Blog

Mitchell Hirsch

By Mitchell Hirsch
Writer for Working America’s Main Street blog

It appears that I underestimated the brazen contempt that Wall Street has for America’s unemployed millions, and for the millions more working only part-time despite wanting full-time work.

Last month, in a post titled Blaming Unemployment Insurance for Unemployment — prompted by a JPMorgan Chase report that attempted to do just that — I wrote:

This kind of cockamamie pseudo-science would just be laughable if it weren’t a potentially dangerous threat to the survival of millions of unemployed Americans. You can bet that bank lobbyists and their conservative cronies are circulating this report and others like it to gin up opposition to extending unemployment benefits.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial, titled Incentives Not to Work, which blames long-term unemployment on extended jobless benefits, amounts to Wall Street’s declaration of war on America’s unemployed.

Conveniently ignoring a logical foundation of rational thought — that correlation does not imply causation — the Journal posits that because there are extended unemployment benefits, there is more long-term unemployment.

… sure enough, the share of unemployed workers who don’t have a job for more than 26 weeks has steadily increased, reaching a record 44.1% in March. The average spell of unemployment is now 31 weeks, even though the economy is once again creating more new jobs than it is losing. Democrats are slowly converting unemployment insurance into a welfare program.

By extension, they might as well say that because of extended unemployment benefits, employers are more reluctant to hire.

The Wall Street Journal’s editors have the incredible gall to blame record long-term unemployment levels on unemployment insurance payments. Not the Great Recession, caused by Wall Street’s financial train wreck. Not the lack of available jobs, caused by Wall Street’s financial train wreck. But on unemployment insurance payments, made necessary by Wall Street’s financial train wreck.

The Journal fails to mention that there are nearly six jobless workers for every one job opening, and that more than half the small number of newly added jobs are temporary — while another chunk are part-time jobs.

After demanding, and getting, its nearly trillion dollar bailout, Wall Street continues to extract billions in excessive payouts and bonuses for profiting at the expense of the rest of the economy and everyone else. With unabashed temerity they object to the meager jobless benefits being paid to those unfortunate enough to have been thrown out of work as a result of Wall Street’s avarice.

And now the Journal’s editors urge Republicans in Congress to stop opposing extended benefits simply when they “add to the deficit” and start opposing them completely.

I wonder how long it will take for some Republicans in Congress to start reading their lines from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial.

***

Cross-posted from Working America’s Main Street blog

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President 

In Columbus Ohio, a 5-year-old girl jumped onto Santa’s lap last month and asked if he could give her dad a job as an elf.

Mike Smith, who works the Santa station at the Polaris Fashion Place in Columbus, asked why, the Wall Street Journal reported. The little girl in the Dora-the-Explorer sweat shirt responded:

“Because my daddy’s out of work, and we’re about to lose our house.”

Happy Holidays America.

The gift this country needs most this holiday season is an economy built on a solid foundation, one that will provide middle class, family-supporting jobs now and into the future.

That present would not be another version of Monopoly for Wall Street wannabees. It would not be Barbie-goes-to-the-mall-credit-cards for youngsters in families already maxed out on their plastic and their mortgages.

The metaphorical gift our economy could really use is an Erector set – a strong steel construction kit from which the intrepid manufacture airplanes, automobiles, robots on motorized tracks, backhoes, helicopters, skyscrapers, cranes, even working Ferris wheels. 

That’s because, most of all, this economy needs manufacturing. Enthralled by the glitz, glamour and bogus bonuses of Wall Street, we’ve allowed multinationals to export our grit and grimy factories overseas. Factories that made clothing, sports shoes, large appliances, tire, glass and so much more in big and small U.S. towns and transferred to China and Indonesia and India, lured not just by cheap labor, but also by lavish government subsidies and absent environmental regulations. 

Manufacturing, the basis of any strong economy, has continuously declined as a percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product since its World War II peak, when it was 28.3 percent. Its new low is less than half of that — 12 percent.

Here’s the most obvious difference between an economy based on manufacturing and one based on Wall Street: You can hold the handlebars of Harley-Davidson in your hands, but just try grasping a derivative.

The paper traders on Wall Street bundle mortgages into exotic financial instruments called derivatives, sell those, buy pseudo-insurance to secure them, then engage in legal betting on whether the “instruments” will soar or fail. This kind of activity caused the financial collapse in 2008. Frankly, beyond being incredibly risky, these transactions don’t create true wealth; they just generate big bonuses. 

In manufacturing, an entrepreneur takes raw material and adds energy, ingenuity, tools and labor to create a product – like steel. That has real value and can be sold on the market to someone who needs it to combine with other materials to make finished merchandise like motorcycles or refrigerators. And those manufactured items are durable and valuable. 

In the process of manufacturing, many people are employed – to get the raw materials, whether it’s limestone or iron or trees, to transport it to a factory, to generate electricity to run the factory, to transform the raw material at the factory, to deliver the product to the buyer, to pave the roads and build the bridges and repair the railroads necessary for all that transportation, to design the highways and factories and overpasses, to feed all the workers lunch.

Tragically, the Great Recession caused by Wall Street has hit manufacturing hard. While unemployment is at a 25-year high of 10 percent, the unemployment in manufacturing has run a couple of percentage points higher than that. More than 2.1 million manufacturing workers have been thrown out of their jobs since the recession began in December 2007. 

These workers are the parents of children in Dora-the-Explorer sweat shirts who are asking Santa for elf jobs.

These are the workers who have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments – although almost half are suffering from depression or anxiety, a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults showed. 

These are the workers who told the pollsters that the frustration and stress of unemployment has provoked conflicts and arguments with family and friends.

These are the workers who have lost their homes or have been threatened with eviction or foreclosure, who have difficulty paying bills and have resorted to borrowing money from friends and relatives. These are the workers profiled by Anne Hull of the Washington Post in a story that began by describing desperate laid off Warren, Ohio residents in a pawn shop:

“At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band.”

These are workers selling their precious keepsakes to survive 15 percent unemployment in an area along the Mahoning River that once was the world’s fifth-largest steel producer – until it lost 50,000 of those family-supporting manufacturing jobs and another 11,500 middle-class jobs at the Lordstown General Motors plant all in a decade.

These workers could be holding good, steady factory jobs if the United States had implemented a manufacturing strategy, the way China, Japan, Germany, even The Netherlands did long ago.

Just last week, the Obama administration offered a gift to all those who believe in manufacturing. It is that strategy for America. Its formal name is the White House Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing.

For that five year old girl in the Dora the Explorer sweat shirt. For her furloughed father and her family. For the future of this country, let’s give ourselves the gift of a future constructed on a solid economic foundation. Let’s implement that plan to revitalize American manufacturing immediately. Millions of unemployed workers can’t wait.

Leo W. Gerard

 
By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

A business group is honoring Roger Agnelli, the CEO of Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world, which, coincidentally, is in the midst of its longest ever labor dispute. The award is for exceptional accomplishments in corporate social responsibility.

The Business Council for International Understanding will give Agnelli the Dwight D. Eisenhower Global Citizenship Award, feting him for his corporate behavior five months after he provoked the strike by more than 3,000 miners, mill workers and smelters in my hometown of Sudbury and neighboring Port Colborne, Canada.

The strikers now include 450 Vale nickel and copper workers from Voisey’s Bay, also represented by my union, the United Steelworkers (USW).  

Vale is the Brazilian-based corporation that boasted $13.2 billion in profits last year and reported third-quarter, after-tax earnings of $1.7 billion this year, more than double its second quarter haul. Vale is a highly-profitable corporation demanding workers take concessions. For example, it wants deep cuts to pay supplements workers get only when nickel prices are high.

Cash flush even during the worldwide recession, Vale has engaged in a buying spree for mines and properties worldwide. In 2008, it announced it would spend $2 billion on electrical projects, mostly coal-fired, and by year end reached agreement to spend $300 million on Colombian coal assets. It got permission from the Brazilian government this year to buy iron ore mines for $750 million. It spent $17.8 billion in 2006 for Inco’s nickel mines and smelters in Canada, and as metal prices rose, earned nearly as much from them over the next two years as Inco had in the previous 10. Still, Agnelli insisted the very Canadian workers whose labor helped Vale make that money take cuts to their income – causing the strike.

Workers and their families have struggled since the strike. The towns in Ontario and Newfoundland have suffered as well because many mining supply and service companies temporarily closed, idling untold additional workers. Kari Cusack, a member of Families Supporting the Strikers, talked about it early in November before a family day on the picket line in Sudbury. She told a local newspaper reporter:

 “We see Vale’s attack on Local 6500 as an attack on our entire community, and we want to do our part to fight back against corporate greed.”

The Business Council for International Understanding chose that corporate social responsibility to reward.

In Brazil, Agnelli has shown off some of that corporate social responsibility as well. In September, the government fined Vale $20 million for failing to comply with an antitrust order. Last year, Agnelli secured a court injunction in an attempt to block protestors from the country’s largest social activist group, the Landless Rural Workers Movement, rather than negotiate with those complaining that the company’s iron furnaces were polluting their village and that a hydroelectric dam in which Vale is a partner was flooding their homes. Also last year, Brazil’s Office of the Environment fined Vale $3 million for illegal sale of wood.

Workers from Canada and Vale Brazil demonstrated together in August in front of the multi-national’s Rio de Janeiro headquarters. They served pieces of a giant cake commemorating the 30^th day of the USW strike in Ontario. There the Canadian workers learned that Agnelli had forced its Brazilian workers to accept a defined contribution pension plan. Now Agnelli is trying to force the Canadians take the same inferior plan. 

The International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the Botswana Power Corporation Workers Union (BCPWU) and others from around the world have written Agnelli expressing outrage about the strike. Bohithetswe Lentswe, BCPWU General Secretary, wrote:

“We have every reason to believe that Vale is trying to destroy its strongest collective bargaining agreement for the purpose of setting a precedent to weaken other collective bargaining agreements throughout the world. Vale is also attempting to export its anti-worker, anti-union practices in Brazil to the rest of the world.”

Of course. That’s what great CEOs do, as the Business Council for International Understanding will proclaim at its Dec. 3 dinner in the Waldorf=Astoria, New York City. With the cheapest tickets going for $1,000, it’s likely none of those $29-an-hour Vale workers will get a seat. But Agnelli, who is one of six Vale executives who together pulled down $33 million last year, could effortlessly drop $100,000 for an “underwriting level” table of 10 at his award dinner.

Perhaps there the Business Council for International Understanding will detail its reasons for selecting Agnelli for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Global Citizenship Award. It only profiles Vale and Agnelli on its web page, without, for example, providing the kind of insight into Agnelli’s personality that Antonio Regalado did for the Wall Street Journal in 2008 in a story:

“Current and former Vale executives say Mr. Agnelli can be hard on subordinates. Some of them cite what they say is an autocratic style and a table-pounding temper. . . . In internal company surveys, employees complain frequently that they are under too much pressure . . . Marco Dalpozzo, Vale’s head of human resources, doesn’t deny that Mr. Agnelli can be rough on people, “He’s a tough guy,” he says.”

Again: of course. That’s what business groups prize – executives with table-pounding tempers.

The Business Council is, however, a group that claims it was started by the late President Dwight D. Eisenhower and named its prize for him.  It’s not clear, though, that the business values of the current council and Agnelli resemble those of President Eisenhower. For example, here’s what the President wrote in November, 1954:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt. . ., a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

To let the Business Council know the ways in which you think this award for Agnelli will increase its goal of International Understanding, call 212-490-0460 in New York, 202-595-2668 in Washington or 44-207-225-3561 in London.

LabourStart has created a web page so you can easily write a personal note directly to Agnelli. It’s here. It enables you to quickly drop Agnelli a little note telling him just how much you think he deserves this honor.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

My union, the United Steelworkers (USW), and three paper manufacturers will have free traders and editorial boards across the nation sputtering, spitting and name calling again this week.

They started labeling us “protectionist” last week when President Obama made what should have been considered a straightforward decision. He implemented a recommendation from the independent, bi-partisan International Trade Commission (ITC) to place tariffs on tires imported from China. The USW had started that process by seeking sanctions in April under special trade safeguard rules, called Section 421, which the Chinese had agreed to obey to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization.

Now we’ve filed a new trade case. We did it with no disrespect or lack of hospitality toward Chinese officials as they arrived in the city of our international headquarters  – Pittsburgh – for the G-20 summit. Proof of that is we included as a defendant in this case China’s fellow G-20 country of Indonesia, who can keep them company in court.

This is not a Section 421 but a more traditional unfair trade case about coated paper, the kind used for car brochures and annual reports. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Commerce found egregious dumping of this paper and improper subsidies by the Chinese and Indonesian governments. But later the ITC refused to impose sanctions because it decided the U.S. industry hadn’t been adequately injured.

We believe we’ve suffered sufficiently now.

But we know the free traders and editorial boarders will vilify us. They’ve taken up with the Chinese government. And let me be clear that I mean government. The USW is in solidarity with Chinese and Indonesian workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers. It is governmental policies that injure us both and that we oppose. Our intent is to hold governments to promises they made to abide by international trade regulations – pledges sworn to gain entrance to the World Trade Organization.

Those rules were meant to make free trade fair.

We want fair trade. Geez. They’ll call us “protectionist” for that – like they did with the tire tariff decision. The New York Times derided the tire tariff a “protectionist remedy.” The Chicago Tribune slammed it as “blatantly protectionist.” A Wall Street Journal columnist said Obama imposed the tariff, not because it was recommended by the ITC, but because the president “owed favors to his friends in Big Labor.” 

These people don’t know what they are talking about. The New York Times, for example, said, “China has not been competing unfairly on tires – just more effectively, mainly because of its far lower labor costs.”

It is unfair trade to abuse workers by not paying them your own country’s minimum wage, by failing to give them your own country’s required days off and other benefits, by exposing them  to grossly hazardous working conditions. Has the New York Times investigated the Chinese tire workers’ situation, the way it has other Chinese workers’, to determine if they are being mistreated in these ways like so many Chinese workers? If so, it provided no evidence.

In addition, just two paragraphs later, the Times lists numerous unfair trading practices it acknowledges China engages in, practices that give it unfair advantages when selling tires on the U.S. market, including manipulating its currency. Those advantages are far more significant to the price of tires than labor costs.

Similarly, the Chicago Tribune editorial was written by someone who apparently did precious little research. It claims the tire tariffs will cause “whopping price hikes,” even though Charles Uthus, vice president of the Automotive Trade Policy Council, which opposed sanctions, calculated that the additional cost per tire, at the tariffs recommended by the ITC but later lowered by Obama, would be no more than $3.50. The Tribune says the tariffs will not bring jobs back home – but the ITC determined they would. Best of all, the Tribune asserts that the tariffs will prompt manufacturers to move production from China to countries without tariffs. Really? Tariffs that will last only three years will prompt manufacturers to abandon plants that cost $180 million to build?

These people are in love with an ideal: Free trade. It doesn’t exist between the U.S. and China. The rules of free trade prohibit subsidizing exports, forcing foreign investors to transfer technology and mandating foreign manufacturers export all products made in the host country. China so routinely does such prohibited stuff that Cooper Tire provided sworn testimony about it in our Section 421 case. Cooper testified that China required Cooper to export all of the tires from its new Chinese plant for five years. 

China cheats. We’re just asking that they follow the rules they agreed to when they joined the World Trade Organization – the same sort of rules they will be discussing this week at the G-20. That’s not protectionism.

The free traders and the editorial boarders also belittled the tire case because none of the tire companies joined the USW. It should be obvious why companies like Cooper could not. And let’s make it clear, Goodyear, which has agreed to invest $600 million in its U.S. plants, made a point of remaining neutral.

In the paper case, the free traders are going to have to choke back that scorn. Three manufacturers are in it with us: Appleton Coated LLC, NewPage Corp., and Sappi Fine Paper North America . Two of them, Sappi and NewPage, have been forced to close plants in the two years since the ITC didn’t see enough damage in the U.S. market to impose sanctions in 2007. Those shut downs cost nearly 1,000 workers their jobs and severely injured the mill towns of Muskegon, Mich., and Kimberly, Wis.

Don’t just take my word, the word of someone who the Wall Street Journal would dismiss as “protectionist Big Labor,” owed a big favor by President Obama. Listen to what businessmen have to say about China and Indonesia:

This is John Cappy, president and CEO of Appleton, “Our goal is to restore fair competition to the marketplace. We are willing to compete with anyone on a fair playing field.”

Here is Rick Willett, president and CEO of NewPage talking about China, “What we want here is simply enforcement of the rules they signed on to in order to be part of the World Trade Organization.” 

And, finally, there’s Mark Gardner, president and CEO of Sappi, who explains that his company clearly believes in free trade because it imports paper made in its European mills to the United States as well as manufacturing paper here: “We want the laws enforced so we can compete on a fair basis.”

Hey, Wall Street Journal, how about those CEOs?

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.