Since retiring from his position as CEO of Home Depot, Bernard Marcus has become one of this country’s most vocal opponents of organized labor, criticizing unions in the media and on Capitol Hill. That is a long way from Marcus’s beginnings in a Newark, N.J., tenement some 80 years ago.
Marcus’s parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and, as was the case in many Jewish families back then, his father joined a union. Marcus credits the union with helping his carpenter father stand up for his rights with a company that was not all that interested in the welfare of its employees.
“He wasn’t being represented well by the company he worked for. The union got him benefits and helped him move ahead,” Marcus told the Forward.
“But,” Marcus said, in his fast-paced, no-nonsense way of talking about the issue, “times change, and I think that employers today are much more enlightened. They understand that if their associates aren’t happy, they don’t produce. There was a time for unions, and there is a time not for unions.”
The changing times are evident in the debate about a current piece of legislation that could be the biggest change to labor law since the days when Marcus’s father was working as a carpenter. The Employee Free Choice Act, which was introduced in both the House and the Senate in March, would change labor law from the 1930s in order to make it easier for unions to organize workers.
Today, as in the ’30s, there are a number of influential Jewish union leaders supporting the legislation. But unlike in the ’30s, a few Jewish voices have surfaced as among the most influential opponents of the legislation. Marcus is frequently mentioned among the leading voices opposing the free choice act. In a famous phone call discussing the legislation with other business executives, he said, “This is how a civilization disappears.” That echoed the words of another child of poor Jewish immigrants, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and Jewish philanthropist who told The Wall Street Journal that EFCA is “one of the two fundamental threats to society,” along with Islamism.
Marcus also has worked closely with the lobbyist leading the anti-EFCA charge, Rick Berman, who has waded into Jewish communal waters to make his argument that the current unions have no connection with the old ones to which Berman’s father belonged.
Many on both sides of the current legislation say that a traditional sympathy for labor that existed in the Jewish community has given way to antipathy in a number of very prominent quarters, with sometimes complicated consequences. Amy Dean, who is active in both the labor world and the Jewish community, says she often encounters people “who have this very warm spot for the labor movement, but it’s sort of romantic and historical. They have these warm feelings for the role of the garment unions, but they think it’s not a modern movement that they want to embrace. We have a huge dissonance within the Jewish community about the labor movement.”
For Berman, this dissonance has appeared in his own family: His son David Berman, a founder of the rock bands Pavement and the Silver Jews, has vociferously attacked his father’s stance on labor unions.
“Jews should always identify with the disadvantaged,” the younger Berman wrote to the Forward. “You cannot ‘graduate’ to a life of self-interest and exploitation.”
Berman, Marcus and Adelson appear to have played a role in halting EFCA’s progress through Congress. While passage looked like a sure thing earlier this year, when Barack Obama took office, the bill’s prospects have dimmed as a number of key senators have announced their opposition to it. It is perhaps fitting that the senator whose opposition represented a turning point was Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter, the child of Jewish immigrant parents. People such as Specter and Marcus do not see the issue of EFCA in Jewish terms, but they acknowledge that they are frequently contending with history when they take up the current legislation or any other labor issues.
“I would say that the Jewish community has always been favorably disposed to labor,” Specter told the Forward in an interview. “The Jewish community is a community of immigrants who struggled. My father, one of his favorite sayings in Yiddish was, ‘It’s tough to make a living.’”
“There was that empathy and sympathy built in,” Specter added.
The debate over EFCA is not, in a strict sense, about whether unions are good or bad. The main point of contention with EFCA is how it would change the process through which employees form unions.
Currently, in order to form a union, employees have to first sign cards declaring their interest in joining. Once more than 30% of employees have done this, a company can require a secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. Unions have long argued that a change is needed because in current practice, the time between the card check and the secret-ballot election gives business owners an opportunity to pressure employees to vote against the union. Like many professors of labor history, Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of California, Santa Barbara, argued that the current setup is an “employer-controlled election. The analogy is elections held in Stalinist Eastern Europe. If you apply the U.S. State Department’s criteria for free and fair elections, the NLRB elections would fail.”
If EFCA is passed, employees will be able to form a union immediately after 50% of the members of a workplace sign a card; no election needed. The anti-EFCA crowd, including Marcus and Berman, has said that the legislation would deny employees the right to hear the company’s position, and would encourage unions to intimidate employees into signing union cards.
“I don’t think this is a management vs. labor fight,” Berman told the Forward. “When you tell someone you can’t have the other side of the argument presented to you — when you cut off the flow of information — something is wrong.”
It has been EFCA’s promise to end the secret ballot vote that has provoked the most opposition to the bill. Specter, who votes with labor about two-thirds of the time, wrote an article last year drawing attention to the problems with intimidation from both sides during union elections. But in March he announced that the secret-ballot issue made it impossible for him to support EFCA. He was the first in a wave of moderate senators who turned away from the bill.
The argument in favor of maintaining the secret ballot has drawn support from other traditional union supporters, including former senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee. But labor activists have pointed out that the campaigns against EFCA have been largely led by people long opposed to unions. The Center for Union Facts, which Berman set up with corporate funding, provides a more general meeting point for foes of unions — its Web site details instances of corruption and intimidation by union leaders. In the Washington Jewish Week, the capital’s local Jewish paper, Berman argued that the Jewish community puts a misplaced emphasis on labor history rather than on the unions of today.
“To the degree the unions paint their mission as a social cause on behalf of the people who have less — and the underdog — it’s easy to identify with,” Berman told the Forward. “There is a tradition in the Jewish community of helping those people. But I’m not sure the follow-through is there from the union side.”
The struggle over the proper Jewish way to regulate relations between employees and employers is certainly not new. The pages of the Talmud contain many meditations on negotiations between Jewish bosses and their employees. During the heyday of Jewish unions in the 1930s, many owners of the garment companies and sweatshops in which Jews worked were themselves Jewish. One of the first Yiddish talking films, “Uncle Moses,” tells the story of immigrant workers who are pushing their Jewish boss — Uncle Moses — to allow them to form a union. Tony Michels, a historian of labor and Jewish community, said that historically within the Jewish community, the voices of the owners tended to get drowned out by those of the workers.
“There are plenty of anti-union Jewish bosses, but the overwhelming tilt was a pro-labor one,” Michels said. “By the ’30s and ’40s, liberalism became a communal religion among Jews.”
This meant that rabbis would often mediate labor disputes between Jewish workers and bosses, and many of the most prominent Jewish business owners at the time — names like Macy and Gimbels — worked closely with unions. Back in 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, the influential, and heavily Jewish, garment unions in New York City rallied working men and women to provide crucial popular support for the legislation. Historians note that Jews had hardly any presence in groups that opposed the legislation; they were often barred from entering the national business associations.
Since that time, of course, the Jewish community has largely followed the route of Marcus out of the tenements and into the business class. The 2001 National Jewish Population Survey found that 36% of Jewish households reported income above $75,000 — twice the percentage in the population at large.
There is a widely shared recognition that even as Jews have entered the class of business owners, a warm feeling toward labor unions has often remained. Phillip Wilson, president of the Labor Relations Institute — a leading anti-union consulting firm — said that he has had Jewish clients who have faced blowback from within their community for not allowing unions into their companies.
“The unions and the Jewish community were allied early in the history of unions and they also share political points of view, so those two things lead the average Jewish person who doesn’t really know much about unions to say they are good, which is different than in most other communities,” Wilson told the Forward.
Recently there have been many prominent Jewish business leaders who have worked closely with unions. In Las Vegas, where Adelson has kept his casinos union-free, another Jewish owner, Steve Wynn, led the way in allowing unions into the city. Wynn’s casino, the Mirage, allowed employees to unionize in 1989 without requiring a secret vote, and since then, every casino in the city has followed suit, except for those owned by Adelson. Wynn’s kinder approach to unions does not appear to have hurt his profitability; his casinos — and the gambling industry in Las Vegas — expanded rapidly in the years after casinos there made it easier for employees to join unions.
For business leaders like Adelson and Marcus, the operative history seems to be less the Jewish labor story than the personal one of emerging from poverty. Marcus told the Forward that the reason he has opposed unions is that they halt the sort of financial ascent he experienced.
“I grew up in a tenement. My parents were immigrants. We were poor as hell — and I made it in this world through the free-enterprise system,” Marcus said.
Marcus explained that he became disenchanted with unions early on, when a union representative came to his house to speak with his father. “They told him he was working too hard and setting a bad example for everyone in the firm. That much I remember. My father said: ‘That’s crazy. I work the way I work.’”
At Home Depot, which he co-founded in 1978, Marcus managed to successfully battle a number of efforts to unionize workers. He says this allowed some of his workers to rise to heights that would have been impossible otherwise, pointing to a Jamaican immigrant who began as a cashier at a Home Depot in Miami and worked her way up to become president of the company’s Southern division.
“If she had been union, she never in a hundred million years would have had that job,” Marcus said. “They go by seniority and not quality.”
The characterization of unions by business leaders like Marcus has been vigorously disputed by many labor activists and scholars. Lichtenstein, the labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has written extensively about the decline in wages that has accompanied the decline in union membership in America over the past few decades.
“When people talk about how the expansion of unions will be the end of civilization, it is really incredible,” Lichtenstein said. “It’s not as though we didn’t have a thriving union movement through much of the most dramatic economic expansion in this country.”
Nowhere is the dissonance on these points more evident than in the rather personal battle being waged by Berman, the leading lobbyist against unions and EFCA in Washington.
Berman has long been a lightning rod for criticism, thanks to the work that his firm, Berman and Company, has done on behalf of such corporate interests as the tobacco and alcohol industries. Berman’s recent work against unions — his firm has spent $25 million on advertisements against EFCA — has won him enemies not only within the labor movement, but also within his own rather prominent family. In January of this year, his son David announced in an Internet post that he was leaving his latest music project, the Silver Jews. He took the opportunity to launch an attack on his lobbyist father.
“My father is a despicable man,” the younger Berman wrote in the January 22 post on the message board of his record label, Drag City. The first specific charge that Berman levied against his father was that he is a “union buster.” In an e-mail interview with the Forward, David Berman said that his father — and his father’s generation — had become disconnected from the hardship of their grandparents. Both of Rick Berman’s grandfathers worked in the New York garment industry.
“My grandparents are good people, raised by good Jews,” the younger Berman wrote to the Forward, “but their children are just living lives of meaningless acquisition. Within two generations, all memory of injustice is forgotten.”
He wrote that in his own life, one of his best work experiences was at the Whitney Museum of American Art, when he was a member of the Teamsters union.
“I have never been treated so well in a job,” Berman wrote to the Forward. “I was able to save enough money to go to graduate school and since then I have worked for myself.”
Rick Berman was reluctant to talk about the break with his son, saying that it “is an issue that the family is trying to deal with.” But he acknowledged that he has contended with an element of familial history in his own work. He said that when his grandfathers were garment workers, unions were a good thing.
“I think that unions made enormous contributions in lots of industries,” Berman said. “Without a doubt, there was a certain amount of cowboy capitalism that was rampant in the country — and collective bargaining did wring out of the workplace some of the abuses that are now just historical.”
But, Berman argues that unions today have little positive role to play in the American economy. In the current environment, he says that opposition to unions — and to the Employee Free Choice Act — is a virtuous act.
“In some ways, Sheldon Adelson is being more true to Jewish heritage than the guys who are pushing for the passage of this law,” Berman said.
A clip from “Uncle Moses” (1932) is below. Restored and with new English subtitles by The National Center for Jewish Film. Time code version here for research purposes. For public exhibition or DVD purchase, visit www.jewishfilm.org.
Contact Nathaniel Popper at popper@forward.com.
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Businesses hate unions because it gives voice to those who can't buy politicians on their own, creating competition to the money-lobby. As Jews have come to control the bulk of the wealth in any given country, no longer needing protection for themselves, they have turned against organized labor since they are now on the paying end. The cost? Public resentment.
But,” Marcus said, in his fast-paced, no-nonsense way of talking about the issue, “times change, and I think that employers today are much more enlightened. They understand that if their associates aren’t happy, they don’t produce. There was a time for unions, and there is a time not for unions.” If Marcus thinks that companies are enlightened he should go see first hand what "good enlightened" US companies are doing to workers in other countries. He would also get a rude awakening in carpet mills and chicken processing plants and other US industries if he paid attention. Unions do not stop people or organizations from groeth and sucess. The jamacian immigrant Marcus referenced could have just as eaisly made it in a unionized workplace from her job as a cashier to her position as President of a Division. As a union cashier she would have been able to feed her family while she was on the way up.
Jews have always been on both sides of the labor-management issue, and during the Progressive Era, there have been many cases of ant-union Jewish clothing factory owners who ended up facing public opprobrium from the Reform rabbinate, the Yiddish-speaking Jewish labor movement, and non-Jewish Progressive activists alike. Except that then the issue was charity versus tzedakah within ones own community--and the hypocrisy of contributing generously to charities that aided the very workers they didn't pay enough to not require charitable aid!
Will EFCA result in intimidation to sign?
My own experience in a number of workplace situations is that a union attempted to use intimidation to get me to sign. And it was only secret elections which enabled me (and other co-workers) to express our opposition to the union's coercion. Without a secret ballot, and with a public EFCA signing, my fear is that free speech and choice will be lost and coercive group "right thinking," as well as the use of force, intimidation and even violence, will be the norm in workplaces. Therefor I oppose EFCA. This is not a Jewish issue but a political issue of values such as choice, voting, free speech and association. It is only a perspective that venerates "workers" and denigrates "non-workers" that makes it into a good vs bad issue.
A boy and girl are having sex. The girl yells out "Talk to me dirty." The boy sais "The union is in the shop."
Supervisors and managers suck big time!!!!!!
Please note this article in the Washington Jewish Week.
Employee Free Choice Act ... will protect workers Washington Jewish Week / Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Sybil Sanchez and Jonathan Zimet Special to WJW
We urge Jews to support legislation that would combat poverty, improve the economy and make important advancements for workers' rights. The Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers' ability to bargain collectively in the workplace. As we approach Passover, remembering that we, too, were slaves in Egypt, it's important to understand why Jews in particular should support it.
Our tradition recognizes that imbalances of power are inherent in society, making the less wealthy dependent on the wealthier. It provides redress through specific laws such as the prohibition against withholding a worker's pay and the command to leave unharvested some of the field for the stranger. The Talmud also acknowledges the right to organize in order to establish prices and wages.
Our age has given rise to a much more complex economy and society. Inequalities of bargaining power have been augmented by the enormous size of today's companies. We all know the experience of job-seekers, tenants and consumers forced to accept "take-it-or-leave-it" conditions. As individuals, we are powerless to alter such situations. Often, it is only through collective bargaining that workers can obtain a fairer contract.
When faced with union-organizing campaigns, 75 percent of companies hire union-busting consultants. Workers risk intimidation and, worse, termination. Even when they succeed in having unions authorized, companies will drag their feet, legally postponing an initial contract for years.
Employee free choice would allow employees to hold government-supervised elections, as is the case now. However, if a majority wanted to sign up through membership cards, the union could also form that way. Unlike under the current regulations, employers would be required to remain neutral, empowering employees to debate freely on how and whether to unionize without corporate-sponsored intimidation tactics.
Employee free choice would also strengthen penalties against companies for union-busting, establish mediation and arbitration when parties disagree on the first union contract, and require reinstatement of fired workers when there is reasonable cause to believe their rights were violated.
Many leading modern rabbis in the United States and Israel support workers' rights and continue to do so, including Israel's first chief rabbis -- both Ashkenazi and Sephardi. Along with being the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel remains the most pro-union country in that, as well.
Judaism teaches that people are neither inherently evil nor good. No one person owns another or the fruits of his or her labor. Early on, our tradition recognized labor as a matter of human dignity through the commandment to abstain from it on the Sabbath.
Some within the Jewish community remain skeptical of the Employee Free Choice Act, as they are of unions. Employers may not intend to abuse employees, but their focus is to prioritize profits. Recognizing that we cannot rely on good intentions to protect the vulnerable, both Jewish and secular law seek to safeguard the worker. Bernard Madoff's fraud and the recent scandal of Agriprocessors stand as tragic examples of the impact that deregulation has had on our community and beyond.
In times like these, with mass layoffs and decreased benefits, workers no longer have the purchasing power necessary to help drive the economy. Conversely, unions have played a critical role in strengthening the middle class. Unionized employees make 28 percent more than nonunionized; nonunion workers are five times more likely to lack health insurance. Strong unions improve workers' benefits even for the nonunionized.
Many American Jews can readily recall their grandparents' or parents' union involvement. Due to those roots, we've fast become an influential part of our country's fabric, succeeding beyond our ancestors' expectations.
However, social advancement comes with responsibility. Supporting the Employee Free Choice Act not only fulfills Jewish values but is in the interest of our community and our economy. It would empower employers and employees to earn a fair living while investing in the nation's future. We urge Jews to support it.
Sybil Sanchez and Jonathan Zimet are, respectively, executive director and rabbinic intern for the Jewish Labor Committee.
Islam and EFCA are the fundamental threats to civilization? One wonders what the heat in Vegas does to the mind.
When workers are fired because they try to form a union and the worst that can happen to the employer is they will be fined pocket change and be forced to reinstate the employees two years later, the damage to the organizing drive is done. The rest of the workforce fears loss of their jobs and the organizing drive dies. For employers, it's a small price to pay for breaking the law. The instance of this happening occurs hundreds (and sometimes thousands of times) a year. And the Bermans of the world aid and abet the process for quite a hefty profit.
So what becomes their issue? Democracy. The so-called "secret ballot" election they advocate that would makes Iranian elections look like pure democracy. Those of us who live in the trenches everyday fighting these issue know otherwise.
The fundamental threat to Bernard Marcus and others who sound so uncharacteristically shrill when it comes to EFCA is the threat to their bottom line. It's that simple.
As a former Union organizer, negotiator and elected leader in the ILGWU who dealt with many Jewish and Italian employers, as well as other factory owners who were of Polish, Asian and Anglo extraction, my 27 years of experience tells me that there is little differences to be found among them. The boss's attitude towards workers and orgnized labor is almost exclusively driven by mean and simple economics - and not by way of any influences from a particular ethnic or religious background. The billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who apparently sees unions as a threat equal to Islamism, has managed to go well beyond these economic parameters and far off into pure ideology. Since Mr. Adelson, himself a philanthropist, cannot be driven by pure greed, one can only assume that he believes a union (or unions) have at one time and in some way inflicted serious harm on him personally or one of his enterprises. Since no thinking person on either side of this question can take serious note of this Union/Islamic theory it is perhaps best to simply ignore it.
Unions saved many a family 100 years ago, unfortunately today they are bloated, corrupt, and many do not even have the cojones to defend the best interests of the workers who opted into Union membership.
Case in point. I used to belong to a Librarians Union in Southern California. I did NOT want to join, and argued against it. At first though, it looked like the Union - SEIU 660* - were supportive. They pushed through medical benefits for our part-timers who worked up to 32 hours. Then a new County Librarian took over, and promptly yanked those benefits and the Union did NOTHING (just ask a young Librarian aide with Crohns disease, another aide with a chemical imbalance who suddenly couldn't afford his meds, or a young man striken with a deadly viral infection with half of his benefit suddenly taken away while he's still in the hospital how good a Union is).
I was outraged by that, and by the fact that the Union asked us to strike about a year later in support of a pay increase for us, and to support other County departments. The County Sheriff and the Nurses at L.A.County Hospital got there increases and the Union declared victory. In the meantime they walked away while our Library negotiators were vainly seeking that modest (15 percent over 3 years) pay increase. We ended up with 9 percent over three years - the County's original offer.
* In the meantime SEIU 660 and especially its head Rick Stern knew how to kow-tow with Democratic Party officials and while we were suffering, the former SDS organizer and bastard knew how to raise $250,000 for John Kerry. That's all current Unions know. Support the Corrupt and Cowardly and Screw the Worker.
Unions are good for the middle class, plain and simple. Jewish people should be on the side of unions, cause the group that hates unions the most are racist and antisemetic southerners, and feel that good jewish people shouldnt want to be on the same side of them haters from them southern states. I give jewish peopler credit cause most of them do agree that unions are a positive and not a negative, and most of these jews dont have a personal stake in unions for their own personal gain, but yet they still support them cause they know the difference between right and wrong, and unions are more often than not, are on the right side. But what baffles me the most is the poor and almost poor protestant southerners who hate unions, when infact unions would personally benefit them. The southern logic is what almost broke up this great nation during the civil way, and this same sick logic is still around today in the form of anti union thinking. Its time for the america south to wake up and realize the business owners and management does not care about their workers most of the time, and its the unions who will give them and their families a decent living, anyone who works a blue collar job and hates unions must not care about their families well being and this to me is quite sad and sick. wake up america and vote UNION YES!!!!
This author gives almost all of the voiuce to the opposition of the labor law and offers Beman this final quote: “In some ways, Sheldon Adelson is being more true to Jewish heritage than the guys who are pushing for the passage of this law.”
He should be ashamed. Bad writing.
I am in most instances Pro-Union. I saw how my Grandfather Moses was treated in Non-Union Garment Factories. He worked by the piece. The faster he could turn out the work the more money he could make...until the bosses didn't want to pay him a living wages and then he would be fired or laid off. I also saw that simple things, such as his ability to even go to use the men's room when he needed to were up to the factory foreman who was some rich macher's kid or nephew. I am a member of the AFL-CIO union, The Screen Actors Guild and I can tell you that without a Union the actor is screwed. I got tired of chasing producers and directors for my pay. Now when I work I get a living wage and money is set aside for my pension. I get residuals when I work as a principal actor, too. As far as I am concerned you cannot be a good Jew and be Anti-Union. It is not part of the Jewish concept to condone exploitation of workers. It is about oppressing people to make an all mighty buck. This is why during the Grape and Lettuce Strikes of the 1960-70s, Non-Union, Non-UFW produce was deemed Unkosher by the Rabbinate. I would suggest that people boycott, deem Unkosher the goods that these Anti-Union, Anti-Worker moguls own and sell. I support David Berman's right to stand up to his father, as sad as it it. His heart is in the right place. It must be very excruciating for him.