Prometheus 6   

Bringing Chaos to the Boardroom
Attack on stock value is key to union victory

SEIU and AFSCME strategists are under no illusion that they engineered the Tenet reversal by dint of their own genius. Wall Street analysts, after all, blew the big whistle on the corporation's over-valued stocks. However, the unions had their megaphones in place, and were able to "capitalize" on revelations of Tenet's frailties at the critical juncture.

The employer's weak points are no longer clustered at the plant gate or the hospital receiving room. Rather, they may be hiding in the folds of padded portfolios, or the contradictions of their business plans. "In the most global sense, the American labor movement needs to figure out how to deal with huge national and international companies if we are going to survive," said the SEIU's Larry Fox. "That old style of one-by-one [organizing] is an obsolete style, when the community hospital has been bought by a national chain."

There is a larger lesson in this story. Hospital corporations operate in the same environment as the rest of corporate America. The bubble they seek to inflate around themselves is filled with the hot air of speculation, nowadays based on relentless acquisitions and fantastic projections of future profits. Their business plans are largely wish lists, fragile documents of intentions.

Like a mad herd that never sleeps, these omnivores ravage the social and economic fabric of the nation, creating a chaos in which security is just a memory. Yet they live and breath in a world of death by headline. Each of these corporations is headed by cutthroats willing to exploit the rumored weaknesses of the other before an audience of speculators whose thumbs turn up or down faster than any crowd at a Roman Coliseum.

To bring the fight to the enemy, one must threaten what they hold most dear. An executive may not cry out when an expendable company is hit by a strike. But he writhes at the prospect of the lost acquisition, and comes unglued when moods turn sour on the only "Street" that counts in his world.

The howls of Wall Street brought chaos to Tenet's corporate boardroom, forcing the survivors to seek sanctuary in a model union contract. Yet the stock values of virtually every U.S. corporation are based on growth projections made of mist. Stock analysts are all ears. There is a great deal to talk about, in every corporate configuration. Rather than simply rail at the destruction wreaked by corporate disorder, unions and other social movements must take advantage of the inherent disorder of corporate life, itself. Then plug in the megaphones, and bring chaos to the boardroom - until they sue for peace.