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Interview
with Eric Frumin, Director of the Health and Safety
Program
UNITE HERE
Brooklyn, New York
January 27, 2005
mR: microRevolt
EF: Eric Frumin, UNITE HERE
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mR: Let's begin with where
you work and what you do.
EF: My name is Eric Frumin
I am the Director of the Health and Safety Program for UNITE
HERE, which is the principal American, Canadian labor union
in the garment, textile, laundry, and hospitality industries.
We represent about 450 thousand workers in the US and Canada.
mR: And how long have you
been with them?
EF: I’ve been with
the union for over 30 years, 31 years in May.
mR: Why is an organization
like UNITE HERE necessary?
EF: UNITE HERE is a good
example of a trade union that fights for workers rights, and
also has a broader social agenda, from workers rights to the
rights of communities, poor people, middle class in the United
States and Canada and around the world. The fact of the matter
is that corporations, you know the high-level bosses, whoever
they are, tend to keep power to themselves.It’s capitalism,
and the purpose of capitalism is to make money for the people
who have the power. Someone who doesn’t have the power
needs protection, and we help them empower themselves to defend
their own economic standards, to get justice on the job, to
have a voice at work, to be able to fight against discrimination,
abusive health and safety conditions, sexism, things like
that.
So, this is a story of the ages. You know it was true under
feudalism, it’s true in post-industrial revolution era,
and it’ll be true for the foreseeable future.
mR: Okay, now I’m interested
in that distinction that you made between feudalism and post-industrial
society, can you talk about that? The differences, and the
overlaps?
EF: Sure. You know, workers
who were working for somebody else, depending on the kind
of work they did, were either a craftsperson who would sell
to his market where they were, needed, much in the same way
that professionals, like doctors used to be treated in this
society. Or they were people who were on the receiving end
of the employment bargain in the so-called master/servant
relationship under English common law. And those are very
important principles in establishing how workers even today
are treated. Barring union representation, at least for private
sector workers and for many public sectors workers as well,
there’s nothing to stop an employer from firing workers
for any reason or for no reason at all. That’s what’s
called, the so-called master/servant common law doctrine that
started in feudal England, came over to North America, the
so-called “employment at will” doctrine. It’s
a horrible abusive way of treating workers in civilized societies.
Europe abandoned it a long time ago. There are labor tribunals
across western Europe and other countries which establish
the need for “just cause” and give workers some
sense of job security. We don’t have any of those legal
protections in this country. Unless you’ve been discriminated
against because of racism or sexism or your some protected
class, the boss can fire you whenever he or she likes. Because
the bosses keep the money for themselves -- no big surprise,
And the only way you get any real protection to keep your
job, to have these working conditions, to be able to negotiate
a decent pay, is to organize together to get some real power.
By and large that’s called labor unions. People try
it in other ways, it usually doesn’t work. There are
associations, open door policies. Sure -- any Walmart employee
can go complain to their manager, that’s not going to
make their family insurance coverage any cheaper. They’re
still not going to be able to afford it.
mR: What do you think the
most common misconception is about workers organizing into
labor unions?
EF: Well, unfortunately the
most common misconception about unions in America these days
is the percentage of workers who are in unions. Most people
if you ask them say “oh maybe 20%, 30% something like
that.” Of course it depends where you ask them, if you
ask people in North Carolina or Texas you might get a lower
number because people down there understand that there are
so few unions. But in point of fact in the private sector,
we’re down to 8%, and that’s shocking to most
Americans. Given what everybody knows is their important presence
in defending the basic economic standards of living, they
think unions are here in large numbers. The fact is those
numbers have declined dramatically in the last 50 years, in
part because of the abusive nature of labor law in America
and in part because too many unions gave up organizing, they
gave up the fight. That’s probably the most important
misconception and the most common one. The other one is that
the law protects peoples’ rights to a union.A lot of
union members believe that, they don’t understand that
the law gives very little protection. And, if they have a
union now their union is at serious risk and they better fight
harder. So, it’s kind of a dire-straits situation and
some unions like ours are fighting to change that.
mR: What do you do in particular
as Director of Occupational Safety and Health?
EF: My main job is to help
a range of different people within the union develop important
and effective strategies for promoting worker health and safety
on the job as part of our campaign to organize new members
and to improve the protections that existing members have.
There was a time when a health and safety expert for a labor
union concentrated primarily on dealing with a particular
safety and health issues for the members alone, and I’ve
done that for many many years. That involves a range of activities,
meeting with employers, doing inspections, going to the Congress
in Washington demanding new laws, fighting with the bureaucrats
in the federal Labor Department and at OSHA to give us the
standards and the enforcements that we need.Those were all
important things. In the last few years we’ve come to
realize that if we’re going to have any hope of having
decent safe working conditions for workers in the US and Canada,
we have to mount a much more aggressive fight, to defend the
conditions we have and to bring a union health and safety
message to non-union workers, and to the communities where
they live. So, today our health and safety program is much
broader and much more aggressive than it’s been in the
past, because it’s linked to our campaign to organize
work places where workers don’t have any rights at all
other than the weakly enforced rights under the job safety
law or some of the other laws.
mR: How do you go about doing
that?
EF: One thing is we make
sure that when a union organizer or a member talks to workers
in plants, places where there are no unions: a hotel, a factory,
a laundry, a garment distribution center, we talk to them
about their working conditions, and about the health and safety
hazards, about the injuries on the job, about the kinds of
production pressures they’re facing, about how often
they have to work extra hours until they can’t stand
the pain, about how many of them are working in pain, about
how many of them cannot afford to take a day off and let their
bodies recover from these abusive conditions because they
have no sick time, because the workers compensation system
is so abusive and so difficult for workers. And gradually
workers begin to respond and they say, “You know, it’s
really terrible what’s happened to us, I know I go to
work everyday, I try not to think about it, I have to feed
my family, this isn’t a good job, I came from Mexico,
I came from Haiti, this is the best I can get but you know
what: Enough! We better fight to get these conditions fixed.”
So it’s a mix of everything from having a high level
joint program with a company [like] Levi-Strauss the paradigm
of corporate social responsibility before they fired 30,000
domestic manufacturing workers and violated the heritage.
We had wonderful joint programs with them, all the way to
fighting for a bathroom with a dry floor for workers at a
laundry in the Bronx.
mR: Maybe it will help to
have a specific example for somebody who does not know about
the health issues. And since you brought up Levis-Strauss,
I’m interested in that, because I hear of it as this
example of a sweatshop abuser, what’s the story behind
that?
EF: Well Levis had an ethic
which was distinctly different from it’s competitors,
which they could afford. And they knew that their labor costs
were going to be higher than their competitors, and they made
so much money for so many years they were able to put their
money where their mouth was, so to speak. As a company they
failed to maintain their dominance in the industry, and the
global economy began undermining their ability to compete
in general.So they had problems on the design side, on the
marketing side, on the production side in the global economy,
they gave up their principles and decided to make a deal with
several devils: one of them was Walmart, another is sweatshop
contractors in other countries.So they probably say they do
a great job monitoring the conditions of their contracting
plants. And maybe they do a little more than some other companies,
but the fact of the matter is that they closed down 35 factories
in the United States and Canada.
mR: When was that, was that
in the last decade?
EF: In the 90’s. The
last one closed I think in 2002 in San Antonio. And they basically
decided to act like a typical corporation that had their economic
goals and now all they have left in the US are 4 distribution
centers, so they’re no different than any of the other
companies which were willing to tolerate terrible working
conditions all along.
mR: So UNITE represented
Levis workers in the States, but now they’re just distribution.
EF: All they have is warehouses,
they don’t have any production facilities, they had
35 factories…
mR: So it’s just getting
in the apparel and sending it out to retailers…
EF: They have their buying
office in Asia, their buying office in Central America, just
like all the other companies. They have their design people
in San Francisco and they contract it out to China, to Mexico,
to wherever. You will not find a pair of pants of Levis-Strauss
that’s made in America anymore. Or Canada.
mR: Are there any direct
safety and health issues with that company in particular that
you’ve dealt with in the distribution centers now?
EF: Yeah, we work with them
to try to make sure that the workers in the distribution centers
don’t have serious health and safety problems and sure
they’ll do a better job there. But how many tens of
thousands of workers in these contractor plants in developing
countries, and of course in China is the big one, are treated
abusively and they’re completely denied the right to
have their own [independent] power and organization to fight
their employers. Levi’s can’t guarantee workers
in China the right to have an independent union no matter
what kind of deal they sign with their contractor. It’s
illegal in China to have an independent union; it’s
against the law; just like it’s illegal in parts of
this country to have unions. So, they’re just a part
of the global marketplace mainstream for the apparel industry
in North America, Europe, you know.
mR: Did you watch this change?
Can you talk about that, because that might be interesting…
EF: Well…
mR: Because you’re
saying this with a certain amount of cynicism and dismay,
as if this is a result of an economic crisis that’s
going in this direction – where everything is outsourced,
but how was it before? As someone who works with workers how
do you embrace the situation? How can consumers think about
it? It’s so complex I'm not sure where to begin…
EF: In some respects it’s
very complex. You know we are not dealing with the model 50
years ago of New York is the American fashion design center
with a “market week” where the suppliers would
send their reps to New York and they’d have little show
rooms and the department stores and they would deal with it
as if it was some bazaar. And we’re certainly no longer
dealing with the few large American companies that had significant
production facilities of their own, whether it was Liz Claiborne
or Hart, Schaffner and Marx, or Levi-Strauss or Wrangler,
those models fell in the kind of manic logic of the global
economy that has compelled corporations that have to compete
in this marketplace to move their production off shore.You
know, they’re business people, they’re corporations
and they’re going to do what the system allows. In a
way, I don’t fault them for it, that’s what they’re
supposed to do. They’re supposed to make as much money
as they can for their shareholders. That’s the nature
of the beast. We don’t like the system, as workers as
consumers, as communities, which are beginning to wake up
and realize that the Walmart business model is destroying
our country. And we have to fight it, but don’t expect
business to feel bad about it or to change, because they’re
in business to make money.
You know, when the head of US steel was asked
why he took 4 billion dollars in the early 80’s from
a company which desperately needed investment, terrible competitive
problems, old antiquated mills, terrible competition and bought
an oil company. He said, “We’re not in the business
to make steel. We’re in the business to make money.”
David Roderick right there in Pittsburgh, I mean it was like
as clear as could be. So, you know these are the rules that
we don’t like to admit to, that our country lives on
people. People think, “Well there are some ethics in
business”, corporations put out there sort of 'green
washes” as the environmentalists call it, they have
huge PR campaigns that talk about corporate social responsibility,
at the end of the day, when it comes to making money whether
you’re Levis-Strauss or Walmart or your neighborhood
fly below the radar sweatshop, that’s capitalism, and
workers and communities have to have the their own power to
protect themselves and to create a different business model.
There are other models for how to organize
the economy and how to organize society, and people all around
the world are discussing those models and fighting for them.
People in Argentina are fighting back against a terrible ravishing
of their economy by supporting worker owned co-ops. In Europe
they set a floor, a floor is hard to defend, but they set
a floor for how much leeway companies can have, they have
higher tax rates so that you have a social basis for defending
people’s living conditions. You know there are a lot
of different versions of it but unfortunately in America we’ve
chosen a pretty backward version. Even the Canadians understand
that you can’t function in a society like this; 45 million
people without health insurance, this is nonsense. The Canadians
look at us like we’re from another planet. So it’s
a system where the powerful will take advantage of what they
can, and unfortunately the progression in our country has
been to take more and more and more, they don’t stop
taking, there’s never enough money for them, never enough
profits. So, time for us to fight back.
mR: Can you give us day to
day examples of health and safety issues.
EF: In some industries we
fight just to keep the fire doors open, just to make sure
the exits are not locked. You think, “My God, why do
you have to do that?” but there are still bosses in
America who will lock the fire exits because they don’t
want people to leave without permission.
mR: How do you find that
out? How does that come to your desk?
EF: That’s what a union
does. A union is an organization which pays attention to details,
whether it’s someone’s right to get vacation pay
or keeping the fire doors open, or making sure that someone
continues to get health insurance when they’re pregnant
and they have to go on maternity leave. I mean those are things
that are not required by law, well, fire doors have to be
unlocked by law but the law is not around when you need them.
There are a thousand OSHA inspectors for the entire country.
In most states, left to their own devices, it would take OSHA
a hundred years to get around and inspect every workplace.
mR: You said OSHA? What’s
that?
EF: Oh sorry, OSHA is the
US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that’s
the federal job safety police. They administer the OSHA Act,
which sets job safety standards and health standards. They
have inspectors who go out and do inspections. A lot of the
inspectors are good, and if you as a worker know your rights,
you can get them to come to your workplace inside of a few
days. And if you know what the standards are you can make
sure that they catch the boss violating those standards and
issue the penalties and issue the orders to do the clean up,
things like that.
So anyway, how does it come to my attention?
Usually it comes to my attention only if for some reason the
boss doesn’t respond when the people who are the leaders
of the union in that workplace, the workers themselves, if
they haven’t gotten them fixed and somehow they need
more help getting it done. They told the boss “We’re
going to get OSHA in here, we’re going to stop working”,
you know, there are different methods they have for getting
the boss to ”straighten up and die right”, because
it works. They’ll come in here and talk to me about
[it], maybe they need me to point out the page in the law
where it says “you’re violating the law,”
because the boss is such an idiot that they have to show it
to him, you know that happens. But those are examples of some
fairly straighttforward, simple safety issues.
There are other issues that are a lot more complicated. For
instance, in the hotel industry, the hotels push maids, housekeepers
to clean way too many rooms in a shift. Some places they require
workers to clean 3 or 4 rooms in an hour, change the sheets,
scrub down the bathroom, vacuum the floor. Imagine doing that
in a hotel room in 15 minutes. And risk of injury to hotel
workers in general is higher than the risk of injury to coal
miners.
mR: Why is that?
EF: Because the hotel managers
push them to do too much work too fast. Imagine trying to
clean 24 hotel rooms in an 8 hour shift, that’s 3 in
an hour, in 20 minutes, one after another, boom boom boom.
It’s damn near impossible. You can’t do it without
hurting yourself, without rushing, without bumping into things,
without hurting your back from lifting the bed over and over
and over. You have 8 folds for every single sheet, you have
to pick it up, stuff it underneath, then in the middle, then
in the other corner, then around the back, that’s just
one sheet, then you have to do the top sheet, pick up the
corner, stuff the sheet in, pick up the middle of the bed,
stuff the sheet in, pick up the corner of the bed, stuff the
sheet in, go around the other side, stuff the sheet in, you
think Charlie Chaplin had it bad, then what about the blanket,
then they go to the new bed where the mattress weighs 85 pounds,
not only is there a blanket there are 3 sheets, they went
from 2 pillows to 7 pillows now the new duvet cover weighs
50 lbs and they have to shake it out every time, because oh
no, they have to promise the guest that this is going to be
washed every single change of guest it has to be washed and
it’s horse shit. But these poor housekeepers are abused,
they need protection. So it’s not just a factory, it’s
not just a little sweatshop it’s Hilton, it’s
Marriot, it’s brand name companies around the world,
just like it is Levis-Strauss and Nike and you know the apparel
companies.
So, some of the issues are about the basic,
brutal production workload, whether you’re the classic
Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line, kind of a workload,
or you’re a truck driver pulling down 12 hour shifts
trying to drive and get some place and unload your truck --
and truck drivers have the highest injury risk than any job
title in America, we don’t represent them but you know
that’s kind of an image some people can understand,
or you’re a hotel housekeeper. They can be abusive conditions.
There are a lot of ways of fighting this stuff, the only way
that really makes a difference is when they have a union to
give them the means, the power to limit their workload to
a human pace, to give them the tools they need to do a job
so that the housekeeper isn’t running back and forth
to the supply closet in the middle of trying to do 3 rooms
every hour because the boss doesn’t give them enough
sheets to work with, gives them a cart that falls over, you
know, just the basics, we’re not asking for a lot, just
a little respect.
mR: And those things are
consider health and safety, [the expectation] to do something
repetitive in a short period of time that is heavy, repetitive,
dangerous…
EF: Human Rights Watch issued
this report yesterday about the meat packing industry in America,
I don’t know if you saw the report of it, in which they
described the abusive production pressures. This has been
another model for abusive conditions in American workplaces
going back a century, Upton Sinclair wrote the Jungle as an
expose in the first decade of the 20th century. The myth about
that book was that it was about food safety, and what would
go into meat and sausage, what the book is really about is
the abusive treatment of the workers in the meat packing industry,
and how parts of their bodies would end up in the sausage.
And we’re right back there in Human Rights Watch yesterday,
it’s pretty scary. So these are extreme dangers to workers
that take many different forms depending on the configuration
of the industry, you could be a truck driver, you could be
a hotel housekeeper, you could be a worker in a chicken factory,
they’re all working too fast and they need protection.
And under our system the only way you’re going to get
that is a union, we wish we had the laws to protect it but
unions don’t have the power politically in this country
to get those laws passed. We’ve learned that lesson
the hard way, increasingly over the last 20-30 years and so
it’s really now a matter of just patiently setting ourselves
about organizing a lot more workers and getting us the ability
to have that kind of power.
In some industries people have it, I would
venture to say a union electrician in New York City doesn’t
worry too much about whether they have the power to shut down
an electrical installation job, because they’re not
worried about the boss firing them and they have so much power
over the electrical contractors in New York, the plumbers
union is the same thing, but that’s the exception. [It]
proves the rule for workers in general, even workers in places
with relatively strong unions like New York and California.
Of course, the other thing that makes the whole thing a wild
card is the abuse of immigrants which has raised problems
of workers in the American workplace to a qualitatively new
level because…
mR: Since when?
EF: There certainly there
was a huge wave of immigration a hundred years ago that created
plenty of opportunities for employers to abuse workers and
immigration has always been a huge contribution to the labor
force in America, in many many different kinds of ways. The
problem is, is that the latest wave of immigration which has
been very powerful for the last 10-15 years, has been happening
at a time where we don’t have the other protections.
Immigrants are not moving into unionized workplaces in the
way that they were 50 years ago. They are not coming to a
country which is serious about enforcing labor law. They are
not coming to a country where employers thought they had the
obligation to provide health insurance to people. They are
not coming to a country where employers were socially ostracized
for killing workers anymore. They’re not, employers
kill workers all the time and it’s like no big deal.
And you’re not coming to a country where the competing
groups were willing to put up with it, competing groups have
been fighting back. It’s no coincidence that the hotel
industry stopped hiring African Americans over the last 15-20
years.
mR: How’s that related?
EF: They can hire immigrants
who aren’t going to fight them. Where as African Americans
stopped putting up with abusive mistreatment, they know how
to fight back, they learned that lesson. They fought back
enough to know that you don’t have to put up with it.
So the hotels turn around and say fine we’ll hire people
who don’t know how to fight back. It was one thing to
hire immigrants at a time when all the workers in the workforce
are willing to fight, but when you populate an entire workforce
of immigrants when a meat packing factory in North Carolina
is 95% immigrants and there’s no one there who knows
how to fight back, it’s a recipe for disaster.
mR: I’m interested
in particular in apparel, and you’re saying that there’s
less and less unions in apparel manufacturing in New York?
Because why… it’s not that there are not apparel
manufacturers?
EF: There is far fewer than
there were in the past. I would say that the New York apparel
workforce now is probably 10% of what it was 50 years ago.
New York is not an apparel manufacturing center to speak of
anymore. There are probably double the number of apparel manufacturing
workers in Los Angeles than there are in New York. The number
of organized apparel workers in Los Angeles is about a tenth
of what it is in New York. Organizing apparel workers in Los
Angeles is almost an entirely hopeless affair. We know, we’ve
tried. We’ve watched apparel companies in Los Angeles
respond to union organizing by closing the door and moving
to Mexico. It’s as simple as that, they just make it
very clear. You show up, you organize a union, “Why
be here, we don’t have to be here, we’re moving
to Mexico”, that’s the great gift of NAFTA there
[is] nothing to stop them. So there were 100,000 workers in
Los Angeles apparel industry almost none of them are unions
and any of those workers who try to organize a union know
what’s going to happen. Companies will shut down and
move to Mexico. And they can get away with it; American Apparel
is a good example, there’s nothing to stop them from
doing it. It’s such a powerful threat for the industry,
because people have seen it happen over and over again. And
not just because of unions, for whatever reason, it’s
a huge problem.
So we do have some apparel manufacturing in
New York City still left, not much, but it’s a dynamic
industry, it changes, companies go into business, they go
out of business, right, that’s the nature of the industry,
especially the smaller companies. And labor law being what
it is, the difficulty of organizing being what it is.
mR: Can you talk about those
in simple terms, like what are the problems in labor law?
EF: But just to finish the
thought, the unionized company to shut down, to organize it’s
new reincarnation, it might even be the same plant, the same
floor, it might even be the same machines, just a different
company, they’re very very difficult. And then came
9/11 which whacked the apparel manufacturing industry of New
York right in it’s heart, in China town, shut the whole
industry down for months at a time, they couldn’t afford
it. So between that and the price differential of going off
shore, it’s been very very difficult to maintain a manufacturing
base for apparel in New York. It doesn’t mean we give
up the fight, we still promote New York made apparel, we still
work with employers to keep their cost down to get low cost
health insurance for workers, to stop the rezoning manufacturing,
all the things that make a difference for employers at apparel
companies to try to stay in the city but it’s very very
difficult because the system drives them out. Never mind the
ultimate system which is the customer which is Walmart which
is the big chains who just keep driving their prices down
down down. Walmart could care less if they say I can’t
afford health insurance. “Too bad, we don’t pay
health insurance to our employees, why should we give a damn
if you can’t afford it for yours.”
Now what are the specific reasons? Employers
have incredible power when they want to fight workers on their
organizing drive. They can close the plant and pick up and
leave and no penalties involved, they can just do it. It might
take them 20 years to be found to have violated the labor
law, cause those are the cases that happen, but they can do
that, and by then what difference does it make? They can violate
the law and fire the ring leaders, the people who say, “Trust
me, come to my house tonight, we’re going to talk about
this,” the people who take the lead. They pay no penalty
for that. They might after 3 or 4 years have to rehire someone
but it effectively shuts down the campaign and they don’t
pay any penalty, all they have to do is pay the workers back
pay. And deducted from that is whatever other money the workers
made on whatever other job they had.
Since the worker wasn’t necessarily
getting health insurance they don’t have to pay for
all their workers’ problems with medical care for that
whole period of time. So, why would someone want to stick
their neck out? You have to be a very brave person as a worker
in America to put up with that kind of terrorism, that kind
of intimidation, that kind of harassment. What else can employers
do? They can almost say whatever they want, about how bad
the union is. They can talk about unions in any other situation
and pretend like it’s the union that they’re talking
about here. They can accuse a union of being corrupt and criminals
going out on strike even though it has nothing to do with
the workers here, and make it sound to these workers who know
nothing about it, as if they’re talking about the very
workers who are meeting with them to say why the union is
a good thing. So the campaign of lies, misinformation, intimidation,
harassment, it’s a matter of record. It’s unheard
of in any other industrialized country. No other industrialized
country allows employers the kind of free hand to terrorize
their workers that we have in the United States. Not Canada,
not the UK, nowhere in western Europe, we hold the record
for this one among industrialized countries.
mR: Any thoughts on why that
is?
EF: Yeah, because we don’t
have the power to stop them, that’s the system. Employers
keep the power. Fredrick Douglass made the observation that
power concedes nothing without a struggle. They’re not
going to give up the power they’re not going to allow
someone, some other force, especially their own workers to
have that kind of power to stop an employer from squeezing
money out of the workers, from increasing their profits. They’re
not going to give it up voluntarily. I mean there might be
the occasional Aaron Feuerstein at Malden Mills [inventor
of Polartec] – he is an incredible person who’s
unfortunately now lost control of his company. He was willing
to do an awful lot [after their devastating fire], he had
an extraordinary sense of ethics about his workers. There
have been some industrialists in the past who have claimed
that they felt they really had the obligation to treat workers
with the respect, who recognized workers’ rights to
have their own union. But they’re very much the exception
-- and the rule is that employers will take advantage of whatever
weaknesses there are in the system to keep their power. The
system in the United States of legally recognizing the right
of workers to have a union, only began in the 1930’s,
and only at a time of tremendous economic upheaval. Revolution
was in the air, and FDR, an industrialist, realized unless
they made some concessions, there were going to be some problems.
There’s a fascinating book about the Triangle fire called
Triangle, which describes how the events of the Triangle fire
led to the New Deal and various incarnations, including the
laws of labor organizing, that you should take a look at.
But in any case, those rights were only conceded
legally to workers in labor unions in the 30’s and unions
only really expanded under the extraordinary powers that the
government had during World War II when employers really were
limited in how much they could fight back. The day the war
ended employers started their fight back; we had huge strikes
in this country, 1946-47. In 1947, the US Congress went ahead
and passed the Taft Hartley Law, to greatly limit the rights
of unions and union activists. Unions also changed then too.
They had gotten strong, they had gotten powerful, they stopped
fighting, stopped organizing because at that time in many
places unions had a lot of power. They were 95% organized
in the auto industry, 90% organized in the steel industry
they really thought they had a lot of power and they stopped
organizing.
We in the textile industry knew that was never
the case. The southern textile industry was like a heartbeat
of reaction and racism. We never got organized in the southern
textile industry and we kept fighting to organize workers
in the southern textile industry in the 50s, in the 60’s,
in the 70’s when other unions basically gave up.
mR: So there’s been
an on-going lack of organizing in the textile industry, in
the apparel industry?
EF: Well more in the textile
industry…
mR: What’s the difference?
EF: Textiles make fabric,
you know, weaving mills, knitting mills, yarn and fabric.
Apparel is where you cut the fabric and make it into a piece
of clothing. So textile factories, in the past, in the industrial
model, tended to be huge, the lowest wages, the worst conditions,
that’s what the system produces that’s what the
Walmart business model produces. But what we are finally seeing
is some communities, some labor unions taking the lead and
saying “No, we’re not going to make compromises
on this anymore, we’re going to stand up and fight for
the kinds of conditions in the community that work, that we
need. Now, we’re not going to do it by just confining
our fight to one community or even one country it has to be
a global fight for the first time, but that fight has the
ability to be mounted.” And fortunately we see people
in other countries doing the same thing. People in Brazil
decided they had enough with the US business model, with the
IMF, they threw them out. They elected a metal worker Lula
to be their president, of the Workers Party. And what was
the first thing that Brazil did? They came to the World Trade
Organization, to the WTO, and said to the United States, “You’ve
been subsidizing your sugar industry and your citrus industry,
we’re not going to bend over for it over anymore, we’re
not going to take it. You want to have trade negotiations
with us, for a Free Trade of the Americas agreement, like
NAFTA but from Canada to Chile? Fine, but there’s got
to be some equity.” And the United States said, “Who
the hell do you think you are?” Boom. The whole trade
talks blew up in Cancun last year. Why? Because Brazil went
there with South Africa and a whole bunch of developing countries
and said “We’re not going to put up with this
anymore, you’re impoverishing our farmers, you’re
not going to do to us what you did to Mexico, where you threw
a quarter of a million corn farmers off the fields because
Archer Daniels Midland was able to export cheap corn from
Nebraska to Mexico. We’re not going to put up with it
anymore.” Just like in Brazil they’re setting
up a social model to fight poverty, to fight hunger, to do
a who range of things., One of the most unequal societies
in the world is finally coming to grips with [poverty], so
there are models to change it, but we’re pretty backward
We have a long way to go in this country but the evidence
of people beginning to fight back is there. To me it is unquestionable
and that’s the optimism.
Is it good today? No. Are apparel workers
in the United States today sitting ducks for some Walmart
executive in Arkansas pointing to a map in China and saying
“Aha, this is where I’m going to make your product”?
Sure, they’re sitting ducks. We didn’t get here
over night but we have the ability to change it. And unions
like us are willing to do it, so let’s get on with it.
mR: Wow, I’m so glad
you got to say all that. Realism is good but it is good to
hear some optimism too. Should we get to your favorite question?
EF: The consumer part?
mR: Well…
EF: I think we dealt with
sweat free versus union busting, and the last one was why
should consumers care?
mR: Right.
EF: This country has survived
as an economic entity because people make enough money to
be able to spend it and that model is severely at risk. You
can’t send that many jobs off shore you can’t
destroy the retirement income the health insurance of so many
people and expect those people to continue to buy. We had
a lot of poverty in this country before the so-called creation
of the middle class in the 40’s and 50’s and 60’s
off of basically good union jobs. We had a lot of poverty
before Medicare was enacted in 1964. We had a lot of poverty
before Social Security started taking care of older people.
Poverty is coming back. Not in the ways that show up clearly
on whatever the statistics are for how many people are impoverished
-- although we have 20 million kids living in poverty in this
country. It’s coming back by setting a trap, by stealing
away people’s medical insurance, by forcing them to
spend down their savings, to refinance their house, to run
their credit card debt up the wazoo, to leave us vulnerable
to huge oil price hikes. This is one attack after another
on the basic economic standards.
We built up a lot of wealth in this country
for middle class people. Of course, the wealthy have always
had a lot and they continue to get more. They haven’t
stopped. Middle class people built up a lot, they’re
spending it down cause they have nowhere else to get it from.
Baby boomers are paying for their kids’ apartments and
their kids’ health insurance, because jobs in America
don’t come with health insurance anymore. What happens
to the next generation when these kids don’t have pensions,
someone who’s in their 20’s now isn’t earning
their pension. In 20 years, in 30 years, in 40 years, they’re
going to face retirement with no pension. With the so-called
private account with an IRA, it’s all a gamble. That’s
what we’re facing if we don’t re-establish a middle
class society where the possibility of it -- where people
can consume and at the same time know they have the income
to support it. We also have a consumer society built upon
terrible environmental degradation, automobiles, energy consumption
irrespective of global warming.
We’re crazy, the rest of the world thinks
we’re nuts, there is something fundamentally wrong with
the consumer society in America whether it’s purchasing
products that are made from sweatshop labor in the US or around
the world, whether it’s paying no attention to the environmental
effects of energy consumption or planning more roads, more
highways, more cars. We’ve got to look differently at
what we’re doing and say “Are we willing to change
basic consumption in America?” It’s not enough
to just have a credit card that sends a penny off to some
charity. Bigger houses, bigger cars, more consumption…
mR: Who is going to be the voice behind that
message?
EF: All over the world people
talk about sustainable development. We stopped talking about
it in this country. We don’t have a discussion in the
United States about sustainable development.
mR: Who’s responsibility
is that discussion, is it media, is it schools is it …
EF: It’s everybody.
Sustainable development is such a broad issue that we all
have a responsibility to it; people in their daily lives have
to do it, journalists, community organizations, churches.
We’re so wowed by the consumer society now, we think
it’s the holy grail, people go to church they pray,
that’s fine, ever other day of the week they’re
going to the church of the dollar. Reverend Billy if you haven’t
heard his thing, he understands this very well. Reverend Billy
talks about consumption and sustainable development in a way
that is accessible to people and we need 100 Reverend Billys.
And they’re not just reverends and they’re not
just comedians and political speakers, they could be there
in many different ways. I mean we’re spending some ridiculous
portion of the gross national product on insurance companies
and middlemen in the health care industry. We could cut it
in half by having a single payer plan like the Medicare plan
that Canada has. It’s ridiculous.
But that’s what the system produces,
so we have to live up to the facts, admit that capitalism
is about making as much money for rich people in corporations,
and say “Fine but that is not my agenda and I’m
willing to work on a different agenda.” But it’s
not going to happen by accident. Workers and unions can to
do their part, other people have to do their part. I think
people learned in this last election, you can’t sit
out an election and just wonder who to vote for on election
day, you got to get out there and fight for it. If we had
a democratic party we would have done something -- unfortunately
we don’t really have one. Maybe by the time the next
election there’ll be a real democratic party that knows
how to fight. But people learned a lot. Don’t leave
it up to the politicians to fight our political battles, we’ve
got to go out there and fight it ourselves. So those are some
of the approaches, we’re still figuring it out, there’s
no easy answers to this.
mR: Thank you so much. |