NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.
The America Diaspora is a sequel to The Chinese Century.
“There is something quaintly British about a miner’s strike,” I’d written in my daily column, after gold miners had shut down 12 mines in early August.
One of the dumbest things I ever wrote.
In South Africa a miner’s stirike a serious business, much more like its American counterparts in the early 20th century than the 1984 British struggle I alluded to. Miners have an incredibly hard life. In fact they are easily replaced, so wages are traditionally very low. Yet the value of the gold being pulled from the ground is incredibly high. In the wake of America’s economic collapse gold prices had briefly touched $1,000/ounce a few times before falling back. But even its low for the year was twice what its high was in 2002.
So Anglo-American could afford to be generous. I didn’t have much sympathy for their arguments that profits must stay high to attract capital.
But I badly misread public opinion, which was surprisingly strong on behalf of the managers. The union was traditionally seen as communist, even Communist. It had been. Its role in the struggle had been as the movement’s strong left hand. But with bottom rail on top, bashing that left hand was how Presidents proved their bonafides to Wall Street.
Still, Wall Street was in Johannesburg now. I ticked over to my ECN screen for Anglo-American, the bell cow for the mining industry. It was up. I linked it to a box next to my column and watched it for a while. It was rising.
Suddenly my phone rang. “This is Dana Blankenhorn,” I said, accenting the first word as I’d done for 20 years, and forgetting that, here, my face and voice were famous.
“Andy Stern,” said the voice in reply. I searched my memory. He said it like I should know it. “Mine Workers’ Service Organization,” he added.
THAT Andy Stern. Another American.
Stern was a non-acquaintance from my days blogging for Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign. Stern had been head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the first labor leader to endorse our good doctor. Word was he was on one of the Bush Administration’s little lists.
“This is a different kind of labor struggle, Dana,” Stern said smoothly. “We have nothing against the company, or its right to make a profit. We just want to share in the profit, when those profits are extraordinary.”
“I haven’t read anything about that,” I said.
“That’s because we’re not yet the recognized union,” Stern said. “We are, officially, a service organization affiliated with the union, providing management assistance in spending union funds under contract. But I have also become a trusted advisor, and I’m telling you, off the record, that an accord can be reached if the two sides show a little imagination.”
I started typing. “What kind of accord are you imagining” I asked. “And are you a source or an advisor today?”
“Source. You’ve got to protect the name,” Stern said. “I’m trusting you, as an American journalist, to protect my name.”
“On Matthew Taylor’s honor,” I said, mentioning the Time journalist “shot while trying to escape” from Guantanamo a few months earlier, after promising to keep an Administration source secret and failing.
“We are looking for a profit-sharing endowment that kicks in after a certain rate, a sort of excise tax on pre-tax earnings that flows, not to the workers, but into a fund for their benefit. The fund will go to schools, to small loans, and to other economic development work on behalf of miner families.
“These guys are all working on behalf of big families. Even when they don’t have a lot of kids themselves, they all have a lot of relatives. They are always sending a lot home. With the fund, which only brings in money when profits are high, as now, they may not have to send as much home. They may be able to spend more in their mining communities. And we want to give them useful places to spend that money, not booze and whores but broadband and restaurants. The miners want to become the heart of a self-sustaining middle class for southern Africa, all of southern Africa. And this agreement can become a model.”
“So when profits don’t meet the threshold no money goes into the fund. What is to stop the companies from trying to hide the profits?” I asked.
“We have a board nominee for them, someone you might know. Jim Turley.”
The name wasn’t immediately familiar. “Rice ’77,” said Stern. “Your class, if I recall. Former CEO of Ernst & Young. Quit after it came out he’d given the maximum to John Kerry.”
“He did?” I had only seen Jim once since we graduated, at our 25th reunion, and he hadn’t struck me as either liberal or a risk taker.
“Well, he didn’t exactly quit,” Stern continued. “He just stepped aside from the chairmanship to become an international development director, out of London. Africa’s part of his beat. He’s got a place over in Cape Town. I met him on the plane coming down.”
“Small world,” I said.
Thus I was able to run strikethroughs through kill that stupid column, with the stupid allusion to England, and offer what I called a modest proposal, one I’d supposedly run by a source close to the union chiefs.
"I know an honest man," it began, "from Texas…"