EDITORIAL ADDENDUM: HOW THE LANGUAGE AND TECHNIQUES OF SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE BEING USED IN UNION BREAKING

You will find what is reproduced here in the video of the interview, but I wanted to highlight it since there is a buzz now about how the working class needs to be seriously involved in the challenges to corporations. I have heard the call from Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader, and the World Socialists. I am sure there are more who have called for the working class to step forward.

This excerpt is edited from the transcript provided by YouTube. Any errors are mine.

Sue Ann Martinson, Editor, Rise Up Times

Glenn Greenwald: I have seen a change in the evolution of union busting by the entitled corporations to using the language of diversity in social justice. Obviously unionizing and organizing unions has been a long-time cause of the left. Yet I’ve noticed all the time now that when corporations want to persuade their workers to reject unionization and the organization of unions they don’t say, ‘oh, you’re going to eat into our bottom line’; that’s not the kind of rhetoric that appeals to people. They smuggle in this kind of social justice language as a way of sabotaging union drives. Talk about some of the things that that you’ve uncovered.

Lee Fang: As part of that reporting I attended a number of conferences sponsored by the union suppression industry −a 300 million-dollar-a-year industry where major corporations hire special consultants that go into a company that’s facing a union threat. They hold captive meeting seminars with employees to dissuade them. As you know there’s typically a vote to decide if workers can join a union or not. This process has gone on for a very long time.

Back in the day they used threats of violence. For a relatively recent example, they used weapons and intimidation as threats to the workers picket line in California striking about offshore jobs in the 70s and 80s. But in the last decade we’ve seen a very sharp turn where a lot of workers in more left-leaning industries such as in the tech industry, Starbucks, REI, and companies of that kind have a large number of liberal Democrat employees who are part of a growing movement to unionize and join the labor movement.

So you see these union-avoidance consultants rebranding. They’re becoming diversity consultants; they’re going in and saying look you don’t need to join a union to have your voice at the company, we can just talk about issues around identity. It’s a very intimate way to connect to an employee. They give alternatives; they say instead of joining a labor union we’ll create an Employee Resource Group, a special club or association of gay or Asian. or what have you, employees:

You’ll have a pizza party once a month and we’ll have a hotline if you have any issues but just don’t join a labor union because that would actually – and they don’t say this part – but that would actually cost the company money.

I mean at the end of the day, whether it’s lobbying Congress or the kind of union busting we just talked about, they want to take away decisions that would change the kind of power structure where more power would be redistributed to workers. to common people. They want to keep those decisions in in the hands of investors and management.

These are the same tactics where in the attempts to crush this growing labor movement we’ve seen in the last few years they are adopting the language and symbols and rhetoric of social justice activists and explicitly using these demands for diversity and inclusion as kind of a jiu jitsu to undermine this effort at unionization. I mean it’s so incredibly cynical and yet so remarkably effective because anything that has that kind of Woke branding is assumed reflexively at this point to be something appealing and attractive.