Health and Diet Scottish Recipes Ferret for Ferrets


[pf] Fw: [corp-focus] Business Power and Mobility
by Kaleopono
30 November 2000 03:11 UTC

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Multinationals use threats of plant closings to drive down wages, benefits.
There's a link in the article to a PDF full study report.  Kaleopono


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Weissman" 
To: 
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 9:05 AM
Subject: [corp-focus] Business Power and Mobility


> Business Power and Mobility
> By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
> The election season makes it patently clear how Big Business is able to
> transform its financial resources into political power via campaign
> contributions.
>
> But an even more fundamental source of business power is corporations'
> control over investment decisions, and the tax, trade and investment rules
> which enhance capital mobility. The ability to shift production to
> different locations, or threaten to shift production, gives corporations
> enormous leverage over the political process and over workers.
>
> Want to adopt serious environmental standards to stem the corporate
> poisoning of the air, water and land? Get ready to face the threat of
> plant closures and job shifting. Want to force companies to bear a
> reasonable share of the tax burden? Be prepared to face company moves to
> lower tax havens. Want to mandate payment of a living wage to all workers?
> Plan to hear how business will be forced to move to Mexico or China.
>
> Nowhere is the raw power connected to corporate mobility more apparent
> than in labor management relations, as Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of
> labor education research at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor
> Relations, makes clear in a new paper, "Uneasy Terrain" (see
> http://web.archive.org/web/20030424021512/http://www.ustdrc.gov/research/bronfenbrenner.pdf).
>
> When faced with union organizing campaigns, employers routinely threaten
> to close their plant and move elsewhere. Understandably, these threats
> intimidate workers -- a union won't do you any good if you don't have a
> job -- and they are tremendously successful at defeating union organizing
> drives.
>
> In the most comprehensive survey ever of U.S. union organizing campaigns,
> Bronfenbrenner found that "the majority of employers consistently,
> pervasively and extremely effectively tell workers either directly or
> indirectly that if they ask for too much, or don't give concessions, or
> try to organize, strike or fight for good jobs with good benefits, the
> company will close, move out of state or move across the border, just as
> so many other plants have done before."
>
> In union organizing drives in the United States in 1998 and 1998, she
> found, more than half of all employers threatened to close all or part of
> the facility if workers voted to join a union.
>
> But the situation is even worse than that figure suggests, because for
> some types employers it is difficult to make credible threats to move --
> hotels and hospitals, for example, are to a considerable extent tied to
> place.
>
> In mobile industries -- manufacturing and other companies that can
> credibly threaten to shift production -- the plant closing threat rate was
> 68 percent. In all manufacturing, it was 71 percent. In food processing,
> it was 71 percent.
>
> These numbers mark a worrisome upturn from a previous Bronfenbrenner
> survey, undertaken for the Labor Secretariat of the Commission for Labor
> Cooperation and published in 1997. Bronfenbrenner's data from 1993-1995
> showed a threat rate of 64 percent among manufacturers, 21 percent among
> food processors.
>
> (That earlier study, prepared for a commission created by one of the NAFTA
> side agreements, was suppressed by the Clinton administration. Eventually
> liberated, it provided some of the key evidence leading to the defeat of
> fast track.)
>
> Employers deliver the threats directly (after posting pictures of shut
> down facilities, supervisors asked workers at a Mitsubishi plant in
> Tennessee, "Is your family ready to move to Mexico?") or more indirectly.
> For multinationals, Bronfenbrenner told us, there is a pervasive "silent
> threat. ... The map on the wall" showing the locations of a company around
> the world is an ongoing reminder that the company can easily do business
> elsewhere.
>
> Employers know the threats work, Bronfenbrenner says. Anti-union training
> materials emphasize that "fear is the most effective tool," she explains.
>
> And the evidence backs up the commonsense insight that threats to close
> effectively intimidate workers.
>
> "Union election win rates were significantly lower in units where plant
> closing threats occurred (38 percent) than in units without plant closing
> threats (51 percent)," Bronfenbrenner found. "Win rates were especially
> low (24 percent) in those campaigns where employers made specific threats
> to move to another country. Win rates were also significantly lower in
> mobile industries where the threat of closure was more credible."
>
> Unions can overcome plant-closing threats, Bronfenbrenner says, by running
> aggressive campaigns that involve rank-and-file union members as
> organizers and actively involve and energize the workers who are being
> organized. But the challenge is immense, especially given the array of
> other anti-union tactics, including firing of union supporters, that
> corporations regularly employ.
>
> Dealing with the problem of plant-closing threats, at least in the union
> organizing context, will require two major reforms, Bronfenbrenner
> concludes. First, labor law must more clearly delineate such threats as
> illegal, and impose big enough penalties to deter employers from making
> them. Second, trade, investment and tax policy must be changed to limit
> corporate mobility, and to block employers from shifting operations to
> avoid unionization.
>
> That's not just a pro-union agenda. It is a basic pro-democracy one.
>
>
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
> Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
> Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
> Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
> Courage Press, 1999).
>
> (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
>
> _______________________________________________
>
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