Carlin Was Right About Workers' Plight

by Vince Beltrami ...president of the Alaska AFL-CIO

Three things happened last week that all juxtaposed in my mind. George Carlin died, I took right-wing radio mouth Dan Fagan to task on the Employee Free Choice Act because he had it all wrong, and the Exxon Valdez verdict came down from the Supreme Court.

Most people are familiar with Carlin's "seven words you can't say on television." My mom unwittingly bought me the "Class Clown" album that featured this track for my 13th birthday. And since I can't say the seven words here, I thought I'd offer seven dirty terms relevant to Alaskans which they better remember come November: greed, corruption, indictments, convictions, apathy, short memories and injustice.

Carlin did a special not too long ago that featured a bit called "The American Dream." It wasn't funny. It was brooding and cynical, but I saw it as a call to action by one of the most accurate, if not offensive, social commentators of our time.

Carlin took Americans to task and lamented how we've been sold a bill of goods on the American dream, and blasted us for standing by as the "real owners" of America stick it to working folks and how the real owners, big-business interests, have taken control of politicians, the media, the judges, etc. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. They don't want well-informed, well-educated citizens, capable of critical thinking. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests.

Carlin went on to say, "They want obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly (expletive) jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced

Big business interests have taken control of politicians, the media, the judges, etc. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. Good, honest, hard-working people; white collar, blue collar, people of modest means, continue to elect these rich (expletive) who don't give a (expletive) about them."

The guy who made me laugh my guts out when I was a kid, stopped me cold with his death and his commentary.

A few days before Carlin's passing, Fagan was railing against EFCA, also called majority sign-up. Fagan's misinformation came from the spin provided by the ultra-conservative corporate-sponsored Heritage Foundation, not exactly a champion of worker's rights.

The act would actually fix a broken National Labor Relations Board system meant to protect workers seeking union representation, and right the wrongs that corporate-friendly appointments to the NLRB since Reagan have created. The union election process has been perverted. This act would protect workers from harassment and intimidation rampant in the organizing process today. It would also do away with typical stall tactics many employers use during negotiations, often for years.

Ultimately, with the passage of EFCA, more money would filter through more sectors of the economy where a small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth.

Get ready for a big media blitz, bought and paid for by the owners of our country, where they will spin this act as something dastardly designed to take away worker's rights. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The union election process has been perverted. This act would protect workers from harassment and intimidation rampant in the organizing process today.

Just look behind the curtain if you can, to see who is peddling the opposition message and the motivation will be self-evident. So far, opposition is coming from the aptly misnamed Center for Union Facts and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, both corporate-sponsored lobbying groups.

And finally, the Supreme Court's Exxon Valdez decision, proving that the conservative appointments of Reagan and two Bushes dictated an obvious outcome protecting the interests of the few and the powerful. And Exxon, like employers fighting unionization, used legal loopholes to draw the process out for way too many years.

When the elections come around in November, we can do what we've always done and get what we've always gotten or we can demand change and give regular folks a fighting chance. If we don't, in my frustration, don't be surprised if I lament by shouting out Carlin's original seven dirty words at the top of my lungs. Rest in peace, George.

from the The Anchorage Daily News