One hundred years ago this June, Andrew Carnegie had the workers locked out of his steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Carnegie wanted to run his mill without unionized employees, and there were no laws protecting workers against being fired simply because they belonged to a union. So Carnegie's deputy, Henry Clay Frick, shut the doors against the 3800 Homestead workers and tried to bring in replacements to operate the mill. The result was a bloody confrontation in which men on both sides were killed. But Carnegie got what he wanted -- he broke the union -- and it was a number of years before this country got labor laws that confirmed the workers' right to join together in unions without fear of losing their jobs.
People commemorated the Homestead lockout this year as a milestone in labor history, just as they commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire a couple of years ago. In the Triangle tragedy, 150 workers lost their lives when a fire raced through their factory and they were unable to escape because the factory owners had locked the exits from the outside.
When we remember terrible events like these, we have a comfortable feeling that we have come very far since those days. Some people feel so comfortable that they think we don't need unions anymore; excellent labor laws and responsible employers have made them unnecessary. But we haven't come as far as we'd like to think.
Look at the striker replacement bill, which has been hanging around Congress for a couple of years. This bill would close up a loophole in current law which says that, while management may not fire striking workers, it's OK to hire permanent replacements for them. What's the difference? President Bush claims that he sees one, and he promises to veto the bill if Congress finally gets around to passing it. But this is a distinction without a difference to people who could lose their jobs. What it really amounts to is denying workers the right to strike: Few will walk off the job, no matter how they are treated, if management is free to give their jobs to other workers.
Something like that happened during this year's strike at Caterpillar, Inc. Over 12,000 union members were forced to go back to work and unilaterally accept management's demands because of management's threat to hire permanent replacements. This kind of pressure could not be put on union members in any other industrialized country.
And if the events at the Imperial chicken-processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, don't remind us of the Triangle fire, they should. In September 1991, when a fire swept through the Imperial plant, 30 of the 90 workers in the plant died, some of them piled up at unmarked exits that were locked -- from the outside. These workers were supposedly protected by occupational health and safety legislation, but laws are no better than their enforcement and the Imperial plant had never been inspected. Of course the workers could have demanded the protection they were entitled to under the law. But just ask yourself how likely poor people would be to risk a job they couldn't afford to lose by lodging a complaint against an employer. They needed a union, but North Carolina is a state whose right-to-work laws discourage unionization so they didn't have one.
The global economy is putting new and even more terrible pressures on American workers. Some of them are apparent in a story about the Monroe Manufacturing Corp. in Monroe, Louisiana, that appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal (July 28, 1992). Most of the workers in the Monroe factory, which makes items for babies like bibs and pacifiers, get $4.25 an hour, the minimum wage. This means that many live below the poverty line and collect food stamps even when they work six days a week. The company provides no health insurance, and according to the Wall Street Journal, working conditions are horrible. Workers tell of 100-degree temperatures and overflowing toilets, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has cited the company for "toxic fumes, poor ventilation, fire hazards, unsafe machinery and overcrowding." Why aren't the workers unionized? There have been a number of attempts over the years, but the owner has threatened to move his plant to some third-world country if his workers organize and he is forced to give them a wage comparable to that of other unionized workers in the industry. So what can they do? "It's so awful there," one of them said, "and I do want my life to get better. But, God, I can't lose this job."
It's probably a measure of how dreadful conditions are that Monroe workers recently voted to take their chances on unionizing. Will the owner move the factory to Mexico or China? He probably won't have to because, if he takes advantage of present regulations, he could delay collective bargaining for years. "I think the record is seven years," he says. And if he keeps the heat on his workers, he might get them to vote the union out before he has to bargain a contract.
Monroe's owner is frank about what he's doing -- running a third-world operation in the U.S. The shame is that our laws allow him to get away with it and that they penalize poor people who want a living wage and decent working conditions.
The union movement took a lot of workers who were relatively unskilled and turned them into middle class people who educated their children and supported the U.S. economy. Now, we've got businesses turning their employees into third-world workers. Is this what we want for the future of our country?