OUT OF SIGHT

In some sense, the history of America is a history of battles between labor and management (where "management" encompasses both commercial and political authority.) The Boston Tea Party; the Whiskey Rebellion; and barreling on into the twentieth century with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; the Railway Shipmans' Strike; Teapot Dome; the OCAW strike (1973); Abscam; the Savings & Loan crisis; Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme; Enron, Worldcom & Global Crossing; Refco; the Great Recession of 2008 . . .

A litany of incidents too numerous to recount1 adds up to this: management, with the too-frequent complicity of political leadership, will cut any corners it can, deny dignity to its workers, ignore degradation of local environments, and exploit any loophole available in its quest for ever-greater profits.

This is not primarily an American problem; with the advent of corporate-favorable globalization, it has expanded worldwide.

Loomis gives us an overview of America's labor history from the late eighteenth century through the present, filled with specific examples of corporate short-sightedness and misbehavior. It is fair to say he strongly detests this behavior; his attitude comes through clearly. But who among us would not detest such behavior as locking the doors of a firetrap factory so the workers can be inspected for fabric, or ignoring building codes to overload a building with extra floors?2

There is a pattern to all this, and it cannot be ignored. Corporate management will prevent their laborers from gaining power whenever they can. If the laborers do gain power, as by forming a labor union, management will often seek to break that union by any means necessary, and will generally succeed — often with the compliance of politicians. In the twentieth century, when new forms of transportation provided greater physical mobility, a common tactic was to close an operation in a state where labor rules were strong and reopen in where the rules were lax. The best-known example is the migration of the textile industry from New England to the southeast.

With the advent of globalization, capital mobility gave management another option: outsourcing. Should a troublesome law such as the federal minimum wage be enacted in America, factories could simply be moved overseas, to destinations like Bangladesh or Vietnam where pay rates were a relative pittance and protections for workers and the environment were next to nonexistent. This has been the story of the twenty-first century: a litany of brutally long work hours, unsafe working conditions, heedless pollution of low-income communities — and American corporations who look the other way.

Then, with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, came the time of the true beginning of globalization. Tariffs on most products passing between Canada, Mexico, and the United States were eliminated. With its lack of enforceable standards on labor rights and environmental protections, NAFTA also eliminated any barriers to outsourcing jobs from America and Canada to Mexico's lower-overhead region. As Loomis notes:

The toll among coal miners, textile workers, and those who handled hazardous chemicals such as lead, phosphorus, radium, and tetraethyl lead continued into the twenty-first century. 2007 gave us the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse, in which six miners and three rescuers died. In April 2010, the Macando Well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven oil workers and severely harming local fisheries. Automation whittled away coal-mining employment; despite this, cases of black lung increased. Meanwhile, hydraulic fracking freed immense amounts of natural gas which replaced many coal-fired power plants.

In 1971, Lewis Powell issued a memo urging the business community to fight the regulations he claimed burdened it excessively. Richard Nixon reluctantly created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and progress was made when President Carter gave it an energetic director. But Ronald Reagan chose construction contractor Thorne Auchter as director. OSHA's budget was gutted in 1982, and its regulations were weakened. In 1980 it had 2,950 inspectors; by 2006 that number had shrunk to 2,092, while the size of the workforce had nearly doubled.

American companies keep on hiring undocumented workers and paying them below minimum wage. Overseas, sweatshops proliferate; workers often have to endure unsafe environments. American companies like Nike, which contract for the sweatshops' products, often choose to look the other way. A notable exception was the University of Wisconsin, which in 2013 sued Adidas over $1.8 million in severance pay for workers in an Indonesian factory. This was one of the few bright spots in a generally dismal picture: a permissive culture in which worker abuse, unsafe conditions, and rampant pollution are common and hard to punish.

The upshot is worldwide employee mistreatment and needless deaths of workers, contamination and waste of food, pollution of workplaces and local communities, ecosystem degradation, and — not to be forgotten — accelerating emissions of greenhouse gases. All of this is fostered by trade agreements that take no serious account of problems other than the ones affecting the management and shareholders. Loomis documents this thoroughly, with a good index and notes. His work has some defects: on page 155, he's too dismissive of renewable and nuclear energy, and I suspect some incidents might not have unfolded exactly as he describes them. But the overall picture is indisputable: the systems of globalization were designed by the wealthy for the wealthy. With a series of recommendations on pages 193-196, Loomis reminds us that we have ways to change this.

The book has very few grammatical errors. But its low page count and slightly smaller page size result in text in a smaller font that is more densely packed than usual, making it noticeably harder to read. Despite that, it is well worth the effort. I mark it down one notch because of its treatment of renewable energy. Nevertheless, I consider it a must-read and a keeper.

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This page was last modified on 16 August 2021.