One of the most important pseudo-conflicts in Western society is that between employer and employees (or "management" and "workers"). It's not a real line of division and never has been, for one needs the other just as much as the other needs the one. Yet for many decades collectivists of all stripes have striven, with a deplorable degree of success, to foment strife between the two sides. To this point, it's been the most profitable of all their campaigns.
Today we have a glaring example before us:
Speaking at a panel at the Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Conference in Washington this week, Kendell Fells a national coordinator for Service Employees International Union, said an increased minimum wage is not the ultimate goal of his group.Fells, who also serves as president of Fast Food Forward – a group that advocates for an increased minimum wage for fast food employees across the country and including in Chicago – said his movement is more about unionizing employees in the fast food sector than it is about them making more money.
“Just to be clear, this is not a minimum wage campaign, these fast food workers are not trying to raise minimum wage,” Fells said. “They want to sit down with the $200 billion fast food industry and get the money out of their pockets and negotiate a union contract with them.”
That's an unusually candid set of admissions from a union goon. Normally they present themselves as first and foremost coming to the aid of the downtrodden and shamefully exploited worker. But Fells has openly stated that his primary aim is the unionization of the many thousands of persons employed by fast-food restaurants...not that anyone with three functioning brain cells would suspect otherwise.
With the single exception of government employees, every occupation that has suffered unionization has declined sharply as a result. The trend is impossible to hide; a reasonably alert worker, regardless of his specific occupation, cannot fail to be aware of it. As workers have fled the unionized industries, they have generally bettered their situations. The principal negative impact has been to the power, pelf, and prestige of the union barons.
Why would we expect union goons to attend to others' interests before their own? They never did so in the past. They seek only to improve their own standing, both materially and as power brokers.
Power of the sort unionists seek requires conflict: something the Left has always worked assiduously to provoke.
The campaign to unionize workers involuntarily is merely one aspect of the "progressive" campaign to foment increasing division and strife in American society. Divide et impera is the guiding principle. "If you don't have an opposition, you don't have an issue" is the Gospel According To Alinsky. The separation of Americans from one another into mutually hostile camps, against the far more natural inclination to see others' desires as reflections of one's own, is central to their aim.
Needless to say, there's a lot of it going on. Racial divisions. Ethnic divisions. Religious divisions. Divisions between men and women, between young and old, between better-off and worse-off.
Much of this is directed at concealing a real division: that between those who wield the powers of the Omnipotent State and those who suffer under its lash.
Kendall Fells speaks of a union contract with "the $200 billion fast food industry" as if that were a real corporate entity. But we who use words according to their exact meanings speak of an "industry" only in a generic sense. McDonald's is a real corporate entity, as is Burger King; the two, major members of "the fast food industry," have no corporate connection and no common interests. Coalescing them rhetorically does nothing to change that.
But the collectivization of fast food workers is equally a travesty. Those folks have no common interests either! Distributed as they are across a wide variety of locales, ages, and life circumstances, they cannot reasonably be said to share the same priorities. Some have just taken their first step onto the ladder of capitalism; others are earning or supplementing their family incomes; still others are merely filling their time with something profitable and (hopefully) agreeable. Compelling them into a collective bargaining contract must inevitably do violence to the interests of some of them at all times.
Fells hardly paused over those minor obstacles. Collectivists are like that. Truth, justice, accuracy of statement...all must give way to the Left's collectivizing juggernaut.
You'd think American society already endures enough fault lines. You'd think men of good will would labor to close them, or bridge them over, rather than contriving new ones and widening those that exist. You'd be right. There are no men of good will among the union goons. There are vanishingly few elsewhere on the Left.
Expect the campaign to divide us from one another to continue and intensify, regardless of overt political developments. Division and the consequent strife are the essential nutrients of the power-brokers. Without them, they could achieve nothing for the simplest of reasons: No one would listen to them.
Verbum sat sapienti.
"pelf"?
ReplyDeleteThat is the FIRST time I ever read that word.
BTW, I did look it up.
"Divide and conquer" - originally, divide and rule, I believe - is the primary game plan of those who pull the strings of the Left.
ReplyDeleteWhile unions can indeed warp the thinking of the membership, it has been my experience that many union members aren't the goons that are prevalent amongst union management, stewards, etc. (Of course the stewards and management _do_ tend to surround themselves with thugs.)
I worked communications for the California Highway Patrol from 1984 through 1995. We were required, as a condition of hire, to belong to the union (CAUSE). Dues were mandatory. That was bad enough, but it was actually worse. One of the inescapable bylaws of the union was that a majority vote of the Board took precedence over a majority vote of the membership.
Yes, you read that right. The Board could - and did - overrule even a _unanimous_ vote of the membership. Total control.
The only satisfaction I had was this: a decision by SCOTUS (I don't know if it is still valid) ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses - because their religion did not allow providing money to political entities or processes - could have their dues sent to a charity, rather than to the union.
When I discovered this, I immediately became a JW, and had CHP send the dues deducted from my paychecks to a local institution for retarded children and adults. (I tried to get others to adopt that tactic as well, although without much success.) Continued that way until I left CHP in '95.