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By David Moberg
Chicago
Outside a southwest neighborhood branch of Harris Bank, three men passed around a bulbous cup with a metal straw, pouring hot water into the mass of green herbs and sipping maté, a Uruguayan drink. They were standing in front of this bank, far from home, to provide support for a thousand workers in Iowa and Mississippi who have been fighting for two years against a boss with an oversized ego, a deep-seated hostility to unions and a bottom-feeder style of management - Maurice "Morry" Taylor, CEO of Titan International, one of the world's leading manufacturers of agricultural and off-road tires and wheels. It was an odd sight, but it reflected an increasingly common reality:
As workers and their unions develop more sophisticated ways to combat intransigent employers, their alliances and targets become ever more wide-ranging. As the maté drinkers sought shelter from the chilly, mid-May drizzle, they were joined by leaders of neighborhood and religious groups and local politicians, all protesting Harris Bank's poor record of lending to homeowners and small businesses in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods - as well as the bank's extension of $175 million in credit to Titan. The money enabled Taylor - who ran a flamboyant vanity campaign for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination - to drag out his fight with Steelworkers at Titan tire plants in Des Moines, Iowa and Natchez, Mississippi.
David Moberg is a senior editor of In These Times.
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In These Times ©
2000
Vol. 24, No. 15 |