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Will Labor Get Its Day?
By Msgr. George G. Higgins
August 21, 1998
A recent op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal, "Why Big Labor Keeps Getting Smaller," is misleadingly titled. The title leaves the impression that the column's writer, Kevin Hassett, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is arguing that what he calls the union's "disruptive absurdities" in the recent General Motors strike explain why big labor is declining.But Hassett really is saying that all labor, big and small, is permanently on the decline because "most Americans want little to do with unions."
Hassett admits that when workers were working 12 hours a day over hot furnaces, unions had the high moral ground. But today, he says, "unions pursue old strategies that are unreasonable, confrontational and ultimately self-destructive."
Hassett's knowledge of labor history and labor economics is woefully inadequate. He says not a word about the legal and economic obstacles that confront workers as they strive to exercise their right to organize. That includes farm workers, many of whom still work 12 hours a day in the hot sun.
One has the impression that Hassett is living in an ivory tower, comfortably sheltered from the grubby realities of labor- management relations.
When Bishop William S. Skylstad, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Domestic Policy, spoke out for workers' rights in the committee's 1998 Labor Day statement, he might have had pundits of Hassett's ilk in mind. The bishop specifically referred to agricultural workers who "cleaned the chickens and picked the strawberries for our Labor Day feast (but) probably cannot afford to purchase the fruits of their labors."
Most agricultural workers, he says, like other low-wage workers -- janitors, window washers, hotel housekeepers and workers in health care and child care -- have no pension other than Social Security and no health insurance.
Would Hassett have us believe that these and other low-paid workers "want little to do with unions"? That may be true of some of them, but Hassett tells us nothing about the systematic efforts of many of their employers (including, sadly, some Catholic hospital administrators) who make it difficult if not impossible for them to organize.
Hassett's silence about violations of trade union rights and the gaps in U.S. labor legislation leaves me to think he is philosophically anti-union and that his one-sided critique of the General Motors strike is dust in his readers' eyes, distracting them from his essential message, namely, that there is no need for unions, big or small, in the American economy.
A current summary of violations of workers' rights is found in the Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights published by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The report says that 50 years after the International Labor Organization (the oldest of the U.N. specialized agencies) adopted Convention 87 establishing freedom of association in international law, this right still is being violated with impunity in every country, including the United States.
If Hassett thinks that the ICFTU report is prejudiced because it comes from an international trade union body, he can check its findings against dozens of books and monographs from neutral and highly respected sources.
A longer version of Hassett's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, we are told, will appear in the official journal of the American Enterprise Institute.
I am alarmed by what appears to be a growing anti-unionism on that institute's part. I had been led to believe that the flagship think tank of the neo-conservative movement in the United States could be counted upon to strike a more objective balance in dealing with labor-management relations. More in sorrow than anger, I conclude I was wrong.
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