A Message for My Union Brothers and Sisters

An Econ prof begs me, literally begs me, to get this word out to my union contacts:

You are killing yourselves and this country by protecting weak employees who have no business being in their jobs. You bankrupted the auto industry (just look at it! look at it! do you need further proof?) and you are harming our children. Please, please, just think about what you are doing.

Consider yourselves pled with.

Because I'm That Kind of Contrarian/Asshole

Getting Tuff Means Puffing Tuff? Major "State of Labor" article in the Major Labor-Liberal Mag

Harold Meyerson writes a big and overdue article about the State of US Labor, 2010 for the American Prospect that's well worth reading whether you are one of the OG's laborite readers, or whether you are the kind of OG reader who feels hopelessly behind on the inner world of trade unionism that we so often evoke herein. Here's a money blurb:

In 2008, unions had worked tirelessly for Obama's election in the hope that a Democratic president backed up by a heavily Democratic Congress could change the law that made organizing American workers so difficult. With the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown in the race for the vacant Senate seat from Massachusetts, however, those hopes were definitively dispelled. The failure to reform labor law almost certainly means that that the half-century decline of unions in America -- from representing nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers at the midpoint of the 20th century to representing just 7 percent today -- will continue apace. It means that the corresponding stagnation -- and periodic decline -- in the incomes of working- and middle-class Americans will likely continue as well.

But the failure of labor-law reform was hardly the only disaster that befell unions in 2009. Amid the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s, many thousands of unionized manufacturing, construction, and public employees lost their jobs, sending the percentage of unionized workers to record lows. Public support for unions also plunged, with both the Gallup and Pew polls showing a decline in public support of between 15 percent and 20 percent over the past several years. (In the Pew poll, those who had a favorable view of unions declined from 58 percent in 2007 to 41 percent in 2010.) Two developments fueled that decline: first, the travails of the Big Three automobile companies, for which one of the most prevalent explanations was the excessive labor costs that the United Auto Workers had inflicted on those companies (an explanation that relied on mislabeling the companies' obligations to their millions of retirees as existing wage costs). The second development, which bodes ill for the future of public-employee unions, is the rising backlash within a largely nonunion private sector against a still substantially unionized public sector, which has managed to retain the kinds of benefits (such as defined-benefit pensions) that were once routine in the private sector but that vanished as private-sector unions declined in size and clout.

Yep. Yep. What is to be done, though? Realistically, what is to be done?

If nothing else, the experiences of 2009 seem to have taught most unions that the Democratic Party is their good friend during campaigns when the candidates need their help but isn't always there when the time comes to reciprocate -- and that sometimes they need to play hardball with Democrats. That's the lesson of Trumka's meeting with Obama and of the unions' support for Arkansas Lt. Governor Bill Halter's primary challenge to Wal-Mart's own senator, Blanche Lincoln. Unions need a supportive government to help them organize and create a thriving working class. If that requires getting tougher with their allies than they've customarily been -- well, it's about time.

Absolutely, fine. But can "getting tough" -or getting tuff- also mean some form of participation outside of Democratic primary and caucus action? Could we get tuff somewhere besides the District of Columbia? Those who know me know that I have a large crush on the District of Columbia, but not because I think that's where labor needs to be doubling down on its tuffness. D.C. is a good place for Dischord Records to get tuff, but a good place for unions to help pass health care and work in coalition with other folks to advance a progressive course towards economic security that legitimizes social democratic government in the minds of voters. There's gotta be a venue where labor can get tuff - some workplace, say - besides the District of Columbia, and there's gotta be a day besides Election Day when democracy in general, and the workplace democracy of our union movement in particular, is made to matter.

Regrets? I'm having some right now.

I, for one, argued early and often that BHO was our best chance to have a Democratic president that might, theoretically break to the left on important issues. I was convinced that Hillary would not do this, given the track record of her husband. That may have been unfair, but it's not like she ran away from her husband's record or said things that made me (or anyone else) think that she would be a liberal president. I also firmly believe that when she decided to run as the racists' Democratic candidate, it was the obligation of all good people in the Democratic party to oppose her.

And yet here we sit today, with a Democratic president that seems determined to be just as center-right as Bill Clinton ever was. To be fair to Barack, he ran as a centrist. Maybe it was too much to hope that a candidate that had achieved little other than getting elected would do anything other than seek to be re-elected. And, unfortunately, a politician gets re-elected by being as timid as possible.

Back in the old days of computing, there was a game that let you be a South American dictator. Your goal was to stay in power until you died. I quickly figured out that the only way to achieve this goal was by caving to whichever pressure group happened to be pressuring you at the time. Teachers on strike? Give 'em a raise. American-backed corporations want a military crackdown on rebels? Crack down. The people want land reform? Nationalize! Landowners want their land back? Denationalize! You get the gist.

After a while it became mindless, but I can see where it might be entertaining to play in real life. How do you stay popular with a populace that simultaneously demands an economic recovery (solution: massive government spending, deficits, tax increases) while demanding less government spending, deficit reduction, and tax cuts? We want health care reform, but not any kind of health care reform that might one day affect what I have right now! Could be fun. Or addictive, anyway.

So here we sit today with a president determined to drive down the middle of the road only dipping to the right every now and again. Here we are, again, with we on the left realizing that it will be another eight years of getting exactly nothing of what we want. We will be told to be grateful it's not worse. That's where we live in American politics, fighting a rear-guard action against things getting worse. We were kings of the world in 1935, it's been mostly downhill since then. Our successes since then - civil rights, women's rights, gay rights - have been hard fought and achieved by the people, with the politics lagging way the hell behind.

Don't mourn, organize!

Yes. Maybe what it will take is for all of us who are looking around for a third party to get out there and get involved. No one hates saying this more than me, as I love my couch and tv, but if I can drag myself out to knock on doors for mainstream, better than the alternative Democratic candidates, then I can certainly do it for someone or some cause that might actually make a fucking difference in this world.

Fuck, looks like I have to actually do something. I'll have to get my pleasure from telling my labor union 'no' when they ask me to go knocking on doors for whatever fuckstick the Democrats nominate.

A trenchant critique of altruism

In a display of über-objectivist praxis, the Ayn Rand Institute kindly requests your donation.

OG commenter/AFT guy Martin on Arne Duncan

from 11/20/2008, back before Obama tapped this bleeping "CEO" for the Education Sec. gig:

As a Chicago Public School teacher, I get very worried when Arne Duncan is mentioned as a possible Secretary of Education. The number of CPS students who have been murdered continues to rise on his watch. The number of neighborhood public schools who are closed (and replaced by charters) continues to rise each year. The only schools in CPS which are not segregrated (mine is 99.7 % African American) are the magnet schools. Working in this system, I see very little the federal government can do to actually help inner city schools (policy-wise anyway, we haven't received money from the state of Illinois to build or maintain school buildings in 6 years. That's for the entire CPS district. So, some infrastructure money might help). If Arne Duncan is put in this post, he offers no real education change.

Praise to Martino for being way out front on Arne Duncan. But heaven help those galldarn teachers' unions! [update, as of 12/16, Wobs tells me some higher-ups say it could be a lot worse. and Ezra Klein has a nice summary post that portrays Duncan as a sort of "Switzerland" between/among the unions and the reformers.]

boof! more depressants for yr depression

a longer, dismal-er Ben Smith take on the Sec. of Labor non-story. boof!

Tea leaves

So fine - I get that Obama campaigned on ending the divisiveness and distractions that have characterized the politics of the last fifteen years in order to solve the urgent problems that face us as a nation. And that somehow justifies letting bygones be bygones after a certain senator from Connecticut repeatedly fucked over his nominal allies.

Ok. Whatever.

So we can expect the Senate Dems to be super friendly to avoid enraging their GOP colleagues "for the good of the country" (the House will still, theoretically, be a den of poo-flinging monkeys).

I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb to declare EFCA DOA.

This Is Not Good

Reprehensible? A legit issue? I find myself saddened when this commercial comes on.

on the other hand

On the "substance" front - let me say that I'm interested by (but unsure how to approach) the issues tied up in Ezra Klein's recent work on the mainstream media's consensus that the U.S.A.'s an intrinsically "Center-Right" country.

On the other hand, on the "sonics/phonics" front - it is kinda nice to hear the word "socialism" tripping off so many Americans' lips, these days.

This Is What Blogs Are For, No?

Writing out of frustration:

Member-run unions are, apparently, great, right up until the moment that your members start telling you that they would like to not receive quite so many mailings related to the upcoming political election. At that point, they somehow (get a team of monks on it!) transition from members whose opinions we value and nominally represent into whiners who need to suck it the fuck up and realize that if Obama loses this election we're all going to hell.

I agree that unions have the right and duty to inform their members about the upcoming election, who the union supports, and why. I fully accept that union members genuinely value receiving the union's opinion and facts about the candidates. I think our greatest resource is our willingness to hit the streets and organize, while the Republicans split their time between the pews and the links. I think this election is very important.

I also happen to believe that one of our greatest strengths is our willingness to listen to our members. We are not thundering from the pulpit, we are not hinting that everyone will lose their jobs if they don't vote for the pro-business party. We listen to our members. We can tailor our message to their needs. We shape them and, in turn, they shape us. We're all in it together.

That's why I refuse to see members who complain about the relentless propagandizing from their union as anything less than brothers and sisters who are trying to tell me that the union's tactics are not sitting right with them. And I'm not talking about Republican members here. I am talking about people who are protesting the sheer volume of the propaganda they receive from their union(s), from mailings to phone calls. We need to listen to them at the risk of alienating them. Only listening to the voices that agree with us is what got us into this fucking mess in the first place. (I mean that sentence as broad as it reads. The whole idea of the organizing model is that we engage all of our brothers and sisters. If the organizing model is not the way out of every mess we're in, I still haven't heard what is).

Anyway, back to the grind. You might be surprised to find that your union supports all the Democrats and is against all the Republicans. You will receive 1-2 mailings per day to that effect for the next 38 days.

Prisonship Internal Memo to Congressional Dems

Memo to Dems: This is Leverage.

Dear Dems,

So, like many of you, I had a hard time turning away from beautiful geniuses like Jim Cramer (swoon) and (my life-pundit) Erin Burnett* as this last week came in with a "laissez-faire" Lehman collapse and went out with an AIG bailout, only to culminate in what Krugman et. al. are rightly (and ironically) referring to as "socialism" in our financial sector.

(Parenthetically, if you're wondering "what the eff does all of this mean, and who the hell can explain it to me?" you'd do well to check out: Jorge on the nuts and bolts of the housing market bubbles, CDOs and how we got here; Krugman on the meat of the Paulson proposal and how it "works" to solve even just the market-related problems at hand; Dean Baker, as usual, with a blueprint for a bailout that might improve things for actual fucking people; and, as pertains to the thrust of this memo, Bob Kuttner on what the Dems could do if they "strapped some balls on their dick," to use the colorful and masculinist phrase once overheard passing from the lips of my 9th grade history teacher.)

Anyway, Dear Dems,

I learned a lot about leverage in my former work as a union researcher. (It's an even-numbered year, so I will assume you remember what unions are.) In my old line, leverage was everything - you never knew where you'd find it, but you knew you'd know it if you saw it. Sometimes it's a matter of public record. Sometimes it's a matter of dumpster-diving. Sometimes it's a matter of building power and rope-a-doping your opponent into revealing her own weaknesses, then building more power in the light of that self-diagnosis, then winning.

This time's one of those times. I've studied and studied and crapped myself thinkin' on the meaning of leverage, its rhythms and habitats and metamorphoses....but I've rarely seen it show itself so plainly. Democrats, you hold a lot of power in your hands this week. And knowing you as I do, I expect nothing less than a warm-hearted, polite and ineffectual surrender.

Does "taking one for the team" always have to be synonymous with losing? Before your very eyes, not just the sitting GOP but the very legacy of Reaganism has shown its "less government in business, more business in government" ass to be a social disease, in need of an unprecedented dose of welfare. While it's understandable (to me, anyway) that our Democratic nominee for president affects something like moderation- and makes all the bullshit bipartisan calls for pragmatism of which it will be the job of people like me and the OGs to disabuse him in January - your job is to make sure that socialism does not come to Wall Street without strings.

There should be more government in business. Now is the time to trim away any compensation for the shareholders and executives we're bailing out, and to erect a wall between houses of finance and government agencies where now there's a revolving-door. For god's sake"White-collar" crimes can be as violent as any other...violent-er, even, when one in seven of our damn bridges are unsound and all our dimes are spread across Iraq and the inter-ether of Over the Counter markets. (fwiw - I will regret not living to see an Attorney General Edwards "assume the position" and enact the purge that gets us to pre-post-neoliberalism.)

There should be less business in government. The idea that, having purchased these "toxic" assets for a sum of $700 billion, we will parcel them out in $50 billion slabs and have currently functioning private financial houses resell them is obscene, insane, incestuous, and it repeats the lie of Reaganism. BHO spoke eloquently of a need to "make government cool again," a neat phrase that in many ways evokes the political and cultural stakes involved in the massive, necessary political project of undoing a 30-year ass-kicking of the many by the few. Our purpose is not served by outdoing the GOP at treating citizens like shareholders. Our purpose is served only by showing that government can and should function within a democratic polity as an agent of (downward) redistribution, and that Democratic government's version of redistribution is a lot more inclusive and a lot less violent than the alternative.

Anywho, summing up:

1. Good News! This week you have the chance to undo all of your past sins. You can work off the debt accrued by your failure to stop an evil, imperialist war by declaring the end of finance capitalism as we know it.
   
2. Bad News! We both know you'll be doing no such thing.
   
3. Don't worry, I'll probably end up voting for all y'all anyway. See you on the teevee!
   

(footnote: * Yeah, it'd seem that my MSNBC addiction is giving way to a CNBC fetish - can you blame me, with a duo like this as the Kiki Dee and Elton John/Gram and Emmylou/Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw for my shut-in vie de brain-diharrea?)

Hillary Never Would Have Done This

In case you all missed it, Obama gave teachers the ol' "Fuck you" yesterday calling for more charter schools, merit-based pay, and making it easier to fire teachers who "aren't up to the job."

Obviously, Obama is pandering to the "independents" who, along with a great many Americans, have bought into the idea that by the very act of giving birth (or completing adoption papers), a person automatically acquires the knowledge to know when a teacher or school is "good" or "bad." Coupled with this intuitive skill is the fact that God conveniently correlates a teacher's crappiness with the performance of little Johnny or Sally in the classroom. When Johnny gets bad grades or does poorly on a test or (and you know I am just joking here) gets sent to the principal's office, a parent is able to know that this is a crappy teacher in action.

Obama's actions are stupid, stupid, stupid. He just threw teachers and teacher's unions under the bus. The Democratic Party now supports merit pay. Oh, I know that he will try to weasel when he's talking directly to the NEA and AFT. He'll try to say that "merit pay" can be based on any number of criteria. He'll try to say it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with testing. "Charter schools" could mean any number of things. "Vouchers" can mean any number of things. The important thing is we "reach out" and move into a "post-partisan" education policy.

Somehow Barack Obama thinks that the collective bargaining rights teachers in America should be modified or curbed or abridged or taken away so that it is "easier" to fire a "bad" teacher. Which is, of course, the subtext here. Obama needs to show that he's independent of those evil, evil teacher's unions who are dragging down education in this country with their insistence on quality at all schools. Their recognition that which kids from what background end up in their classes is not up to them, so paying them based on how these kids do on standardized tests is ludicrous. These crazy teacher's unions that believe that if employers want to fire their workers, there should be a written process as to how that gets done and that process needs to be negotiated.

The Democratic Party candidate for President just bought a whole host of right-wing talking points. And for what? Do you think that the Republicans are now going to stop attack the Democrats as being in the pocket of the teacher's unions? Does Obama think that joining with the Republicans in demonizing teacher's unions will mean that the Republicans will stop demonizing teachers? Does anything in Obama's experience lead him to believe that the Republicans will accept his proposals as fair compromises between two positions? That they will meet him in the middle?

Of course they won't. The goal of the Republican party is to smash public education in the US. Education is the great equalizer. The Republican party does not want equality. Hell, I think that's their official motto. They are not going to suddenly abandon that goal. They are not going to reach across the aisle.

The conversation in about education in America just took a giant leap to the right. Thanks to Barack Obama, who stood up to his allies instead of his enemies.

I Won't Have My Voice Silenced!

Here in Oregon, we loves us some citizen initiative process for the expression of the "peoples" voices. Got an issue? Gather some signatures on a petition, get that issue on the ballot, and let the people have a say! No more tyranny from the fat cats in Salem! Democracy!!!

Of course, this is not how it works. Rich men with a political ax to grind pay young people to gather signatures on initiatives that everybody agrees to -- "Sign my petition to save kittens, sir?" -- and then they copy names and addresses on to completely unrelated petitions. Then millions are spent convincing the Oregon voter to vote in the interest of a very few rich men and/or corporations. Or for God. The Oregon voter loves having God's back when it comes to abortion, gays, or (Heaven forbid) marriage between gay abortionists.

This year the Oregon voter faces a bevy of ballot choices. The one most near and dear is Measure 64, which would cripple Oregon's unions. The initiative would prevent public employers from using payroll deduction for collecting union dues that could be used for political purposes.

As it works now, a public employee union member signs a dues deduction card, the employer deducts the union dues from the employee's paycheck and sends that money to the union. The union uses the money in any way it legally sees fit. If this measure were to pass, then a member would still sign a dues deduction card, the employer would deduct dues and send it to the union, but the union could not use that money for political purposes. If the union wanted to be involved in politics, then they would have to collect all that money on their own.

The measure basically seeks to fuck with Oregon's public employee unions.

As the days approach, I imagine that I will be writing frequently about this campaign. We have been getting better about forming coalitions to fend off these attacks from the right. Unfortunately, these coalitions tend to run to the center and at times advance tropes that are troubling for those of us on the left. (Perhaps Lips could favor us with a few remarks about "progressive nativism"). I imagine that I will find places to critique my own coalition as well as alerting you and all to the scurrilous propaganda of our enemies.

For instance, the powers that be have decided on the slogan "Don't Silence Our Voice." Not much different than the "Oregon Families Need a Voice" that Lips and I came up with, which is kind of scary given the state we were in when we thought up that slogan (hint: It wasn't Idaho). I'm not in love with the fact that they have chosen to make the main web address for this campaign http://dontsilenceourvoice.com which is hardly intuitive. http://noon64.com seems available, so I am not sure why they went with the more-complicated-to-remember address. (Although http://noonmeansure64.com redirects to dontsileceourvoice.com). And I know that Google magic will eventually happen, but right now searching for "no on 64" or "no on measure 64" on Google doesn't get you anywhere near this website, even if you add the word Oregon.

Anyway, first of many, I suppose. Since one of our authors is a ballot initiative expert, one is a local politics expert, and one of us deals with state legislatures for a living, we should be able to have a nice little discussion, no?