Workers' rights: another oxymoron

All my workers

Fit one type:

Beaten down

So they won’t gripe.

A classic American saying asserts, “The rich are different from the rest of us.�

So are the poor. While the rich enjoy rights, privileges and legal protections that the middle class can only envy, the poor suffer from weak and ill-enforced labor laws that the middle class need seldom fear. And since media owners often generate their own fierce disputes with labor, battles over worker rights frequently go unpublicized.

Take the National Labor Relations Board. That healthy New Deal innovation has in recent times run afoul of big money politics, though the press has precious little interest in it anyway. Although its ostensible job is to adjudicate labor disputes, budget starvation and political pressure have instead converted it into a tar pit for burying significant cases. Senate Republicans won’t approve any pro-labor appointees and the Democrats seem unwilling to force the issue. That would anger their own big-business campaign contributors.

Much the same fear has stymied the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, aimed at making it easier to form a union. That bill has gone nowhere because many Democrats listen cheerfully to the rustle of business dollars raining into their re-election coffers. Thus it remains enormously difficult today for workers to organize, even with a president nominally on their side.

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Fortunately, the Labor Department has improved a bit since the last election, but undoing eight years of hostility to workers takes time. This is especially true since some of its career civil service positions were filled with pro-employer officials by President George W. Bush just before he left.

The results of this paralysis of labor enforcement are tragic for the lunch-pail set. Bosses can get away with almost anything, like pressuring injured staff not to claim workers’ compensation or to file actions over short pay. They’re dealing with toilers living on the economic edge, who panic at the thought of being fired. Not only would their pay be gone, but health insurance as well, if they’re lucky enough to have any. With adjudication taking years, they simply can’t afford the risk of complaining.

And there’s plenty to complain about. The Government Accountability Office recently performed an undercover investigation of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. It found that the division mishandled nine of the 10 cases that investigators presented. There was little effective enforcement against threats, short pay or even child labor. Representative George Miller (D-CA), the House Labor Committee chairman, observed, “It’s clear that under the existing system, employers feel they can steal workers’ wages with impunity.�

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Unfortunately, the problem is only getting worse. Illegal immigrants are especially reluctant to file complaints. That reality hovers over American-born workers, too, who fear that they will simply be supplanted by even more vulnerable foreign replacements if they gripe.

The recession further undermines the status of workers by increasing the pool of their desperate, unemployed colleagues. So does the steady outflow of jobs abroad to nations where employees are treated more like chattel than human beings. Employers love that fear, and many have found that even if they can’t export their jobs, they can often import grisly working conditions.

Creating more unions and passing stronger laws would be the normal response to such abuse, but our government is too much under corporate influence to allow such cures. Consequently, the United States is developing an underclass the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.