From: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
Newsgroups: alt.amateur-comp,sci.econ,soc.culture.usa,alt.activism
Subject: Re: The Real Voice of Adam Smith
Date: 5 Oct 1992 19:09:12 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben)
NNTP-Posting-Host: hela.ins.cwru.edu



In a previous article, MEDELMA@cms.cc.wayne.edu (Michael Edelman) says:

>In article <1a94hkINN6lk@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
>au329@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ronda Hauben) writes:
> 
>>     [quoting Smith]
>>  "The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which
>>   comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with
>>   great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after
>>   having been long and carefully examined, not only with the
>>   most scupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.
>>
>>Smith explains why he says this:
>>
>>  "It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never
>>   exactly the same with that of the public, who have
>>   generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress
>>   the public, and who accordingly have, upon many
>>   occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
>>     Wealth of Nations (Modern Libary Edition) p. 250
>>
> 
>What Smith is talking about here is the government acting in a way
>so as to interfere with a free market. His interest in writing The Wealth

If you read the above it says that employers CANNOT be trusted to
propose legislation in favor of the society.

Smith is NOT talking about interfering with the FREE MARKET here.

He is acknowledging the need for LEGISLATION which is opposite to
any free market.

And he is saying what class can be trusted to have the same interest
as the public or social interest with regard to legislation.

It is interesting that the MYTH about Adam Smith is so pervasive
that when one looks at what he actually says one is told that that
is a mistake - that the myth
is what is real!


>of Nations was to explain why the contemporary Mercantilist theory was

No Adam Smith didn't write Wealth of Nations to comment about
Mercantilism.  He had planned to dedicate the book to Quesnay had
Quesnay lived. Quesnay was a French Physiocrat - The French Physiocrats
were the first school of scientific economics.

Smith clarifies that he is building on the work of the Physiocrats and
that he had great respect for their work.

Thus it was not that he was writing his book in opposition to something
as its main aspect, but rather to clarify the principles of scientific
economics that had been developed up to his time.

>insufficient to explain the wealth of Holland. He realized in a way that was

Only the fourth book takes up the different theories that existed and
critiques them.

>not formalized until the latter twientieth century that monopolies cannot
>exist without government intervention, and that some sought the intervention
>of the state to create these monopolies for personal interest.

Smith was certainly against corporate monopolies and he condemns them -
there were such monopolies in his time which he discussed at the end of
his book. But today the so called "laissez faire philosophy" of Smith
is being used to defend just the kind of corporate monopolies that
he condemned.

> 
>>Smith, on the contrary, maintains, that workers have the SAME INTEREST
>>as the public and thus his interests should be supported by the public.
>>Smith writes:
>>
>>  "The interest of the second order, that of those who live by wages,
>>   is ...strictly connected with the interest of the society."
>>               (Ibid., p. 249)
>>
>>So Smith differentiates between those class interests which benefit
>>the public and those which don't and he finds that the interests of
>>workers benefit the public and the interests of employers most often
>>don't.
> 
>I don't think so. You're trying to rephrase Smith into endorsing a Ricardian
>view he did not subscribe to.
>>>
I'm not rephrasing Smith. Above is what he said. The point is that he
has been used to represent something very different from what his work
was written to establish.

>>
>>The National Labor Relations Act was not, as far as I understand it,
>>a minimizing of government interference, though that is the
>>current trend of nonenforcement of the law that it carries out.
>>To the contrary, it was the government interfering in the right of
>>employers to create company unions, to pay the union dues of their
>>workers, etc.
>>
>>Such government interference is very much needed or it is impossible
>>for workers to have UNIONS that are other than COMPANY UNIONS.
> 
>Untrue. The UAW was organized without government intervention; perhaps

This is contrary to the record of the history of the UAW. The UAW
became possible when the Wagner Act was being codified into law.

UAW members I know told me that they kept their eye on what was
happening in Congress at the time. They felt that LaFollette's
investigations were a sign that they would have some of the support they
need to create the UAW.

Also, some of the sitdowners went to Washington in 1936 and testified at
the LaFollette Committee hearings in Congress about the spies in their
unions that were making it impossible to have independent unions.
Also employers were forming COMPANY UNIONS which they dominated through
verious means such as paying the union dues of their workers.

All of this made it impossible for workers to have unions that were 
independent of the employers. 

It was only when Congress was willing to act with regard to stopping
these pratices and regulating employers - that the CIO form of 
democratic unions became possible.

>in spite of it. Ford, via influence through corrupt local government,
>wielded a tremendous amount of quasi-governmental power, but could not
>prevent the UAW from organizing his plants.

No Ford was not organized until 1941. It took a favorable decision in
an NLRB case to make it possible to organize Ford. 
>>
>>When I worked at Ford, my union dues was paid by the employer. I
>>took the case to the NLRB and to the State equivalent at the
>>Michigan Dept of Labor. The National Labor Relations Act and the
>>state equivalents forbid the employer from paying the union dues
>>of their workers. This is a significant and important form of
>>government regulations. (I was not allowed to pay my own union
>>dues and thus I was not allowed to have a union that was other
>>than a company union.) The NLRB found an excuse NOT to enforce
>>the law. The case has been at the State level (with the Michigan
>>Department of Labor) since 1986 and I haven't yet gotten a decision
>>from them.
> 
>You have a conceptual mioosunderstanding. Saying that Ford paid your
>dues is like saying Ford paid your income taxes. They distributed money
>to you, some of which was redistributed to other agencies. The union dues

No the union dues was paid for me - it was not part of my wages.
It was paid as a pay off to my union so I wouldn't have a legitimate
union. It was an illegal transfer of money from the employer to 
the union - exactly the kind of payoff forbidden by the NLRA when
it was orginally passed. It was financial domination of the union by
the employer. (It wasn't checkoff where part of my wages were sent to
my employer. It was a payoff by the employer.)

>were paid directly to the union because the unions in Michigan have privileges
>that go far beyond those in most other states. We have "Union Shop" laws
>in which employees can be coerced into paying dues even if they choose not to
>belong to a union.

But this was not a question of part of my wages going for union dues.
This was financial domination, not checkoff - the union wouldn't take my
money and I wasn't allowed to have it deductedfrom my wages because it
was a payoff. This was admitted in both a court case and in a case at 
the State Labor Baord (the Michigan Employment Relations Commission)
and even though it is firmly forbidden, it is now five years later and I
have been thrown out of work, but no government agency yet seems willing
to enforce the law when it comes to a large company like Ford. 
> 
>What you experienced was not undue excercise of power by Ford, but by the UAW.
>>
No Ford made clear that they wanted this to go on - that they would not
follow the law. I appealed the NLRB ruling. Until the NLRB dismissed the
case for lack of jurisdiction Ford just hassled me and the UAW members
in the programming classes by cutting out classes, not advertising
classes and then cancelling them, putting BASIC and PASCAL classes in
the same room at the same time, etc.

But once the NLRB dismissed the appeal - then Ford wrote a new contract
which left the computer programming classes out of the contract.

So there were direct time correlations between the action by the NLRB
and Ford's ending of the classes. Supposedly this is forbidden under
NLRB law - if one goes to the NLRB one is not supposed to suffer any
penalty. But there was direct retaliation and the NLRB would do 
nothing about it - hence it had no regard for the integrity of its
own law.

>>But the point is that GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE IS NEEDED FOR WORKERS
>>TO BE ABLE TO HAVE UNIONS.
> 
>Again, nonsense. The historical records says otherwise. However, it is true

What historical record are you referring to? Why don't you give any
details? 

The historical record says quite the opposite - the LaFollette 
Committee Hearings which numbered in the hundreds of thousands of
pages showed the elaborate spy operations that most large corporations
had in place to prevent their workers from joining unions in the 1930's.

>that government intervention has been used to force unionization in some
>instances where the majority of the workers did not wish to be represented
>by a given union.
> 
I agree that workers should have the right to be in VOLUNTARY not
mandatory unions. The Flint Sit Down Strikers believed that 
when workers were forced to pay union dues - that they lost the right
to a union of their choice.

>>The relationship between employers and employees is not equal.
>>The employer can threaten workers and deprive them of their
>>livelihood if they want to stop them from joining unions.
> 
>And a union can close down a company. The company may not use any
>extra-legal means to stop them. The UAW, in particular, has greater
>privileges under the law than do the auto companies. It has a near-

I agree that the interests of the International Union (UAW) and other
unions are not the same interests as that of the workers.

That workers need to be able to have a VOICE in runnning their 
unions - that the uncensored local union press of the 1940's which
the UAW imposed censorship on at the 1951 UAW Convention - spelled
the end of workers haveing any say in their unions.

>monopoly on automotive labor in this country, across all companies.
>It has managed thereby to acheive a premium on unskilled labor estimated
>at 40-60% over similar industries.

No auto workers fought long and hard for the wages they have earned -
and they thereby set a pattern that has helped other workers and the
whole ofthe U.S. society.
> 
>>Hence the government has to INTERFERE boldly on the side of workers
>>and regulate that the employers DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE WORKER'S
>>RIGHT TO FORM AND HAVE UNIONS.
> 
>Nope. Nonsense.
>>

Yes we need the laws that were created to enable workers to have unins
to be enforced again.

Also, the need for OSHA and other health and safety regulation shows
that employers on their own cannot be supported to determine working
conditions.

The case of Holden vrs Harden in 1898 (Supreme Court) clarified that
workers and employers have different interests. That employers will
force workers to work as many hours as they can get away with at
the lowest wages and the worst and most unsafe working conditions, and
workers must do that or they will be fired unless they have something
intervening on their side. And the govt has a duty to protect the health
and welfare of  its citizens and thus to intervene on the side of
workers.


>>As long as the U.S. govt doesn't enforce these regulations (and I
>>found that they weren't enforcing them) the right of workers in the
>>U.S. to join unions is severely limited. If the worker who wants to
>>be in a union is fired once the employer realizes that the worker is
>>pro union - there is no right to be in a union. That's what happened
>>when I was at Ford. The government still hasn't imposed its force
> 
>What? Fired from an auto company for being pro-Union? When was this?
>1912? The opposite is true today. You can't work for Ford without being in

No that was 1987. Only a part of the Ford workforce are allowed to be 
in unions. The 1980's have been some of the most anti labor years
in the U.S. - the percentage of the workforce allowed to be in unions
today is lower than that of the days before the victory of the 
Flint Sit Down Strike in 1937.

>a union- a union whose monopoly is protected by the government.
> 
I agree that today's unions are not independent unions - that it
is a problem that workers must pay union dues (even though it was
a worse problem that the employer clearly violated the law and paid
mine)

The Flint UAW pioneers felt that workers should only pay union dues
voluntarily. The shop stewards would collect the money from the
workers and bring it to the International. In that way both the
workers and the shop stewards had some clout with the International.

Now the International and the companies control the purse strings
and workers even those in the UAW have very minimal union rights.

>>letting Ford know that it could not interfere with my right to be
>>in a union. The right to belong to unions thus is not available to
>>many workers at companies that act to terminate workers when they
>>try to form unions.
> 
>And Ford is supposed to be an example of this? This is a joke, right?
>>

Yes Ford is a prime example. The case is a MERC Case in Michigan
so there is a public record that all of this happened.

But also I met some of the UAW pioneers who brought the NLRB case that
helped win the right to the UAW for Ford workers. They had been fired
for union activity before the UAW intervened and ruled on their behalf.
Then they got their jobs back as a result of the favorable NLRB 
ruling. That was the kind of ruling that was required in the charges
I filed at both the NLRB and at MERC. I was still at Fords when I 
filed the charges. Agencies like the NLRB and MERC (the Michgian 
version of the NLRB) have to protect the integrity of the law by
firming stopping companies from getting rid of workers who file charges

The fact that neither govt agency acted in my case to let Ford know
that they couldn't discriminate against someone for filing charges
shows the weakness of the current law as some of the reason for the 
low number of people who are currently in unions. 

>>The thousands of pages of testimony at the LaFollette Committee hearings
>>     [...]
>>It is myth that the marketplace works - it doesn't and Adam Smith
>>clarifies that it doesn't.
>>
>This is a gross misreading of Smith, and a gross misunderstanding of the
>history of the labor movement in the US and its position and power today.

No this is the history of the U.S. labor movement - the same is
true in other countries like England - there is a strong need
for government intervention against employers on the side of workers.

>Smith was describing how the newly emerged capitalist system, in which people
>were free to trade among themselves, was superior to the earlier mercantilist
>system, in which the right to engage in a given activity was a monopoly
>strictly controlled by the Crown, and individuals were not allowed to contract
>freely for their services.

No this is a misrepresentation of Adam Smith's work. Did you read
the paper that started this thread on the Voice of Adam Smith?

If not I can send you a copy.

(I am being told I have to get off now, so I'll finish this up another 
time and post this for now)

This discussion is important and it rarely happens in the U.S. press.
             Ronda

-- 
Ronda Hauben  Amateur Computerist Newsletter
P.O. Box 4344   other email addr:ae547@yfn.ysu.edu
Dearborn, MI 48126
Newsgroups: alt.amateur-comp,sci.econ,alt.activism,talk.politics.misc