COMMENTARY:

Grocery Strike Averted in Md., But at What Cost?

The New Oxford Dictionary defines "omen" as a prophetic sign. It may indeed be a prophecy of doom for unionized labor. Union jobs are an endangered species, and unions won't take much more stress until they become an extinct form of social organization.

Just as free-market capitalism uses and abuses the natural environment, it will defeat any efforts to organize workers in anything but a ritualistic pro forma way--a hollow echo of a glorious past hardly now remembered. Labor is no longer a countervailing power to management. The individual worker has triumphed as a a lone individual. There can be no meaningful struggle.

The two-tiered system in labor negotiations is becoming a precedent, yet another euphemism for worker concessions to employers. The United Food and Commercial Workers, with 340 stores in the Baltimore-Washington region, has followed the lead of their brothers and sisters in Southern California, who had just settled a five-month strike on a platform of similar negotiated concessions.

Senator John Edwards, before he abandoned his Democratic presidential primary campaign, brought a message that had some resonance with large audiences: that, as a people, we are becoming two Americas, increasingly unequal. The electorate ultimately calculated that this message, similar to the messages heard from Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, was a message that could not carry the day against the entrenched powers. Sadly, it is a calculation that says that we ordinary citizens cannot take back our country.

In the same way, the union rank and file will not risk dissonance, and will go along with their bosses who, "in this day and age," as a union leader puts it, must settle for a few crumbs from the table, eschew confrontation, and at least hold on to what they have. The members voted by a 90% margin to ratify a contract that takes their welfare another notch backwards.

Despite record store profits, the specter of Wal-Mart on the rise was enough to bring legitimacy to the employer's position. But there will always be a boogeyman behind the curtain, so when and where do the people take a stand? And will they be left hanging out to dry when they do? The vote was simply for employment over unemployment--is that the only choice left?

Under the terms of the new contract, existing employees will receive an increase of $1.25 an hour over the four-year contract period. That works out to 31 cents an hour, or $650 per year before taxes, and maybe $500 after taxes. For someone making $13 per hour (about $27,000 annually for a full-time worker), that is an increase of a little over 2% per year. It is unlikely that this raise will exceed the rate of inflation over the next four years, and may well fall significantly behind.

The chief negotiator for the employers called the deal a victory because it will "manage labor costs," and respond to "competitive realities." This is a polite way of telling the workers they're cannon fodder in the discount wars.

The new contract's concessions in health care deductibles and co-pay increases may well offset the entire wage increase for many, and new employees are sold down the river (the new hires will have to slave for at least five years to enter full "journeyman" status). Pensions remain inadequate.

Union officials were reported as defending the two-tier contract, saying that this is nothing new, and it gives the new employee something to look forward to. It is likely that new employees will bail out before the five-year probation period is up. There is already high turnover in this business, and this contract should guarantee that it will increase.

The objective for the employers has to be a workforce made up of part time or temporary workers who will not stay long enough to achieve a status where they will be entitled to full benefits. This "plan" works for such successful giants of the corporate world as McDonalds and Wal-Mart.

Indeed, the employers' share of the costs of benefits is not trivial. Even in an HMO group plan with high deductibles and co-pays, it is not unusual to see a family health insurance plan costing $13,000 per year. That's half the average annual pay.

Furthermore, employers are abandoning defined benefit pension plans as fast as they can. Congress is about to give these employers a $90 billion gift by re-defining implicit interest rate assumptions so that more profits can go to the bottom line and less into the pension plans. It is currently estimated that American corporations carry unfunded pension obligations of $350 billion. On paper, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Fund is insolvent--the steel industry put it under last year, when most of the last remaining American steel-making giants declared bankruptcy and escaped their pension obligations.

The lead negotiator for the supermarkets was quoted as saying that the contract just settled "is not the ideal way, but we do not live in an ideal world."

Another union leader was quoted as saying, "The objective is always to protect what you have."

I guess it comes down to a definition of what "have" is. We are certainly in a world of haves and have nots, or have littles. We are warned not to be class-conscious--by the upper class, of course. But why would we take that advice? It amounts to a prescription for mediocrity and a life of concessions.

In general, it seems to me, today's union leadership lacks vision. Either that, or they consider themselves to be more aligned with management. It is depressing to see the American labor movement grinding to a halt. The rust has finally clogged the gears, and the machine is about to cough and sputter its way to the junk yard.

The union rank and file needs to be acquainted with the power it possesses. That power remains hidden to them and unused, behind a curtain of respectability and inertia because their leadership provides little stimulation. Imagination is in short supply.

On the larger scale of our Republic, we don't trust our leaders to lead, so we don't elect the ones who might. At both the political level and the labor level we continue to get what we have always had--faded vision and a "go along to get along" philosophy. So we are all adrift on a rudderless boat, with a captain shouting out words we are not listening to--adrift on a sea of broken dreams. If our labor leadership were resolute, they might grow their membership--and the right direction should not be hard to discern. There is enough wealth to go around--it is just mal-distributed.

We have been at this democracy-building enterprise for over 200 years now, but we still can't seem to get a world that works for the worker. How can we re-balance the boat? That is the nautical question of this new century. And to push the metaphor just a little further: when is it time for mutiny?