A comment from Stan

I was pleased to see The Brownsville Herald run a story on the labor movement, the actual object of the Labor Day holiday, as opposed to our beloved State Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr.’s rather weak statistical analysis of the current labor force in the Sunday Herald. They’ve become such little boosterettes over there that one is surprised not to find the Chamber of Commerce seal somewhere on the Herald’s masthead. The article they ran was from The Monitor, of course.

It was interesting to note that there was an actual labor movement in the Valley. So many folks in these parts have fallen for the “right to work” line here in Texas–a matter of state law, of course– that it was surprising to see people attached to something like a union and then doing something about it. Surprising, too, that the object of the action described was to bar migrants from Mexico taking away field jobs here in the Valley. To no avail, of course.

There used to be a pretty vibrant community of migrant workers around here who, while not the richest folks I ever made, were doing pretty well when we moved here in 1981, were honest and fairly independent folks, and produced some of the best students I ever encountered. It’s amazing what reality and work will do for one’s desire for education and advancement.

It’s been my suspicion for quite a while that the boom in migrants from Mexico that began under Reagan was allowed because as an anti-labor phenomenon. Reagan was a union buster, as he demonstrated with the air controllers, and the rhetoric from his side of the aisle could not say “union” without tagging “socialist,” “communist,” “fellow traveler” or some other term meant as pejorative along with it. Of course, when he managed to quell union growth elsewhere, he virtually killed it here in the valley. Meanwhile, the history books were being stripped as clean of labor history as one could imagine. The last eighth grade U.S. history book I saw had maybe two paragraphs on the topic.

Yet the fact is that if you enjoy an eight hour work day as opposed to a twelve or sixteen hour day, enjoy a five day work week, or even working for a legally established minimum wage as opposed to the pittance your boss keeps saying your work is worth–well, thank a union for that. People died for your sake along the way.

Even in unorganized industries during the height of the labor movement people benefited from union activity. My father was a store manager for Marsh, an Indiana market chain similar to HEB, and it was a good place to work because of unions. The Marsh family recognized early on that if they were going to avoid being unionized, they had to treat their employees with fairness and equity. Kroger’s had thought otherwise and had been unionized and went through some labor turbulence.

Marsh avoided the problem by matching the union package for the most part, including something of a truncated grievance procedure. It was a small enough company that the headquarters was only thirty miles away and you could get in to see Estell Marsh or one of his brothers.

The Marsh defense wasn’t perfect.  They had some trouble keeping up with the meat cutters’ and trucker’s demands and periodically the unions would try to re-engage their employees. But, at least until I quit paying attention, the defense held. I don’t know the history of HEB, but I’d make a wild guess that it’s similar.

That “right to work” law, otherwise known as the “you can’t organize no matter what you do because to do so means that, if you’re male, you just willingly cut your own balls off, and, if you’re female, you’re going to give up your right to decide anything for yourself ever again,” has been an excellent rhetorical device for the corporations. Besides keeping labor pliant and fragmented, it has masked that the corporate structure is collectivism–that is, socialism; that is, communism– for the folks with money.

With the dual innovations from the Supreme Court that a corporation is a person before the law (thus shielding the actual owners from most liability issues with their more hare-brained schemes) and that money is speech (fomenting the erection of the media idiocracy that protects the moneyed folks and their actual workings from view), those folks with the money have the means to rule virtually every aspect of life in the country. And so they do.

Here’s hoping that the working class and the middle class wake up from their befuddlement. Happy Labor Day. There is a new attempt in Congress to renew the right of the people to organize themselves, but, in the current rhetorical atmosphere, it doesn’t stand much of a chance, but one can always hope.