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Harvard Law Professor Paul Weiler estimates that one in 20 union supporters -- an average of
approximately 10,000 workers a year -- are fired by their employers during union organizing campaigns.
Similarly, in a study of 400 elections on union representation conducted by the National Labor
Relations Board, Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University found that 50 percent
of the employers threatened to close the office or plant and 32 percent fired workers who actively supported the union.
These actions are in violation
of the NLRA's provisions prohibiting employers from firing, harassing, or threatening employers who seek to organize unions.
All this is a far cry from the original vision of the National Labor Relations Act, which saw
unions as indispensable institutions in an industrialized democracy. Introduced by Senator Robert F. Wagner (thus, the NLRA
is frequently called "The Wagner Act"), a liberal Democrat from New York, and
signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the NLRA reflected the era's egalitarian economic philosophy. The Depression
had been caused by corporate excesses, the New Dealers believed, and by the lack of consumer demand resulting from low wages.
Moreover, ordinary citizens were powerless to right these wrongs unless they joined together. Thus, unions were desirable
because they offered workers a way to resist corporate abuses, raise their wages, and restore their rightful role in the nation's
economic, social, and political life.
Thus, the law begins by blaming hostile employers for labor unrest, declaring:
quotes from the act:
"The denial by some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by
some employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife." The law goes on contend that individual workers don't have the power to improve their conditions and to present collective
action as a cure for the lack of mass purchasing power that produced the Depression: "The inequality of bargaining power between
employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in
the corporate or other forms of ownership association ... tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions by suppressing
wage rates."
Thus, the law begins by blaming hostile employers for labor unrest, declaring: "The denial by
some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by some employers to accept the procedure of collective
bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife."
The law goes on contend that individual workers don't have the power to improve their conditions
and to present collective action as a cure for the lack of mass purchasing power that produced the Depression: "The inequality
of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers
who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association ... tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions
by suppressing wage rates."--Quote from the act passed by Congress.
The current lack of labor unrest, media production of ideas, and congressional pro-business legislation, these
all lead to a prediction that the current downward trends in unionization, wages, and benefits will continue for decades--jk.
THE SHIT OF THE TAX BURDEN AWAY FROM CORPORATIONS
• Average corporate tax rates in
industrialized countries have fallen from 45 per cent to 30 per cent in two decades due to influence peddling through political
donations by business.
• if corporate taxation keeps receding at
the current rate, corporate tax rates will hit 0 per cent by the middle of the century,
• out of the 275 largest corporations
in the US, 82 paid no tax in or received a tax refund in at least one of the years between 2001 and 2003,
• the
number of Export Processing Zones has risen from 850 in 1998 to more than 5,000 in 2004, despite their generally bad track
record on labour rights,
• in 2001, the amount of income estimated to be lost in the US due to the abuse of transfer
pricing alone was US$53.1 billion,
• as a share of total taxation, corporate taxes have dropped by 15 per cent
in the UK and by 22 per cent in Italy since the 1980s, by 41 per cent in Germany and by 43 per cent in Japan since the 1970s
and by 53 per cent in the US since the late 1960s.
Companies as large as Boeing, Halliburton , Morgan Stanley, Pepsi, Citigroup and Xerox are either incorporated in tax havens
or have a large number of subsidiaries there. This allows them to under-report their profits for the purposes of paying tax
whilst at the same time benefiting from taxpayer money through government contracts.
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