Living in plastic and card board shacks, over looking the affluent valleys of California, undocumented teenage farmworkers keep warm on a chilly Sunday night, their only day off.
This story repeats itself thousands of times all over the US where undocumented farmworkers eek out a living they can't find near their homes in Mexico. Caesar Chavez built the United Farm Workers union through the 1970's to better the lives of migrant workers. In the 1980's it's hay day was over, but it's budget continued to grow. Reviewing it's budget in 2004, it reflects salaries and expenses of the staff, but few services for farm workers. The number of farmworker contracts has dropped to little more than a handful.
Looking at it's business activities, it looks as if it has become a foundation to benefit primarily it's own employees. This isn't a new situation for unions, but it is the most recent example. The Teamsters Union, in it's history has allegedly served as a front organization for organized crime. Rank and file membership seldom are particularly enthusiastic for their union, because they know too, that it exists primarily to benefit itself, and the membership secondarily.
Los Angeles Times
Chavez's heirs run a web of tax-exempt organizations that exploit his legacy and invoke the harsh lives of farmworkers to raise millions of dollars in public and private money. The money does little to improve the lives of California farmworkers, who still struggle with the most basic health and housing needs and try to get by on seasonal, minimum-wage jobs. Most of the funds go to burnish the Chavez image and expand the family business, a multimillion-dollar enterprise with an annual payroll of $12 million that includes a dozen Chavez relatives.
The UFW is the linchpin of the Farm Worker Movement, a network of a dozen tax-exempt organizations that do business with one another, enrich friends and family, and focus on projects far from the fields: They build affordable housing in San Francisco and Albuquerque, own a top-ranked radio station in Phoenix, run a political campaign in support of an Indian casino and lobby for gay marriage.
The current UFW leaders have jettisoned other Chavez principles:
The UFW undercut another union to sign up construction workers, poaching on the turf of building trade unions that once were allies. The UFW forfeited the right to boycott supermarkets and stores, a tactic Chavez pioneered, in order to sign up members in unrelated professions. And Chavez's heirs broke with labor solidarity and hired nonunion workers to build the $3.2-million National Chavez Center around their founder's grave in the Tehachapi Mountains, a site they now market as a tourist attraction and rent out for weddings.
A few hundred miles away, in the canyons of Carlsbad north of San Diego, hundreds of farmworkers burrow into the hills each year, covering their shacks with leaves and branches to stay out of view of multimilliondollar homes. They live without drinking water, toilets, refrigeration. Fireworks and music from nearby Legoland pierce the nighttime skies. In a larger camp a dozen miles to the south in Del Mar, farmworkers wash their clothes in a stream, bathe in the soapy water, then catch crayfish that they boil for dinner.
All large organizations, as they grow, shift their missions. Once a business has grown beyond it's base to allow diversification, it leaves behind it's initial mission of producing a product at a profit, or in the case of non-profits, to serve more people. It moves into the business of feathering it's nest. In the case of for profits, owners profit takes precidence. In a publicly traded company, shareholders are the primary benefactors. In a non-profit, employees get the perks. The organizations primary mission shifts from building a success to maintaining itself. For government, it's much the same as for a non-profit. The larger the organization, the more excess goes to feather the nests of it's benefactors.
My values say all organizations owe a debt to the society that allowed it's success. The organization was successful in the first place because it's initial mission served the public and consumers responded by making the organization a success. Yet there is no incentive for organizations to serve society, even as it benefits from it's wages.
We're in the middle of a tax revolution that has made more billionaires than ever in America. I am not one to take it away from them now, we need to rebuild the productive infrastructure of America. We need to make more jobs, rebuild a manufacturing core that can compete worldwide. Lets encourage reinvestment by taxing only the dollars that don't grow the economy, that benefit only those who have enriched themselves on successfully gathering the wages of others. For example, the latest tax cut was one of the few that made sense. Capital gains is the primary means that profit is taken from a mature investment. Lets not tax those dollars that go back into rebuilding America.
As for unions, let this story be a wake up call for the union movement. We are going to need grassroots unions in the future in this world of globalization. But lets make sure, they stick to their primary mission by keeping them small and focused on membership, their only means of survival. The big unions need to de-centralize, and spend most of their dollars on the rank and file. Big unions need to devolve into associations of small unions.
Hat tip to The Agonist.
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