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LABOR ORGANIZING AND FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION
[If huge disparities in income and wealth create major public health problems and an unsustainable society, then we need a more equitable distribution of available benefits. Historically, labor unions have played this role, effectively advocating for minimum wage laws, the 8-hour work day, paid vacations and holidays, health insurance, and retirement funds. Today when the typical chief executive officer earns in a day what a typical worker earns in a year, we find ourselves -- more than ever -- needing the labor movement to provide pressure toward a fairer distribution of benefits. This essay was originally written for the Labor Party (see www.igc.org/lpa/) --P.M.]
by Peter Kellman*
Part 1: The Problem
The bad news is that since 1979 the percentage of union workers in the United States has declined from 24% to 14%. The good news is that given the choice of joining a union or not, 48% of workers in this country would join.
Due to the export of jobs, outsourcing and automation, existing union jobs are being lost as fast as new members join unions. The traditional strategy of organizing workers -- work place by work place -- does bring in new members, but employer opposition still denies most workers union representation.
A case that makes the point is the healthcare industry in Massachusetts, which currently employs 400,000 workers, 10% of whom are union members. Unions put a fair amount of financial and human resources into organizing healthcare workers, and in 1997 organized 819 new members through the union certification process. At this rate it would take 434 years to organize the industry if the number of employed stayed at 400,000, but the industry is projected to grow another 250,000 in the next 45 years.
You see the problem. We have to do something different. In Sweden, for example, 83% of the work force is represented by unions, and employers are prevented by law from interfering with the formation of unions. Unlike U.S. workers, Swedish workers have THE RIGHT TO ASSOCIATE AND BARGAIN COLLECTIVELY. In Sweden, Japan, France, Germany and most countries with which U.S. corporate managers say we compete, the RIGHT TO ASSOCIATE AND BARGAIN COLLECTIVELY is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations and stated in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 under Article 20: Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. This right is explained in the UN's International Labor Organization's Convention #87-- Freedom of Association and the Right to Organize, which establishes the right of all workers to form and join organizations of their own choosing without prior authorization. Although 118 countries have ratified Convention #87, the U.S. Senate has steadfastly refused to do so for the past 51 years.
Freedom of speech plus freedom of assembly equals freedom of association. It works like this. A group of people want to form a corporation. They call a meeting (freedom of assembly) and discuss (freedom of speech) their options and decide they want corporate recognition. Then they send a representative to their state capital and file some papers. That's it. Their corporation is recognized by the rest of the society. No cards are signed; no campaign is waged, no one gets fired and no election occurs. Just recognition. In this country forming a corporation is a protected activity. It is a right. Getting a corporation to recognize a union is not a right; forming a union is not a protected activity. IF IT WERE, 48% OF THE WORK FORCE WOULD BE UNION MEMBERS IN A HEART BEAT.
During a union campaign, in this country, the company will put up anti-union posters and hold captive-audience meetings. But the union can't put up posters because it doesn't own the walls. The union can't bring a representative to the work place to talk to workers in the private sector because the union doesn't own the building.
In this country we have freedom of speech and assembly on public property. On private property the owners of the property determine who can speak and assemble. Workers surrender their free speech rights to their employers when they enter the work place.
If we want to associate, to organize, to exercise power, we need to change some fundamental relationships in our society.
But first we need to understand how the fundamental relationships that now govern our lives were set. WE NEED TO KNOW OUR OWN HISTORY.
"He came to know... that history was not a page in a book, but something held in memory and in blood."[1]
Part 2: Knowing Our History
Imagine a church without the Bible, a synagogue without the Torah, a mosque without the Koran or the Iroquois without their story of creation. It is the teaching of the stories from these great books and oral traditions that holds the congregations and tribes of our people together. The wisdom acquired over the ages is passed down through the stories of the past. These stories guide us into the future: they give us our values, direction and strength. Without them we are rootless, have no direction and live only in the uninformed present.
The same is true for labor. We need a framework to view our history and connect the many stories of our great struggles. We need to learn from our past mistakes and victories. We need to take the best from the past and use it to help build our future. If not, we will forever live in the present and make the same mistakes over and over again.
It is often said in labor circles that we will never increase our numbers until we have better laws. The fact is that for most of our history pro-labor laws have been the exception. Most laws relating to labor have been anti-labor, anti-union laws. It wasn't until 1937 that the National Labor Relations Act was declared constitutional and today that law is of more use to the employer than it is to us. But that is nothing new. The law favored the wealthy in the 13 American colonies and still does in the country our people created.
George Washington didn't become the most powerful and one of the wealthiest men in America in 1776 by surveying house lots.[2] It is true that Washington did do some surveying for the Ohio Company, a company in which he was a major stockholder. George and members of the planter and commercial class in colonial Virginia where he grew up had a plan to exploit labor and make themselves even richer and more powerful. The plan had two parts. First, they had slaves to run their tobacco plantations and second, they created the Ohio Company. The Ohio Company was founded in 1748 by George's older brother Lawrence and received a grant of 200,000 acres of land west of the colony of Virginia from the King of England. Later, Virginia's Royal Governor Dinwiddie, himself an Ohio Company principle, "successfully appealed to the British authorities in London to offer ships passage to indentured servants who would work to clear and improve roads and farmsteads and build company trading posts for seven years, in return for the right to remain on the lands as leaseholders afterward."[3] Pretty good plan. The King grants the company the land and then supplies unpaid workers to build the roads, to access the land and the forts to defend it. Then if the workers survived their seven years of servitude, and many didn't, they had the privilege of renting land from the Ohio Company.
But it wasn't just Washington who was involved with this kind of scheme. The Ohio Company was in competition with the Loyal Land Company of Virginia, owned in part by Thomas Jefferson's dad, and the Vandalia Company, owned in part by Ben Franklin. We have heard a lot about Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but who were these indentured servants and slaves? What was their history?
The history of the indentured servant, for our purposes, begins in 1500 when one-third of the land in England, France and Germany was owned by the Catholic Church. Much of this land was occupied by subsistence farmers. With the Protestant Reformation of the Church in 1517, Church land was taken over by nobles or sold to speculators who drove the tenant farmers off the land. Then in the 1600s and 1700s the "common lands" which had been at the disposal of the poor in Europe were enclosed, fenced off, and the people who lived on them driven off the land. Finally, in the 1800s, in a process known as "clearing the estates," farmers were pushed off the land they rented to make room for sheep to provide wool for the growing textile industry.
As these events were taking place, laws were passed that called for people without a place to live or work to be branded, punished, jailed or sold into slavery. This created a large pool of humanity with an incentive to leave Europe and provide cheap labor in North America.
Meanwhile in Africa, rich merchants from Europe organized an international slave trade, buying slaves from West African princes whose soldiers carried European weapons. The trade in African slaves spanned three centuries and, "Before it was over, ten to twelve million Africans would be transported to the New World."
Indentured servants from Europe and slaves from Africa, people whose lives were contracts to be bought and sold, provided the founding fathers of our nation, men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, the labor to exploit the natural resources of North America. Roughly half the immigrants to colonial America were indentured servants. At the time of the war of Independence, three out of four persons in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia were or had been indentured servants. And by this time, roughly 20 percent of the colonial population was in slavery.[5] Slaves from Africa and indentured servants from Europe lived under the same fugitive slave laws, and their children were the property of the masters. These people were property to be bought and sold -- property protected by colonial law and later the United States Constitution.
FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD. For taking up and securing Mary Brown, a Pennsylvania born indentured Servant, who ran away from the service of her Master a few days ago: She is a so-so-sort of a looking Woman, inclinable to Clumsiness, much Pock pitted, which gives her an hard Favor and frosty Look, wants several of her Teeth, yet speaks good English and Dutch, about 26 or 28 Years old, perhaps 30... --James Crofton, Albany (1761 newspaper advertisement Albany NY)
For many in the United States the images of the colonial period are dominated by scenes of Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, Captain John Smith and people seeking religious freedom. These images hide a colonial scheme that went like this: European adventurers "discovered America" and began killing off the indigenous population. They were followed by European speculators who extracted profits from the new land primarily through the labor of African slaves and European indentured servants. But the Americans who made great fortunes on the backs of slaves and indentured servants weren't happy sharing their wealth with the English King, bringing us to the American Revolution. [Continued next week.]
*Peter Kellman is a labor activist, member of the National Writers Union and the Labor Party. He works for the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) a small group of activists looking at the history of democracy and corporate power. For information on the work of POCLAD engage them by E-mail: people@poclad.org; or on the web: www.poclad.org; by phone: (508)-398-1145; or mail: P.O. Box 246, So. Yarmouth, MA 02664-0246.
BIOTECH IN TROUBLE--PART 2
We saw last week that the genetically-engineered-food industry may be spiraling downward. Last July, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman -- a big supporter of genetically engineered foods -- began comparing agricultural biotechnology to nuclear power, a severely-wounded industry.[1] (Medical biotechnology is a different industry and a different story because it is intentionally contained whereas agricultural biotech products are intentionally released into the natural environment.)
In Europe, genetically engineered food has to be labeled and few are buying it. As the NEW YORK TIMES reported two months ago, "In Europe, the public sentiment against genetically engineered [GE] food reached a ground swell so great that the cultivation and sale of such food there has all but stopped."[2] The Japanese government also requires GE foods to be labeled. Americans in overwhelming numbers (80% to 90% or more) have indicated they want GE foods labeled but the GE firms consider a label tantamount to a skull and crossbones and the Clinton/Gore administration has sided with the biotech corporations against the people. To be fair, there are no indications that a Republican president would take a different approach. The biotech firms have invested heavily in U.S. elections and the resulting government represents their interests at home just as it does abroad. On this issue, to an astonishing degree, the biotech firms ARE the government.
Since the early 1980s, biotech corporations have been planting their own people inside government agencies, which then created a regulatory structure so lax and permissive that biotech firms have been able to introduce new genetically modified foods into the nation's grocery stores at will. Then these same "regulators" have left government and taken highly-paid jobs with the biotech firms. It represents an extreme case of the "revolving door" syndrome.
The U.S. regulatory system for GE foods, which was created in 1986, is voluntary.[3,pg.143] The U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates genetically engineered plants and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates foods made from those plants. If any of the plants are, themselves, pesticidal then U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gets involved. But in no case has any long-term safety testing been done. As the NEW YORK TIMES reported last July, "Mr. Glickman [U.S. Secretary of Agriculture] acknowledged that none of the agencies responsible for the safety of genetically modified foods -- the Agriculture Department, the F.D.A., and the Environmental Protection Agency -- had enough staff or resources to conduct such testing."[1] At the time Mr. Glickman made his statement, 70 million acres in the U.S. had already been planted with genetically modified crops and 2/3rds of the food in U.S. grocery stores contained genetically modified plant materials.[3,pg.33]
The importance of safety testing was emphasized by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in its latest (April 2000) report on biotech foods. The NAS [pg. 63] said safety problems might include these:
** New allergens may be introduced into foods.
** New toxins may be introduced into foods. The NAS said, "...there is reason to expect that organisms in US agroecosystems and humans could be exposed to new toxins when they associate with or eat these plants." [pg. 129]
** Existing toxins in foods may reach new levels, or may be moved into edible portions of plants. ("Overall increases in the concentrations of secondary plant chemicals in the total plant might cause toxic chemicals that are normally present only in trace amounts in edible parts to be increased to the point where they pose a toxic hazard," NAS said on pg. 72.)
** New allergens may be introduced into pollen, then spread into the environment. [The NAS remains silent on the human-health implications of new allergens spread via pollen. If the biotech firms have their way, we will learn about this by trial and error. Unfortunately, trial and error has a serious drawback in this instance: once new genetic materials are released into the environment, they cannot be retrieved. Unlike chemical contamination, biotech contamination is irreversible.]
** Previously unknown protein combinations now being produced in plants might have unforseen effects when new genes are introduced into the plants;
** Nutritional content of a plant may be diminished. [pg. 140]
The mechanism for creating unexpected proteins or unexpected toxins or allergens would be pleiotropy, the NAS explained [pg. 134]. Pleiotropy is the creation of multiple effects within an organism by adding a single new gene. In other words, putting a new gene into a tomato, intending to make the tomato more resistant to cold weather, might by chance, and quite unexpectedly, make some people allergic to the new tomato. "Such pleiotropic effects are sometimes difficult to predict," the NAS said. [pg. 134] The NAS said that FDA, USDA and EPA all need to pay attention to such "unintended compositional changes" of genetically modified foods.
Unfortunately, as the NAS pointed out, current tests are not adequate for determining all the problems that might occur because of pleiotropic effects. For example if a new protein is created that has not previously been found in the food supply, then there is no reliable basis for predicting whether it may cause allergic reactions. Allergic reactions are not a trivial matter, the NAS pointed out: "...food allergy is relatively common and can have numerous clinical manifestations, some of which are serious and life-threatening." [pg. 67]
New tests should be developed to test for allergenicity of genetically modified foods, the NAS said several times (see, for example, pg. 8, where the NAS called such new tests "highly desirable"). Specifically, the NAS recommended that tests be developed that actually measure reactions of the human immune system, which is the human system in which allergic reactions develop. The genetically modified foods on the market today have not undergone controlled experiments on real human immune systems. (Putting such foods into grocery stores is an uncontrolled experiment of sorts, but with no one collecting the data.)
In addition to human health problems, the NAS report discussed some of the agricultural and environmental problems that might occur from genetically modified (GM) plants:
** New chemicals in GM plants might kill predators and parasites of insect pests, thus leading to the loss of nature's own biological controls on certain pests. [pg. 74]
** Plants themselves might become toxic to animals. [pg. 75]
** Fallen leaves from GM plants might change the biological composition of the soil, leading to changes in nutrient uptake into plants or even toxicity to creatures living in the soil. [pg. 75]
** Genes from genetically-engineered plants will escape and enter into wild species. This is called gene flow and the NAS says, "[T]otal containment of crop genes is not considered to be feasible when seeds are distributed and grown on a commercial scale." [pg. 92] In other words, gene flow is going to occur. Wild plants are going to receive genes from genetically modified organisms. The biotech firms are re-engineering nature without understanding the means or the ends.
** When a plant is genetically engineered so that the plant itself becomes pesticidal (for example, Bt-containing corn, potatoes and other crops now planted on tens of millions of acres in the U.S.), there may be effects on non-target organisms. In other words, pesticidal crops may affect creatures besides the specific pest they were intended to kill. The NAS says, "Nontarget effects are often unknown or difficult to predict." [pg. 136]
In sum, agricultural biotechnology has raced ahead at lightning speed (going from zero acres planted with GE crops in 1994 to 70 million acres planted in 1999) without any long-term testing, and with minimal understanding of the consequences. The NAS refers to these politely as "uncertainties" and it acknowledges that these uncertainties "often force agencies to base their decisions on minimal data sets." [pg. 139]
So 2/3rds of the food in U.S. grocery stores contains plant materials that were genetically engineered. If they were subjected to government approval at all, it was on a strictly voluntary basis, and the government "often" approved new plants and new foods based on "minimal data sets," according to the National Academy of Sciences. Some of the most important aspects of these new foods had to be ignored because there is no way at present to test for them.
In sum, the biotech industry and its acolytes in government are flying blind and we are all unwitting passengers in their rickety plane. This is not a historical record that inspires confidence. No wonder the Clinton/Gore administration and the biotech corporations do not want anyone to know which foods have been genetically engineered. None of the biotech firms are even CLAIMING that there are taste or nutritional benefits in the biotech foods being sold today, so, to put it bluntly, consumers would have to be out of their minds to eat this stuff or serve it to their children.
Given the serious problems that the NAS said may occur as thousands of new genetically modified foods are introduced into the U.S. food supply without labels, naturally one wonders about liability insurance for the biotech industry. You will not find liability insurance discussed on the biotech industry's web site, www.whybiotech.com, so it is probably one of the industry's most serious problems.
Recently the Swiss company, Swiss Re, issued a report on GE foods.[4] Swiss Re is a re-insurance company -- it insures insurance companies against catastrophic loss. Swiss Re said genetic engineering "represents a particularly exposed long-term risk" and "genetic engineering losses are the kind which have not yet, or only rarely, occurred and whose consequences are extremely difficult to predict."
Swiss Re then asked (and answered) the question, "...so how can genetic engineering risks be insured?" Here is Swiss Re's answer:
"It is currently not possible to give a direct answer to this question. A lot depends on whether consensus can be reached on the relevant loss scenarios in a dialogue involving the genetic engineering industry, society, and the insurance industry. This will make genetic engineering risks more calculable and more interesting to traditional insurance models. From the point of view of the insurance industry, WE ARE AT PRESENT A LONG WAY OFF. [Emphasis added.]
"Today we must assume that the one-sided acceptance of incalculable risks means that any participants in this insurance market run the risk not only of suffering heavy losses, but also of losing control over their exposure."
Without intending to do so, the Swiss Re report brings to mind an agenda for citizens who oppose the expansion of ag biotech:
(a) On the principle that the polluter shall pay, biotech firms should be held strictly liable for any harms they may cause, not requiring proof of negligence;
(b) Ag biotech corporations should not be allowed to self-insure; as we know from the asbestos industry, self-insurance can lead to bankruptcy and hundreds of thousands of legitimate claims never being paid;
(c) Law suits should seek damages for gene flow, pollen drift, inadequate testing for allergenicity, crop failures, and so on. A series of lawsuits against private firms or government agencies would get the insurance industry's attention.
(d) Stockholders in ag biotech firms should express concern (to the board of directors, and to the Securities and Exchange Commission) about the failure to disclose incalculable risks. Stockholders in insurance companies should express concern about the potential for "heavy losses" and "losing control over their exposure" if coverage is extended to ag biotech firms.
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