Look for the Union Label
I remember the ILGWU song from when I was a kid and the women would promote their union in television ads, and as many times as I heard stories of union corruption and misuse of power, I heard the stories of the struggles they made to benefit all workers. Power relationships are always troubled, especially when the balance of power between labor and management is weighted too far in favor of one or the other side. In the case of unions, this too often resulted in infiltration by organized crime, while on the other side of the equation, you got sweatshops and moving factories into Third World labor markets and CEO’s lining their own pockets at the expense of the company and its workers. Government, to the degree that it has attempted to ensure fairness in the relationship, has instituted various controls to make such problems less attractive to the greedy, whether by enacting laws or pursuing investigations and prosecutions of offenders. For the Ayn Randers and the selfish individuals over the years espousing what’s now called the neo-con line, unions are always corrupt and must be abolished, while insider trading and limitations on executive power are unwarranted government intrusions. This is the kind of thinking that’s put George Bush and John Howard into office. While in the U.S. Bush is busy reorganizing how the Department of Labor defines overtime eligibility and planning how Social Security can be put into the hands of stock market investment banks, in Australia, John Howard will on Friday take majority control of the Senate and begin his push to alter the industrial relations controls that have served to protect workers for many years now, an agenda he’s been pushing since at least 1996, but can only now realize. Many here among the Howard supporters will tell you that unions are out-dated and that the Labor party has lost any purpose in the political landscape, but while the latter is true insofar as Labor needs to assert itself in the public policy discourse, the former is only true to the degree that you do not believe in a fair wage, an assertion Howard’s minions would dispute, because to them, fair is what they get, not what anyone else is paid. They disgust me, and if you, too, deplore their attitudes and actions, there’s more you can do about it. Find out what’s happening, stay up-to-date, and make sure you’re heard: The Last Weekend, at Sydney Olympic Park, 11 a.m., Sunday, 7 August (gotta love the caricature of Howard in the poster – are those stink lines or is he supposed to be radioactive?).