American Workers Take Firings in Stride;
Foreign Workers Fight to Save Their Jobs

On November 1, the Chrysler Corp. announced it would reduce its workforce by eliminating 12,000 positions from its hourly, salaried and contract employees through 2008. It did not consult the workers who would be fired, nor did the United Auto Workers seriously challenge the company on whether the number of discharges could be reduced or alternative solutions found.

Workers were led to believe that Chrysler had no alternative to cutting jobs since the market demand for cars had soured. Why should the company keep people on the payroll if there were no productive, profitable work for them to do?

So if Chrysler workers, aged 50 or more, were on the list to be fired after nearly many years of loyal service to the company, what ware they to do? Let the company take away his livelihood without even a protest? Go to school and try to learn a new trade or occupation? What were their chances of earning a wage that would be nearly that of an autoworker?

Some companies that have used overnight e-mails to fire workers worry that they may face a rebellion the next day, but that has rarely happened. American workers treat their discharge with resignation, as though it was an act of God, not a human failure. Employers are now hiring outside “terminators” as special consultants to prevent any demonstrations by discharged workers at a plant or office. An occasional news story about a worker who shoots the manager who fired him keeps the problem of handling layoffs very much alive.

It’s hard to understand that when there are mass firings, workers take the loss of their jobs with so little protest. They can have fist fights over a parking space or come to blows at a bar over an argument about baseball scores, but they don’t react angrily and bitterly, even when a top boss, whom they have never seen, takes away their livelihood.

Long-Time Foreign Workers Feel They Own Their Jobs

In many countries, employers encounter time-consuming restrictions when they try to fire employees. Unions make it a condition that there be no layoffs during the life of the contract Workers take the loss of a job more seriously than do American workers...They conduct sit-ins in the factory and stay there until they get some assurances that their jobs will be saved. They go on hunger strikes. They defy riot police and arrests in their fight for their jobs. There have been occasions (in Argentina, for example) when workers took over a bankrupt factory and ran it as a business, in order to keep working.

In England, France, Germany, South Korea, Chile, Peru and other countries. there have been major strikes to protest government reforms that would curtail employment. One of the major struggles of unions abroad is to prevent the privatization of state-owned industry, which is usually followed by deep cuts in employment.

How Did Labor Surrender Its Birthright to Employers?

Today, as always, the nation’s workers provide the goods and services that keep the economy going and sustain the living standards of the American people. Yet the fact is that workers have less economic power and their unions are weaker than they used to be, while employers have usurped the power to dominate them, even to the point of not allowing them to join unions in their own defense.

What was the dynamic that made workers so subservient to a rising employer class? Can labor ever regain the power it once had? It’s something for labor leaders and union members to think about, as they sweat out another year before the 2008 elections.

Our weekly column, “The World of Labor,” reports the struggles and victories of unions in countries around the globe. Check our web site: www.LaborEducator.org.