On “Being Reasonable”

    Our fight to secure a decent contract from the Strand Bookstore has reached a crucial point. The most recent offer put forward by the ownership contains improvements in the terms it offers current members relative to the truly hostile “final offer” we rejected in April. In several conversations with fellow Strand workers I've detected a desire to dispense with all the contentiousness and accept an offer that doesn't ask egregious concessions from current members. There exists an attitude, which is expressed nearly any time the topic of labor unions is brought up, that it is all well and good to resist attacks on your standard of living, but that the fight should never extend into purely principled ideological territory or even to attempting to secure significant gains from the employer. Thus, many people would rather give a little something up than seem greedy. There is a generalized fear that asking for too much will somehow leave one accepting nothing, and few wish to take this perceived risk for the purpose of benefiting some as of yet nonexistent coworker.

     

    There are two things I would hope everyone keeps in mind as they decide how they will vote this week. One is that the two-tier system is as much an attack on the current employees as it is on those who will come in the future. The second is that the “reasonable” thing to do is to continue fighting, not to accept the unsatisfactory if not terrible offer we are now faced with.

    At one of the informational meetings held last week it was expressed that we (relatively) long standing employees deserve a better deal as a reward for our loyalty to the company. If you think about what a two-tier system really means, however, it becomes clear that the impetus behind it is the complete opposite of one that seeks to reward anyone but the company's owners. If they wanted to reward the longstanding employees they could increase longevity payments without establishing a ceiling over the benefits of all employees who come in the future. Instead they're giving almost nothing to their current employees and setting the stage for a situation where there is a certain level of resentment among newer employees, who if they stay long enough to become union, will not be likely to engage in the type of fight we have been to protect the benefits and pay of their more senior co-workers.

    Though working class people always seem to wish to “be reasonable” the company has no such compulsion. No matter how profitable they are, they can always be more so by lowering their labor costs. Their asking us to cast our future coworkers off into a second tier is essentially a way of expressing that we are overpaid and that the second tier will represent a more healthy level of labor costs for them. Rest assured that they will wait with bated breath for us to move on, and may find ways of compelling us to do so. The next negotiation will be an exercise in trying to force us to move closer to the lower tier. Through a combination of attrition and further aggressive negotiating the company hopes to return to a single, lower tier as soon as possible.

     

    Two months ago we were faced with a “final offer” that asked for concessions from every employee and for a more pronounced two tiers. We resolved to stand united against this offer and to go beyond the act of voting. We engaged the press, picketed the store, kept each other informed and showed that we could force the company to move in our direction. By accepting the current flawed proposal, we would be forgetting a lesson we only recently learned and giving into irrational fear. That would be completely unreasonable.