|
By Ed Sunday-Winters
What does it mean that the best known, most visible labor unions in our country are those associated with professional sports? Kenny Rogers, pitcher for the Texas Rangers baseball team, recently enlisted the aid of his union to cut short a twenty-game suspension for hitting a cameraman. It worked. He only served a twelve-game suspension. One can only imagine how the National Football League Players’ Association will intervene on Terrell Owen’s behalf should the Philadelphia Eagles get tired of his immature and unprofessional behavior. In reality, those two players get away with such outlandish ways, not so much because of the strength of their unions, but because of their talent. The message that is reinforced time and time again is that if you can strike people out or catch touchdown passes, you can behave any way you want to. The moral temperament of our time begins with the assertion that what really matters is not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose. That is true in boardrooms as well as ballparks.
So why is it that the best known labor unions in the country represent such a small percentage of the workers in this country? Part of the answer might be that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, has been highly effective when it comes to preventing its workers from organizing unions.
Attempts to organize have been met by effective resistance. In some cases, elections were delayed so long that most of the workers who originally called for the election were no longer on the payroll. When efforts have been successful, Wal-Mart has responded by eliminating positions. Ultimately, Wal-Mart can simply close any store that votes to organize. That sends a pretty clear message to other workers at other stores. Organize and you will lose your job.
Sadly, if any group of workers ever needed the power of collective bargaining, Wal-Mart’s 1.6 million employees certainly do. Consider the novel way Wal-Mart addresses the issue of employee health benefits. In Alabama, no other company has more children of employees on State Medicaid rolls than Wal-Mart. In Georgia, 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in that state’s healthcare program — about one child for every four Wal-Mart employees in the State. In 2004, a North Carolina hospital found that of 1900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees, 31 percent were on Medicaid and 16 percent had no health insurance at all. In California, Wal-Mart employees cost the state $86 million annually. $32 Million of that goes toward healthcare. 25 percent of Wal-Mart’s 37,000 employees in the State of Tennessee are enrolled in Tenncare. It is easy to see how Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer with these kinds of government subsidies.
Increasingly, corporations rarely act in ways that benefit anyone other than their stockholders, their bottom line, and their pocketbooks. Again, we live in a culture where it is not how you play the game that matters, but whether you win or lose. It is a culture that allows some grown men to act like children while other grown men have to seek charity to get healthcare for their children. Would that the Prophet Isaiah could be heard anew:
“They shall not build and another inhabit;
They shall not plant and another eat;
For like the days of a tree shall the
days of my people be,
And my chosen shall long enjoy the work
of their hands.
They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
For they shall be offspring blessed by
the Lord—and their descendant
as well.” Isaiah 65:22-23
Joy and peace,
Ed
|
