Open thread for night owls: On profit-taking and yellow dogs

At Dissident Voice, David Macaray writes On Profit-Taking and Yellow Dogs:

With Labor Day weekend upon us, it's appropriate we take a moment and consider the status of the American worker.  Given the unemployment figures, the devastating export of American jobs to foreign countries, and, accordingly, the paucity of full-time jobs that offer decent pay and good benefits, it's not a very encouraging picture.  In fact, it's fairly bleak.

One doesn't have to be a hardcore cynic to ask why we continue to celebrate Labor Day.  Clearly, the patriotic aspect of this once-exalted holiday is long gone.  No one is interested in glorifying the American worker'not John Q. Public, not the beleaguered workers themselves, and certainly not the companies employing them.  In truth, the only purpose Labor Day now serves is providing the last 3-day weekend of summer.

David Macaray Not surprisingly, U.S. companies continue to thrive.  In November, 2010 (in the midst of a debilitating recession), the Department of Commerce reported that U.S. companies just had their best quarter . . . ever.   That statement bears repeating.  U.S. companies had their best quarter ever.  Businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, which is the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted figures) since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago.

That statistic tends to confuse people.  They naturally assume that when you have one of the worst recessions in American history, one that followed the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression, the fallout is going to affect everyone, not just the people on the bottom'the ones who lost their jobs or their homes or had their pay cut'but America's corporations as well.  But that didn't happen.

Corporate America is doing amazingly well.  And when you take a moment to consider it, you realize why.  They have not only laid off millions of workers, they have cut or squeezed the wages of those who remained.  That represents an enormous, unprecedented savings in overhead.  With skeletal, understaffed, underpaid workforces looking just to hang on because they're afraid of losing their jobs, these businesses are flush.  The only thing they have left to bitch about is their taxes, which they do non-stop.

But just when you thought things couldn't sink any lower, there are reports that some of these employers are engaging in the same anti-union mischief that was done way back in the 1870s and 1880s.  American companies are now asking their non-union employees to sign documents promising that they will never join a labor union.

Such agreements, prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were called 'yellow dog contracts,' and signing one was a condition of employment.  They wouldn't hire you unless you signed it.  And if you signed a yellow dog contract, and were caught trying to organize or join a union, you could be fired on the spot.  They played rough in those days.  They hated unions and did anything in their power'legal or illegal'to keep them out.

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