Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.
Of all the many comments, pro and con, that have been made about the widespread attempts to weaken American unions, none have been clearer or more on the mark than the words of President Bob King of the United Auto Workers Union.
King, of course, is on the union side of the argument. But as King made very clear, that’s the side to be on if you believe working people should have full collective bargaining rights and the decent wages, hours and working conditions that result from fair bargaining.
King’s comments came in an exceptional column in the latest issue of Solidarity, the UAW’s official magazine. The column is titled, simply, “Do Justice.”
To Bob King, “doing justice does not mean trying to reduce the wages, benefits and standard of living of all workers in America,” as far too many Republican politicians at all levels of government are trying to accomplish, with their main target – for now – public employees.
“Doing justice to me,” said King, “means that everyone has an equal opportunity, and if they make the individual decision to work hard and live by the rules, then they will be able to live a middle-class standard of living and retire with dignity and maintain their middle-class standard of living.”
I know, and you know, that can’t happen if working people are denied the essential right to unionization – the essential right to a strong bargaining voice in determining their pay and benefits through their unions. That’s obvious, for unionization is the main reason for the rise of an American middle class, beginning with the granting of union rights to most workers by federal law in the 1930s.
But as Bob King warned, those rights and the middle class they established are under serious attack by anti-union politicians and others who “preach the vision of scarcity, the vision of division and the vision of fear.”
Ours is a country gifted with great abundance, with plenty to give each of us a fair share. But union opponents preaching “the vision of scarcity” deny that. They act as if there’s not enough in this, the world’s richest country, to give a fair share to all.
Yet there is enough to go around, as we should know, and unions are the primary vehicles for guaranteeing that working people get their fair share of our abundance.
Which is why greedy corporate interests and other anti-labor forces that want a larger share at the expense of others argue selfishly against unions and, indeed, against the very concept of collective bargaining.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.