Organize! Many Employers Are Just Using the Recession to Stick it to Workers

Whatever the truth is about where this economy is heading, one
thing is clear: employers are taking every opportunity to slash employment
and, if they are unionized, to hammer unions for pay cuts, even when there
is no justification for these actions.

Take Safeway Inc., a large national supermarket chain. The
company, which had $44 billion in sales in 2007, and which, based upon third
quarter figures for 2008 was well on the way to show record sales for 2008,
appears to be using the economic downturn as a justification for laying off
employees and making remaining employees work harder.

I can only give anecdotal information on this, but the
Genuardi's Family Market store (a Safeway subsidiary) where I live, in Upper
Dublin, PA, an upper middle-class suburb north of Philadelphia, according to
its employees, has been laying off cashiers, and slashing its night work
force; the people who restock the shelves and unload the delivery trucks when
the store is closed. The management is doing this not because sales have
slumped. They haven't. People may not be buying new cars, but they are still
buying food, and in fact, if they are cutting back on eating out, as
restaurant chains are reporting, they are probably actually buying more
groceries, not less. Management is making these cuts simply because they can
get away with it.

The layoffs, in the face of continued heavy business, means that
cashiers are working harder. It means that the night staff, cut by half, is
working twice as hard. But with jobs getting scarce, what is their option?
If they don1t like the speed-up, where are they going to go in the current
environment? Meanwhile, if service gets worse, customers will accept the
decline because they'll blame it on the economy, not noticing that there is
really no justification for employee cutbacks at the supermarket.

Temple University, which is a major public higher education institution in
Philadelphia, is reportedly telling all departments to make substantial cuts
in their budgets . This will inevitably lead to layoffs of faculty and
support staff critical to the education mission. And yet, what is the
justification for such draconian measures? The governor initially announced
plans to cut the state's contribution to the university's annual budget for
next year by a few million dollars, but the new Economic Recovery Act
stimulus package includes huge grants to the states, including Pennsylvania,
more than compensating for those cuts. Furthermore, state-funded
universities across the country, including Temple, are reporting increased
applications and enrollments, as students whose parents cannot afford to
send them to private colleges, send them instead to public institutions, and
as workers who lose their jobs decide that the economic downturn is a good
time to go to college and get an education. That means more tuition revenues
coming in. Moreover, student aid, including Pell Grants for lower-income
students, have been substantially increased in the stimulus package, meaning
more money for public colleges. Money might be marginally tighter at places
like Temple (while, as with most public institutions, the university's
endowment is not a significant contributor to the operating budget, small as
it is it is certainly significantly reduced because of the market collapse),
but it's certainly not down by enough to put universities in crisis. It may
not even be down at all.

It might be understandable that state and local governments
would be considering layoffs, or reduced pay and hours for public employees,
given the slump in tax revenues from property taxes, sales taxes and income
taxes. It is certainly necessary for the auto industry, which has seen sales
plummet, to lay off workers. Luxury stores like Circuit City are going bust.
But not all employers are hurting alike. Health care industries are still
booming. Public colleges are doing fine. Supermarkets are doing well.
Energy companies are okay.

Criticism of the nationwide wave of layoffs by companies and
employers that really don't need to beggar their workers or push them out
onto the street came from an unusual quarter recently, when Steve Korman,
chief executive of a privately held Philadelphia-area company called Korman
Communities, blasted corporate executives for laying off workers when they don't really need to. Korman had gotten upset when he saw Pfizer Inc.'s CEO
Jeff Kinder say, on a television business program, that he planned to lay
off 8000 workers in anticipation of a merger with Wyeth, another drug
company. The layoffs were not being made because Pfizer was losing money or
in trouble financially, but rather to improve profits. Korman, who owns
stock in Pfizer, got angry and spent $16,000 to run ads in the Philadelphia
Inquirer and the New York Times, saying:

"I have listened to the executives of many companies say that they are
eliminating thousands of jobs to 'improve the bottom line,' I own stock in
many of these companies and would prefer that the company make a smaller
profit and [that] the stock fall, in the short term, rather than affect the
lives of our neighbors and their families as jobs are lost.

"Please join me in reminding all CEOs that we are not just dealing with
numbers and profit, but with real people and real families who need to keep
their jobs."

Korman sent individual letters saying much the same thing to 16
companies in which he is an investor, including Federal Express, Google,
Cisco Systems, Caterpillar, General Electric, ExxonMobil, Kraft, Nokia,
Intel, Johnson&Johnson, Apple, EMC, Chevron, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Oracle and
Dow.

If this phenomenon is bad enough that it has upset a prominent
capitalist like Korman, it is clearly a major problem.

The irony is that as all these companies slash their workforces,
and force remaining workers to work harder, and as public institutions like
Temple University and other colleges cut their faculties and increase class
sizes for remaining teaching staff, they are undermining any stimulus that
taxpayers are subsidizing in the massive stimulus bill, and thus making the
recession worse, not to mention wasting the huge deficit-spending measure
itself.

Nobody would argue with a company's laying off of workers when
sales collapse and there is no money coming in, but in many cases this is
not what has been happening.

One reason there is a tidal wave of layoffs even at viable
businesses and institutions across the country is simply the lack of or
weakness of labor unions. With workers at most employers unorganized (unions
represent only some 8 percent of private employees), it is easy for managers
to engender an attitude of fear and passivity among employees, which makes
it easier to pick them off, and to make those on the job work ever harder.
Furthermore, without labor contracts, there is little workers can do to
resist speedups that can seriously threaten their health, safety and
well-being.

Only a new militancy and sense of solidarity among American
workers, and a revitalization of the nearly moribund labor movement, can
rescue this situation, which will only get worse as the economy continues to
sink.