Matt, excellent piece.  

I love the metaphor of "economic violence" and think it is something that we need to build upon and reinforce going forward.

I have a close friend in the SEIU also talked about the globalization of workers efforts for economic fairness and justice as the perfect and inevitable countermove to corporate globalization to evade it.

Thanks for your continued commitment to and insights on this topic.

waiting for my job to be outsourced. I'll go from a very good salary to half - if I'm lucky. That will surely be good for the economy. of IBM.

And these poor moral values are so insidious, if we work for a corporation, you have to internalize them to fit into the culture. You have to talk about tax cuts like it's some kind of panacea. You have to pretend that homeless people are lazy and don't want to work. You have to treat any concept that would favor workers against the "owners" as purely socialist and incompatible with the culture.

What I wonder is when management goes back on agreements why the union can't sue for Breach of Contract.

Is that something that's taken care of in agreements? Just de rigueur as it were?

simple fact is that over 80% of Americas taxes are now paid by individual taxpayers, less than 12% paid by corporations.

about 20 years ago or so it was 40% corporations, 60% individual taxpayers.

Looking over the financials, Keegan and his banks seem to be playing a questionable game.  Goodyear has made small profits the last two years, totalling less than half what they lost in 2003.  At the current rate, it will take six years of company profits just to pay off the amount they borrowed to fund the strike.  Stupid.

This is a stagnant market.  In fact, Goodyear's unit sales rose a measly 1.4% in 2005.  Increased sales of 7% relied mainly on the ability to charge more for a tire.  Whether that was a cause for the increase, Goodyear raised selling and general administration costs by $500 million in 2004 and kept them up in 2005.  So the cutbacks from the workers go to pay for what? TV ads and exec salaries, I would guess.

Keegan's background is uninspiring.  He's a marketing and finance guy with degrees from a third rate college and a second rate grad school.  His time has been spent mostly in marketing at Kodak.  So he screws up manufacturing without a manufacturing background.  His earlier efforts to promote "savings" ventures are prominently mentioned in the annual report but seem to have produced chump change in cost cuts.  He is also creating an extremely adversarial relationship with his own workers and their unions that is likely to get personal.  I've seen this at a slew of companies like Bethlehem Strrl and Eastern Airlines that wound up going belly up.

The best move may be to drive down the stock prices of companies that pull this crap.  That, even in the short term, would stop this in its tracks.  Ethicalutual funds, folks?

I think the captains of industry have forgotten what we had BEFORE the unions were a prominent force.  They called them the "dangerous classes".  During the Civil War draft riots in New York, they had Gatling guns stationed on top of the New York Stock Exchange to keep these people at bay.  No one was safe in the entire city.  Because of the exploitation of workers, they felt no loyalty or even pity for the ruling elites.  They went into their homes and looted them, including some of the most famous industrialists of the time.  In those days, the dynamiting of factories was a common event.  Pitched street battles took place.  In later years a transportation system was improved to allow people to live on cheaper land, making housing more affordable and to eliminate tenements and unhealthy living situations.  Unions afforded a decent wage, so people had a stake in their society and hope for the future.  The climate of fear the elites used to live in, the fear of the unwashed masses rioting and pillaging, gradually subsided.

I am not saying that time will come again.  But if you sever the ties that bind us together, you will introduce social instability.  If you have nothing to lose, you will vote for something that will change your situation.  If you have nothing to lose, you are encouraging the rise of worker radicalism once again.  

It gets worse, if you take the long haul, this kind of situation is unsustainable.  The United States cannot remain a superpower if we don't make anything.  Pushing around piles of money is not a recipe for success.  We cannot live off of the financial industry.  If it comes to that, the Chinese, the Europeans and other countries will take their yearly cut of our capital and we will start to diminish as our investments are consumed and we will begin to weaken.  Over time we may lose our ability to project power globally.  If we lose our status as a superpower, our economic house of cards will collapse.  We will have difficulty refinancing our debt, and our leverage on other countries will be nil.  In addition, there will be a huge power vacuum (much like what has happened when the Soviets collapsed) leading to global instability which is a terrible environment for economic growth because people are hesitant to invest.

The lack of loyalty of these American companies will not only lead to their destruction, but also that of the current economic order.  There is no point in having a million dollars if the dollar is worthless.  We will all live in the same shithole if we keep this up.

Unfortunately I have to run and can't more than scan this.  Deserves study and thought.

But would also like to know progressive labor's midterm hope list in terms of federal regulatory changes, etc., though it might have to wait on a new president.

Could connect with/be integrated with trade, tariff changes on the one hand and financial "services" regulation and anti-trust issues on the other.

A platform to run on?  Corporate elite would go crazy.

Combine with single payer health and corporate America could be split (Insurance companies vs the rest who could dump health care costs), but the corporatist would be terrified with all the other issues that would be raised.

Sorry this is so Delphic and off the top of my head.

If the unions want to be around in ten years they need to band together NOW. Goodyear can be a great example
1. Truckers, the union one's, stop hauling the product refuse the load 2.UAW tell your workers not to touch the tires let the auto maker go to someone else for tires 3. America wake up stop buying the product 4. Picket auto dealers who sell cars with Goodyear tires. 5. Operating engineers stop using Goodyear. 6. NASCAR fans let them know you do not want jobs sent overseas
This how you save jobs. This how you force a CEO out of his job. This how you make America strong.
 

Goodyear is one of the candidates in the Jobs with Justice "Grinch of the Year" contest to determine the national figure who has done the most harm to working families this year.  You can cast your vote at http://www.jwj.org/grinch.  Please spread the word!