Modern Day Pharoahs

If turn around is fair play, if the majority cannot simply clobber the minority into submission in the land of the free and the home of the brave, let’s pass a law that calls for annual election of governors of Wisconsin and not have their salaries automatically deposited. Let’s pass a law that for every dollar a billionaire donates to one party he has to donate 50¢ to the other. Free speech isn’t free, after all. Soon enough it will be Passover and we will be reminded again about Pharaoh’s unfair labor practices. At our table I think we’ll contrapuntally read excerpts of the conversations between Governor Walker and the man he thought was David Koch. (If that fundraiser from NPR resigned after he was caught in a sting; if the woman who was NPR’s CEO resigned after her subordinate was caught in a sting, doesn’t fair play suggest that Walker resign too? When kosher pigs fly. Maybe.)

I’ve been thinking about union busting a lot lately. You can’t avoid it; it’s everywhere: Wisconsin, Ohio, Providence. The old manufacturing unions are pretty well pre-busted. Not because American workers abandoned them but because capitalists decided to close shop up north and move south only later to discover that they could make even more money off the backs of cheaper labor in Asia so they hightailed it across the Pacific. Conservatives and “Right to Work” advocates (= right not to have any say in working conditions or salary) now are after the public unions recruiting the jealous, the ones who used to have a good job but whose livelihood has been snatched away by the recession brought about by the economic activities of the very people now giving themselves huge bonuses and buying politicians, having managed to defeat campaign finance reform. These unfortunates are willing to say, “If I can’t have a pension, why should they?” as if the public employees’ pensions are taking food out of their mouths, as if the suffering should be shared only by all poor people while the wealthiest get tax breaks. But the public workers of Wisconsin were willing to take lower salaries and contribute more to their benefit packages. Their line in the sand was collective bargaining.

Next week we mark the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster. Many of us remember the Station Nightclub fire that cost this community 100 lives. If there was anything good to come of that tragedy it was a series of laws to tighten fire codes (I suppose we are still paying fire marshals even though they are public employees). Back on March 25, 1911 600 workers, the vast majority immigrant girls, mostly Jewish, were working on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the ironically named Asch Building. A match carelessly dropped onto some fabric cuttings set the conflagration going. The fire hose was rotted and fell apart as men tried to extinguish the fire which quickly spread among the materials and cleaning chemicals. Some of the women managed to get to the roof and from there escape to other buildings; a brave passerby manned the elevators until the shaft was engulfed in flame. To prevent pilfering the owners of the business had the doors barred shut. In only 18 minutes a hundred and forty six women were killed, either from burns, from suffocation or from smashing into the pavement as they jumped in their desperate attempt to survive. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, managed to escape the conflagration, thank goodness, and later they managed to escape prosecution. Let us all praise devious lawyers. (The owners subsequently lost a civil suit and were required to pay $75 per victim which they could well afford as their insurance company paid them $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours and fined $20.)

Did any good come of the fire? Well, there were new safety regulations, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900 was greatly enhanced and served for decades to protect workers against the Max Blancks and Isaac Harrises of the world, men who put the bottom line before the lives of the people who made their profit possible. But I forget; we are all anti-union nowadays; we see the unions as self-serving and out of touch with the real working people of America—the ones without jobs.