Episodes
Saturday Sep 27, 2014
Alternative Visions - Corporate Strategy Part II - 09/27/14
Saturday Sep 27, 2014
Saturday Sep 27, 2014
Jack Rasmus revisits and continues the discussion of the evolution and consequences of Corporate Strategies introduced in the late 1970s-early 1980s (sometimes called Neoliberalism) that continue to evolve and intensify today. In Part II of the discussion on Corporate Strategy in America (for Part 1 see the Alternative Visions show two weeks ago), Jack explains how the destruction of union labor membership since 1980 has also resulted in the near-collapse of collective bargaining as a means workers and unions to raise their wages and standard of living. The transformation of collective bargaining from a tool to benefit Labor to a tool that increasingly benefits management and corporations is explained. The elimination of National Bargaining and Pattern Bargaining in the 1960s-early 1970s and its replacement with Concessions Bargaining—first wages and then benefits— is traced. Unions’ ineffective strategic response to concessions bargaining in the 1990s with the introduction of Maintenance of Benefits Bargaining (MOB)--and the imminent demise of MOB today as corporate America and politicians together cooperate to phase out negotiated pensions and employer health coverage-- is described. The destruction of union membership ranks (Part 1 show) and the ‘inversion’ and destruction of collective bargaining (Part 2 show today) are one and the same event, Rasmus explains, both products of the corporate offensive launched in the 1970s that continues to evolve and gain momentum today. With MOB at a dead end, and concessions bargaining expanding and deepening in the 21st century, workers and unions will have to devise a new approach and strategy to resurrect collective bargaining, Rasmus argues.’ (In Part 3 future show, the political dimensions of the Corporate Strategy will be discussed, as well as Union Labor’s failed political counter strategy response since the 1970s).
Saturday Sep 20, 2014
Saturday Sep 20, 2014
Jack Rasmus welcomes environmental activists, Michael Rubin and Glenn Turner, to discuss tomorrow’s major environment movement event, the demonstration in New York City and elsewhere in the USA (and globally) advocating the need for reducing global green house gas emissions to avoid a coming global environmental catastrophe. Jack and guests discuss the significance and the demands of the Sept. 21 events. Jack challenges guests to clarify the demands and future strategic objectives of the USA environmental movement. What comes next, after Sunday? Will the many environmental groups continue to unify or continue after Sunday to lead their separate struggles, only occasionally coming together for demonstrations that make no specific demands for change on the system. Will they unite with other groups and forces outside the environmental community—i.e. unions, community and ethnic groups, student organizations, religious organizations, forming a ‘united front’ to confront the destruction of the environment and ultimately the economy as well? Listen to the lively discussion, as Jack plays ‘devils advocate’ challenging environmental activists to evolve to a higher level of political action.
Saturday Sep 06, 2014
Alternative Visions – Corporate Strategy in America – 09/06/14
Saturday Sep 06, 2014
Saturday Sep 06, 2014
Host, Jack Rasmus, discusses the origins and evolution of Corporate Strategy in the USA since the 1970s and explains how that has played a central role in gutting union membership, undermining collective bargaining, and all but negating effective union political action. Jack describes the collapse of union membership and the net loss of 20 million potential union members since 1980, how corporations transformed collective bargaining from a means for workers to improve wages and benefits to a tool for taking away wages and benefits, and how union labor political action has collapsed into a policy of little more than providing money handouts to Democrats. Jack explains how the failure of union strategy for organizing, bargaining, and political action is in large part due to the corresponding successes of corporate strategies that originated and began in the 1970s. Union strategic failures thus cannot be separated from Corporate strategic successes; they are both sides of the same coin. Rasmus describes in detail how Corporate America in the 1970s reorganized and restructured itself to enable new strategies that took on the building trades unions, the teamsters union, and manufacturing unions, gutted their membership ranks, and effectively destroyed their union national, regional, and pattern bargaining power within a decade—by multiple means including double breasted operations, NLRB rule changes, industry deregulation, free trade, corporate tax incentives promoting offshoring & runaway shops, rise of tens of millions of temp workers and independent contractors not allowed to unionize, intensified open shop drives, and today’s de-unionizing of public employment, and other measures. Today’s economic (and increasingly political) class war in America, Rasmus explains, has its roots in corporate strategies formed in the 1970s, that continue to evolve and gain momentum today. Rasmus concludes new, more effective union strategies will have to be accompanied by fundamental reorganization and restructuring of American Unions—just as had occurred in US history before.