labor Committee found work in grueling, sweatshop conditions to assemble toys that are supposed to bring joy to American boys and girls, toys of Ernie that, ironically, is the character symbolizing playfulness, not work, on Sesame Street.
Even if the Ernie K’Nex toy isn’t bathed in lead paint, the National Labor Committee inquiry found that he’s drenched in the sweat of young workers, including some child laborers. Here is what the NLC discovered:

Forced overtime

The 600 workers at the factory, including 100 16-year-olds, routinely put in 13 to 15-hour days, and work seven-day weeks for months on end. Occasionally, they’re required to endure 23½-hour work days. The weekly overtime is mandatory, even though it exceeds China’s legal limits.
Despite the long hours, workers earn less than one cent per Ernie doll they assemble – 43 cents an hour. That is below Shenzhen City’s minimum wage of 62 cents an hour. And, like the minimum wage in the U.S., that is not subsistence earnings in China. After the factory deducts for room and board, the workers receive only about 28 cents an hour.
The rooms are shared by eight workers, sleeping on metal bunk beds, washing their clothes in sinks, and using communal bathrooms. Many of these workers are young teenagers, who pay additional money toward tuition with the hope of eventually attending technical schools.
Younger children who were working in the factory earlier this year disappeared after a Chinese newspaper, Southern Metropolis, revealed in April that hundreds, if not thousands, of children from impoverished areas in Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan Province were being sold to work as slave laborers in toy and garment factories.
The Kai Da factory does not cover health care and will dock pay if workers refuse overtime. In addition, if a worker quits before a committed period of time elapses, typically six months, the factory will withhold an entire month’s pay.
These practices are all illegal under Chinese law – the excessive overtime, paying less than minimum wage, and not providing health care. But the National Labor Committee documented them.
K’Nex responded to the report by saying: “We are a family owned company, and we are committed to the safety and welfare of children. The . . .toy factory is ICTI (International Council of Toy Industries) certified, which means that we comply with the highest safety and labor laws in the toy industry. We take the NLC allegations very seriously, and as a result we are launching an immediate investigation.”

Laborer-children

The question, however, is whether K’Nex, or any multinational, is devoted only to the safety and welfare of customer-children and not to that of laborer-children who produce the products.
Or, really, more fundamentally, how did we get ourselves into a situation in which children in China are assembling Ernie toys for children in America? Surely the late Mr. Rogers, were he here to advise us, would say there’s something deeply wrong with this neighborhood. Sesame Street could benefit from a little morality training from Rogers, a Presbyterian minister: It’s wrong to abuse one child so another may play with a cheap Ernie toy. It’s wrong to abuse a child for corporate profit.
There’s something else at play here as well. As children began to toil in China, factories closed in the U.S. The American toy industry lost nearly 60 percent of its jobs over the past 15 years. U.S. factories closed. American workers found themselves unemployed. Now, Chinese adolescents are assembling toys in sweatshops for American parents to buy and wrap for Christmas for their children – well, the American parents who still have jobs and houses in which to put those Christmas trees anyway.
It’s difficult not to buy a toy made in China with 85 percent of those in U.S. stores made there now. But a parent wouldn’t knowingly hand his own child a dangerous toy, one with lead paint or the Aqua-dots kit with its “date rape” chemical substituted by a Chinese manufacturer.
American parents must provide the same consideration to Chinese youngsters and boycott toys that have endangered them by working them in sweatshops. The Sesame Street Kid K’Nex “Ernie” is one of those toys.
The National Labor Committee investigation has provided us with that documentation.

Fair trade

No moral American can enjoy seeing their child play with a toy covered with the sweat of a child laborer. We must have fair trade agreements and regulation that ensure products imported into the U.S. are manufactured in factories that, at the very least, conform to the minimum child labor, wage and overtime laws of the countries of origin.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, has introduced legislation, the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act, supported by the NLC and the USW, that would make it illegal it import or export goods made with sweatshop labor.
If we as a country can protect property with trademarks and copyrights, and if we can defend foreign pets by prohibiting the importation of cat and dog fur, it’s time to pass Dorgan’s bill protecting human beings from degrading and inhumane sweatshop conditions.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

21st century slavery
The Government Accountability Office reported to Congress this week that, under the Bush administration, the Labor Department determined that what amounted to a 21st century case of slavery was just fine with the U.S. government.
A Labor Department investigator told the slave, a night attendant at an assisted living facility in Ohio, to file a civil suit to seek redress if she was aggrieved by her lot. And then he closed the case. With no action against the employer who had neglected to pay the woman any wages for an entire year.
Yep, that’s your U.S. Labor Department working for you, the very Labor Department charged with the duty of protecting 100 million workers, the very Labor Department responsible for ensuring employers pay workers, at the very least, the federal minimum wage, and for overtime hours, under the provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The GAO report arrived in Congress in the midst of high unemployment and inflation, the subprime mortgage crisis spreading like, well, just like fear of bank failure, taking down homeowners; the former global investment bank Bear Stearns, and now IndyMac Bancorp, the second largest financial institution to fail in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are stumbling, causing havoc on the stock market. The dollar’s value continues to fall, which, of course, forces the price of gasoline in the opposite direction. Read the rest of this entry »

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Toxic Trader invades DC
With a motorcycle police escort, the United Steelworkers’ “Toxic Trader” puppet lurched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, on his way to the Grand Hyatt Hotel on H Street in Washington, D.C. on July 9.
That is where the Bush administration-backed Import Safety Summit was being conducted by industry leaders and lobbyists who proposed self-instituting standards for safety rather that face government-imposed inspections and regulations to ensure products shipped into this country don’t maim and injure consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

By Robert L. Borsage, Campaign for America’s Future

John McCain continues his rousing campaign tour of the swing states of NAFTA this week. He will celebrate July 3rd in Mexico City after a jaunt through Colombia to pledge support for the pending free trade accord with that center of cocaine trade. He surely will increase his margin over Obama among business elites in Mexico and Canada. Obama will travel to Zanesville, Ohio, once more exposing himself to McCain’s jibes about embracing “protectionist” policies.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Here everybody has a neighbor
Everybody has a friend
Everybody has a reason to begin again
Bruce Springsteen – Long Walk Home

Sen. Barack Obama yesterday asked 4,500 delegates and observers at the convention of the United Steelworkers in Las Vegas to help him give America a chance to begin again. The group responded with a roar of applause.
The presumptive Democratic nominee for President appeared before the delegates by videocast after an introduction by former Sen. John Edwards and established solidarity immediately when he said, “Working together, ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things.” That’s something we’ve experienced up close and personal from organizing drives to picket lines. Read the rest of this entry »

By Leo W. Gerard
International President
Staking everything
Today, in Las Vegas, a town where jackpots are sought and fortunes are lost, Derek Simpson, general secretary of the UK-based international union, Unite the Union (Amicus Section) and I together staked everything on a worthy cause — working men and women world wide.
We signed an agreement at the USW convention in the Paris-Bally’s Conference Center joining our two great unions, creating the first global one. It is called Workers Uniting, the Global Union because we foresee industrial unions from other continents joining us to face off unregulated multinational corporations that exploit labor worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Nobody’s second class citizens

In Las Vegas, a town infamous for carelessly bankrupting the naïve, members of the United Steelworkers voted Tuesday to pay a little more forward out of each paycheck to ensure they won’t be duped, overpowered or taken for anybody’s second class citizens.
All of the additional pennies-per-hour steelworkers decided to invest into our strike and defense fund will provide added protection. From 850,000 steelworkers, that will build the account into a formidable force, one to stand up to the kind of power that comes from the boundless capital multinational corporations command, the very multinationals that unions now must reckon with. Read the rest of this entry »

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Rich get richer

After a year in which the majority of Americans suffered the effects of recession, including tens of thousands who lost jobs because of rising unemployment, hundreds of thousands who lost homes in the subprime mortgage crisis and millions who lost their shirts because of unrelenting gas price hikes, Merrill Lynch & Co. informed us last week that, by contrast, the rich still got richer.
Merrill found that the number of dollars in millionaires’ bank accounts grew faster than the number of millionaires did, a trend expected to continue. The average wealth of the world’s richest was more than $4 million, the highest it has ever been, according to Merrill. They’re an elite club — one-fifth of one percent of the globe’s 6.7 billion people. Read the rest of this entry »