Stella D’Oro Workers Win
MICHAEL HIRSCH
Sometimes David does beat Goliath. Or lets the giant know it’s been in a fight. On strike and locked out for more than 11 months, 134 Bronx, N.Y. bakery workers—almost all new immigrants from Latin America—employed at the last Stella D’Oro bakery in the nation won a June 30 Administrative Law Judge decision forcing management to call them back to work at their previous salaries and benefit scale. The fight’s not over, though, as they return without a new contract and in the face of a corporate threat to close the plant within 90 days and relocate it, presumably out of state.
In announcing the projected closing, company managers cried poor-mouth blaming the national recession for an inability to offer the same level of wages and benefits it provided in better times.
The newly returned strikers are mulling over their possibilities, ranging from a second NLRB challenge and locating a new buyer to organizing a workers cooperative. And the lesson of last year’s successful Chicago window-plant occupation runs through their minds, as it does to management and local police.
The reason virtually all Unions are dead or dying in
America is because the tactics, abuses and complaints
of 80 years ago are outdated. Free enterprise can no
longer exist in American Trade and Commerce with
uninformed demands that cripple a company’s
right to make a fair profit for the amount of money
risked. Unions stifle the best workers and they move
on to greener pastures – Marginal and weaker
employees remain while millions of US jobs are shipped
overseas to those that appreciate opportunity.
Almost all unions will be gone by 2015; never to raise
their greedy misinformed heads again. Unions have
eternally downgraded free enterprise with endless
truly stewpit demands as the rest of the world learns
from union blunders.
Unions will NEVER disappear Terry, because they arise out of an inexorable contradiction of capitalist production. Workers want high wages, shorter hours, safer conditions; capitalists need to maximize productivity and minimize expenditure.
Now historically if a labor movement gets too strong, yes, they can become a fetter on production. Labor CAN become overvalued and public expenditure/taxation can hinder capitalist activity in the private sector. In America ever since the Neoliberal Revolution three+ decades back we’ve seen worker productivity rise 50 percent, but real wages stagnant or in decline.
Companies do have a right and an obligation to maximize profit. It’s the bedrock of the free market system, but collective action will always occur, even if unions are outlawed and the state apparatus is used against it. And you don’t have to guess, which side of the barricades I’ll be on.
Ideally I would like to see the contradiction resolved one day …. until then unions aren’t going go away and they’ll be embedded within the capitalist system. Deal with it.