Let us talk this Labor Day about slave labor in the United States. No, not the antebellum kind before the Civil War but the slavery that persisted well into the 20th century, the slavery that was integral not only to the southern economy but slaves owned by northern corporations and used to break strikes and keep the South a union-free reserve. And I don’t mean some metaphorical slavery, but, as Douglas Blackmon writes in his recent Slavery by Another Name, the slavery of brutal forced labor, whips, death and sexual rape of black women–in many ways worse than that of the older form of slavery.

The author is not a leftwing journalist but Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, but what he documents is seven decades of a southern gulag- and I use the word “gulag” deliberately for what his story shows is that the U.S. had within its borders as brutal a regime of degradation as the worst that Stalin could dish out. This southern gulag involved millions of black workers enslaved through a combination of capitalist employers, farm owners and a legal system that promised a brutal fate for anyone defying their de facto masters. And it is a key story for understanding the ultimate weakness of the overall U.S. labor movement, since having a deunionized Southern region was an essential tool in disciplining Northern workers who feared loss of jobs to a region without labor rights. That is the story that Blackmon tells. I urge every person to go out and read the book, but the following gives the highlights (or lowlights if you will).

Blackmon notes, as Reconstruction ended, white state governments realized “that the combination of trumped up legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a desirable business proposition and an incredibly effective tool for intimidating rank-and-file emancipated African Americans and doing away with their most effective leaders.” (p. 55)   Every state in the South soon had laws allowing the leasing of prisoners.

Slavery Worse Than Old Slavery: Those convicted of these trumped up crimes – from vagrancy to “illegal voting” to using obscene language —  would be sold like slaves to farms or industrial concerns that could whip them and work them like antebellum slaves.  In fact, their conditions, as Blackmon provocatively argues, were usually worse, since sheriffs leasing out convicts to pay court fees “had no reason for concern about how they were treated by their new keepers or whether they survived at all.”  Those renting a slave were quite willing to work a leased convict to death.   In the first two years that Alabama leased prisoners, 20 percent died.  Within three years, 45 percent were killed.(58)  In the mines using the slave convicts, death was constant, with week after week of “dead black corpses” dumped into shallow graves.(327)

The culture of slave labor permeated most industries even for ostensibly free blacks.   Free laborers who applied for jobs with the Southern Railway would instead find “guards with shotguns and dogs patrolling the perimeters of the worksites” and leather straps  to beat men who tried to flee and assisted by county sheriffs who would return fleeting African Americans to the camps.(300)  And the degradations of older forms of slavery extended to women caught in its nexus as well:

“At the lumber camps in southern Alabama, women seeking the freedom of their men were simply arrested when they arrived, chained into their cells, and kept to serve the physical desires of the men running the camps…And the laws of the South were interpreted explicitly to ensure that the rape or coercion of a black woman by a white man would almost never be prosecuted as a crime.”(305)

Such slave labor was a key revenue source for state and county governments.   In the 1880s, leasing convicts added up to more than 10% of state budget for state of Alabama. (95)  By 1903, payments to the state from convict leasing was nearly equal to 25 percent of all taxes collected in Alabama.(112)

From key mining concerns to lumber mills to steel companies, fortunes in the south were built on such leasing of slave labor.   In Atlanta, James English, a mayor of Atlanta in 1880, would build a network of industries, from Coal to brickmaking to the Georgia Pacific Railroad to the First National Bank of Atlanta based on convict slaves he bought and sold.   Just one example cited by Blackmon is that prisoners just in English’s brickyard in 1907 produced $1.9 million in profit.(342)

While official state reforms were supposed to restrict the system in the 1910s and 1920s, it actually ballooned after World War I, especially at the county level and would last until World War II.

The Permeating Effects of Convict System on Southern Black Population: The southern slave system did not end with the tens of thousands of blacks officially convicted and sold under the system.  Far larger numbers of African Americans were threatened with convictions and “voluntarily” would “confess judgment” and agree to work without compensation to pay a bond to the white landlord–turning them back into conscripted labor in the fields subject to shackles and the lash.(67-68)

Since any black person could be falsely accused and sent to the worst of situations–the slave mines – they were a tool for de facto enslaving most of the black population of the South:

“The reality of incarceration in the slave mines became so ubiquitously understood for African American men that landlords and local sheriffs – equipped with almost unchecked powers of arrest and conviction and enormous financial interest in providing labor to the mines and other enterprises – could make almost any demand upon any black man.  More often than any other that demand was that they remain on the land of specific white farmers, living lives of supposedly voluntary serfdom”  or face the worse fate of the mines.(332)

Blackmon’s estimates that about half of the 4.8 million African-Americans living in the Black Belt region of South in 1930 lived in “some form of coerced labor.”(375)

Blackmon marvels at the ignorance that allows a time period in the South to be characterized by the almost benign term of “Jim Crow,” when it was such a packed horror house of slavery, death and degradation.  For black workers, the southern gulag’s legacy was one of generations of stolen wealth, broken families and racist ideology.

The Effects of the Southern Gulag on U.S. Labor Movement: One key fact Blackmon emphasizes is that the convict slave system was completely integrated into the most advanced industrial concerns of the region, including mines and other companies soon owned by Northern capitalists and corporate holding companies.   And everyone recognized that:

“Coal mines, timber camps, and farms worked by imprisoned men couldn’t be shut down by strikers, or have wages driven up by the demands of free men.”

White miners would launch a strike against the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad company in 1904; in response, the company shut down some of the free mines and opened two more mines using convict laborers–defeating the strike. (293)  This was a company that was soon bought by Wall Street investors from the North and supplied steel rails to the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads, and in the economic crisis of 1906, would be merged into U.S. Steel–with that Northern company becoming “the largest  customer of the Alabama slavery system.”(295)

When the United Mine Workers organized more than ten thousand free miners in Alabama in 1908, slave convict labor was crucial to maintain operations during strikes.   Almost all were in jail for incredibly petty crimes, such as riding a freight train without a ticket.(313)   At the pitch of struggle, 7000 white miners joined by 500 free black miners were on strike (many of the latter initially brought into the mines as strikebreakers).     Coerced farm tenants, themselves de facto debt slaves to landlords, were forced by farm owners to come into the mines to help break the strike.  “Trains loaded with black farmworkers from the Black Belt pulled into Birmingham every day.”

The united strike by white and black workers led to mine owners leading an “aggressive campaign to divide the union along racial lines” with a black union leader arrested and then lynched.  Alabama Governor Braxton Comer told union leaders that officials were “outraged at the attempts to establish social equality between black and white miners” and that he would not tolerate “eight or nine thousand idle niggars in the State of Alabama.”  He called the strike a threat to white supremacy and used armed military units to finally break the strike.(326)

The whole system reached its zenith as industrial concerns worked with local law enforcement and agricultural owners to smash black resistance and labor union organizing, with the system:

“knitting together the interests of capitalists, white farmers, local sheriffs and judges, and advocates of the most cruel white supremacy–all joined and served by an unrelenting pyramid of intimidation.”(330)

The Legacy of the Southern Gulag for Labor: When unions would finally succeed in organizing nationally in the 1930s, that organizing was still nearly impossible in the South.  Economically, the South would become a region where unionized firms could threaten to move to break unions in the North and, politically, it would remain a political bastion of anti-union voting to support anti-union legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947.    To this day, racial divisions are still promoted by employers to block union organizing drives.

Many conservative analysts try to explain the weakness of labor unions and social democracy in the U.S. through a whole range of culturalist explanations about the U.S. working class.  Racism is often cited but as Blackmon’s book makes clear, one incredibly key but almost completely unmentioned factor is the southern gulag that destroyed free labor in a whole region of the country–with the full cooperation of northern capitalists who recognized the economic and political usefulness of a non-union region of the country to undermine labor in the rest of the nation.

Blackmon began his book wondering how U.S. companies would stack up if compared to the German corporations who relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II.   The answer from his book is that the U.S. corporate elite still has much history to answer for, history which unlike in Germany or the Russia, is barely even acknowledged.

About the Author: Nathan Newman is a lawyer, policy analyst and longtime labor activist, having started as a union organizer twenty years ago and has since worked as a policy researcher and labor lawyer. Currently, he is Policy Director for the Progressive States Network, a nonprofit that supports state legislative campaigns for economic and social justice. Newman has a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC-Berkeley and a law degree from Yale Law School and has been published in a range of academic and popular journals, including Working USA, The American Prospect, the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, MIT’s Technology Review and he is a regular columnist for the Progressive Populist. He is also the author of the 2002 book, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits and the Costs to Community. He can be contacted at nathan@nathannewman.org. All views expressed at Today’s Workplace are those of Nathan Newman and do not necessarily reflect those of Progressive States Network.

This post crossposted at TPMCafe.

What’s the fastest growing and most heavily unionized sector of the workforce? Surprisingly, it’s professionals and technicians, 23 percent of whom belong to unions, compared to only 15 percent of the entire workforce.

Why are these workers – who are supposed to be prospering in the new economy – joining unions? And why would even more organize if only the right to organize was strengthened for all working Americans?

Yes, part of the explanation is that so many classroom teachers, social workers, and college professors work in the public sector, where employers are less likely to fire or harass workers who try to form unions. But that’s just part of the story. As with other workers, professionals and technicians suffer from stagnant wages, shrinking benefits, and insecure jobs. Moreover, these workers are also vulnerable to offshoring, which is eliminating from 300,000 to 600,000 American jobs every year.

But there’s also one other important source of dissatisfaction for workers in professional, technical, and skilled service and blue-collar jobs. With corporations increasingly focused on cutting costs and boosting their quarterly profit statements, workers are subjected to more micromanagement, second-guessing and penny-pinching. In growing numbers of industries and occupations, workers who care about quality products and services find themselves overruled by managers who care mostly about the bottom line. Thus, nurses and doctors find their professional judgments being overruled by insurance companies and HMO’s. Aircraft engineers are being compelled to cut back on the tests that they conduct on the airplanes. Software developers and testers are told to rush products through to completion. And journalists are being steered away from serious stories and asked to focus on fluff.

These pressures to cut corners are creating new kinds of workplace conflicts. Model employees are becoming malcontents because they care enough to get mad about threats to their professional standards and the quality of the products they make and the services they provide.

Many of America’s most educated, skilled, and committed workers are more dissatisfied than ever. In most workplaces, these workers aren’t organized, so their discontent takes the form of “silent strikes.” In the face of massive layoffs, increased workloads for their remaining employees, and drastic changes in their strategies and product lines, non-union companies such as IBM and Kodak have suffered from internal dissension. In occupations such as nursing, teaching, and engineering, many workers are leaving and fewer are entering the profession, creating growing shortages. Given the choices between staying and fighting or giving up and getting out, many workers are simply departing.

But others are staying and fighting for the future of their professions and the companies, hospitals, and public agencies where they work. During the year 2000, I interviewed workers who took part in workplace conflicts in the Seattle area. At Boeing, engineers and technicians conducted the longest and largest strike by professionals in private industry in U.S. history. But their picket signs said they were “On Strike For Boeing” because they believed they were fighting for the future of Boeing’s leadership in commercial aircraft. At Microsoft, workers holding short-term positions founded a website-based union –WashTech – to protest being perma-temps. But they were almost as upset about their problems testing software as they were about their own precarious prospects. At Northwest Hospital, technicians and service workers complained that patient care was getting short shrift and joined a union that had been founded by nurses. At Kaiser Aluminum, during a lockout that dragged on for two years, production workers allied themselves with environmentalists to combat corporate cutthroat tactics.

As I write in Love the Work, Hate the Job, these workers – and many others across the country – care deeply about the future of their companies and professions. In fact, they’re convinced that they care more about quality than the executives whom they work for. They’re joining together with their co-workers and taking issue with their employers for the same reasons that they entered their professions. Unions, companies, and public policymakers should take notice of – and tap into – this concern for quality.

More than a century ago, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, summed up the movement’s demands with one word, “More.” At the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, union organizers should add one more word, “Better.”

About the Author: David Kusnet, a former staffer for AFSCME, was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He is the author of Love the Work, Hate the Job (Wiley, 2008) and a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.

To many, the 2007 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. marked a low point for protecting women against pay discrimination in the workplace. The case held that Lilly Ledbetter, the plaintiff, could not hold her employer, Goodyear, accountable for pay discrimination that had occurred over many years under Title VII because her statute of limitations for such a claim had run out before she even knew about the discrimination.

The Ledbetter decision creates an absurd result. Individual pay decisions by themselves are usually small, incremental changes, not as obviously motivated by discriminatory intent the way that more serious discrete acts such as terminations or failures to promote do.  It is not until many discriminatory wage decisions have occurred that the discriminatory injury becomes clear to the employee.  Often, it takes many years for this pattern to develop before the employee realizes that she might have a claim.

The Ledbetter decision is inconsistent with the purposes of Title VII to both make victims of discrimination whole and to eradicate employment discriminatory practices from society at large.  It leads to an absurd situation where employees must bring pay claims prematurely when they cannot be sure there has been unlawful pay discrimination. If the employee waits to a later time when there exists more substantial evidence of pay discrimination the employee will be barred from bringing the claim at all by the statute of limitations (as in Ledbetter).  This inequitable state of affairs cannot stand and, it is my hope, it will be legislatively nullified.

But legislative nullification depends on both what the next Congress and President plan to do to address this glaring gap in ensuring pay equity in the workplace. Even if Congress continues to support the Lilly Ledbetter Pay Equity Act and passes it in both houses next year, the identity of the next President may determine whether that legislation is signed into law.

John McCain has stated that he is “in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems . . . . This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.” McCain chose not to return to Washington to participate in the Senate vote on the Ledbetter bill (See Washington Post article.)  Barack Obama, on the other hand, has pledged his unequivocal support for the Ledbetter bill and returned to Washington for the bill’s Senate vote in April.  (See Washington Post article.)

On this Labor Day, while we praise all the workers throughout this country for their dedication and selflessness in making the United States the economic power that it is today, let us not forget that without equal wages for an equal day’s work for all members of our workforce, we really have accomplished very little. Let’s hope that regardless of who is elected president that women are no longer afforded merely second-class status in the workplace and the Ledbetter decision’s days are numbered.

About the Author: Professor Paul Secunda joined the Marquette University Law School as an associate professor of law in the summer of 2008. He teaches employment discrimination, employee benefits, labor law, employment law, civil procedure, and seminars in special education law, global issues in employee benefits, and public employment law. Professor Secunda is the author of nearly three dozen books, treatises, articles, and shorter writings. He is also the author, along with Rick Bales and Jeff Hirsch, of the treatise, Understanding Employment Law, along with Sam Estreicher and Rosalind Connor, of the case book, Global Issues in Employee Benefits Law, and of the Teacher’s Manual to the 14th Edition of the Cox, Bok, Gorman & Finkin Labor Law casebook.

Professor Secunda is a frequent commentator on labor and employment law issues in the national media and has written numerous columns and op-eds for the National Law Journal and Legal Times. He co-edits with Rick Bales and Jeffrey Hirsch the Workplace Prof Blog, recently named one of the top law professor blogs in the country, which is part of the Law Professors Blog Network.

Note: Workplace Fairness is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed by our guest bloggers are their own.

Labor Day has become not just a time to for a parting celebration of summer, but for a hardy band of labor advocates to remind the public — at least those who bother to listen — of the perilous state of workers’ rights and economic security.  For instance, Change to Win Chair Anna Burger announced this week new findings about working families’ concerns:

“Decades of decline in wage and benefit levels, the shift of income and wealth from the many to the few, and the unrelenting corporate attack on worker organization has eroded the foundations of the American Dream.” Her solution? Start with restoring the rights of workers so they can be truly free to join unions.

Yet if the potential appeal and value of unions is so great, why are only eight percent of the private workforce members of them?

Both critics and champions of unions often point to decades of bad press lingering from past corruption scandals, ineffective PR and organizing strategies,  and slow-moving labor bureaucracies.

But none of that, no matter how true, accounts completely for the pathetically low rate of union membership. That’s why it’s become a cherished goal of workers’ advocates to pass the Employee Free Choice Act to impose stiff penalties on companies that block union organizing while allowing workers to freely choose to join unions without getting fired.

But there’s been less attention paid to the mindset of the lawyers and consultants who make up the multi-billion dollar unionbusting industry so critical to the underhanded strategies designed to thwart union campaigns. Last year, I published an article about going undercover to just such a unionbusting seminar in In These Times, and I discovered just how wily these lawyers could be — while going right up to the edge of legality.

All too often, of course, some companies and unionbusters simply break the law in practice. As pioneering Cornell University labor scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner has found, in at least 25 percent of organizing campaigns, companies illegally fire workers because they want to join a union.

But the attorneys from Jackson Lewis, a leading “union avoidance” firm, told the 20 or so representatives from small and large companies, such as UPS and Harmel,  they faced economic peril unless they blocked unions.  And, they argued, unions were no longer necessary — indeed were harmful — in the modern global economy. The senior attorney, recalling how his father was a dockworker, contended, “We believe that the union is irrelevant for the 21st century,” adding, unfortunately, “unions have new weapons” — including the dreaded “public campaign” that creates a PR nightmare.

I was inside that Las Vegas hotel’s conference room, legitimately, as a vice-president of my family’s tiny real estate company, but I was pretending to be concerned about SEIU organizing among janitors at some (mythical) apartment complexes our family owned.

And the veteran attorney was there, in part, to drum up business by feeding corporate paranoia about unions: “They’ll attempt to destroy you no matter how good you are. The better you are, the bigger target you are.”

Fortunately, they explained, there was always a legal way to bust unions. For instance, one younger attorney advised us, when asked how we could fire a worker who was organizing, that it was indeed possible to do so.  But we had to be careful to do it for other reasons. “Union sympathizers aren’t entitled to any more protection than other workers,” he explained. But the firing could not be linked to their union activity.

At the same time, the attorney, when talking about supervisors sympathetic to unions, offered a glimpse into the hard-nosed tactics that remained unspoken in their public presentation. “You know what we do with a supervisor who comes to you and says, ‘Hey, boss, it wasn’t me, they said it was the company?’”, the lawyer asked. He jerked his tie upwards against his neck to suggest a hanging—the only time the lawyers openly hinted at lawbreaking.

Yet in that one moment, he helped me understand the harsh reality behind all the legalisms, delays and loopholes that allow corporations to continue to crush unions and those who wish to join them. On Labor Day, it’s time not only to remember workers in unions but those who want the opportunity to join them for the economic and benefits protection they offer,  but can’t do so by the legalized unionbusting enabled by today’s feeble laws.

About the Author: Art Levine is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly who has also written for The American Prospect, AlterNet, In These Times, Salon, The New Republic, The Atlantic and numerous other publications. He’s written investigative articles on unionbusting and other corporate abuses, and recently completed  Cornell University’s Strategic Corporate Research summer program. He blogs regularly for Huffington Post, and co-hosts a weekly Blog Talk Radio show, “The D’Antoni and Levine Show,” every Thursday at 5:30 p.m. ET.

If we have Mother’s Day to celebrate mothers, Father’s Day to celebrate fathers, and Valentine’s Day to celebrate lovers, it makes eminent sense to have a day—Labor Day—to celebrate the nation’s workers. Far too often the accomplishments of the nation’s workers—whether it’s producing the food we eat or protecting us from hurricanes—are ignored, instead of honored. Labor Day should be a day in which the nation dedicates itself to the proposition that its workers—indeed every worker—deserves respect and fair treatment.

The two main themes of my book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, are that America’s workers are being squeezed economically and treated with less and less respect. This declining respect has taken several disturbing forms. First, many companies and managers treat their workers with a shocking callousness. A Wal-Mart cashier in Kansas City told me that managers were so stingy about bathroom breaks that some cashiers ended up soiling themselves. A computer engineer was laid off while his eight-year-old was visiting on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Corporate managers told Myra Bronstein, a software engineer in Seattle, that as long as the company did well and she worked hard—she put in many 14-hour days—she would have a job. But one day the company suddenly fired Bronstein and 17 other engineers, telling them that if they wanted any severance pay, they had to spend the next four weeks training the workers from India who would be replacing them. “We felt sucker-punched,” Bronstein told me. I remember a janitor in Houston—who made $5.25 an hour after a decade on the job—telling me, “They treat us worse than animals.”

Another sign of diminished respect is the way many managers cheat employees out of wages. Managers at Wal-Mart, Pep Boys and Family Dollar admitted to me that they secretly erased hours from workers’ time records because of fierce pressures from above to minimize costs. At many stores and restaurants, managers strong-arm employees into working off the clock, threatening to write them up unless they work several hours unpaid. It’s galling that many of these victims of wage theft earn less than $10 an hour and are barely scraping by. The growing number of lawsuits over wage theft underlines that something is badly broken in the nation’s workplaces.

This declining respect has also translated into a worse economic deal for millions of workers. During the economic expansion that began in November 2001, corporate profits soared and productivity per worker rose more than 15 percent. Nonetheless, hourly wages have actually slid since then, after inflation, while median income for working-age households has fallen by $2,000 this decade. At the same time, health and pension benefits are deteriorating and job security shriveling. That the nation’s corporations have not shared their increased prosperity, profits and productivity with their workers also shows that something is broken.

In The Big Squeeze, I write of other ways that companies show little respect for their employees. Workers have a right to unionize, but many corporations (and their union-busting consultants) flout the law to keep out unions, by, for example, firing the workers who lead organizing drives. And some companies, most notably FedEx Ground, insist that workers are independent contractors even as judges and labor officials say the companies maintain such tight control over everything these workers do that it’s a sham to call them independent contractors.

To put it crudely, many companies seem to treat their workers like chumps—to be squeezed on wages, pushed to the limit and discarded when no longer needed.

What this nation needs is a movement to revalorize its workers—and what better day to launch such a movement than Labor Day. Plain and simple, revalorization would mean treating workers with a newfound respect, to start treating them as if they and their concerns matter. For too many years, the American worker has not been part of the conversation. For too long, the nation’s workers are viewed as Bud drinkers, NASCAR fans, Oprah watchers, members of the ownership society, but not as workers qua workers. For too long, the nation’s politicians, news media and public discourse have largely ignored the struggling worker (except every four years when presidential candidates descend on factories in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with TV cameras in tow). All this has made it easier for corporations to continue squeezing workers ever so quietly and for many political leaders to ignore workers’ problems (while cozying up to corporate donors).

Fortunately the nation has begun paying more attention to workers in recent months because of the economic downturn and the presidential campaign. Here’s hoping that after the next president is inaugurated on Jan 20, the nation’s beleaguered workers will not again be ignored and forgotten.

Labor Day should be a day to help push the nation’s workers—and their problems—onto center stage.

About the Author: Steven Greenhouse has been covering labor and workplace issues for The New York Times since October 1995. He joined the Times in 1983 as a business reporter, covering steel and other basic industries. He then spent two-and-a-half years as Midwestern business correspondent based in Chicago and then five years as the paper’s European economics correspondent, based in Paris. He then spent four years in Washington D.C. for the Times, covering economics and foreign affairs.

He has a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also has a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.

For more information on his book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker, see the Web site stevengreenhouse.com.

Several years ago, an upscale supermarket opened in Princeton, where I live. The store was non-union and members of the local UFCW were picketing. Not only did virtually all of my liberal Democratic neighbors cross the picket line as if it weren’t there, when I asked them about it later, they laughed at me.

There was a time when Americans, or at least Democrats, understood the importance of unions. That time has passed. While Democratic leaders support unions and the right to organize, many people who drive a Prius, are pro-choice, oppose the war in Iraq, and support gay rights don’t believe that unions are important. They believe that unions made sense in the 1950’s, in a mass production industrial economy, but that they don’t fit in with the new flexible information based economy.

They couldn’t be more wrong. As the song says, “the fundamental things apply as time goes by”. A fundamental rule of employment is that compensation is a zero sum game. Workers and management can cooperate to increase productivity and increase profits. But when it comes to dividing up the pie, a dollar that goes to management bonuses or shareholders is a dollar that will not go to workers.

Rule number two is that there is strength in numbers. While unions may have less bargaining power than in the past, workers negotiating as a group inherently have more leverage than workers negotiating on their own. Union members continue to earn significantly higher wages and benefits than comparable workers who do not belong to a union. This has always been important to working families. A few thousand dollars a year can mean being able to afford a modest vacation or building a college fund for their children. The extra income received by union workers is especially important at a time when wages are stagnating.

The other principal benefit of unions is less commonly recognized. Despite the greatly publicized exceptions, the law of employment at will reigns in the American workplace. Hard data is elusive, but after 10 years at the helm of the ACLU’s national employment rights office and almost 10 more as head of an independent workplace rights group, I have lost count of the workers who have called me after being fired for the most outrageous reasons imaginable. My personal “favorite” was the man from Pennsylvania who was fired for filing a policy report when he was assaulted by a co-worker who was a drinking buddy of the boss. Although one could argue that the man from Indiana who was fired for having a few beers in a neighborhood tavern after work (the employer was a teetotaler) or the woman from Alabama who was fired for having a “Kerry for President” bumper sticker on her car should win the prize. In virtually all of these cases (including these three), I had to tell the workers, “there’s nothing anyone can do to help you”. Everyone else I know in the field has comparable stories to tell.

This doesn’t happen in union shops. Collective bargaining agreements invariably contain a provision that allows discharge only for just cause, as interpreted by a neutral arbitrator. Just cause protection is like life insurance; there’s a good chance that you won’t need it, but having it when you need can save your family.

How we acquired our collective amnesia about the importance of unions is a mystery. Some chalk it up to well-publicized stories of union corruption. But Enron’s “Kenny Boy” Lay and other board room bandits have received equal coverage, if not more, without turning Americans against management.

What is clear is that Americans need to hear more about unions and how they help real people. Workers that belong to unions need to tell their friends and neighbors about how the union has improved their lives. And labor needs to tell these same real life stories in its public education programs.

The battle isn’t lost. Most Americans still care about what happens to ordinary people when they go to work. They just need to be reminded about how unions make people’s lives better.

About the Author: Lewis Maltby is founder and president of the National Workrights Institute, a not-for profit organization dedicated to expanding human rights into the workplace. Maltby has testified before Congress many times regarding electronic monitoring, drug testing, arbitration of employment disputes, the right to organize, and other issues. He is the author of 6 model statutes on which more than 40 state statutes have been based.

Maltby’s remarks on workplace rights have been featured the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, and other major publications. He has appeared on Larry King Live, Oprah, Crossfire, NPR, and other major television and radio outlets.

Prior to founding the Institute, Maltby was director of the ACLU’s national workplace rights project and executive vice president of Drexelbrook Controls, Inc., a leading manufacturer of industrial control systems. He began his career as a public defender in Philadelphia, Pa.

The mood of the American worker in a word: jittery.

This Labor Day, organized labor celebrates (if you can call it that) its 12 percent-of-the-workforce clout – 7 percent if you count only the private sector.

Gone are the days when the unionized workforce was an effective checks-and-balance agent for stratospheric executive pay. Thirty years ago, when unions were stronger, the ratio of top executives’ pay to average worker pay was about 35 to 1; today, the ratio of S&P 500 CEO compensation to average worker pay is 344 to 1.

Slipping away is the ability of unions to help define a viable middle class.

Union members, like most of the rest of the workforce – except for the top 5 or so of earners – are observing Labor Day 2008 anxiously.

Job eliminations, raise pools that lag this year’s inflation pace, and wage freezes are common.

According to a survey taken in May by the John Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, more than 8 in 10 workers are worried about the state of the job market. (See Heldrich Center study.)

Although a majority of workers in many surveys have said they’re at least passively looking for a better job, the Heldrich report found that two-thirds think it’s a bad time to be looking.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reinforced that concern in a report published in August. About 8.3 million U.S. workers lost their jobs from January 2005 through December 2007 because of business closures or moves, insufficient work, or elimination of their shifts or jobs.

The Heldrich study produced a further sobering note: Slightly more than half of the workers it surveyed are working fewer hours than they’d like. For hourly wage earners, that translates into an income cut.

Various reports peg the share of workers who say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck at one-third to two-thirds of the workforce. And, as a whole, the national personal savings rate has fallen below zero; we are going into debt and spending more than we earn.

Then, because our national health care insurance system ties subsidized coverage to employment (or poverty), the prospect of losing an employer-based plan is terrifying. Correctly so.  A leading cause of personal bankruptcy is inability to pay medical bills.

Small wonder that The Conference Board finds consumer confidence tumbling. Why would it not in the face of slipping home values in many markets and higher prices for such consumer-prominent products as gasoline and food?

Yet few of these opinions are mirrored at the top of the income scale. Top executives and political policymakers continue to build vacation homes and hop on airplanes, commercial and private. They continue to have tax dodges that lesser earners don’t. A $4-a-gallon fill-up doesn’t dent their budgets or force them to make spending choices.

The Economic Policy Institute reports that top 1 percent of earners enjoyed income growth of 204 percent from 1979 to 2006, while the lower 90 percent of earners gained 15 percent.

Meanwhile, business owners rail against any increase in the minimum wage, blaming inflation on those modest raises for a relative handful of the nation’s least-paid workers (which don’t come close to keeping up with cost of living).

In short, more productivity is being squeezed out of the workforce in return for a smaller share of the rewards. The need for systemic change is paramount.

Can we place hope in an election year?

About the Author: Diane Stafford is the workplace and careers columnist at The Kansas City Star.

A veteran journalist, she has held several reporting and editing positions at The Star on both the business and metropolitan desks. Currently, she writes columns that appear in The Star on Thursdays and Sundays as well as other business and economic news articles throughout the week.  Her daily “Workspace” blog also is available at www.workspacekc.typepad.com. She is the author of “Your Job: Getting It, Keeping It, Improving It, Changing It,” a career advice book.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communication from Stanford University.

Around this time of year, it’s become traditional to question labor’s relevance, to take the pulse of unions and suggest that even if they once had a legitimate purpose they now are dinosaurs in a modern era. That’s understandable, in light of labor’s weak vital signs, but it completely misses the point, given what’s happening to working and middle-class Americans.

As most of us know all too well, the pendulum continues to swing sharply toward corporate interests, and, as a result, average Americans find themselves under assault at the workplace and in their economic lives.

Job security has gone out the window, and just this decade three million good-paying manufacturing jobs have vanished as well. Pensions paid for with wage concessions are too often honored in the breech. The share of the gross domestic product going to wages and salaries is the smallest in decades, the share to profits the highest. For the first time, a majority of adults don’t think their children will do as well as they have.

Trying to combat these and other trends, tens of thousands of workers were illegally fired or penalized last year for seeking to organize their workplace, just one of several factors that make the United States among the toughest industrial democracies in which to form a union. Not in law, but in practice.

As corporate power becomes more concentrated and often more distant, and employees find themselves buffeted by forces and trends they cannot hope to counter as individuals, how can it reasonably be argued that workers need no collective voice?

And so the question shifts from whether labor remains relevant to this: What can labor do to revitalize itself so it can address the challenges millions of Americans face on a daily basis? Here are a few ideas:

Wise up politically. Shift some of the energy and resources used for electing Candidate X to instead inject labor’s issues into the campaign discussion, so when its “side” wins there’s actually a mandate for labor’s issues. Problems such as the de-industrialization of America or inadequate labor laws will never be tackled after elections unless they’re raised during elections.

Stress values. Nine hundred impoverished black women won a strike on the Mississippi Delta against all odds because their union framed it as a battle of human decency, not of wages and benefits. This applies to politics as well. Labor cannot afford to let blue-collar conservatives/Reagan Democrats juxtapose their “values” with their economic interests, a formulation that makes the latter seem petty by contrast. Is it really so hard to argue that economic fairness or health care for your kids qualify every bit as much as values as preventing two gays from marrying?

Get out the message. For unions to survive, they need to help the public connect the dots between what’s happening to ordinary people and the decline of labor. But for that to happen, labor must communicate better – and stop lamenting unfair treatment by the media, which while true doesn’t excuse labor’s culpability in the deafening silence about unions and workers.

Make it all about the rank and file. Where labor has succeeded in recent years, such as the firefighters’ under-reported achievement in Iowa’s 2004 caucus, it was typically because labor leaders let workers take center stage.

Labor’s fate is, or at least should be, of interest to people far beyond labor’s immediate ranks. Here’s why: One key if often-overlooked reason the United States has long enjoyed economic and political stability has been a robust industrial relations system where management, labor and government voice their concerns. No single party or point of view always prevails, but a fair hearing marked by vigorous advocacy generally has led to reasonable public policies and private practices and, equally important, a feeling of inclusion.

The current unbalanced system, however, generates the skewed policies and practices that have left so many Americans disillusioned. In the short term, a few gain an advantage; in the long term, the situation is not sustainable. Righting this ship is in the national interest.

About the Author: Philip Dine, a Washington-based journalist, is one of the few remaining labor reporters and his labor coverage has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His book, “State of the Unions: How Labor Can Strengthen the Middle Class, Improve Our Economy, and Regain Political Influence“ (foreword by Richard Gephardt) has been called “one of the best books in years on the labor movement” by the AFL-CIO; ”excellent, inspiring and very readable” by Sen. Edward Kennedy; and ”a playbook for a comeback for organized labor” by the Boston Globe.

Dine designed and taught a college course on the media’s coverage of labor, did graduate studies in industrial relations at MIT and spent two years researching labor unions and immigrant workers in France and Germany. His op-ed pieces have been published in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and Newsday.