Unions still mourning the dead and fighting like hell for the living
By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
Safety first?
It was mostly safety last in American mines, mills and factories before the advent of unions, government safety regulations and OSHA.
With the Trump administration flashing the green light, many employers, especially non-union ones, are still trying to cut safety corners. On this 50th anniversary Workers Memorial Day, the coronavirus crisis "has revealed a reality many workers have long confronted--workers are routinely forced to work in unsafe conditions, risking their health and safety for a job," says a report by Celine McNicholas of the Economic Policy Institute.
It's a one-two punch against workers. We've got an anti-labor secretary of labor appointed by one of the most anti-labor presidents in our history.
Trump's phony populist con job won him votes from more than 38 percent of union members nationwide going on four years ago, according to polling pro Nate Silver.
"The reality and rhetoric of Donald Trump are radically different," said Louisville labor lawyer Dave Suetholz. "He says he cares about the American worker--America first. That's rhetoric, a joke. The reality is that all of his appointees are business cronies who couldn't care less about working people."
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Added McNicholas: Instead of looking for ways to address weak health and safety protections for workers in this crisis, Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia is taking this opportunity to weaken protections for millions of workers. He issued a rule exempting certain firms from being required to provide paid sick and family medical leave to workers, which could rob nine million health care workers and 4.4 million first responders from paid leave protections. Further, Scalia has refused to require employers to follow Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance for public businesses."
Scalia is the son of the late reactionary, union-despising Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. The labor secretary "has even resisted calls to issue safety requirements to protect health care workers," McNicholas also wrote. "The CDC recently issued a report finding that between February 12 and April 9 over 9,200 health care workers reported coronavirus infections. Of these cases, 73% were women. Twenty-seven workers had died of COVID-19 as of April 9."
History, the subject I taught in a community college for two dozen years, could hardly be plainer when it comes to strong unions and to strong worker safety and health laws. We need them both.
In a perfect world, everybody would live by the Golden Rule, some form of which is found in just about every major religion. Sadly, we live in a real world where greed is the gospel of many employers.
If a lot of business owners and managers had their way, we wouldn’t have unions or worker safety and health laws. For a long time, we didn’t have either in the United States. Not until the 1930s did a Democratic-majority New Deal Congress pass legislation that gave workers the fundamental right to bargain collectively and required employers to recognize unions.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, signed the legislation into law.
Not until 1970 did Congress create the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The landmark bill passed with bipartisan support.
Hogs will fly and kids will stop shooting hoops in Kentucky before Trump would sign--or McConnell would let the Senate pass--anything like the Occupational Safety and Health Act that created OSHA.
OSHA was needed because many, if not most, state and local worker safety and health laws were inadequate or were not effectively enforced.
Before strong unions and meaningful protection for worker safety and health, most workers toiled long hours at low pay in jobs that threatened—and often claimed—life and limb.
A century or so ago, railroads, mines and factories were slaughterhouses. Many children were among the dead and maimed. Child labor was widespread in American industry. Adults were so poorly paid that boys and girls as young as 10 had to go to work to help their parents make ends meet.
Many industrialists bragged about how often they went to church. Some said God gave them their money. While Christian "Captains of Industry" hated Charles Darwin’s scientific theory of evolution, they loved Social Darwinism, a brutal and inhuman philosophy which claimed that business works like nature.
It was "survival of the fittest" in both, Social Darwinists said. There was nothing anybody could do—or should do—about it, they argued. Hence, Social Darwinists said unions and worker safety and health laws should be rejected because they interfered with the "natural operation" of the "free market." Under Social Darwinism, all that mattered was making money.
With Social Darwinism, millionaires didn’t have to worry about workers losing a leg, an arm, an eye or their lives on the job. Social Darwinists said workers were stupid and lazy anyway; otherwise they would be millionaires.
Social Darwinist millionaires had many friends in government; workers had precious few. The plutocrats bought off politicians to make sure that unions were scarce and that worker safety and health laws were off the books, or toothless.
Sound familiar in the Trump-McConnell era?
Unions commemorate April 28 as Workers Memorial Day because OSHA was born on April 28. OSHA did much to improve worker safety and health for all workers and not just union members.
Doubtless, if it were up to the Trump-McConnell tag team, unions and OSHA would vanish. When union-busters like the president and his chief lickspittle extol "free enterprise," they mean free of unions and free of laws that safeguard workers on the job.
When we pause this Workers Memorial Day to remember those who lost their lives on the job, let’s remember the words of one of the greatest union heroes from history—Mary Harris "Mother" Jones: "Mourn the dead; fight like hell for the living!"