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Changing the Balance of Power in the Workplace
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2010-12-26 22:26:59
Last weekend I chaperoned my seventh grade Sunday school class to New York City for their annual field trip. One of the
high points of the trip each year is a visit to the New York City Tenement Museum, and once again, it did not disappoint.
The 12-year-olds crowding into the kitchen of the three-room apartments learned that these were not only family residences
but also factories known as sweatshops, where family members, including children their age, worked 12 to 16 hours a day
for wages that barely covered rent and food. Our tour guide talked about the efforts of union organizers to organize these
scattered workers in the face of owners’ tough opposition and the availability of replacement workers willing to work for
even less money. This year’s tour took place in the context of a new generation of isolated workers who have found
themselves underpaid and vulnerable in the Great Recession. They range from poor immigrants like those who populated the
nineteenth century tenements to the freelancers of New York City and elsewhere—many of them writers, editors, translators,
graphic designers, web consultants, and other creative professionals. On December 13, 2010. Governor Paterson signed the
Wage Theft Prevention Act, which requires companies to explicitly state how much the employee will be paid and increases
penalties for employers who steal wages from workers. Supported by a variety of unions, the Wage Theft Prevention Act is a
small victory at a time in which unions are under assault from corporations and government officials such as the Right’s
favorite big bully, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. There is no question that unions improved the lives of New York
City’s garment workers of the last century. Higher wages and better working conditions, combined with child labor laws,
gave the children of these impoverished immigrants a future, and today their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are
some of the leaders of our own community. The assault on unions that began in the early 1980s is one of the reasons—along
with regressive tax and spending policies—that inequality has grown in the United States to levels generally seen in the
developing world. Today, unions have been demonized and broken, and the result is the rapid decline in real wages and the
outright exploitation of workers. For example, today when a freelancer seeks work, the potential client often asks him or her
to complete a sample assignment. The freelancer puts time, effort, and often expense into the project; submits the work; and
never hears from the employer again. By baiting an army of desperate job applicants, the company can get its work done for
free. A Wall Street Journal series from April 2010 reported that 40 percent of freelance accounts receivable could not be
collected. From my own experience, that number is accurate. Clients know that freelancers do not have the money to hire
lawyers, and (except maybe now in New York) it is impossible to file criminal charges against even the most flagrant
fraudsters and the ones who boast about their acts. A friend in another state who was stiffed despite having a written contract
found herself threatened with a lawsuit, and received abusive, personally insulting e-mails, when she tried to claim her
payments earlier this month. She ended up advancing even more money to silence this modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge. When
she tried to contact the state attorney general’s office in the offender’s jurisdiction, her complaint was rejected. Apparently,
the attorney general was more interested in overturning Obamacare than in defending people cheated by his state’s
businesses. If the union-busters have their way, the situation facing my friend will become increasingly the norm, especially
in the absence of public authorities willing or able to protect ordinary people against the powerful. We can look forward to a
return of the sweatshops, as well as the kind of violent intimidation, widespread crime, and unrest that took place before the
era of Progressive reforms. We will see the conditions workers and families
ONLINE OR OFFLINE.
YOU'VE GOT TO ORGANIZE
TO SURVIVE.
HEW YORK TIMES bestselling author of LITTLE BROTHER
Acii-oocroROW
regularly endure in the developing world. The garment sweatshop of
yesteryear has given way to today’ s electronic sweatshop, and a vision of what this new, non-unionized, highly exploitative
universe will look like can be found in Cory Doctorow’s recently published thriller, For the Win (Tor, 2010). Set in a near
future that could actually be today, the novel depicts young men and women, ages 14 to 30, who labor in various aspects of
the video game industry. Most are low-paid workers in China and India who spend 16 hours a day in grimy, crowded
Internet Cafes, farming virtual gold for local bosses and multinational corporations. Some of the local bosses stand out for
their brutality. At the beginning, a talented gamer in China is beaten nearly to death for seeking to strike out on his own, and
the entire family of a 15-year-old girl is threatened when the girl fends off an enforcer’s sexual advances. The Chinese
gamer and his friends—including a 17-year-old California teenager, Leonard “Wei Dong” Goldberg—come to support a
multinational union led by an elusive Malaysian woman organizer known as Big Sister Nor. The Indian girl, the much-
admired “General Robotwalla” for her gaming skill, opposes the union despite her best friend’s involvement. As the gamers’
strike approaches and the Chinese government increases its repression, Wei Dong smuggles himself into China in a
container to join his friends’ cause. The revolution that has begun in cyberspace quickly becomes very real. Through
Doctorow’s third person narrative, we see a huge cast of characters, making this an exciting plot-driven book that reads life a
television drama. Interspersed with the individual stories are the author’s discussion of the video game industry, speculative
financial instruments, elaborate scams, and the economics underlying the global recession. For many of the wealthy and
powerful in the United States, China—with its barely restrained capitalism and it government suppression of civil and
human rights, including the right of workers to organize—serves as a model. In the future, we can expect more admiring
words from this crowd, as China surpasses the US as the world’s largest economy. It doesn’t have to be this way. European
countries have continued to enjoy strong economic growth with policies that are fair to workers as well as to owners. There
and here, unions remain workers’ best hope of maintaining decent wages and working conditions in the face of employers
who would otherwise hold all the power.
