Corporations have always used propaganda in their battle against the unions. The companies’ enormous public relations firepower is one of the leading reasons for the weakness of the labor movement in the United States, in comparison to other industrialized nations. In the last week, the provision of card check neutrality has been removed from the Employee Free Choice Act, taking the bill from a major measure to a minor one, and this is a direct result of a corporate propaganda victory.
The fight against unions in the 1930s followed all the same patterns as today in its corporate rhetoric. As is detailed in Allan Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation, The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a group representing mostly larger businesses and probably second in influence only to the US Chamber of Commerce among business organizations, had a 1934 internal memo written by the Employment Relations Committee, which laid out strategy for fighting labor and regulations. First it explains that “collective barganining…is a vicious menace even when it is not evil in effect.” Then it proclaims that “manufacturers should make public declaration that they believe in collective bargaining.” Similarly, “the Association has no choice but to appear to favor unemployment insurance in principle if it wants to make any fight against it.” The key is “assaulting every working plan proposed, for they are all vulnerable.” In other words, companies claim to support rights for workers and reform, but in practice tear any actual proposal to shreds. This is thoroughly dishonest and Machiavellian by any measure. In Lichtman’s words, “they would pay lip service to reform while working to kill liberal programs or shape them in their interest.”
This practice is still current. The Center for Union Facts, one of the primary propaganda engines for companies, claims to “support employees who elect to join a union,” and is simply against “union officials’ abuse of power.” The furor over the “secret ballot” is a perfect example of the companies’ tactics of dissimulation and watering-down. The companies are convincing the voting public that companies want workers to have the right to form a union in the most-democratic possible fashion. In reality, they understand card check neutrality as a means for a rapid increase in unionization, while the secret ballot (the current system) is so greatly in favor of the companies that unionization will likely continue to decrease.
The great historical success of company propaganda is having convinced many Americans that the foremost obstacle to a democratic process of unionization is that unions deploy coercive power. A worker, or anyone who has spent much time with workers, would consider this idea ludicrous, because the overwhelming characteristic of the distribution of power in the workplace is the massive concentration of coercive power in the hands of management. To a worker, the union organizer is a like a fly, while the company, especially a multinational corporation, is like Godzilla. The company controls everything – the job (and hence survival, in a recession), the working conditions, the scheduling, the pay, raises and promotions. I would have put benefits on that list, but most blue-collar workers don’t receive benefits unless they are organized. Companies can also embarrass and humiliate workers. During the unionization process, if an election is called, companies use the period of several months before the election occurs to use every tool of coercion implied above. They harass workers, they threaten them, they force them to attend captive-audience meetings, they even fire them. This is all of course in violation of the law, but the law is not enforced. The Labor Board, which adjudicates these allegations, is stocked with Bush appointees. This is why majority sign-up is more democratic than a National Labor Relations Board election: the card-signing process happens with only the normal degree of company pressure on workers, but the election happens after the company has deployed all the fury it has locked away, disguised by bland assertions of support for the right to collectively bargain.
Company propaganda is powerful, but it has not conquered those who experience these conditions. An easy way to tell whether someone has had any experience with working-class people (with the exception of managing them) is if they consider the secret ballot to be preferable because it is more democratic. This is why I call it propaganda: that idea is radically out of touch with the actual world. It is designed to destroy workers’ efforts to organize themselves to stand up for their rights.
You’ve reminded me of a very important fact, namely: that worker democracy and worker control are not identical. Democratic forms alone do not resolve the problems of autonomy and solidarity in the workplace; they do not ensure that the workers have mastery (both technical and political) over the productive apparatus. Formal democracy, as you point out, can conceal a situation whether real power remains in the hands of the management. Worker control requires democracy, but cannot be reduced to the existence of democratic procedures.
I just bought a book about called “Changing Venezuela by Taking Power” about the Chavez government. Apart from an analysis of Chavez, the book also lays out the author’s own interpretation of a successful socialist society. One important part of this is the transition from private enterprise to cooperatives, and from representative democracy to participatory democracy.
Anyways the point is that, indeed, economic reforms must be accompanied by political reforms that both allow and encourage these economic reforms.