7/14/2003

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Protecting the Past Rather Than Creating the Future:

The Backward View of Some of Montana’s Labor Leaders

Montana Republicans, fighting their traditional hostility to organized labor, are seeking to position themselves as the champions of Montana workers. This was evident at the recent Montana Republican convention that invited a leader of one of the unions representing Montana’s forest products workers to speak. This strategy requires a bit of a stretch given that the Republicans’ current standard bearer, Governor Martz, bragged at the beginning of her term that she was proud to be the lapdog of big business.

But Republicans, since at least Ronald Reagan, have seen an opportunity to use environmental issues to split some of organized labor off from their traditional Democratic Party allegiance. That was the theme the invited labor leaders stressed at the Republican convention: Environmentalists and environmental regulation are what have damaged the Montana economy, causing the loss of timber industry jobs, the shut down of lumber mills, the abandonment of existing mines and the blocking of new mines, the frustration of new energy projects, etc. If organized labor were to join with corporate leaders, they could combine forces and turn this miserable situation around.

It is not surprising to find corporate leaders and their political allies making these arguments. It is surprising to find representatives of Montana’s workers going along with this line of argument since it is built around factual assumptions that are demonstrably false.

Environmental protection clearly benefits workers. As leaders of Montana’s workers have repeatedly said in the past, the worker is the first citizen to face the toxic effects of pollution. That has been tragically demonstrated in Libby with the asbestos poisoning of a significant part of the population, beginning with the vermiculite workers who brought the poison home to their families. Are our labor leaders now saying that environmental efforts to control that epidemic of morbidity and death would have hurt workers and their families?

Or consider the most recent reason that mines, mills, and refineries shut down in Montana. It was high electric prices brought on by the successful corporate-led attack on utility regulation in Montana that forced almost the entire heavy industry base to shut down. Some of it remains shut down. It is the unstable electric and natural gas prices associated with that deregulation that has led so many proposed energy projects to be abandoned. That attack on utility regulation also led to the demise of the Montana Power Company and the bankruptcy or near bankruptcy of Northwestern Energy and Touch America. This is how big business in Montana protects Montana jobs. Why labor leaders would be seeking to make common cause with these job killers is unclear.

The suggestion that it is Montana’s environmental laws or Montana’s environmental activists who have caused mines, forest products mills, and proposed electric energy projects to fold is easily disproved. Just look across the nation. During the 1990s American counties that depended on mineral development were economically the worst performing set of counties in the nation. Across the nation small lumber mills have also been shutting down, even those in regions of the nation where timber harvest comes entirely from private lands and there are no environmental regulations on timber harvest. The source of these industries’ problems has been global competition, not environmental regulation. Promoting that globalized economy, of course, has been a high priority item of our larger corporations who are now cynically seeking alliances with the very workers who have been damaged by the process.

Someone here does not know who butters their bread and who it is that confiscates both the butter and the bread. And it isn’t our corporate leaders who are ignorant about what they are doing.

One problem that workers across Montana face is that the state labor movement is focused almost exclusively on protecting existing jobs that were inherited from the past, already unionized and well paid. Only a tiny and shrinking sliver of the state’s working people benefit from that strategy. The irony is that the “good” “high-paid” jobs in forest products, mining, mineral processing, and other heavy manufacturing did not used to be “good jobs.” They were dangerous, debilitating, low paid jobs that were transformed as a result of union organizing that often was violently opposed by both corporate leaders as well as the state and federal governments.

Rather than now joining our cuddly lapdog Governor in a fawning embrace of these corporate leaders, the best thing organized labor could do for Montana workers is to get to work vigorously organizing the hundreds of thousands of new jobs that have been created in the state and doing for them what was done for heavy industry over the last century, converting those lousy jobs into good jobs. That, however, is not a job for corporate lapdogs.