Working In These Times
Leader of the Pack: Harley Begins to Take Public for Ride Against Union
A parade of 10,000 motorcycles passes spectators lining the rooftop of the Teamsters hall in August 2003, in Milwaukee, Wisc. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Harley-Davidson has branded itself as a Milwaukee icon, drawing on the city's blue-collar, rough-and-tumble image to establish "authenticity" for its retro-looking motorcycles. Harleys are widely viewed as macho products made by macho guys and gals.
While other Milwaukee-born corporations have off-shored most of their employment to Mexico, Harley Davidson stands out from the rest. Johnson Controls, Rockwell, Briggs & Stratton, Master Lock, Badger Meter, and AO Smith all employ more workers in low-wage Mexican plants than in the Milwaukee factories where their original fortunes were generated through generations of workers' toil.
But now Harley has decided to join in the extortion game, threatening to move 1,400 of Harley's 1,500 manufacturing jobs to another U.S. site unless Milwaukee workers concede to $54 million worth of wage and/or benefit cuts.
WHOSE HANDS ARE ON THE DETONATOR?
But as has become customary among sophisticated corporations in Wisconsin (e.g., Mercury Marine last year), Harley has worked hard to persuade the public that it is the workers and the United Steelworkers—not company management—who have their hands on the detonator. The workers, not the corporate executives, will supposedly determine the fate of the Milwaukee operation.
Thus, if Harley pulls the 1,400 jobs out of Milwaukee, it will be perceived as the direct consequence of the union's stubborn and short-sighted "intransigence."
If Harley's PR strategy works properly, the workers will face enormous pressure from elected officials, neighbors and perhaps even family members to make enormous concessions in the name of preserving jobs in Milwaukee. That's precisely what occurred at Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac, Wis. last year.
Harley also wins—provided they can keep dominating the message war—if USW Local 2.2209 turns down the demand for concessions. Corporate officials will then say that the union senselessly pushed down on the detonator and blew up the company's hopes for staying in Milwaukee.
Wearing pained, regretful looks, Harley executives will point to the corporation's long and deep roots in the community, its charitable activities, and the local Harley museum which is a big tourist attraction (financed with the help of at least $7 million in public funding).
Since Harleys are an expensive (prices range from about $7,000 to $35,000) discretionary product with demand dependent on economic conditions, sales have of course fallen during the downturn. Harley has taken small losses over the past couple years, amounting to $55.1 million on $4.8 billion in sales in 2009.
SALES DROP IN BIG DOWNTURN: WHAT A SHOCK!
In response, Harley took drastic action in early 2009 by closing two factories, a distribution center, and the planned elimination of nearly 25% of its total workforce—roughly 3,500 employees.
But with an economic upturn, Harley will undoubtedly return to major profits. In fact, first quarter results from 2010 show Harley back in profitable territory, with $68.7 million in profits.
While Harley has made extensive layoffs in response to the downturn, the pain has clearly not been felt by CEO Keith Wandell. According to CEO Paywatch, "In 2009, Keith E. Wandell received $6,363,579 in total compensation. By comparison, the average worker made $32,048 in 2009. Keith E. Wandell made 198 times the average worker's pay."
However, media coverage in Milwaukee of the Harley situation has been a fact-free zone. There is little about Harley's condition in the context of a severe recession, no talk of how relatively low Harley wages are, nor any talk about the massive pay of the CEO.
Nor has there been any significant discussion of Harley's obligation to the community, based on taxpayer subsidies it has received, ardent support from the Milwaukee area, or the union's historic willingness to cooperate with management.
Virtually the entire discussion has been framed in terms seemingly crafted by Harley: Are the workers willing to be sensible and provide the $54 million that Harley needs to "remain completive? Or are they intent on committing suicide and bringing down Milwaukee with them?"
HARLEY'S FRAME: WORKERS VS. COMMUNITY
This systematic kind of "framing" issues in the public mind—pitting "selfish" union members against the community—actually dates back at least to the late 1930s. That's when corporations based in New York's Mohawk Valley, led by Remington Rand, recognized that they needed allies in the community if they were to turn back the rising tide of labor organizing.
The corporations employed what came to be known as the "Mohawk Valley Formula" which means, fundamentally, "employer mobilization of the public," as explained in Alex Carey's classic book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty."
Following the formula, the public was to be mobilized through systematic repetition of anti-union messages via every medium available: radio shows, billboard ads, planted news articles, films, and speakers' bureaus. Through these various media, corporate leaders worked at painting unions as an alien, intrusive, and obstructive force in community life..
The propaganda was specifically aimed at turning the sentiment of the general public and community "influentials"—elected officials, the clergy, leaders of charitable groups—against unions.
While World War II interrupted the anti-union backlash, it soon resumed immediately afterward with a new urgency and vastly more corporate spending. The big scare for business: much of the working class was rejecting "the business definition of the American way" in favor of "equal rights, industrial democracy, economic equality, and social justice," as Elizabeth Fines-Wolf wrote in Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism 1945-60.
LESSON: IF LABOR DOESN'T LINE UP ALLIES, CORPORATIONS WILL
Flash forward to Milwaukee in 2010, and we again see the same strategy of "employer mobilization of the public" at work. The lesson for labor should be very clear.
If the labor movement fails to enlist the public on our side in support of economic justice, we can definitely count on corporations working to convince the public that unions are somehow responsible whenever corporations decide to abandon the workers and community that made them prosper.
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Comments
Unfortunatley the USW along with the UAW made huge concessions in the 80’s and we all know what they got in return! Bethlehen, U.S. Steel, ARMCO shut most of their plants down. GM,Ford, Chrysler all cut wages, benefits and still moved factories to Mexico, Africa and elsewhere!
Unless the labor movement begins building support in their respective communities, the same will occur with Harley-Davidson.
At present many people are angry at the corporations due to their unquenchable greed. This anger must be directed into action in the streets, in the courtrooms, in governmental hearings, anywhere we can stir up the dust!
In the midst of economic crisis, labor cannot afford to be passive.
Dear Chicano Wobbly:
I could not agree with you more. At a point in the early 1970’s when the relocation of jobs to the South and Mexico was beginning in Milwaukee, only the UE and a couple ilocals from other unions worked to raise awareness and build a coalition.
But major union organizations steered clear of the coalition, probably out of the belief that they had the power to stop relocations at the bargaining table.
But as corporations launched an all-out class war in the later 1970’s, labor lost more and more members, and its clout at the bargaining table was trumped by management’s very real threat of relocating more jobs.
During the 1980’s, labor largely failed to contest plant closings at the local level (In Racine, Wis., our local coalition of labor, clergy, and community groups like the NAACP stopped four of them in 1982, and helped increase severance packages in other situations.) During this same period, labor generally neglected to challenge management’s power to move jobs, and also got very little in return for the concessions it granted.
In the present era, labor’s density in the private sector has been diminished to about the same level it had in North Carolina in 1980. But nonetheless, labor still has a large presence in many factory towns where it should concentrated its energies in fighting pant closing and foreclosures.
Labor cannot allow itself to become just another Washington-based lobbying group, while neglecting to draw upon the energy and creativity of its 15 million members to wield power—often through strategically-selected disruptive protests. In solidarity, Roger Bybee
Harley-Davidson has behaved very badly in recent years, trying to whipsaw its union employees with threats of closures and relocations.
As far as I am concerned H-D is “iconic” of nothing except corporate bullying.
Free Trade? You mean the bosse’s having the freedom to exploit, abuse, & misuse workers here and abroad?
It never ceases to amaze me how some people are so callous, so ignorant and completely out of touch with their fellow man. The evil of Capitalism teaches us that it has not worked for the working class, never has and never will. Perhaps at the MBA classes taught at Harvard, Yale and other institutions of ignorance, the evils of capitalism are eagerly taught and believed in. In my world and the world of most U.S. workers, we know better! The Good Book sums it all up very elegantly; “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Dear Faye Wong and Chicano Wobbly:
I concur very much with my amigo Chicano Wobby on this.
Let’s really examine the mantra of “free trade.”
1) FREE? Faye: Is is “free” when much of our commerce is with corporations located in dictatorships that deny the most basic freedoms to workers and other citizens?
Just think of China, its repression of labor, suppression of free press, and constant monitoring of its citizens’ e-mails and every movement via closed-circuit video camera. Is that what you mean by “free”?
Or Mexico, with its rigged elections (especially 1988 and 2006) , arrests of independent union leaders, suppression of strikes, and brutally low wages (generally $1-$2 an hour or thereabouts) a “free” society?
2) Is it “free” trade when an agreement like NAFTA is 2,000 pages long because it carves out special privileges, subsidies, and protections for favored US industries like agri-business?
As a result, the new influx of government-subsidized corn from US agri-business drove an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million Mexican corn farmers off the land. Many of the displaced farmers had to become economic refugees to the US.
3) TRADE? Is it really trade when 60% of the good imported into the US from China come from primarily US-owned or other foreign operations? Or when up to 72% of trade with Mexico is “intra-firm transfers”—like GE sending machinery and parts to Mexico and then sending finished products back into the US market?
Faye, I’d like to see if you still hold your faith in free trade after really examining the actual situation. On piece you might try is my article on the NY Times and Free Trade Fundamentalism at http://www.zcommunications.org/free-trade-fundamentalism-by-roger-bybee
Many enlightened and well-educated people have a reflexive affection for free trade, but it melts away when they examine the impacts like the destruction of the US productive base and American factory towns, the polarization of income within the US and internationally, the conversion of food-growing land in the Global South to the raising of luxury products like shrimp—at great cost to the environment—while local people are starving, and the vicious maltreatment of workers, especially young women, in sweatshops.
Thanks for writing. Let’s maintain our dialogue. Best, Roger
I think the Machinists showed a lot of courage when they went on strike against Harley in 2007 (at the York, Penn. plant) over the issue of higher health care rates. Although they didn’t “win” the strike, they showed that the union had some strength and determination.
Dear Bruce:
Harley-Davidson, like the rest of Corporate America, has done plenty of complaining about healthcare costs. General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, for example, all pay $4 an hour per worker more in the US than Canada because our neighbor to the north cut out the parasitic insurers. Yet they all bailed out of aggressively supporting a sensible “singe-payer” of “Medicare for All” plan.
As a result, healthcare costs imposed on workers remain one of the most frequent causes of strikes. But as you noted in an earlier post, it’s very hard for workers to win a traditional strike because of the way that management “whip-saws” workers in one location against each other, which flows from their strategy of setting up duplicate production sites.
In particular, it’s disgusting to see Harley exploit its image of making working-class machines while ripping off the working class in York and Milwaukee. Best, Roger Bybee