The Secret War Against American Workers

Juanita Borden, 39 and jobless, patiently waits as her resume
methodically works its way, line by line, through a fax machine at a
state-run job center in downtown Philadelphia. Lying open before her on
a round conference table is a neatly organized folder. "This is my
resume and everywhere I've been faxing to. This is how I keep track of
what day I've sent them on, so I can call and check back," she says,
leafing through pages of fax cover sheets. "I usually give five
business days before I inquire whether or not they've received it and
whether or not they're interested."

Juanita was fired last October, when her employer found out that her
driver's license -- a job requirement -- had expired. "It was only a
matter of twenty-six dollars. I was under the impression that it
expired in November of '08, but it was actually November of '07, and
because I hadn't been driving I wasn't aware of it." The one occasion
on which she was required to drive, though, she couldn't, and that was
all her employer needed to fire her for failing to fulfill her
employment responsibilities. She has since renewed her license and says
with an air of futility, "I'd like to have my job back if they would
give it to me."

She hasn't been asked back and, despite her persistent efforts, she
hasn't received a single call from a prospective employer either. "The
good thing," she says, remaining remarkably buoyant despite her
misfortune, "is that usually when I interview I get the job. So... I'm
hoping for an interview soon." Until then, her carefully managed folder
serves as a small measure of control over an otherwise steady drift
into poverty and homelessness.

Juanita isn't the only one at this job center on the precipice of
acute need. And she isn't alone in relating a story about being fired
for what would seem to many a frivolous reason. Chris Topher, 25 and
making his first visit here, was axed in March of last year. The
telecommunications company he had been working for sent him packing
when, as he tells it, he installed cable equipment a customer hadn't
ordered. It didn't matter that the mistake was on the work order Chris
was given. "It was the best job I had since I graduated high school and
I've had a few: Turnpike Commission, working in a Senator's office.
I've had some nice jobs, but that one, I enjoyed it the most."

And there was good reason to enjoy it. Chris pulled down
$1,200-1,300 every two weeks in addition to receiving a full benefits
package. He thought of contesting his termination, but at the time it
looked like a long, uphill battle that he wasn't eager to take on. It's
a fight that, in hindsight, he thinks he could have won and that his
employer probably knew he would win as well. "And that's why I believe
I was approved by my employer for unemployment," he says.

Under unemployment eligibility requirements, an employer must
certify whether an employee committed a "fault" on the job and was
therefore terminated. If an employer indicates that no fault was
committed and the employee meets several other requirements, including
being physically able to work, states grant an unemployment claim. In
other words, Chris's former employer granted him a small concession,
while otherwise turning his life upside down amid the worst job market
since 1983.

"Unemployment is the pits pretty much," says Chris, whose
unemployment compensation is significantly less than half what he made
as a cable installer. Still, he's better off than Juanita, who has
applied for unemployment twice and been denied both times. She is now
appealing, but her employer is conceding nothing. In a recent
arbitration hearing, Juanita says, her former supervisor claimed that,
if she had only told them about her expired license, they would have
allowed her renewal time. If only.

Now, Juanita lives with her brother and his wife, but they, too,
have financial problems. "My brother is working part time and it's
driving him crazy, because it's causing money problems between him and
his wife," she explains. "And with me being there," she hesitates,
"...it's a little constrained."

Ratcheting Up the Fear

The mainstream media has generally sketched a picture of a labor
market in which, under the pressure of an economic meltdown, workers
succumb to two types of downsizing. In one, a fierce recession forces
businesses, desperate to cut costs in terrible times, to lay off
workers. They, in turn, face grim prospects for gainful employment
elsewhere. In a kinder, gentler version of the same, employers,
desperate to cut costs in terrible times, offer -- or sometimes force
workers to take -- "furloughs," salary cuts, union give-backs, four-day
work weeks, or un-paid holidays rather than axing large numbers of
them.

In this case, tough as it may be, workers benefit, retaining at
least some of their income, while businesses wait out the recession. In
both cases, businesses are largely depicted as unenthusiastic
dispensers of pink-slips. Managers and bosses are just facing up to an
unpalatable reality and unavoidable pressures imposed on them by the
worst economic moment in recent memory.

A visit to a job center is hardly a scientific survey. The
experiences of Juanita and Chris, along with those of other unemployed
people I spent time with while in Philadelphia, may be purely anecdotal
evidence. But they do raise questions about a subject of no small
importance, and it's not one you're likely to read about in your daily
paper -- not yet anyway. If a deepening recession weighs down and
threatens businesses, some of those businesses are undoubtedly also
making convenient use of the times to do things they might have wanted
to do, but were unable to do in better conditions.

In some cases, under the guise of "recession" pressure, they may be
waging a secret war against their own workers, using even the most
innocuous transgressions of work-place rules as the trigger for firings
-- and so, of course, putting the fear of god into those who remain. In
this way, company payrolls are not only being reduced by mass layoffs,
but workers are being squeezed for ever greater productivity in return
for lower wages, worse hours, and less benefits. The weapon of choice
is the specter of unemployment, a kind of death by a thousand (or a
million) cuts.

Companies stand to gain a lot these days from such small-scale but
decisive actions. After all, they reap a double benefit. Not only do
they pare down the size of their payroll, often without needing -- as
in Juanita's case -- to consent to unemployment compensation, but they
also contribute to a climate of intensifying fear. Workers who remain
on the job are now not only on edge about lay-offs or scaled-back
hours, but also know that a late return from a bathroom or lunch break
might mean being shown the door, becoming another member of the legions
of unemployed -- now at 12.5 million and rising fast.

This dynamic is, of course, hardly new. Countless critics of working
conditions have written about it since the dawn of the industrial age.
But at the moment, even as the latest unemployment figures make
screaming headlines, this is a subject that seldom comes up. Consider,
though, that in December, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer,
settled 63 outstanding class-action lawsuits
that alleged massive wage and hours violations. Fearing termination,
Wal-Mart workers, according to their testimony in the lawsuits, labored
through lunch breaks and past their scheduled hours for just above
minimum wage pay, with little hope of getting enough hours to qualify
for the company's health benefits.

As a condition of the settlement, Wal-Mart will pay out as much as
$640 million to those workers. If corporations were able to exert such
coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5%, what can they
do in a job market in which 14.8% of the population can't find adequate work?

In fact, the world's largest retailer is one of the few American
corporations doing well in dark times. While retail sales slid almost
everywhere, the company's same-store sales
went up 5.1% in February (when compared with February 2008 sales). Yet,
in that same month, it announced a move to "realign its corporate
structure and reduce costs." It cut 700 to 800 jobs at its Wal-Mart and
Sam's Club home offices, in effect acting no differently than any of
the companies being battered by the deepening recession.

Free-Firing Zone

Rodney Green, a soft-spoken 52-year-old, comes to the job center three
times a week to search on-line job listings. He describes his
decades-long drift from full-time employee with benefits to
marginalized temp-worker with no benefits and, finally, to the category
of unemployed for an extended period.

From the late 1970s until the early 1990s, he worked for Bell
Telecommunications, where he earned a good salary and full benefits.
Since Bell laid him off, he's worked periodically as a forklift
operator for various companies, getting temporary placements through an
employment agency. Most recently, he earned $12 an hour working for a
deli meat and artisanal cheese producer. No benefits were provided. A
year's work, he explained, would mean a week's vacation, "but they
don't keep you that long. They lay you off or rotate you into another
job before then."

Today, as he's discovered, even such temp jobs are becoming scarce.
"In the eighties, it wasn't as bad as it is now," he comments from the
unemployment heartland of what, in 2009, is a deeply de-industrialized
Philadelphia. "The city had jobs, but then the jobs moved to the
suburbs. Now they're moving overseas. Back then, say, you applied for a
job, maybe fifty others applied, too. Today, that same job, you're
going to have hundreds -- I mean, a thousand for that one job. It's
hard. It's depressing."

For the past year and a half, Rodney has been collecting
unemployment periodically, and in that time, he hasn't landed a single
interview. Recently, because the Bush administration finally acquiesced
to grassroots and Congressional pressure to lengthen unemployment
benefits, he received a thirteen-week extension, providing him a little
cushion (unlike equally interview-less Juanita). "That helped me a lot.
Times are hard right now. I hear there are over four million people
collecting unemployment. That's kind of high."

If Juanita and Chris are casualties of the intensified war of
attrition businesses are quietly waging on workers, Rodney represents a
deeper unraveling of jobs and job security, thanks to a globalized
economy in which the hard-pressed workers in this country are pitted
against cheaper labor pools in Latin America, South Asia, China, and
even the American South. In such a job environment, what is one to do?

Someone I interviewed prior to my job center visit described her
reaction when she heard that her company had recently closed a plant in
the Midwest: "The first thing I thought, and I felt bad for thinking
it," she recalled, somewhat sheepishly, "was that means more work for
us -- at least for the time being."

Her comment speaks volumes, as does her request not to be
identified. Who needs union busters, patrolling shop-stewards, or
legions of high-paid lawyers fighting wage and hours claims when a
worker is so anxious about job security that she responds positively to
the laying off of those she imagines as potential competitors? When
employees police their own behavior for fear of the axe -- monitoring
their time checking email or using the bathroom -- bad times distinctly
have an upside for management.

In this job environment, it's easy to turn not just on others, but
on yourself. Reflecting on what she will do without a job and
unemployment benefits, Juanita wonders if the problem isn't the
economy, but the choices she made in life. "I left home when I was
sixteen and lived in my own places, had my children, and got married,"
she says nervously, continually folding and refolding a local
newspaper. "I should have gone to school and did a lot more things to
make myself more marketable earlier in life. Now I'm left having to
start over again."

A look at corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act
(EFCA), whose passage in Congress is a central demand of organized
labor, offers a glimpse of how persistently companies seek to
disadvantage their workers. EFCA would allow workers to form a union
when a majority of them sign union cards in a given workplace. "Card
check," as it is frequently called, enables them to organize unions
without the need for an election. In a November column surveying the business elite's response to the Act, Wall Street Journal
op-ed columnist Thomas Frank wrote: "Card check is about power.
Management has it, workers don't, and business doesn't want that to
change."

In Frank's estimation, the current struggle over EFCA is the latest
incarnation of a constantly evolving struggle between workers and
employers. For the under- or unemployed crowding into this center in
Philadelphia, the current recession isn't a time-out from the normal
struggle, it's more like a new open season for corporate attacks on
them.

Right now, for Juanita, Chris, and others at this center, there are
actually two wars going on, and only one of them seems to have caught
the attention of labor and business reporters. The headlines about the
first read: Desperate Companies Forced to Cut Jobs. But many here seem
to be experiencing a second war in which businesses are using bad times
to act in ways they couldn't in the best of times.

Shouldn't reporters be heading out in search of this one-sided, covert
struggle? Isn't it time for the second business war of our moment to
make a few headlines of its own?