Then
May 7, 2013
Three Horrific Disasters: One Unlearned Lesson
On April 24, 2013, a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed and initial reports put the death toll at 580, and the news did not get any better. These workers, who start working with a salary of $40 a month, did not know that the factory in which they were working was not strong enough to hold the weight of the people and the machines used for cutting and stitching together the garments worn by people around the world. They did not realize that the very vibrations of the machines they were using were literally shaking the building out from under them. What a horrifying way to die.
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City caught on fire. Management was in the habit of locking the women who worked there in each morning and letting them out when their shift was over, so as the fire grew, the women, who tried to leave by the doors, found that they could not as the doors were still locked. These women either burned to death or leapt to their deaths from upper story windows. Also, a horrifying way to die.
While we were still dealing with the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terrorist attack, also in April 2013, we learned that a fertilizer plant in West, Texas blew up killing many workers and flattening a good portion of the town of West. Yet another horrifying way to die.
You would think that we would have learned the lesson of The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and we did for a while. We got unions to help prevent bosses from abusing workers by not allowing them to do things like locking them in. We got OSHA to inspect industrial premises and force bosses to be aware of safety violations, to fine them for infractions, and to do whatever they could to call attention to possible negative outcomes. As their findings were public, society and unions could put pressure on manufacturers to fix unsafe conditions.
So, we might be able to understand that workers in Bangladesh are sort of in the position that the ladies were in during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They are not unionized. They are in a country that desperately wants to raise the standard of living in their nation. It is relatively inexpensive to live in Bangladesh and people are happy enough to earn a stable income that they may not be paying attention to the conditions in their workplace, or they may feel powerless to change these conditions as others are waiting to take their place. I’m sure they did not foresee this terrible accident. But their bosses were cutting corners and were not paying attention to the safety of their workers. They did what bosses do; they kept their eyes on the bottom line and it was looking good.
In 1911 there were not a lot of industrialized nations anywhere but in Europe and America. We might be able to excuse those bosses for making enormous demands on their very poor workers. In fact, all over the industrialized world bosses were not expected to treat workers with any kind of respect or fairness; they were just expected to keep production going. There was no compassion, society basically belonged to the wealthy, and they looked the other way because of tradition and privilege.
We could argue that Bangladesh is in the place where Western nations were in 1911 and leave things at that, except the bosses there are taking their orders from us for products used here in America and we are buying these products because they are inexpensive. We understand that these workers are not being taken care of properly, that our bargains come at the expense of worker’s rights and safety, but a horrific occurrence such as this collapse in Bangladesh is making us rethink our “good” fortune. However, much we would like to change things for these newly exploited workers, the fact is that unless the real manufacturers of this products are “outed” in the press we have almost no way to know what is made where, a piece of information we used to possess. This makes boycotts difficult and, besides, the outcomes of boycotts often have unintended effects that hurt the very workers they are supposed to help.
Will we make these nations reinvent unions and rules to protect the safety and conditions of workers? Probably not because we have no mechanism to interfere in the ways these countries function, nor do we have the will. The global press may be able to effect some change and we can hope that the learning curve of this new group of workers will be steeper than ours was. We may cut back our consumption of goods because it looks like we are headed for more abstemious times, but that will not necessarily be good news for these newly industrialized nations either. Besides, if we get our own economic and employment issues straightened out, we may become happy consumers once again. But as these workers improve their standard of living, they will demand better treatment from their bosses, and those bosses, who have benefited from extremely low overhead, will find that they are moving towards the regulations they left America to escape.
Last, but not least, we have the killer explosion at the fertilizer plant in West, Texas. This comes at a time when our nation is going about the business of union busting and cutting back on safeguards and rules because of a lack of resources and stubborn Republican governors who are intent on wiping away years of social progress which, as these examples clearly show, is a stupid way to go. The amount of ammonium nitrate (I think that is the chemical) being stored in that factory was way over safe limits. How could this happen in 21st century America? We are pedaling backwards in every way and if you want to know why look to the ‘small government’ crew, the ‘deregulation’ crew, the ‘Big Business rocks’ crew. Unregulated capitalism is a nightmare we have experienced before; why would we want to experience this nightmare again?
Now
May 2, 2022
Unions
This Staten Island Amazon lost union vote. The New York Times
Are there truly people who are better than others? Are there those who control the fate of others and have the right to treat them as if they are less than human? Humans have both fought this hierarchy and accepted this hierarchy, apparently since time began. Is it fine to force employees to work long hours, with insufficient breaks, with unaddressed safety concerns because they are workers and if they want to be paid, they must do as their bosses demand?
We accept the idea that poor people are laborers and that their labor should be onerous. We don’t put up a fight for fair labor laws unless workers reach a certain level of income that puts them in the middle class. Shouldn’t all humans get to live a happy life with both work and with leisure to enjoy personal pursuits or family? Shouldn’t all humans make a living wage.
Some people who run businesses seem to believe that misery is the lot of those who must labor. They push their employees to perform at unnecessary levels of productivity to maximize profits and keep workers in line. Perhaps it is believed that if work is treated as a cooperative venture, workers will take advantage of the lack of oversight or surveillance. Even in situations where supervision is suspicious and domineering some people figure out how to goof off. Maybe the worse workers are treated the more creative they become at pretending to work.
Republicans like to tell a story that American workers sent our factories on a world tour of developing nations. They like to blame unions for asking for wages that were too high to allow bosses to make the profits previous generations of bosses had made. They ignore the fact that the Gilded Age caused the Great Depression. They ignore the fact that our factories simply went looking for cheap labor and new consumers.
Republicans began a campaign to fire up workers’ anger towards unions. They whined on Talk Radio, pretending to commiserate with workers about the fact that they were forced to pay dues to unions although they were not signed on to belong to those unions. They did it to kill the unions they had always perceived as great obstacles to capitalism, which Republicans fight to deregulate. Of course, when unions won concessions for workers everyone shared in whatever was won from bosses and unions had more clout if they had bigger war chests, but it was quite easy for Republicans to whip up a sense of grievance in workers who resented paying the fees to unions. Republicans called their project “Right to Work,” putting a positive spin on taking rights away from workers and leaving them open to exploitation. With many of our factories gone Republicans have made great inroads against unions.
If you read Nomadland, Jessica Bruder describes seniors who lose their homes or apartments through financial setbacks and decide to join other seniors who live in campers and vans to travel with the weather to various parks and camper grounds. Amazon offers seasonal work to these campers, but the jobs are not easy on a senior. The floors of the warehouses are concrete. Employees are either picking merchandise to fulfill orders or putting merchandise away in the bins where they belong. These older workers cover miles each day. Breaks are short. Their legs and feet suffer pain and swelling. Sometimes workers cannot work every day because their body must recover from the physicality of the job. If they can’t work, they will be fired.
Reading Nomadland gave me insight into what it was like to work in the Amazon warehouse culture which was sometimes mentioned on social media but never described as graphically. We are learning that young people who work for Amazon are feeling some of the same pressures as seniors. The first Amazon to be unionized is on Staten Island and Amazon is in court trying to close that down. The second attempt to unionize an Amazon warehouse just failed. Starbucks is also seeing an increase in unionization. Our corporate overlords are not happy.
Staten Island Amazon Wins A Union - Financial Times
If businesses believed that treating workers well, that work is an alliance between makers and takers, then we might not need unions. But power and wealth, exercising control over others, tempts employers to adopt an us-versus-them approach to their workers, and when they pay workers, they feel they are taking money from their own pockets, although they could not profit without their workers. These attitudes are ingrained in our societies and the patterns we follow may be part of our psyche. Perhaps the union pendulum is swinging back towards workers who work in retail jobs and other jobs that cannot simply leave America for greener pastures.
You might want to look up Michael Moore on Substack.com to read his excellent article about the possible resurrection of labor unions.
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