Ehrenreich: The Lexus & the Right to Pee Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit "In These Times" June 13, 1999 THE LEXUS AND THE RIGHT TO PEE by Barbara Ehrenreich The right to organize is a little like the right to buy a Lexus. It exists--theoretically and on paper, thanks to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935--but is of almost no practical value to the average working person. A few years ago, for example, an organizer I know almost had convinced the employees of a confectionery warehouse in Queens to exercise this right--when management got wind of their intentions. The boss charged in, plucked out the two most vociferously pro-union workers, and pistol-whipped them in front of the terrified work force. End of organizing drive. More commonly, in your larger and better-funded workplaces, management brings in a union-busting firm--sometimes at a price greater than several years of the wage increases workers are seeking--and institutes a campaign of brain-washing. Employees are forced to attend "meetings" where they listen for hours as skilled union-busters explain why unionization would, in effect, ruin their lives: Because unions are huge, corrupt, mob-like structures bent on extorting dues from gullible workers; because their pro-union co-workers are twisted, power-hungry wretches; because unionization will force management to relocate to Guatemala; etc. In a tragically high proportion of cases, these Orwellian tactics work. John Sweeney's rejuvenated AFL-CIO is launching a broad campaign for labor law reform that would make the right to organize a little less theoretical. This is exciting and long overdue. But if the campaign is limited to the right to organize into a union, it doesn't go far enough. As any of the AFL-CIO labor lawyers who met in New Orleans earlier this month could tell you, the right to organize isn't the only human right missing in the American workplace. Take freedom of speech: A couple of years ago, I read about a Dallas grocery store worker being fired for tactlessly wearing a Green Bay Packers' T-shirt to work. Ho ho, I thought, they won't get away with this. I was wrong. You can be fired for anything, so long as it does not constitute discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability or religion. (And, strangely enough, Packer fandom is not yet recognized as a legitimate religion.) Yet anti-feminists still like to argue that sexual harassment laws limit male workers' "freedom of speech." In the American workplace, there is no freedom of speech. Ditto freedom of assembly: Management is free to assemble the work force as a captive audience for anti-union harangues, but the work force is not free to assemble for its own deliberations, even on breaks. And you can't ever count on having a break, even to pee. There is no federal guarantee of the right to take a break --an omission, as explained in Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard's extremely useful book Void Where Prohibited, that has an ugly effect on bladder and kidney health. The most egregiously missing right is the right to any kind of privacy. American workers, supposedly proud heirs of the Revolution of 1776, can expect to have their phone conversations and e-mail monitored, their purses searched for contraband or stolen goods, and their private lives surveyed for unhealthy practices--such as smoking or motorcycling--that could be costly to the company health insurance plan, should the company be so generous as to offer one. Even more degrading, 70 percent of major companies now require employees to undergo urine tests for drugs--which tests commonly involve stripping down to one's underwear and peeing in public. For workers who do not pilot airplanes or drive school buses, urine tests have no function other than to serve as a ritual of humiliation. It would help, in the coming struggle for the right to organize, if the unions had been a little more militant all along about the other missing workplace rights--if they had, for example, more firmly resisted the encroachment of chemical fascism in the form of drug-testing. Maybe to hard-pressed union staff these seem like peripheral issues. But if you can't speak freely at work, assemble or even safely carry union literature in your handbag, you're not in any position to organize. More insidiously, the dictatorship of the bosses breeds submission in its victims. Why don't more self-respecting workers disrupt those union-bashing, captive-audience meetings? Because, after years of surveillance and monitoring and urine testing, they may not feel so self-respecting any more. The right to organize is, of course, indispensable. But what we need is nothing less than a new civil rights movement--this time for workers of all colors and genders--upholding the idea that the rights of free citizens are far too precious to check at the workplace door. If it wants to squash the management image of unions as dues-eating parasites, the AFL-CIO should lead the way. Barbara Ehrenreich is a contributing editor of In These Times. source - Jun 2, 1999 by meisenscher@igc.org ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-06.04.99-08:29:01-15357