When the news hit, there was the expected speculation that the workers’ resistance to tighten their belts in these tough times will hurt Ford’s ability to recover and prosper. Days later, the company reported whopping third quarter profits.

The Associated Press reported that the company was trying to buy a yes vote before news of their financial success went public, offering members a $1,000 bonus for ratification, but the freezing of entry-level pay and limiting the ability to strike weren’t palatable options for members. As one local leader explained, workers wanted to see more cuts at the top, arguing that the dwindling car manufacturing workforce has already sacrificed enough.

“The Ford contract concessions were predicated on the assumption that Ford was in deep, deep trouble, which they weren’t,” said Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist and labor expert based the City University of New York Graduate Center. “Luckily, there was a rank and file that would not stand for that.”

As much as this was workers calling the bluff of company bigwigs, it was also a sharp rebuke to UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, who along with settling for the punitive contract terms, stood by the heads of the Big Three automakers before Congress in the pleas for a bailout. His presence there, along with the union’s own interest, was in part to gloss over the image of incompetent industrialists looking for a government hand-out. Gettelfinger made the bail-out a pro-labor and populist cause, in the contrast to the bailout of the banks. In return for the image boost, Gettelfinger would help the bosses trim labor costs.

But there’s a greater lesson for the rest of us during this economic crisis. As UAW members fight against concessions and transit workers in Philadelphia strike against a company that won’t bargain in good faith, passersby tend to dismiss their actions by noting “I didn’t get a raise either,” or “Hey, it’s tough times.” It’s also the same time when the economic gurus get to say that we are on the rebound, enough to justify payouts to bank executives, but not enough to justify the trickle-down to workers.

For the rest of the country, most of whom are not in unions, putting pressure on their employer to raise wages and benefits is not easy. However, collectively, we can pressure more legislative reform in terms of living wage laws and mandates for health-care coverage. These aren’t new ideas, but in the model of the Ford workers, when we demand more from the ruling industrial class its claims of poverty should be met with skepticism.

Protectionism: Even the word sounds xenophobic, stubborn and regressive. One rarely calls him or herself a protectionist, and such a term is often used in the pejorative to dismiss anything from the opposition to conditions of free trade agreements to government subsidies of certain industries.

The current administration, in part at the urging of organized labor, is attempting to put the  government back in the business of intervening in commerce in the hopes of creating more and better jobs to spur economic recovery. The general move, of course, has been derided as protectionism, but we need to realize that there are different kinds of protectionism, some good and some bad.

One economist recently explained to me that developing economies have often used so-called protectionist methods-such as tariffs or subsidies-when building new industries. After all, with an economy of scale, such countries could not compete in the beginning without a little bit of help. On the other hand, there is the destructive tendency for nations to subsidize the “dinosaurs” of the economy, which just keeps afloat an industry that really doesn’t help the public.

The best example of how our country doesn’t have a full discussion about our options was the debacle over the bail-out for the Big Three automakers. Proponents of having the government supply bridge loans to the huge but ailing companies argued that letting them go under during a recession would result in an economic Katrina, especially in the Heartland. Opponents noted that doing so would just waste taxpayers’ money by delaying their inevitable deaths.

What wasn’t on the table-and only heard in the margins of American political discourse-was the notion of government control of the automakers infrastructure and turning them into something better, such as mass transit and alternative transportation development (if the Big Three can make big cars, what could stop them from being transitioned into manufactures of buses, light rail cars and energy-efficient vehicles?). Such an idea is not without precedent: Part of the New Deal and the way out of the Great Depression was marrying the unemployed masses with public works projects whose goal was increase the quality of life for the general population.

On the other hand, there are plenty of demonstrations of protectionism gone wrong. At the beginning of the economic crisis, the previous administration railroaded a bail-out package for troubled financial institutions. Some of them are making out well. But unemployment is still high.

It will take time, but we need to stop chanting the Reagan-era prayers are starving the beast, i.e. reducing taxes and government services. Instead of turning our nose at any policy or project meant for industrial job growth and infrastructural development with taxpayer dollars, we should examine and evaluate these plans on a case-by-case basis.

Nationwide, the group has been known to give its organizers long hours at pay bringing them close to the poverty line. The National Labor Relations Board even found that one ACORN affiliate had acted with anti-union animus when it fired several organizers who were trying to unionize the staff.

It might seem odd for a group that fights Wal-Mart and pushes living-wage legislation to fight worker organizing. But there are many groups like ACORN that hold a double standard, and inside the labor movement there is a deep split on the issue of whether union staffers should have their own unions.

(Note to reader: Your correspondent was an active member in his staff union, the Federation of Union Representatives, while employed at Unite Here from 2006 to 2007.)

The case pro-union unionists make is simple: practice what you preach. Unions claim that morale is higher and turnover is lower when workers have a say in their pay and conditions and that they prove essential in winning things for workers such as safety protections, progressive wage increases and other things that make work livable. For a union to suggest otherwise by fighting its staff from unionizing would only validate capitalist propaganda.

While some unions have good relationships their staff unions, others have fought tooth and nail to keep unions out. In a few instances, union leaders have employed the very same union-busting tactics they deplore. Part of the opposition to staff unionism is purely about the bottom line; union leaders want to lower operational costs and have flexibility with its staff. But often it runs deeper.

For example, many question the dedication of union staffers who organize, claiming that they put the staff’s interest before that of the members. This logic is specious at best, especially considering that it falls right in line with the fallacy that public-sector workers shouldn’t have collective-bargaining rights because it’s putting their pay and benefits before the needs of the taxpayers.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University, explained that because unions find themselves in a sort of battle mode with employers, they have a tendency to scrap democracy in the same way the United States sacrificed many basic civil liberties in the War on Terror.

“There’s a tendency to say, ‘We can’t play by the same rules, so we can’t have staff unions because we’re in a crisis,’” she said.

That’s a big problem for unions if they want to recruit young and talented people for careers in the labor movement. If that’s the employment strategy unions want, the only people they can recruit are the few people who want sacrifice themselves for that kind of battle, or the kind of young people that will live like that and burn-out quickly.

If they want to be strong, they might want workplaces that have the kind of pay, benefits and opportunity for promotion that encourage bright folks to make the labor movement a real career.

“Employers will keep being employers,” Bronfenbrenner said. “Union staffers at some point have to be able to say, ‘We need decent work conditions.’”

This week Trumka shifted gears and came from the industrial town to New York City, the capital of global finance. Standing with union members outside the New York Stock Exchange, he promised a broader push to curl back much of the de-regulation and idolatry of the Invisible Hand that has progressed since the Reagan administration. His tone in regards to how firms us Federal bail-out money was anything but conciliatory.

“If you lock out families wanting homes and businesses desperately needing capital to create jobs and new opportunities for families, if you take money from us tax payers and you spend it on more speculation instead of investing it in businesses that create jobs, if you large your executives with bonuses and largesse while you’re squeezing families out of their homes with unfair lending, you better get ready because the American labor movement is going to fight you,” he said to roaring applause.

When asked what “the fight” would look like, Trumka clearly elaborated: the AFL-CIO is going to do a lot of congressional lobbying.

That isn’t to say there won’t be any direct action; he did say that unions would mobilize members against firms that stood in the way of any legislative action that would require more regulation for derivatives and hedge funds, noting that members would vote with their “dollars as well as their feet.”

But while the more militant side of the labor movement-understandably-yawns at all these promises of labor leaders to get behind the Democratic agenda, there is reason for it. For one thing, due to shrinking union ranks since the Reagan administration, organized labor simply does not have enough foot soldiers to do real battle with Wall Street. And even if they did, they wouldn’t because pension funds are invested in the market. Just like traders, they can’t stand to see the Dow Jones Industrial Index plummet either.

But as consumer advocate and single-payer health-care proponent Ralph Nader recently said on Democracy Now, one reason universal health-care has never become a reality in this country is that there is a huge health insurance lobby, while there is no real single-payer lobby.

If the American economy is going to be rebuilt so that what Wall Street does with the peoples’ investments can’t go unregulated, and thus contribute to a kind of widening the wealth gap that has been going on since Reagan, there will need to be heavy-hitting, targeted lobbying on issues like a public option for health care and stronger financial regulations. President Obama and congressional Democrats won’t do it on their own.

Yes, there needs to be rank-and-file mobilization to accomplish any political goal, but the need for a lobby other than just for union members is also deeply necessary. It has often been said that the unemployed have no union. The same can be said for the independent worker, the blue-collar Joe working in a state where union presence is almost non-existent, or a migrant laborer. The union apparatus can and should reach out and represent these sectors, the most downtrodden of the working class, against the strong united lobbies of predatory capitalists, despite the fact that there aren’t dues to be collected.

Since the AFL-CIO, unlike the Change to Win coalition, has not made new member organizing its top priority, broadening its legislative scope is interesting, but it is too early to see if Trumka can really push for change.

The currently shelved labor-backed bill would make it much easier for workers to form unions by stiffening penalties for bosses who interfere in organizing, but the most controversial part of it mandates employers to recognize the union when a majority of workers in a potential bargaining unit to sign union cards-a process called “card-check”-instead of forcing an election. The compromise, several labor insiders have estimated, is keeping the secret-ballot process but mandating an election shortly after workers petition that they want one.

Well, the WSJ just won’t have any of this. On Sept. 17 the Monty Burns-wannabes wrote “This shotgun vote is intended to deny employees the kind of educated choice that comes with a proper discussion of the merits of unionization informed by both management and labor.”

Such a lovely Harvard Club way of putting it. With National Labor Relations Board elections taking months after workers petition for a vote, the “education” and “discussion” workers often get is the company firing and harassing organizers, railing against the union constantly in captive audience meetings and using other threats and fear tactics, while the union gets little or no say.

Labor leaders believe that more and more workers in America, seeing health-care and the general cost-of-living going up while wages stay stagnant, want a union, but can’t organize because the current NLRB process is stacked in the employer’s favor. EFCA, they believe, would level the playing field, and the decline in percentage of union members in the workforce would reverse.

And what earth-shattering catastrophe would occur in reversing that trend? Let’s turn to history.

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to combat economic depression by raising wages and signed the National Labor Relations Act, which established protections for many private-sector workers to organize unions and engage in collective bargaining. Union ranks swelled in the years that followed, and public works projects stimulated growth and rebuilt infrastructure. When America emerged victorious from the Second World War, what followed were the wine and roses times of the 1950s.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one in five members of the workforce held a union card. For the next two and a half decades we saw the Federal government and the corporate community dismantle labor rights, break apart labor unions and deregulate industry and finance in the name of promoting free trade. And currently, only 7 percent of the private-sector workforce is unionized. The number of Americans without health-coverage grows. For working Americans: under-employment, bankruptcies, debt, you know the story.

During a panel discussion in Washington in January, Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted that in the last 30 years as labor rights protections were eroded, productivity increased while real wages decreased. There was prosperity during that era, indeed, but only for those at the top of the economic ladder. “Workers got nothing,” he said. “Wages must go with production growth.”

So the impact EFCA even in a compromised form would have is it would increase the buying power of American workers, thereby stimulating general economic growth and rebuild the middle class. But this is not usually the kind of prospect the causes bosses to clink champagne glasses with their propagandists at the WSJ.

Sure, unionized workforces make running a business more cumbersome as opposed to treating employees like indentured servants. But there are ways to smooth labor relations. Interestingly, considering our nation’s current debate on health-care reform, what bogs down contract negotiations are not always wage-and-hour terms, but the cost of health-care packages. Sweeping health-care reform in this country would take a lot of that acrimony off the bargaining table, making relations more harmonious and easing the burden on employers.

Maybe WSJ editorialists could write about that.

So the question is: Why would there be opposition to such regulation? The simple reason is that very often employers in many sectors oppose regulation out of principle rather than business reasons.

The case for paid sick days is multi-faceted. For workers, it is only moral and just that they be given the right to tend to their medical needs and not be penalized financially for it. For employers, having sick employees can reduce productivity (you think a worker downing cold-medicine is going to be as perky as the one who isn’t?) and the lack of time-off from work reduces morale.

And in many industries, having sick workers can really hurt business. Ask yourself, “are you going to patronize a restaurant were the wait-staff is constantly coughing into their hands?”

But far too often employers put paternalism over reason.

Free-marketers who believe their system is just and democratic (as opposed to the capitalist who doesn’t and thinks the poor deserves their sorrow) often point to the model Henry Ford provided to American business, and with good reason. He believed that it made no sense for one’s workers to be too downtrodden, because after all, someone needs to buy the product. So under this model an employer provides decent wages, benefits and often other services to make their workers middle class.

Sounds awesome. But the operative function here is that control is strictly in the hands of the boss. When, say, a union presses for similar protections for workers or the government mandates them because these things are seen as a public benefit, that’s when the resistance comes in. Bosses, even if they are benevolent people, can’t give up an ounce of control being ceded to public, even when it doesn’t really affect their ability to generate surplus.

In fact, this situation is often more pronounced in small businesses and non-profits than large firms, many of which often think in cold mathematical terms. The former’s thinking is often clouded by “This is my business, I founded it, this is the way we’ve been running things for the last X-number of years and over my dead body if we’re going to change it now.”

Partly due to the Protestant Work Ethic, as described brilliantly by the late German sociologist Max Weber, we Americans believe that any standard having anything to do with economic life must be set by those who control business, and only wrong-doing can result from interference from a mandate from the citizenry via its elected officials.

It is a recipe against democracy and it’s why we see bosses getting into disputes over proposals that aren’t worth fighting. Because of their influence on politics, they often win. With the case the sick-day bill in NYC, it looks as if it will pass with wide support in the City Council.

Perhaps David Harvey, the social theorist at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, has put it best in the past: One of the greatest ironies of capitalism is that its proponents cite rationality as a defense of its own irrationality.

When Americans recall the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on the anniversary of Sept. 11, often the grief and anger about what happened eight years ago over-shadows the fall-out currently endured by the thousands of firefighters, cops, construction workers, paramedics and sanitation workers who are suffering from upper respiratory illnesses—some of them fatal—that were contracted from inhaling the dangerous fumes at Ground Zero. City health officials also say that one in eight WTC responders suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of working at the site, the morgue and other clean-up facilities.

For now, responders receive federally funded monitoring and treatment, but this micro-form of universal health-care is in a precarious situation. Funds are allotted on an annual basis, and next year funding could be reduced or not granted at, leaving many sick responders with nothing. While the health-care debate rages on with false accusation of “death panels,” Congress is also considering a bill that would establish permanent Federal funding for 9/11 medical monitoring and treatment, giving workers—and lower Manhattan residents—long-term health resources.

The James Zadroga Act, named for a New York Police Detective who many believed died as a result of illnesses contracted while working at Ground Zero, has support in both houses of Congress from the New York and New Jersey delegations and lobbying muscle from the building trades and municipal unions, but it appears to inspire little action from other lawmakers. While workers from all over the country participated in the dangerous clean-up, the only sizable constituency of workers to push for change is in the tri-state area.

The bill has also lost some of its supporters from last year; it was shelved in October when Congress turned its attention to a $700-billion bailout package for Wall St. The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents most NYC cops, opposes it in its current from because there is no specific language covering cancers that might arise from 9/11 exposure, even though other unions believe that it is more important to get the permanent funding stream in place and worry about specifics and tweaking later.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a vocal supporter of the bill last year, but pulled it regarding language affecting the city’s oversight of treatment programs.

There is another aspect of Federal long-term funding that goes beyond simply treating the workers who are currently sick. Jacqueline Moline, the director of the clinical center the WTC Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, says by treating 9/11 responders doctors are able to conduct the necessary research to find out why conventional building materials were so toxic as a result of the Twin Tower collapse, research that will be invaluable to preventing such large scale harm to rescue workers in future disasters, man-made or otherwise.

For labor leaders, there is a clear moral obligation on the part of the Federal Government. “The mark of a country is how they deal with those people who have fought for that country,” says New York State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes. “We’ve always felt that we had a certain obligation to our veterans.” He adds that 9/11 workers “deserve the same care as we give our veterans because they in fact gave the same sacrifice.”

Photo by NJScott

Life for them is going to get worse. Right now, the livelihoods of many of America’s mail workers are endangered as the US Postal Services aims to decrease service and close post offices. The fiscal crisis facing the agency, management claims, is increased competition from the Internet and private couriers.

The unions say they have a better solution. The USPS is mandated by law to pre-pay retiree health benefits, costing it about $5.6 billion a year, which essentially means the agency pays for a worker’s health-care retirement benefit while he or she is still working. No other Federal agency has to do this. Had it not been for this imposition, claimed one American Postal Workers Union official, the USPS would be $1.2 billion in the black.

Ending pre-paid health benefits isn’t a foolproof solution. The costs aren’t erased, but rather deferred. Still, the APWU thinks it could help get the Service back on its feet.

The APWU and the National Letter Carriers Association are supporting two House of Representative bills that would provide some relief on this front. But, anti-worker sentiment has been kicked up in the Senate, where an amendment has been tacked onto the companion legislation that would allow arbitrators to consider the USPS’s financial situation when awarding contract terms, which they already do. Unions see the result this way: weaken their bargaining might while management continues to pay this burdensome health cost, resulting in fewer workers who are lower paid than those in the previous generation. Death by a thousand cuts.

The Senate amendment is, indeed, a typical right-wing reaction to what is often viewed as excessive “union entitlement.” It is added pressure on workers, because arbitrators already consider an employer’s financial health when awarding contracts, and likewise, also consider things such as the Consumer Price Index and inflation rates in order to evaluate what types of raises are fair for workers.

The unions, however, don’t see that the structure of the USPS is, in fact, anachronistic. More and more people do chose to use the Internet or companies like the United Parcel Service because it is easier and often cheaper. The USPS could look to ways to diversify service. Why can’t a person go there to make copies, use a public computer or do many of the other things that people do at UPS stores or Kinkos? Free-market zealots in Congress would resist these efforts, but the postal unions are an influential force, and would make that revenue-producing scheme more viable if they made it a legislative priority.

Instead, they are saying that the service remains busy and that when the recession ends large-scale business mailing will go back up. Maybe so, but agencies and businesses need to change with the times regardless.

With the attention of the Democratic majority, the postal unions could give them the right recipe: relieve the USPS of the pre-funding, scrap the Senate amendment and diversify operations. The result is a healthy public operation that creates more middle class jobs and services the public needs.