Labor makeover?

Labor faces a moment of truth - Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman - POLITICO.com

Many strategists and even some labor officials argue that the genuine passion and emotion being felt and displayed on the ground in Wisconsin is obscuring a central problem: Unions still haven’t figured out even a semblance of an effective PR strategy.

True enuff, as far as it goes -- but how far does it go? To what extent is the problem just the frame, unionistas? There's also the structural problem of state fiscal crises, and the political-cultural problem of ubiquitous deficit hawkery, right?

“Whatever happened to the vague sense 10 years ago of the need to develop a community unionism?” asked another official, who suggested labor leaders on the ground in Wisconsin shouldn’t have been surprised by the Walker attack, yet were clearly caught off guard. “They’ve been talking only to themselves for too long.”

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.

After Andy

Dissent Magazine: Melvyn Dubofsky on "The Legacy of Andy Stern"

The distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell wrote this in 1995 about the alliance between intellectuals and organized labor that flourished in the aftermath of Sweeney’s rise to power: “For the intellectuals it’s a lot of wishful thinking; I don’t mean that in an invidious way. The real test will be whether labor has the ability to expand its numbers. Simply becoming more rhetorical and becoming more active politically is not in and of itself enough.” The same can be said about Andy Stern and his creation of [Change to Win.] It was indeed a lot of wishful thinking.

The motherfucking lid blown off of EFCA

All I can say is that

I was unaware of the negative consequences of EFCA when I wrote in support of it in the past. All I can say is that I put my trust in a certain individual who I, apparently, should not have trusted. In the future, I will do my own research before endorsing this type of thing.

This Fox News story is the tragic tale of a small plant in Indiana that suffered through an organizing drive conducted by the UAW. These factory owner asshats actually let their employees decide whether to organize a union via Satan's preferred method - card check. I think we can all see what's coming (we all watched the video, right? That makes it easier to see what is coming). Two! At least two people were harassed by some union THUG. We'll one of the women mentions that he was always there and she seems like she didn't like it, but she doesn't actually say that she was harassed. The second woman is pissed because people knew she was against the union and see seems to have been harassed by her co-workers, but still UNION THUGGERY PROVED!!!

And here's the sickening thing. At least 50% of people at the plant signed a card. A union was formed. Some percentage [at least 30%, although the story keeps vague about all the numbers. Maybe so that no one has a better idea of how this really works] of workers asked for a vote. The vote was held and the union was decertified. See how horrible EFCA would be? Union THUGS can harass people, intimidate them, and force them to sign union cards that they don't want to sign. Or, at the very least, card check would create more situations where it is easy to manipulate a story to make it seem like this kind of thing could happen.

And then what happens when these union THUGS!!! get their union by threatening to kill anyone who doesn't sign a card? What happens to these poor, frightened people? Well, they are forced to sign a petition to the National Labor Relations Board asking for an election. After some mandatory employee meetings, some video watching, saying goodbye to some longtime colleagues who were total dicks throughout this whole thing, and hinting to your bosses that your spouse is looking for work, you get to vote on decertifying the union. The similarities to Communist Russia cannot be overlooked.

Thank God the fine folks at NW Republican are on top of this stuff. I doubt very much that I will be falling for whatever Lex pushes on me next time (unless it is shiny.)

wow

have a nice day.

Security, Freedom, Choice, etc.

Labor activists have always believed that union security prevents non-members from benefitting unfairly from the sacrifices they make to obtain fair wages and conditions. But union security has always had an even greater relevance for labor leaders because union building in the United States - with its extremely dynamic economy, its divided working class, and its business interests seemingly intransigently opposed to unionization - has made leaders all the more aware of the insecure nature of their organizations. For union officers, the ability to achieve some form of union security protected against employers or non-members undermining wage and labor standards. It also enhanced organizational stability, particularly financial stability; and most importantly, it made the threat of a strike much more potent. By freeing union leaders from these bedeviling problems, union security practices aimed to establish a stable power base for their organizations.

Grounded as it was in a power relationship, the controversy over union security could easily assume expansive conotations. When it did so, the discussion was not really over individual freedom - or the ethics of labor solidarity for that matter. The dispute instead resembled something akin to a debate about the desireable extent of union power in American society. When viewed from this perspective, the volatility of the subject and its keen concern to both unions and employers is easier to understand.

- Gilbert Gall, The Politics of Right to Work

BHO on Occupation: Not Crap

See for yourself. This is meaningful, I think. So does Ezra K.

Here's hoping this inspires a hilarious revival of the ACORN-Alinsky shuffle from the Right. Goodness knows the UE deserves a place (between/among) those latter two.

(almost) Shattering Silence

Ezra Klein gives voice to one of the many renters in my panic-ridden chest:

You have to imagine that organized labor, which spent $100 million to elect Obama, is getting worried. Secretary of Labor, which is where their ally traditionally sits, is not going to be a top economic job. The folks who have been selected for top economic jobs are associated with Robert Rubin, who unions generally considered an impediment to their priorities during the Clinton administration. And when Rahm Emanuel went before business leaders, he pointedly refused to make a case for the Employee Free Choice Act.

Merit Pay and the AFT

I seem to remember a certain union offering Obama's support for merit pay as a prime reason to support his Democratic opponents in the primaries. Oh the times, they are a changin'.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A teachers union said it is open to President-elect Barack Obama’s effort to tie pay raises to student performance.

Many teachers dislike the idea; Obama was booed when he mentioned it at union meetings in 2007 and again this year.

Yet Randi Weingarten, the newly elected president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Monday there is a role for teacher raises based on how pupils are learning.

“Of course there is,” she said in a speech at the National Press Club.

She described the teacher pay system in New York City, where schoolwide bonuses are based on overall test scores in high-poverty schools. Weingarten, as head of the New York teachers union, negotiated the system last year with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The new system is working, she said: Teachers already are getting bonuses for improving pupil achievement in 128 of 200 eligible schools.

“If an innovation is collaborative and fair, teachers will embrace it, and it will succeed,” she said.

Monday’s speech was the first major address for Weingarten as newly elected president of the 1.4 million-member AFT.

It came at a time of great anticipation by the two big teachers unions — AFT and the larger National Education Association. Both were effectively shut out of the administration of President George W. Bush. Bush’s first education secretary, Rod Paige, once labeled the NEA “a terrorist organization.”

As Obama seeks education reform, “no issue should be off the table,” Weingarten said, with just one exception: Her union opposes publicly funded vouchers for parents to send kids to private school.

In her speech, Weingarten avoided serious controversy. Though she mentioned the New York system — and was introduced by Bloomberg — she said nothing about the thornier issue of pay raises for individual teachers, as opposed to schoolwide bonuses.

Actually, I have no problem with this, as we should always be up for ideas that are collaborative and fair; but as our friend Han Solo once said, that's the real trick, isn't it? Management doesn't like to give up control and they'd have to give up a lot to make sure merit pay didn't just become "raises for ass-kissers." It would probably also be good for teachers unions to make this a bargaining, rather than electoral, issue.

Our team

I love it when we're the ones who can speculate about our Dream Team Cabinet. As for who will run the show at Labor...

• Former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.)
• Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union
• Kay Hagan of North Carolina
• Jeanne Shaheen, former New Hampshire governor

As of right now, I see one and only one politically acceptable name for this post. Et tu?

Makes Me Proud

Avi Zenilman and Ben Smith give credit where credit is due, to the "older, industrial unions" that have, in their opinions, actually answered Obama's call for dialogue about race in the USA. I've over-ranted about this aspect of "Labor 2008" already, but the fact is that it's a welcome galldarned thing.

LOLGrads

I made this for CGE to celebrate them getting fair share. Thought I'd throw it up on the ol' blog.

Bailout/Election/Labor Redux

Krugman:

There seem to be two prevailing narratives about the bailout plan(s). Both have elements of truth, but are fundamentally wrong.
One narrative is that of the Wise Men and the Destructive Yahoos. According to this narrative, men who Understand What Needs to be Done put together a plan to save the world, but they did a bad job of communicating, and a mob of ignorant people stands in their way.
The other narrative is that of the Evil Plotters and the Righteous Uprising. According to this narrative, the same people who sold us the Iraq war have tried to bully Congress into adopting a plan that is, in essence, a cynical ripoff - a scheme to transfer vast wealth to the rich and cripple the next administration.

What we have here seems like a crisis of legitimacy. In terms of the bailout, one's perception seems to be largely based on whether or not one believes that there is an impending financial collapse awaiting us if we do not act now. I think we have heard compelling arguments from every side of the debate. Certainly I'm not usually one to question Peter DeFazio and Donna Edwards when they get together, let alone Dean Baker, but neither am I likely to expand beyond reason the idea that this is really a timely moment to tip our hand and start spreading the "new New Deal" rhetoric around before we have the 2009 majorities (please! - ed. ) Not only am I unsure about the immediacy of the crisis, anyway - I'm also unsure as to the extent to which Dems would do well to try and pass an expansive, leftward-leaning bill.

At the moment, whole swaths of this country aren't sure if they trust the pragmatism of party leadership in every branch of government. Neither do they implictly trust the principles of Right- and Left-leaning stalwarts who objected to the bill. Meanwhile, the mainstream media and Wall Street speak with one voice (shucks, I'm shocked- ed.), telling us, oh shite, the End is Near. 'Seems like people are either a) having a hard time trusting any of these groups, or b) feeling there's no way any "special interest" would possibly succumb to elevating "the public good" over its own agenda.

So we turn our attention to November - wondering, how will the bailout play out for Senator, President, County Commissioner, and the whole merry band? I am unsure whether my attention to the election stems from the fact that I think I understand that context better than that of finance capital, or whether I think that the election outcome is one that us "people" (union people, for example) have a better chance of influencing.

The fun thing about ballot initiatives is that they allow for the public to enter into dimly ideological debates about public/private, market/state-type questions under the pretense that the partisan interests of Dem and GOP "politicians" are not central to the framing of this issues. Oregon's public employee unions come to the fore of per-bi-ennial (not a word?) "Vote No" campaigns. But they do so not as self-identifying unions, but as members of the public: citizens, servants, Oregonians. Labor is usually "victorious" in striking down what are increasingly called "Conservative Populist" initiatives. One could even contend that they have inured their unions, and by extension, the image of the public sector, to Oregon voters.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten:

We have often been called a "special interest." I will never apologize for that because our special interests' are the students we teach, the patients we care for and all the people we serve.

But one could contend other sorts of things, too. My point is merely to say, even if we grant labor a certain legitimacy within Democratic politics, and even if it attains a quasi-autonomous political identity in initiative states, it can't be a good thing to say that labor's primary interface with the broader public is through electoral politics via television ads, primary season news coverage or the occasional newspaper editorial. If I include get out the vote operations and person-to-person, more "organizing"-ish encounters... then are we pleased with labor's popularity or legitimacy within the society?

God knows nobody seemed to be asking our opinion of the bailout. God Bless the four serious magazines and 2.5 think-tanks that help keep some of our ideas alive in DC, but jeez louise. Is it enough to be seen as a relatively enlightened special interest among special interests? Is there a way around it?

The movement for the Employee Free Choice Act reflects a conversation about democracy within the labor movement that dares to question the NLRB - "Labor's Magna Carta," - and, at its better moments, relegates collective bargaining to a lesser status as just one among many forms in labor's repertory of political acts. The movement to pass the Employee Free Choice Act - over the ideological hysterics of the national Chamber of Commerce, and past the menacing and righteously-outraged Republicans with their "small business" and "secret ballot" fetishes - will necessitate the reassertion of workplace democracy as a popular (hegemonic?) idea. Since its heyday in the middle of the last century, workplace democracy has been steadily, deliberately eroded in form and content. During that same time, electoral politics has suffered low turnout, voter fraud, impeachment and "stolen elections," but it remains the most trusted, most exploited venue in which Americans do democracy.

The Employee Free Choice Act will have to (at least implicitly) critique the sanctity of the secret ballot as a venue for democratic decision-making. Ironically the road to this act of iconoclasm (not a word?) goes straight through Washington, D.C., and by extension, straight through electoral politics. Is that paradox "the point"? I hope not. I'd like to know what you all think of this weird conjuncture in political economy/elections/labor politics, and whether you, like me, dare to think that a small piece of labor legislation, EFCA, might contain within it the seeds for labor's first big, 21st Century "moment"?

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.

"Social Movement" Unionism has proven...

to be an absurd framework through which to understand labor's political identity in the 21st Century, in my opinion.

but some interesting issues come to light as one goes about taking that framework apart. par example, see Paul Johnston's Success While Other Fails; Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (1994):

This does not mean that public workers’ movements will promote a “workers’ state,” abolish capitalism or the state, and so on. Different parts of the public workforce are likely to be implicated on different sides of every great social contest. The important point is that public workers' claims are framed in certain common forms and that these workers rely on certain kinds of strategic resources; beyond that, the significance of a particular movement depends on its historical context. As they frame their interests as administrable public interests, they are perhaps the quintessential “state-making" social movement.

No on Measure 64

it's all about the fidelity on the vocal track, here.

imagine hearing this on a record with no accompanying visuals or text.

Vote NO on Measure 64

"When your child goes to school, they build your future."

NO on Measure 64, Defend Oregon!

"I'm opposing Measure 64 because it's going to make our job of protecting our communities harder."

GOP Emails

Every liberal special interest group from MoveOn.org to Big Labor to anti-drilling extremists are laying it all on the line in 2008 with one goal in mind: to seize total control of our government.

T. Frank on Public Employees

excerpt from The Wrecking Crew by Tom Frank, from the chapter entitled "The Best Public Servant is the Worst One:"

In the mythology of the American right, federal rank-and-file workers are villains whose wickedness is surpassed only by that of the Soviet Communists themselves. They have just four concerns in life, sneered the journalist Don Feder in 1985: "pay, pension sick leave and throwing around their not inconsiderable weight around. No one has to teach us to detest public workers. It comes naturally, by process of observation and experience. "

Their tendency to join unions makes these public workers even more detestable. Once organized, civil servants support liberals, both with votes and campaign contributions - and these liberals, once in office, return the favor by making generous concessions to their unionized employees. Or so it seemed, anwyay, back in the seventies wen everyone from teachers to trashmen was going on strike - and winning, too. In that unhappy decade, the conservative mind began to dimly perceive a diabolical scenario unfolding, a disastrous endgame in which its two greatest enemies came together as one: government remade as a tool of its unionized employees, who would use its tax power to plunder the hardworking businessman.

The famous "Prop 13" tax revolt that swept Californaia in 1978 was inspired at least partially by this doomsday vision, with the rebellion's leader thundering, "We're not going to permit public employee unions to run this country." The issue also spawned an obligatory bout of direct-mail profiteering, with an outfit called Americans Against Union Control of Government sending out appeals for funds to help them fend off the "very real possibility of a relative handful of unions bosses seizing control of America's government."

The vivid colors of this particular catastrophe-dream have long since faded in the public mind, but Washington conservatives never forgot. Their policy toward career government personnel has always been to club them down, and by putting it into effect they have delivered massive rewards both to their political faction and to their primary constituents in the business community.