Accept no substitutes

When an argument is a "no-brainer,” we shouldn't need to justify it with footnotes or cite chapter and verse.  

The positions taken by labor unions, even on issues that have no direct bearing on collective bargaining, are altruistic and evoke global citizenship. By comparison, the worldview of industrialists, who tend at least sentimentally to be union-busters, has historically been cynically self-serving and amoral.  

In present times, judging by their donations, wish-lists, affiliations and policy advocacy,  that pattern persists. 

People will do anything they can, within reason and the law, to secure a high quality of life and standard of living for themselves and their loved ones. Most of them have to strive and overcome various incarnations of victimhood. Others may be naturally born to privilege or acquire it by hook or by crook. Advantages may have been snatched, or been conferred on them by accident of birth, social ties or fluke. 

Some of us have been told to rely on our guardian angels, but they are situationally challenged and poorly dispersed among the general population. Besides, logistics is not their forte. They tend to show up at the wrong place and time and forget their identification badges.

Justice doesn't fall like unsolicited manna from heaven into the laps of workers in their break rooms. It's just another card that employers can play if the spirit moves them. There are anecdotal reports about some being decent, even saintly. But that doesn't matter.  They retain the option of despotism. A CEO is still Zeus. When he's not channel-surfing, he's hurling lightning. 

A good labor union can make his members ride those bolts as though they were bucking broncos. 

Labor unions represent the triumph of individual merit. They are not omnipotent but they keep the solitary worker from being impotent. They must work within the system even while trying to reinvent it. They must "render unto Caesar" while forcing him into being a pragmatic parliamentarian. Unions must "play the game" in order to be effective political activists. They must audit the nerve centers of political power and expand the horizons of their own.

By nature, it is impossible for any victory won by labor unions to have been "ill-gotten.”   They must never apologize. After all, their struggle is righteous and defensive. They are the primary targets of opponents of individual freedom.  

Union- busting organizations are heavily involved in funding elected officials, stroking influencers, corporations and any entity that shares their animus to unions. They have sophisticated websites, foundations and think-tanks driven by sophistry, and they fund bogus "investigative reports" about supposedly corrupt, selfish, greedy and unpatriotic labor unions.

The union-busters accuse labor unions of bartering votes in exchange for surrender to their narrow goals of self-interest. They've most recently said this about the teamsters at UPS, where a strike looms on July 31st. 

But their favorite target has always been teacher unions.

Teacher unions don't accept that their sphere of concern should or can be restricted to classrooms. Education must be panoramically experienced, not myopically viewed. To some extent, that's true of medicine also, as embodied by Doctors Without Borders.  

Education encompasses not only traditional curriculum, but everything from human rights to climate change. 

Universality is the foundational nature of educational focus. Whether directly or indirectly, from the acquisition of basic skills to a commitment to global moral stewardship, it is about the betterment of society.

That is the "human capital" of educators. And that mission is evident in part by political donations and pension investments. It is done with the aim of healing the world without abrogating fiduciary duty.

Union-busting corporatists, fueled by warped perceptions, accuse labor unions of influence peddling. Let's consider how their own "bottom line" has been used less to heal than to drive the world asunder as collateral damage for the primacy of their own profit.

What do the following have in common? IBM, Ford, Unilever, Dow Chemical, Lever Brothers, Chase Manhattan Bank, General Motors, Standard Oil, ITT, Woolworth, Kodak, General Electric and the Rockefeller Foundation?

They are among the companies that cozied up to Nazi Germany, although after the war some of them feigned denial that they were cogs in its death machinery (major Nazi war criminals at the original Nuremberg War Trials conjured the same excuses.)  They made business decisions.  

How did their ethics stack up with Labor's equivalent of "business decisions,” such as investment in environmental protection?

According to “Nazi Nexus,” an acclaimed book by Edwin Black, as summarized on Amazon,  IBM aided the "facilitation of the identification and accelerated destruction of the Jews. General Motors and its rapid motorization of the German military. … Ford Motor Company for its political inspiration. … the Carnegie Institution for its proliferation of the concept of race science, racial laws and very mathematical formula. … for systematic destruction."

In her book about "Dark Money," author Jane Mayer notes that the father of the American Koch brothers, David and Charles, built a large oil refinery in Hamburg that impressed Hitler. Alcoa furnished huge amounts of essential aluminum, and ITT helped with German radar and air-raid warning devices. Dow Chemical chipped in with incendiary bombs. 

According to Jewish Currents, IBM "helped the Nazi government with a punch-card mechanism for identifying Jews, Gypsies, and other 'undesirables. '... Each concentration camp kept tabs on inmates using IBM's technology, IBM-trained SS personnel in how to use their machines to record the movement, sorting, and mass executions within the death camps. Without this technology, the camps could never have achieved their horrendous numbers, and the Final Solution would not have been as final.”

And the Nazis weren't guilty of the discourtesy  of violating the intellectual property rights of IBM.  It was freely given. Their technology wasn't stolen. In fact, their CEO, Thomas Watson, was also hailed by Hitler.

General Electric played a role with Krupp in building gas chambers for efficient genocide and General Motors factories with "Blitz" trucks for the Wehrmacht. DuPont may have been the inspiration for Monsanto and Union Carbide in the Vietnam war. Chase Manhattan Bank seized Jewish accounts for the Gestapo and F.W. Woolworth fired all its Jewish workers in order to achieve the status of "honorary Aryan sellers.” 

The Washington Post noted that "in June 1940, after the fall of France, Henry Ford personally vetoed a U.S. government-approved plan to produce under license Rolls-Royce engines for British fighter planes.” Hitler so adored Henry Ford that he awarded the American union-hating Ford the highest decoration available to a non-German national: the Order of the German Eagle, First Class.

Today we must be on high alert as social media and technology giants collude with governments in Faustian pacts for mutual power: existential threats, battle for the nation's soul, yada yada. 

The same people who excoriate labor unions for getting involved in political, social and economic issues are inclined towards giving corporations a pass for their historical indulgences of entrepreneurship. Their pet scapegoat, if (scapegoats can be pets) are the teacher unions.  

Let's see if we can get a sense of the American Federation of Teachers’ moral direction from a sampling of its resolutions: "Strengthen and Diversify the Educator Pipeline,” “Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms and Data Protection in a Digital Age, Bargaining for Disability Accommodation and Access,” "Address Homelessness, Foreclosures and Evictions,” "On Books, Literacy and Intellectual Freedom,” "Teaching and Learning About Labor,” "Lowering the Voice of Money in Politics.”

The AFT’s immersion in the global issues that relate to the survival and perpetuation of democracy and the planet have driven reactionaries crazy. Teachers unions are at the vanguard, but many other unions, such those in the manufacturing, transportation, communication, construction and service-industry sectors are on board as well.

Which have the superior claim on the public trust: union-busters or labor unions? No spoiler-alert necessary.