Workers of the World Unite on Labor Day

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Bill Fletcher Jr.
Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Labor Rights Forum

(4) Everyone has the right to form and join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Several years ago, during a social event, I had a frank discussion with a very wealthy businessman. In the course of the conversation he informed me, once he found out that I am a union activist, that if workers attempt to form a union at any of his factories, he simply closes down the factory and moves the work. This sort of cavalier activity, and more importantly, the threat of such actions is a critical image in the minds of workers, not just in the USA, but across the globe. The ability to shift production, brought about largely through technological changes, has resulted in what the late economist Bennett Harrison called a "credible threat" facing all workers.

Irrespective of the rights that an individual may have in so-called civil society, when they enter the workplace many, if not most, of those rights evaporate at the door, as if the individual were shifting dimensions in some science fiction tale. A clear example of the cynical portrayal of economic injustices to serve political ends can be found if one reflects on the 1980s. The Reagan/Bush administration gave a considerable amount of attention to the rights of workers in Poland (and other parts of the then Soviet bloc) to form or join labor unions. Yet at the same time, here in the USA, this same administration was crushing the air traffic controllers and in the US sphere of influence in Latin America, was actively cooperating with Latin American dictatorships and quasi-dictatorships that undermined any and all efforts by workers to form workers' organizations, all in the name of fighting communism.

The right to join or form labor unions is so central but so often overlooked precisely because it goes to central questions regarding power in so-called free market societies. The power that employers enjoy emerges through their unbridled control over the workplace and, as a consequence, through the profits that they gain as a result of the worker's daily labor. Efforts by workers at self-organization call into question such power and ultimately raise the issue as to whether the employer has a larger social responsibility, a question that most employers strenuously resist.
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