11-21-08, 1:15 pm
They 'should be shot; should be thrown out of there goddamn jobs,' Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus said last month about business leaders who do not oppose the Employee Free Choice Act, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
According to the article, Marcus referred to CEOs who have not already giving money to anti-worker, right-wing politicians like Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman (R) and others who oppose the proposed bill that would make it easier for workers to join or organize labor union.
Recent surveys estimate that 57 million American workers would join a labor union if they had the opportunity. Currently, federal laws allow employers to game the system to pressure and threaten workers out of joining.
While threats and harassment are illegal, federal law imposes such weak penalties that many large employers like Marcus have no incentive to abide by the law. They prefer being fined (which they can avoid paying for years by appealing the fine) to allowing workers exercise their right of free association. In a 2007 report on a related matter, Human Rights Watch characterized the abuse of labor laws in this manner as a violation of human rights.
According to the Wall Street Journal article, Marcus also stated, 'This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it.'
Seemingly, Marcus did not even try to square his sense of what 'civilization' means with his apparent preference for vigilante-style revenge killings of other business leaders who do not share his views. After all, are summary executions civilized?
What Marcus seems to have also misunderstood is the upswelling demand for change that took place on Nov. 4th. That election was a complete rejection not only of George W. Bush, but also of the economic policies he advocated. Bush and Marcus share the common view that the wealthiest people deserve first and foremost the fruits of the labor of working people. They call this a profit margin, and claim they have earned it.
That Bushian disconnect between the imagined rights of the wealthy and the rights of working families is what people rejected on Nov. 4th. They told people like Bush and Marcus that this is our country too. They rejected the robber barons and monied interests like Marcus who take and take. With their anti-working families policies, they have taken everything out of this economy and have left the rest of us to scrape by.
But that era is over. It ended when tens of millions of people streamed to the polls and drove it into the waste bin of history. We want a change. We want a society in which we can work together to improve our lives. For workers that means unions. It means bargaining collectively to improve our standard of living. And that is more and more appearing to be the best way to recover from the financial and economic crisis caused by the 'elder statesmen' of 'civilization' like Marcus and some Wall Street tycoons who put growing their immediate profits before the common good.
So far almost 900,000 people have signed a national petition urging congressional passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
