Forum: Boss-bashing grows as a labor technique

As employees and nearly everyone else celebrate Labor Day, workers are sharpening a new tactic in management-labor battles for supremacy in the workplace: boss-bashing.

The technique has been around in one form or another for a while, but lately has seen increasing regularity and ferocity. It consists of publicly deriding top management in an attempt to influence public opinion and, ultimately, force the boss' departure.

This enhanced boss-bashing occurs as labor unions continue to see their memberships drop, from a high of about one-third of the private sector a couple of generations ago to about 8 percent of all private-sector workers today.

The reasons for this diminution have been well documented. They include the changing nature of the workforce, with the demise of heavy industry and its replacement by lighter, high-tech enterprises; and the proliferation of in-home, off-site, and outsourced employees. Adverse actions by legislative bodies, administrative agencies and the courts have also contributed to the decline in potency of organized labor.

While learning to live with diminished clout, workers are responding in other ways. The boss-bashing that has become a central feature of management-labor relations has been particularly prevalent in Minnesota.

The many imbroglios engaged in by Northwest Airlines, which has a long history of adverse employee relations, during its recent encounter with bankruptcy stirred numerous outcries by the carrier's employees. After the bankruptcy, both the pilots and the flight attendants, the two chief "whipping posts" of the airline while in bankruptcy, decried the $26 million-plus in stock-based bonuses given to company CEO Doug Steenland.

That was followed in short order by other pilots publicly bashing Paul Foley, the CEO of MAIR Holdings Inc., the former parent company of Mesaba Airlines, which was absorbed by Northwest during the bankruptcy. The rhetoric they used to describe his $550,000 bonus was unusually harsh. The chairman of the pilots union at the airline called him a "leech" who was the "poster child for obscene executive compensation."

A somewhat less vitriolic but nonetheless somber tone was expressed by the staff at this newspaper at the actions of the publisher, Par Ridder, in connection with his departure from the St. Paul Pioneer Press to become publisher of the Star Tribune in March. Ridder's departure ignited a legal battle when the Pioneer Press owner alleged violation of a noncompete agreement and the taking of Pioneer Press financial data and computer equipment. Members of the union representing most of the journalists at the Star Tribune overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling for Ridder's resignation.

Reporters at the Wall Street Journal staged a daylong walkout to protest the purchase of the Dow Jones publication by tabloid impresario Rupert Murdoch, whom they fear will convert their newspaper to a partisan political sideshow now that he has gained control of the venerable publication.

Talk-show host Don Imus was kicked off of radio and TV after he made disparaging racial and gender comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, many of whom are African-American. The outcry was instigated, in large part, by objections voiced by other employees of his cable TV sponsor, MSNBC. This action paved the way for his ouster, although he recently received a big payout and now seems to be on the verge of returning to the airwaves with other outlets.

These vocal remonstrations by employees are more intense than ever, but are not really that novel. They spring from a long history of employees publicly bashing their bosses in attempts to influence the public. In the early 19th century, the Luddites in England protested an early form of automation at the dawn of the age of the Industrial Revolution by busting new textile machinery that they feared would jeopardize their jobs.

Several years later, a new word came into the lexicon when protesting Irish farmers urged the public not to deal with Charles Boycott, an agent of their landlord whom they felt was unscrupulous and unfair. Their actions spawned the term "boycott," a practice frequently used by labor unions and others to pressure employers to change policies deemed to be antiworker.

Boss-bashing is likely to intensify as working people, whether in labor unions or not, seek ways to preserve and improve their rights, benefits and opportunities in the American enterprise system. If the conditions workers perceive to be inequitable persist, this Labor Day is likely to mark a surge in the boss-bashing syndrome.