If we are going to have a capitalistic system, we need to have balancing factors to keep it from collapsing and to keep corporate oligarchs from coming to power. In Russia, business tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett — to name a few — are known as oligarchs. Yet here we call them “entrepreneurs.”
Oligarchs are members of a government ruled by a few (in this case, the rich and powerful). Tycoons are wealthy and powerful businesspeople or industrialists, magnates. This fits what is going on now, in our country, in particular. Unions are a balancing factor we must have if we are going to keep capitalism. If we have well-paid workers able to care for their families, workers are less likely to revolt. Desperate people who feel that they have nothing left to lose are the most dangerous to the existing system.
Unions help balance the power of the ultra-wealthy. Unions help economies thrive. Let’s take German auto workers as an example. They are paid $67 per hour compared to the $34 per hour paid to workers in the United States. Germany is also well-regarded as a place that does excellent car work — perhaps this is a correlation to their workers being well-paid? Many corporations in the United States try to bust unions; this is because they know that workers, as a collective, have much more bargaining power, and they will have to pay more. Similarly, many employers try make sharing salaries taboo. This is a federally protected discussion.
Unions help protect workers. They do this by providing better benefits to workers (health care, better pay, etc.) and forcing the company to negotiate and give workers more power. According to the AFL-CIO, union workers get paid more, have better collective bargaining power, help strengthen the middle class, and provide benefits to their children (children of parents who didn’t complete a degree but worked as part of a union had earnings of 16 percent higher on average than those with a degree who were not unionized).
Children also benefit from the health care and child care provided by union membership. According to the AFL-CIO, union workers get paid $191 more per week than their non-union counterparts. Workers do need to pay union dues to keep the union afloat, but in exchange they receive much more protection because collectives have more bargaining power than individual workers.
If oligarchs and large multinational corporations such as Amazon didn’t view unions as such a large threat to their power, why are they trying to keep workers from unionizing? The answer is that they want to keep all their money.
To put this in perspective, in December 2021, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian that Jeff Bezos had made so much during the pandemic that he could afford to give each worker a $105,000 check and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic began. Amazon also recently busted a union that was forming in Alabama, which goes to show that this issue is not about politics but about the rich versus the poor. We are seeing the same problem right now with the hiking of gas prices. Oil executives could take less money and less profits to keep prices down, but why would they? They, like other top monopolizers, are using this situation with Russia to gouge consumers. We are running out of oil, yes, but they are also taking advantage of this situation, knowing that people will pay any price for oil. The time is now to show the power of the people and to cap oil companies’ enormous power.
Unions help keep this power in check. They give the workers bargaining power. Unions benefit workers by helping them get better medical insurance and better benefits for their family. These benefits include wages and benefits that keep up with the cost of living, job training programs for better mobility in the job market, student loan repayment and scholarship opportunities as well as many others, according to the AFL-CIO.
Our current work system in the United States is flawed. We are the only country in the Americas without a universal paid parental leave benefit (Europeans have 20 weeks, according to 20somethingfinance.com). There is no maximum work week hours in our country, nor is there a law requiring sick leave or legally mandated annual leave. Compared to other industrialized countries, we work more and have a lower quality of life.
We must fight companies to give us what we need to have a functioning society. People are working themselves to death out of fear of having their jobs outsourced and being replaced. To this I say, let these unpatriotic companies leave. Our workers are worth it. It is time to stand up and demand to be paid so that you don’t have to break yourself for a company that will toss you aside. We need our mental health and our families more, and unions can push companies to support workers.
Cedar Bushue is a pro-union, pro-people writer who believes in people over profit. More of his writing can be found at linktr.ee/cedarbushue.
Read more of the Apr. 6-12, 2022 issue.