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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Starbucks, Amazon, the Big Three automakers – what do these all have in common? The drive to negotiate unfair labor agreements in challenging times.
On one side are these hugely profitable businesses, on another workers who have been squeezed for generations and now face increasingly perilous economic times with the very underpinnings of what work entails on the chopping block.
And on the third side of a very unequal triangle are the governments where the business base is demanding more breaks and the electorate is demanding more services, where tax income in many jurisdictions is dropping and requirements to address critical issues such as climate change and homelessness keep mounting.
Negotiations are upcoming for the USPS, the national railways, Boeing, IATSE, LAUSD, the Los Angeles City (yes, again) and more...
Heads up! Bargaining in secret has no value other than to allow negotiators and management on both sides to make handsome payments to each other for often minor concessions, with the focus on not rocking the apple cart that feeds their power... and their pocketbooks.
When Amazon and others were able to keep negotiations secret, they were able to coerce workers afraid of losing their jobs.\
When city governments are allowed to bargain behind closed doors, the parties can easily cut side deals.
When union leaders are paid by the rank and file but won’t listen to them, catering instead to the wishes of employers or cutting side deals elsewhere, who benefits?
Last summer, there was a trifecta of unions sweeping aside the curtain and inviting all Americans to see what used to only occur behind closed doors.
On one hand stood representatives for auto workers, TV and movie writers, and the actors themselves whose predecessors’ power and ability to deliver real benefits to the workers had steadily declined over the decades.
On the other side sat the powers-that-be with their lawyers and enticements for both politicians and union leaders to cave hat-in-hand to their corporate betters.
Those that benefit from lackluster agreements will always be those who stand to profit the most. Not the taxpayer, and not the worker.
Because behind the negotiators are their corporate overseers.
In too many cases these are not small business owners who knows all their employees personally, but a corporate pyramid where bosses answer to other bosses all the way to Wall Street, where Monopoly man Milburn Pennybags makes decisions based on leveraging more black ink in the short term and erasing the red, never factoring in the human sweat and blood of Main Street.
Leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks driven by Wall Street focus on quarterly stock prices, not on a healthy future for the local, national or world economies.
Corporate raiders drove up the paper value of Toys “R” Us on Wall Street as it loaded the company up with debt and sucked its assets dry before filing for bankruptcy in 2017. Thirty-three thousand workers lost their jobs.
When Bed, Bath, and Beyond collapsed last year due to a Wall Street-pressured stock buybacks over the previous two decades, it cost more than thirty-three thousand jobs.\
Since 1996, mass layoffs have impacted more than 30 million workers and their families.
Cynically, companies fire quality employees to finance mammoth stock buybacks that drive up stock prices for the financial industry leeches while gutting their workforce, fudging quality-control metrics and producing inferior products.
No sector of the economy is immune. In 2022, more than 165,000 high tech workers lost their jobs. In 2023, 263,000. Tens of thousands more have joined them since January were laid off. So far this year, another 74,000 workers have joined them.
And the workers? How greedy are they?
In unrealistically expensive communities that surround the better job opportunities in California, a living wage is exorbitant compared to some places. But is it unreasonable to demand enough to put food on the table, a roof over one’s head, put children through college, have health coverage, and save for retirement?
To pay the taxes to ensure public safety and good government?
Companies must return to making money the old-fashioned way, by making good products rather than manipulating debt and manufacturing their share price.
By supporting their workers instead of paying unscrupulous coteries of merciless lawyers to suppress and destroy them.
By welcoming everyone to the table and not cutting deals in back rooms.
By expressing pride in their products instead of cutting costs – and quality – and paying similar pit-bull firms to draw out proceedings and pile up costs so consumers have little chance of any recompense for faulty merchandise.
To get there we must remake the relationship between capitalism and the worker. Not capitalism per se, but those that suck all profit off the labor of others while giving nothing back.
We must move the conversation from win-and-lose to gradations of success. Not what is just good for one side or the other but what is good for both.
No enterprise operates in isolation. There are investors and manufacturers, workers and management, suppliers and marketers, regulators and consumers.
If one part grabs more power the others suffer. If several collude to advance their personal interests at the expense of the less powerful, the whole system slides out of whack.
Which is where most of America is now.
The outrageous amounts of money to be made by perpetuating the current rotting system is demonstrated by the vast infrastructure entrenched capitalism has constructed to buy judges and politicians. What it spends shows just how much it stands to lose.
Unions are the last remaining bastion to protect not only their workers but the American economy as a whole.
To rebuild pride in workmanship and re-embrace customers who won’t buy shoddy goods.
But many of our unions may need a makeover themselves for the rising economy to lift all boats.
Stay tuned.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
