Re: News from the Horizon/Alaska Customer/Employee Co-Ownership Assn.

[LynnRWilliams@aol.com]

One would have to know a great deal more about the relations between 
Horizon/Alaska and its Teamster local to comment very intelligently regarding 
the alleged comments of the Teamster local leaders about the airline.

In any event, as everyone on this network knows, I'm sure, including Norm 
Kurland, the comments as quoted by Mr.Nieman are not typical of the American 
labor movement. The labor movement, by and large, has been immersed now for 
twenty years, in industry after industry, in coping with the impact of 
globalization, of the all too frequent failure of American leadership to care 
about the significance of the manufacturing sector, of a free trade ideology 
bordering on fanatacism, of irresponsible corporate greed manifesting itself 
as it has not since the 1920's, of a constant attack on the right of American 
workers to be represented in collective bargaining and, therefore, to be 
heard from in a meanigful way. 

For a most insightful comment on the role of American corporate leadership at 
this very moment, in the midst of the terrorist crisis, I commend Paul 
Krugman's op-ed piece in the weekend Times, if you haven't yet seen it.

With the actions of CEOs in helping themselves to salaries five hundred times 
the earnings received by their average workers is it any wonder that workers 
may be somewhat less than totally committed to their welfare?  When one sees 
the interest of so many world corporations in exploiting workers in 
developing countries to the maximum, with sweat shops, and ever shifting 
contracts, and child labor, and environmental degredation as in the 
Maquiladoras, and in leading the race to the bottom, is it any wonder that 
workers have some degree of cynicism concerning many company presentations of 
their problems?

In any event, I've been there.  I was there when, in the aftermath of the 
threat to our society in World War II we built a society, for a time, which 
welcomed the role of trade unions and collective bargaining, which created 
real jobs with some security and some level of benefits, which talked about 
social responsibility by the corporate leaders, and I was there as the 
buccaneer capitalists of the turn of the century re-emerged, challenged and 
destroyed much of that progress.  I witnessed, for example, a Marshall Plan 
that built a new Europe, which continues to provide a way of life for 
ordinary people far more secure than ours, and saw our leaders, faced with 
the great needs and opportunities of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and 
leading a vastly more wealthy society than existed at the end of World War 
II, refuse to accept such a challenge and develop a similar program of 
economic growth and development..

I've been there in my own industry.  There is no doubt in my imind that 
without the concern, input and involvement of my union in the steel industry 
it would long since have been in worse shape than it now is.  To speak about 
labor earning too much, or being noncompetitive in a world in which wealth 
has been increasing exponentially, is simply to display one's prejudice and 
superficiality concerning the need to move forward, not backward.  

In my union we have pursued the idea that workers need access to the benefits 
of ownership as well as of labor and I, personally, attach great value and 
importance to that idea, but many of my labor colleagues see a world in which 
that idea has relatively little acceptance and in which the immediate, daily 
struggles of workers are crucial, and that, given that reality, the employee 
ownership and related ideas are largely irrelevant to the more immediate 
crises.  We should be focussed, from that perspective, on raising living 
standards here and across the world.  It has taken the current crisis to 
provide at least some greater rhetorical attention to the dangers to our 
entire civilization of a world in which 2/3rds of the people are attempting 
to live on a dollar or two a day.  Nelson Mandela made some powerful comments 
in that regard when recieving honorary Canadian citizenship in Ottawa last 
week - I do not know but suspect they were not widely publicized in other 
countries.

In the work we did in my union concerning employee ownership the greatest 
challenge was finding managers who both knew their business and had the 
sensitivity to work with employee owners, to appreciate where such owners 
were coming from, to truly participate with them in an open, constructive and 
creative way.

I obviously do not know, but I suspect that something of this nature behind 
the remarks about which Mr.Nieman is concerned.  About three years ago there 
was a strike at one of the Steelworker ESOPs largely if not entirely, in my 
opinion, the result of insensitive and inadequate corporate leadership.  We 
assisted in finding a new President and CEO and the situation is entirely 
turned around.  Leadership matters and in a private enterprise, private 
ownership economy it matters enormously.

We desperately need leaders with a vision that includes, but extends far 
beyond the bottom line of their own corporation and includes as well, and 
significantly, what is happening in the broader world, to the living 
standards of humanity at large and to the health of our ever tinier and more 
crowded planet.  Important to creating this vision, and I suspect important 
in Mr. Nieman's specific situation, is to have some meanifngul involvement 
and discussion with the union leadership and membership about their ideas 
concerning the creation of our future.