On July 19, a federal judge overturned a Maryland law that would have required the capitalist giant Wal-Mart to spend eight percent of its payroll on health care for employees. Activists worked hard to pass the law in January 2006, but U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz said last Wednesday that the company “faces threatened injury” from it. He found that the law violated a federal law that exempts multi-state corporations from having to comply with a patchwork of various health benefit statutes.
The “Wal-Mart law” was passed—over the governor’s veto—after community members, labor unions and progressive
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The Maryland law was an opening salvo in an attempt by the AFL-CIO and others, to use the legislative process to force corporations to provide healthcare for employees. Organized labor has been trying to organize Wal-Mart’s workers for at least a decade, always meeting a coordinated, massively-funded union busting campaign. They hoped to use this law as an issue to diminish Wal-Mart’s nearly unchecked corporate power. After the “Wal-Mart law” passed, these groups and others took their cause to other states. But the federal court case is a big setback to this strategy.
Around 45 million people in the United States lack health care coverage. Many tens of millions more, working at places like Wal-Mart, pay outrageously high amounts to maintain coverage.
As America’s largest retail outlet and one of the world’s largest corporations, Wal-Mart offers meager employee benefits and low wages. When they move their superstores into urban areas, hundreds of people gain employment, but the net affect is that wages in the entire surrounding area are driven down. It’s bad for workers and the small capitalists in the region. Smaller retailers and shop owners have difficulty competing with Wal-Mart for business.
Courts and corporations on the same side
The mere fact that the “Wal-Mart law” was able to pass shows that a significant portion of Maryland’s workers are fed up with the exploitation and unaccountability of a corporation like Wal-Mart. It’s a positive sign. The legislative reform was a step in the right direction.
When elected representatives, feeling the pressure of the unions, pass legislation that supports workers against capitalist corporations, then the corporations turn to the courts to overturn the decision. This is a basic violation of genuine democracy, but a clear example of the meaning of bourgeois democracy.
In the United States, everyone is taught from the earliest age that we live in a democracy. But revolutionary socialists point out that it is a class-based democracy. Its essential “freedom” is the freedom of the bosses to exploit labor, “free” from any interference. This is what is meant, in the jargon of the mass media, as the so-called “free market.”
Workers are allowed to vote for the politicians who will oppress them for the next four years. But if those same politicians, under the pressure of union organizing, depart from their mission of serving the interests of big business and adopt laws that actually benefit the workers, those same laws are overturned by capitalist judges—99 percent of whom are nothing more than corporate attorneys wearing black gowns. Capitalist democracy is fundamentally a form of political rule for private property interests. It’s only democratic in the narrowest, most limited sense of the word.
In a land where “democracy” supposedly reigns, workers at Wal-Mart, the consumers—mostly workers—who regularly shop there, and the working class in general have no control over how Wal-Mart behaves. There is no mechanism within the existing “democratic” system to control profits are realized or used. This is the reality of life under capitalism. Corporations can do what they like with near impunity.
The overturning of the “Wal-Mart law” also demonstrates the limits of traditional lobbying. What can make a difference is the class struggle. Seventy years ago Ford Motors, General Motors and US Steel wielded the same power as Wal-Mart does today. They were mega-corporations who used every legal and illegal method to smash unions and any attempt at union organizing.
It was only the heroic sitdown strikes of 1935-37, where workers seized the factories themselves, which showed the limits of corporate power. That’s how these giant corporations were unionized and how workers won wage increases and health care benefits and pensions. Because of the mass struggle of workers, the politicians and the courts in the 1930s validated the “democratic right” of workers to unionize.
Revolutionary socialists say we must have fighting unions. Millions of workers want to be organized. Those workers who are already unionized, but are facing huge cutbacks and give-backs, desperately want to hold onto to their wages, health care benefits and pensions. These struggles can be victorious, but only if the unions face reality and organize truly mass struggles. This is extremely difficult, but it can and will happen.
Pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the Democratic Party won’t do the trick. The overturning by the courts of the Maryland “Wal-Mart law” is proof positive that the answer lays elsewhere. The working class has to scare the hell out of the capitalist establishment with fierce, militant struggle if we want to hold onto the gains from the past, or to unionize Wal-Mart or to win any new victories.
