Private Equity Firms, Our New Corporate Masters?
Workers returned Tuesday to the job at Stella D’oro Biscuit Co. in the Bronx after a judge ordered the company reinstate the 136 employees who had remained strong throughout a brutal 11-month strike. But before they could even walk through the doors, they were greeted with the anti-union response by the company’s private equity firm owners, the 21st century’s mutation of the robber barons: Brynwood Partners announced it would shut down operations in October. (”Private equity firms” is the euphemism those leveraged buyout corporations adopted after leveraged buyout got a bad name in the 1980s.)
Established more than 75 years ago, Stella D’oro is a nationally known maker of specialty baked goods and until recently was a family-owned business. But a series of corporate buyouts ultimately resulted in Brynwood’s 2006 purchase of the company. And a private equity firm’s only reason for existing is to make money-lots of it. Even robber barons ultimately had to ensure they had enough workers on the job because those companies made money by making things. Not so for today’s private equity firms. Closing shop and making off with the profits is what they do.
What Book Do You Want Obama to Read?
| It’s time the economy worked for everyone again. That’s the message of this new TV ad in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. |
Over at Washington Monthly, the editors asked a few Famous Names to describe the book they think President Obama should read. But they did not ask the rest of us.
So I’d like to submit a suggestion. In fact, I’ll go easy on the new president and offer up a report rather than an entire book.
Consultants, Lawyers and the “Union Free” Movement in the USA since the 1970s, by British economist John Logan, analyzes the emergence of professional “union-busters,” providing case studies of each of the main groups comprising the industry: law firms, consultants, industry psychologists and strike management firms.
At 18 pages, it’s an easy read for a president who holds his books right-side-up. But the information is crucial for an understanding of why the nation needs passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Big Business lobbyists are all over the new administration and Congress trying to convince lawmakers that corporations are even-handed and open-minded—and therefore no change is needed to current labor laws because the laws are so fair now. NOT.
Here’s Why We Need Employee Free Choice
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Marcy Rein, a retired member of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 29 who worked in the ILWU Organizing Department for most of the Blue Diamond campaign, describes how the Blue Diamond workers’ years-long effort to gain a union recently ended with a loss. Rein also vividly describes how that experience demonstrates yet again why we need passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.
For four years, the workers on the Organizing Committee at the Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) plant in Sacramento, Calif., had done everything they could to avoid being where they were on the night of Nov. 19. They campaigned hard for a free and fair choice on whether to join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). But there they were watching the vote count at the end of an election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) run under the same old broken rules.
They stood around in the huge bare room where the election had taken place, in a cold storage building that doubles as the site of the annual Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. Sounds bounced off the concrete floor and disappeared on the way to the 40-foot ceiling—sighs, a stray cell phone quickly squelched, a hiccup of distress.
