[Marxism] Europe's cheap US labor

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Europe's Cheap U.S. Labor

By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post, Wednesday, November 26, 2003; Page A25

It's time again to overeat and commemorate the Pilgrims coming to these
shores to build their democratic theocracy and share some grub with the
natives. The natives, we all know, didn't make out so well as the European
conquest progressed, but that, at least, was then.

Or was it? In fact, right now, in the opening years of the 21st century,
Europeans are still coming here to exploit the American workforce.

The irony is that these European-based global enterprises are the kind of
model corporate citizen over there that has all but vanished over here. In
Europe, they pay their workers decently, tend to health and safety concerns
and actually encourage their employees to unionize.

When they cross the Atlantic, however, they find themselves in a brave new
world where wages have eroded (a new Russell Sage Foundation study
concludes that 24 percent of U.S. workers make less than $8.70 an hour) and
employees' rights to unionize have been effectively abolished. And rather
than bring their Euro standards with them, the companies go native.

Consider the H&M clothing chain, a Swedish-based firm with more than 800
outlets in Europe. Over the past three years, H&M has opened about 70
stores in the Northeast, with outlets cropping up here in Washington over
the past several months. A highly profitable purveyor of "cheap chic"
fashions, H&M plans to open 12 to 15 stores a year in the United States.

Which would be a boon to U.S. workers if the chain adhered to its own code
of conduct, which proclaims: "We have to make sure that nobody whose work
is contributing to our success is deprived of his or her human rights, or
suffers mental or bodily harm."

That comes as news, however, to Ana Maria Araujo, a Peruvian immigrant and
mother of three who until Nov. 6 worked at H&M's U.S. distribution center
in Secaucus, N.J. In September of last year, a box toppled off a dolly in
the plant and knocked her unconscious. Then, this February, she ruptured a
tendon in her right shoulder from hoisting too heavy a load. She was on
disability for a month, then returned to work under orders from her doctor
not to lift boxes or packages over a certain weight.

Which brings us to Nov. 6, when Araujo and a number of fellow workers with
similar medical restrictions were called into their manager's office and
given a choice: Either work without the restrictions or find work
elsewhere. Fourteen workers were discharged, eight of whom had such
restrictions, says Steve Weingarten of UNITE, the apparel union that is
trying to organize H&M in the States.

As Araujo tells the tale, H&M is the kind of employer that adds insult to
injury. When her daughter was facing surgery in Peru last year, Araujo
asked the company for a 10-day leave. "My manager told me that if I wanted
to go, the only way to do it was to resign," says Araujo.

If H&M treated its workers in Sweden this way, it would be banished to the
company of moose. In the United States, though, in the age of Wal-Mart,
conduct such as H&M's is increasingly the norm, especially with an
immigrant work force. The company is resisting workers' attempts to
unionize; it has thrown organizers out of its stores and called the cops
when UNITE began organizing outside its Secaucus plant this July, only to
have the cops tell the company that the union wasn't breaking any laws.
(Calls to H&M's management were not returned.)

Meanwhile, another pillar of the Euro-corporate community, the Danish
security company Group 4 Falck, is taking a similar tack with the thousands
of security guards it employs here since it purchased Wackenhut Corp. in
May 2002. In Denmark, Group 4 Falck's security guards receive 111 hours of
training and make between $16 and $19 an hour. In the United States its
guards receive as little as one hour's training, and pull down an hourly
wage of about $8. In suburban Chicago, where the Service Employees
International Union recently won family health insurance for guards at 30
companies, Group 4 Falck refused to sign the contract and informed its
employees that if they wanted to maintain their company health insurance
they'd have to leave the union.

So it's come to this: When European employers look to the United States,
they see roughly the same thing that U.S. employers see when they look to
China: millions of low-wage workers who have all but lost the right to
organize and a government intent on keeping things just the way they are.

The erosion of worker power and the growth of employer supremacy here have
transformed the bottom half of the U.S. workforce into a vast exploitable
mass worthy of a colonial backwater.

Something to chew on as we give thanks for the marvel that once was America.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org