Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 10:41:44 EDT
Chicago Tribune
April 7, 2006
OPINION
Working stiffs, unite
Respect on the job shouldn't be something that we have to work overtime to
achieve
By Studs Terkel
I feel a shift in the air. It may have started last summer with the big
storm. The television filled with images from New Orleans that we
usually associate
with developing countries. The southern city we loved to romanticize was
under water, and its poor were left to fend for themselves. Our nation wanted
answers.
Then, right before the Labor Day holidays, New York City's transit system
shut down. New Yorkers grumbled about marathon walks and having to
share taxis.
Bus drivers, conductors and train operators, men and women used to flying down
the tracks and getting folks to work, stood idled. They wanted to make sure
the newly hired received the same benefits package they had. The rest of New
York just wanted to know what was slowing their lives down.
And just this spring, 500,000 Los Angelinos and a million Parisians hit the
streets. French students and workers are demanding a reversal in a
new law that
would make it easier to fire young workers. Back in the U.S. a groundswell
has surged in protest against anti-immigrant workers legislation.
There is some
serious hot air out there.
It just could be, and this would be a welcome development, a call for a
shake-up of the status quo. Moving poverty from the shadows and taking the
conditions that create it to task. Transit workers refusing to have
their pensions
raided. Hotel workers on the move toward good pay and safe working conditions.
Young Latinos striving to make sure the jobs available to them
aren't perpetual
sweatshop jobs of second-class status. Like the meat cutters, and public
employees before them, today's workers know that higher standards on
the job come
with a union. Workers earn more with a collective bargaining agreement, and
employers benefit from reduced turnover and increased productivity.
Here in Chicago health-care workers and nurses are organizing. They have the
best interests of their patients at heart. As far as common sense goes it
seems to me that if you do right by the workers then you do right by
the patients.
But some health-care workers, earning as little $8 an hour, can't afford to
pay for their own health insurance. They see the hypocrisy. They're coming
together to form a union.
Giving breath to the union dream is the first step in what invariably becomes
the long trip through employer intimidation. Workers face incredible
opposition when they discuss forming a union. In the Chicago area,
when employers are
faced with organizing campaigns, 30 percent fire pro-union workers, and 49
percent threaten to close a work site, according to a recent study
commissioned
by American Rights at Work.
Too many employers have trampled upon the rights of America's workers for too
long. But janitors won't allow them to get away with that anymore. They
organize and then walk out as a whole, across an entire city. Hotel
staff see the
cost of the amenities add up for guests and work piling on them without a bump
up in their wages. They learn from their industry's consolidation trends. If
the hotels are to be run by four big chains, then workers will bargain across
those chains.
Cable technicians, bartenders and truckers will do the work to keep America
running--the work that can't be off-shored. With a voice at work they'll make
those jobs good jobs.
What brings workers together can be heavy-handed employers, but it also can
be a belief, a hope of improving the climate and community at work--the spaces
where so many of us spend so much of our lives. Respect on the job and a voice
at the workplace shouldn't be something Americans have to work overtime to
achieve. Their work is more than an inanimate unit of labor, and
they deserve to
knock off at the end of the day with the same dignity they clocked in with.
Feelings of self-respect, appreciation and pride do not show up on economic
forecasts or on a profit and loss spreadsheet, but they are the result of
decent pay for honest work. The security a breadwinner feels knowing
a sick family
member will receive the care they need. The joy a mother and father experience
when they can afford to help send their kids to college. When people come
together to join a union, they build something bigger and better for
themselves
and their families. They create community.
We could use more of that.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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