Can U.S. labor organize a general strike?

UAW on Strike: Photo via AFP

[Update 11/18/2023].  Big 3 autoworkers vote to approve contract with historic raises.

[Update 11/14/2023].  Evidently some auto workers aren’t willing to wait until 2028.  I’ve added some addition material at the end.]

The United Auto Workers has called on organized labor to prepare for a general strike on May 1, 2028.

That’s the date that the new auto industry contracts expire.  If other major unions could set their contracts to expire the same date, U.S. organized labor would be in a uniquely powerful position.

Wage-earners have been losing ground for decades.  The national government ignores their concerns, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.  Things are unlikely to change, whether Joe Biden, Donald Trump or someone else wins next year’s elections.

So the only path to change is through some sort of direct action.  Hamilton Nolan, a labor writer, says that a general strike could be the way to do it.

The general feeling of a labor power resurgence since the pandemic has been fueled by a procession of high profile wins: The Starbucks and Amazon union drives, the massive organizing on college campuses, the friendly Biden administration and its uniquely pro-union NLRB, the historically high favorability of unions in public opinion polls, the periodic mini-strike waves at a variety of fed-up workplaces. This year, we have seen a trio of actions—the Teamsters backing down UPS with a credible strike threat, and the successful WGA and UAW strikes—that show what can be won with the power of strikes at a larger scale.

All of this is encouraging. All of this is evidence of a real shift in public sentiment. All of this, however, does not add up to a robust and lasting change in the balance of power between capital and labor. Right now, what we have are a bunch of discrete occurrences, a bunch of data points that amount to proof of potential.

There are two things that will determine whether or not this promising moment leads to a true, historic revival of the labor movement. The first is easily measurable: union density. Barely 1 in 10 American workers is a union member today. Despite all of the wins just mentioned, that number has not risen in the wake of the pandemic. The primary thing that unions need to do today is to organize more union members. Without this, organized labor is a walled and shrinking garden, rather than a legitimately expansive force for society-wide change.

The second thing is related to the first, but it offers a broader menu for action: We must see some tangible coordination of action across the U.S. labor movement. It is great when one union wins a contract, or organizes an important new company, but those isolated events will not be enough to take on the combined power of trillion-dollar multinational corporations and their political allies. Not even when they involve tens or hundreds of thousands of workers.

United Auto Workers goes on strike

Auto Workers Strike Plants at All Three of the Big Three by Luis Feliz Leon and Jane Slaughter for Labor Notes.

Tick, tock. At midnight the clock ran out, and auto workers massed on picket lines.

The first-ever simultaneous strike at the Big 3 automakers—General Motors, Ford, Stellantis—started September 15 with 13,000 workers walking out of three assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Missouri. There are 146,000 Auto Workers (UAW) members at the Big 3.

The UAW is calling its strategy the “stand-up strike,” a nod to the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-1937 that helped establish the union.

The shot across the bow came two hours shy of midnight via a very short Facebook Live video where UAW President Shawn Fain shared the strike targets: Stellantis’s Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio; GM’s Wentzville Assembly Center, near St. Louis; and the final assembly and paint departments at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant, west of Detroit. These plants make highly profitable full-sized SUVS and trucks, including the Jeep Wrangler, Chevy Colorado, and Ford Bronco.

Fain laid out the union’s escalation strategy on Wednesday. The union will target a few plants at first, letting the Big 3 know the union is willing to inflict financial pain.

The idea is to keep the companies guessing. If they don’t move on the union’s demands, more pain will be applied—but the companies won’t be able to predict where.

“An all-out strike is still a possibility,” Fain said.

“Keep the Companies Guessing”: UAW Stand-Up Strike Explained by Jake Johnson for In These Times

United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain criticized the Big Three car manufacturers’ latest contract offers as woefully inadequate late Wednesday and made clear that, with existing labor agreements set to expire in a matter of hours, a historic strike is now likely.

In a negotiation update streamed on social media, Fain said union negotiators are ​“seeing movement from the companies” but not nearly enough.

Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have respectively proposed wage increases of 20%, 18%, and 17.5% over the course of a four-year contract — well below the UAW’s demand for a 36% wage increase to make up for years of falling autoworker pay amid rising corporate profits and surging executive compensation.

Since 2003, autoworkers have seen their average hourly wage decline by 30%. Meanwhile, over the past decade, the Big Three automakers have raked in more than $250 billion in profits and rewarded shareholders with tens of billions of dollars in stock buybacks and dividend payouts.

“They could double our raises and not raise car prices — and still make billions of dollars in profit,” Fain said Wednesday. ​“They spent more money enriching shareholders in a year than they spent on us in the entirety of the last contract cycle.”

What to make of the Teamsters-UPS deal?

Teamsters rehearse picketing earlier this summer.

[Update 08/23/2023]. Unionized UPS workers approve contract by Haleluya Hadero and Matt Ott for the Associated Press.   The Teamsters said the vote was 88 percent in favor of accepting the contract.

Terry Ostrow and Stephen Franklin of In These Times reported:

The Teamsters and UPS announced Tuesday morning that they had reached a tentative deal in what had been contentious negotiations — and not a moment too soon.  The Teamsters’ contract with United Parcel Service (UPS) — covering some 340,000 U.S. workers — expires in about a week.  That’s when the Teamsters had said they would go on strike — one of the largest at a single employer in decades — if no deal was reached.

The tentative agreement, which must be ratified by a vote of Teamsters members, includes what the union describes as ​“historic wage increases” for full-time and part-time UPS Teamsters: the end of a despised two-tier wage system among delivery drivers; the creation of thousands of new full-time union jobs; the targeted installation of air conditioning in new package cars (purchased after Jan. 1, 2024) and other measures to protect drivers against the heat; limitations on forced overtime and Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday, among other measures.

“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien said in a news release following the announcement of the tentative deal. ​“UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations. We’ve changed the game, battling it out day and night to make sure our members won an agreement that pays strong wages, rewards their labor and doesn’t require a single concession.”

UPS also confirmed the tentative deal Tuesday morning. ​“Together we reached a win-win-win agreement on the issues that are important to Teamsters leadership, our employees and to UPS and our customers,” Carol Tomé, UPS’ chief executive officer, said in a news release posted on the company’s website. ​ “This agreement continues to reward UPS’ full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong.”

But maybe it’s not what it’s cracked up to be.  Mike Elk of Payday Report wrote:

The news shocked many, who expected the Teamsters Union would hold out until their contract expired on July 31st before reaching a deal.  This past weekend, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien declared at a rally this weekend, “We’ve organized, strategized, now it’s time to pulverize.” 

However, President Biden pressured the Teamsters to settle nearly a week before the deadline to avoid any shocks that uncertainty of the strike could cause the economy. 

“Today’s announcement moves us closer to a better deal for workers that will also add to our economic momentum,” President Biden said in a statement.

Not wanting to upset the White House, the Teamster’s leadership agreed to a tentative contract, according to interviews with various people involved in the union.  

While the agreement contains $2.50-an-hour raises for full-time Teamsters drivers and $7.50-an-hour for Teamsters drivers with more than five years of experience, the contract leaves over 180,000 part-timer UPS workers with no path to making full-time status or wages equivalent to what full-timers earn, maintaining a sub-category of part-time, precarious workers at UPS. 

Part-time workers will start at $21-an-hour.  Only 7,500 part-time workers will be converted to full-time; less than 10,000 part-time workers converted to full-time status during the 1997 strike. 

“I petitioned with [Teamsters for a Democratic Union] call for a $25/hr base wage. I’ve been telling that to my coworkers for five months.,” Chicago-based UPS part-timer Peter Lynsgo told Payday Report. “The part-time activists I’m plugged into are furious. I feel betrayed.” 

I don’t know.  Sean O’Brien in a video told President Biden to “keep walking” and stay out of the union’s business.  I was  impressed – maybe more than I should have been.  

LINKS

The Narrative Here Is That Workers Fought and They Won, an interview of Teddy Ostrow for FAIR.  [Added 8/23/2023]

UPS and Teamsters Have Reached a Tentative Deal, May Avoid Strike by Teddy Ostrow and Stephen Franklin for In These Times.

Strike Threat Makes UPS Deliver by Teamsters for a Democratic Union [Added 7/26/2023]

UPS Teamsters to Vote on Contract that Ends Driver Tiers, Lifts Part-Time Pay by Alexandra Bradbury for Labor Notes.  [Added 7/27/2023]

180,000 UPS Part-Timers Left Out of Teamsters Deal – Biden Pressured Teamsters to Settle Early by Mike Elk for Payday Report.

Teamsters announce sellout deal at UPS to block strike by 340,000 workers by Tom Hall at the World Socialist Web Site.

The Teamsters and today’s labor militancy

A half-century ago, the Teamsters were one of the USA’s most powerful labor unions, and also one of the most corrupt. They’re still powerful, but they shed the old corrupt leadership many years ago.

This 18-minute video is a good portrait of today’s Teamsters and a good explanation of the issues in the likely upcoming strike against United Parcel Service. Millions of other American workers face the same issue.

I thank my e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey for sending the link.  I highly recommend the video.

How the jubilee idea inspired the oppressed

Peter Linebaugh

George Rosso, a reader of this blog, sent me a link to an article called Jubilating–Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, with Some Success  by a radical writer named Peter Linebaugh.  It was published in Radical History Review 50 (1991).  

This article is a much fuller account of the Jubilee concept – the periodic cancelling of debts, freeing of slaves and returning of land to its original owners – than does Michael Hudson’s book, which was mainly about the Jubilee as practiced in ancient Near Eastern history.  

It tells how the Jubilee idea in the Christian Old Testament inspired slaves, the dispossessed and other oppressed people in modern history.  It continues to inspire the Latin American liberation theologians and Palestinians (many of.whom are Christians) trying to reclaim their land.

Linebaugh went into the Jubilee idea and its connection with liberation movements more deeply than Hudson did and of course more deeply than I am doing here.  If you care about this topic, you should read it in full and not be content with my summary.  But I’ll try to hit a few highlights.  

I’ll start with the Jubilee song of Thomas Spence, who wrote it in 1782 (sung to the tune of “America” or “God Save the King”).

I

Hark! how the Trumpet’s sound,

Proclaims the Land around

The Jubilee!

Tells all the Poor oppress’d,

No more shall they be cess’d;

Nor Landlords more molest

Their Property.

II

Rents t’ourselves now we pay,

Dreading no Quarter-day,

Fraught with Distress

Welcome that day draws near,

For then our rents we share,

Earth’s rightful Lords we are,

Ordain’d for this.

And all the World releas’d 

from Misery.

The Fir-trees all rejoice,

And Cedars lift their voice,

Ceas’d now the Feller’s noise

Long rais’d by thee!

IV

The Sceptre now is broke,

Which with continual Stroke

The Nations smote!.

Hell from beneath doth rise,

To meet thus Lofty Eyes,

From the most pompous size,

How brought to nought!

And all the World releas’d

from Misery.

The Fir-trees all rejoice,

And Cedars lift their voice,

Ceas’d now the Feller’s noise

Long rais’d by thee!

V

Since then this Jubilee

Sets all at Liberty

Let us be glad,

Behold each one return

To their Right, and their own,,

No more like Doves to mourn,

By Landlords sad!

Minimum wages around the world

Click on Visual Capitalist for a larger map.

Maybe I didn’t give Biden enough credit

Krystal Ball, writing for The Lever, said the Democrats were stronger than expected in the Rustbelt states because the Biden Administration actually did things that benefitted working people.  Half a loaf, or even crumbs, are better than no bread.

President Joe Biden’s economic policy has been a genuine break from the market fundamentalism of the Clinton and Obama White Houses.  Instead of pushing terrible new trade deals that ship jobs overseas, the Biden administration has challenged China with an export ban on semiconductors and signed executive orders to encourage American manufacturing.

In fact, companies are on track to reshore 350,000 jobs this year alone.  This is a huge reversal of what happened under the Trump administration when offshoring actually increased to the tune of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

What’s more, instead of tax cuts for the rich à la Bill Clinton, or bailouts for Wall Street like Obama, Biden hiked taxes on corporations with a 15 percent minimum tax rate passed through the Inflation Reduction Act.  This is, of course, a giant break from the tax-cuts-for-the-rich giveaway, which was the main accomplishment of Trump.

Biden’s union policy also deserves credit.  Rather than abandon unions or actively union bust like plenty of Clinton-era Democrats and every Republican, Biden appointed a genuinely pro-worker National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and a fantastic General Counsel who has set about trying to reinterpret the horrible labor law that has let so many workers down over decades.

The recent organizing wave at Starbucks, REI, Amazon, Apple and more could have been stopped dead in its tracks without this pro-worker NLRB.

Biden’s infrastructure package and his Inflation Reduction Act both contain significant investments in the region and are especially vital for automakers trying to compete in the new electric car era.

Like the entire nation, the Industrial Midwest will also benefit from the new antitrust direction of the Biden Administration led by Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

I don’t want to oversell Biden’s populist wins. He’s still no FDR and his policies fall far short of what’s actually required to revitalize the Industrial Midwest and deliver for the working class.

The CHIPS Act, which was heralded as the beginning of a new era of industrial policy, may just end up being a corporate giveaway, because it contained no labor standards or job-creation requirements.

Having a strong NLRB is great, but workers are still severely hampered by labor laws rigged to benefit corporations.

The Inflation Reduction Act was better than nothing, but came nowhere close to the transformational change of Democrats’ original Build Back Better proposal.

In fact, what’s astonishing is the size of the political response to the Biden administration accomplishing the bare minimum.

[Added Later]  Even giving the Biden Administration the benefit of the doubt, none of this offsets his dangerous and self-destructive war policy.

LINK

The Real Reason For Dems’ Rust Belt Revival by Krystal Ball for The Lever.  [Hat tip to Steve from Texas]

Why Biden Is Not a Transformational President by Thomas Neuberger for God’s Spies.  From 2021.  The other side of the coin.

1971 – the year the USA started going downhill

I’ve posted versions of the chart above several times before.  It shows how American wages once grew along with growth in productivity, and how, around 1971 or so, wage-earners stopped benefitting from being more productive.  This fact about the U.S. economy explains a lot.

I saw an Internet post yesterday consisting of charts showing how many more kinds of things changed for the worse in 1971.  Economic inequality, the cost of living, inflation-adjusted wages—all got worse.

There are too many for me to copy and re-post, but here is a sample.

What happened in 1971?  The only major event I can think of is the Nixon administration’s decision to go off the gold standard.  From then, the U.S. dollar was redeemable not for gold or some other precious metal, but for U.S. Treasury bonds – in other words, IOUs.

Economist Michael Hudson has written books about how this decision allowed financiers and bankers to flourish and the U.S. military to finance its wars while the U.S. manufacturing economy faded away and living standards declined.

As much as I respect Hudson, it’s hard for me to believe that this one thing could have caused changes in so many different things so quickly.  Maybe it’s a tipping point caused by a lot of different things coming together at once.

The passing scene: Links 12/27/2021

The Claims of Memory by Wilfred M. McCloy for First Things.  Conservatism is necessary for progress.  If you can’t preserve existing good things, it is futile to try to create new good things.  Burning everything down and starting over is one of the worst ideas in history.

Everything Going Great: Bad Faith, Worse News and Julian Assange by Edward Snowden for Continuing Ed.

2021 Year in Review: The Only Way Out Is Through by Alexandra Bradbury for Labor Notes.  The labor movement is reviving, but has a long way to go.  [Hat tip to Bill Harvey]

Smartphones Are a New Tax on the Poor by Julia Ticona for Wired.  Low-wage workers are expected to be connected to the Internet, even though many can’t afford it.  As someone said, it’s expensive to be poor.

Hillary 2024? Given the competition, she may be the Dems’ best hope by Joe Concha for The Hill.

Friendly foul-mouthed crow befriends entire elementary school before state police are called in by Lizzy Acker for The Oregonian.  Something cheerful to end with.

A message from the labor movement

Sara Nelson is president of the Fight Attendants Union.  (Hat tip to Gene Zitver)

China, journalism, strikes: Links 10/15/2021

The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning by N.S. Lyons for Palladium.   The clash of civilizations.

Intersectional Imperialism and the Woke Cold War: The New Faith Prepares for a Global Crusade by N.S. Lyons for The Upheaval.

‘Frozen Chosin’ Korean War Movie Set to Be Biggest Hit of 2021 by James Barber for Military.com.  In the movie, the Chinese are the good guys.

Out of the Newsroom by Spencer Ackerman for Forever Wars.  Newspapers whose reporters and editors all work from home.

“Government Without Newspapers”: the manufacture of ignorance by Patrick Lawrence for The Scrum.

A strike wave is coming to save America’s working class the old-fashioned way by Will Bunch for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Great Strike of 2021 by Jack Rasmus.  They also strike who simply refuse to take dangerous jobs for less than a living wage.

Why Record Numbers of Workers Are Quitting and Striking by Sonali Kolhatkar via Naked Capitalism. [Added 10/16/2021]

The Untraversed Land by John Michael Greer for Ecosophia.   How the structure of the world economy causes shortages.

The Afghan War Comes Home to Minneapolis by Thomas Neuburger for God’s Spies.

The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think by Zeynep Tufeckci for The New York Times.

How many people get long Covid?  More than half of those infected, researchers say by Pennsylvania State University.

A new stanza for Solidarity Forever

My old friend, Gene Zitver, told me there is a new stanza for the old labor song, Solidarity Forever.  It’s a fitting capstone for my posts on wokeness, critical race theory and white supremacy culture.

They divide us by our color, they divide us by our tongue.

They divide us men and women, they divide us old and young.

But they’ll tremble at our voices, when they hear these verses sung.

For the union makes us strong!

Amazon union drive in Alabama fails

Amazon workers in Alabama vote against forming company’s first union by Michael Sainato for The Guardian.

The Message from the Amazon Union Defeat in Alabama Is Clear: Keep Organizing by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney for In These Times.

Flawed Approach Sunk Amazon Union Drive, But Birthed National Movement by Mike Elk for Payday Report.

Excavator operator’s heroism goes unrewarded

Excavator operator helping free ship blocking Suez Canal

Business Insider India reported on how excavator operator Abdullah Abdul-Gawad risked his life and worked 21-hour days to free the Ever Given, the skyscraper-sized container ship stuck in the Suez Canal.

Then Abdul-Gawad was not only virtually ignored, but at the time of writing had not received his overtime pay..

Describing the scene that faced him at work [on March 23], Abdul-Gawad told Insider it was “really quite something.” “It was awe-inspiring,” he said.

The 28-year-old, who has been operating excavators since university, said he and his colleagues worked 21-hour days, barely sleeping – and still had not received their overtime pay.

Freeing the Ever Given was an international effort, with winches, dredgers, tugboats, and excavators all brought in.

But Abdul-Gawad was the man who was literally at the rock face of the problem. Once he got to the base of the ship, there was no choice but to start digging.

In his estimation, the Ever Given’s bow was lodged about six meters, or 20 feet, higher than where the ship ought to have been floating.  Its stern was also sitting on the opposite bank, and the sideways ship was blocking all traffic.

To approach the base of the vessel, he built a makeshift “bridge” from rubble he dug up, allowing him to get closer.

The image of the little excavator gave the world unparalleled meme fodder, but for Abdul-Gawad the situation was far less funny – it was dangerous.  Under the looming sides of the ship, he feared destabilizing the ship and having it topple onto him.

“The thing is, I was terrified that the ship might list too far to one side or the other,” he said. “Because if it fell onto its side on me, then it’s goodbye me, and goodbye excavator.

“If you see the size of the ship and you see the size of the excavator, it is absolutely terrifying.”

A weak labor union for Amazon workers?

An organizing drive for Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, may amount to less than it’s cracked up to be.

More than 3,000 out of 5,800 warehouse workers have signed cards in favor of a vote for representation by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWReDSU).  Workers have until March 29 to send in ballots.

But when reporters for the World Socialist Web Site asked the RWDSU what the union’s demands will be, spokesmen said that will have to wait until negotiations begin.  Serious unions always organize around a set of demands.

There is broad support among Amazon workers to abolish the oppressive rate system, which requires workers to perform a task as often as every six to nine seconds. The constant pressure to “make rate” is not only unsafe and physically exhausting. It is also degrading, demeaning, and injurious to workers’ mental health and well-being.

A popular phrase among Amazon workers is, “We are not robots!”

There is also powerful support for higher wages, the changes necessary to reduce injuries, adequate compensation for injured workers, and an end to the tyrannical surveillance regime that records and logs every second of a worker’s day.

During the pandemic, Amazon workers staged walkouts and demonstrations to demand countermeasures against the spread of the virus.  Workers demanded up-to-the-minute information on infections in their workplaces.  When management refused to provide that information, they organized on social media and collected it themselves.

When Amazon workers formed an independent rank-and-file committee in Baltimore in December … … workers demanded an end to the abusive management speed-ups and the regime of harassment around so-called “time off task” (TOT).  Workers also demanded the reinstatement of hazard pay, real scientific contact tracing, paid time off for sick workers, accessible coronavirus tests, and the closure of facilities for necessary cleaning.

Last week the RSDWU even disavowed a call for a one-week boycott of Amazon, the WSWS reported.

When a union contract is in force, union members renounce their right to strike or take job actions.  A weak contract with a weak union would benefit Amazon more than its employees.

So maybe there’s less to President Biden’s and Senator Marco Rubio’s support for Amazon unionization than meets the eye.

LINKS

The unionization campaign at Amazon: A top-down operation, with no program for workers by Tom Carter and Jerry White for the World Socialist Web Site.

Radical Anti-Racist Unionism Has a History in Bessemer, Alabama by Willem Morris for Jacobin.  [Added 3/18/2021]

RWDSU Disavows Boycott Amazon by Kris LaGrange for ucommblog.  (Hat tip to Bill Harvey) There are tactical and legal reasons why the union does not support the boycott, but there’s no reason why others can’t.  As for myself, I already avoid patronizing Amazon.  [Added 3/19/2021]

Amazon Workers Consider Unionizing at Several More U.S. Sites by Spencer Soper and Josh Edelson for Bloomberg.  [Added 3/21/2021]

‘Anti-racism’ as an unfair labor practice

On July 31, 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student and teaching assistant at Smith College was eating lunch at a dorm and was approached by a campus police officer and asked what she was doing there.

My account of what happened next is based on an article in the New York Times.

Deeply offended for being harassed for “eating while black,” she posted a denunciation on social media of a janitor and a cafeteria worker that she thought had reported her.

Kathleen McCartney, the president of Smith College, immediately apologized to her and put the janitor on paid leave.  She also hired a law firm to make an impartial investigation of the incident.

She also ordered anti-bias training for all staff, revamped the campus police force and created segregated dormitories for non-white students.

In October, the law firm submitted its report.  The dormitory in question had been reserved for high school students taking part in a summer program.  Smith had asked college staff to report unauthorized persons in the dorm.  The campus police officer had spoken to her politely and left without taking any action.

The janitor she denounced, Mark Patenaude, was not the janitor who notified police.  The cafeteria worker had mentioned to her that the dorm was off limits, but had not notified anybody.

In other words, nobody had done anything wrong.

McCartney made the report public, but commented, “I suspect you will conclude, as did I, it is impossible to rule out the potential of implicit racial bias.”

My interpretation of that comment is: (1) Employees accused of racial bias are guilty until proven innocent.  (2) It is impossible to prove you are innocent of racial bias.

Jodi Blair, the cafeteria worker, earned $40,000 a year at Smith.  Tuition, including room and board, is $78,000 a year.

Blair said she got notes in her mailboxes and taped to her car, and phone calls at home, accusing her of racism.  She heard students whisper as she went by, “There goes the racist.”

The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented the student commented, “It’s troubling that people were more offended by being called racist that by actual racism in our society.  Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailboxes, is not on a par with the consequences of actual racism.”

Blair suffers from lupus, a disease of the immune system, and stress triggers episodes.  She checked into a hospital last year.  Then she, along with other workers, was furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

She applied for a job in a restaurant, and, she said, the first thing she was asked was whether she was the notorious racist.

The janitor who called campus security is still working at Smith and didn’t want to be interviewed.  Mark Patenaude, the other janitor, quit not long after his name was posed on Facebook.

Campus staff, but not faculty, are required to attend anti-bias training.  Blair and Patenaude both disliked being interrogated about their inner feelings and childhood experiences regarding race. 

Another employee, Jodi Shaw, said being subjected to such training should not be a condition of employment.  She resigned and is suing the college.

Biden made a great statement on labor rights

President Joe Biden made a great statement last Sunday about labor union rights.

He called attention to what the law requires, as well as certain basic facts.

That may not seem like much.  But it has been decades since any President has been willing to speak up for labor.

Republicans from Reagan to Trump have been hostile to organized labor.  Democrats from Carter to Obama have been indifferent.  This has been a disaster.

Labor unions, as Biden said, made possible the middle class prosperity the United States (and many other countries) enjoyed following World War Two.  They also were essential to electing Democrats.

As unions have declined, so has the middle class.  And so has the Democratic Party. 

Recent public opinion polls indicate that 65 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, and 48 percent of non-union workers would join a union if they could.  

But only 10.3 percent of American workers actually belong to unions.  It would take a long time to get back to the 34.8 percent of the work force that belonged to unions in 1954.

Biden’s statement, without mentioning names, referred to labor union efforts to organize Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama.  This sets him against Jeff Bezos, who is possibly the world’s richest man and also the owner of the Washington Post.

If Biden is willing to make an enemy of Bezos, I have to respect him. I hope he doesn’t walk back his statement.

Winners and losers in the COVID economy

A blogger who calls himself Nikolai Vladivostok posted this chart. It shows what people in different segments of the U.S. population say about whether they’re worse off or better off.

People whose income was $100,000 a year were, on average, very happy with their situations. So were those with post-graduate educations.

The unhappiest were people whose income was $50,000 a year or less. Women on average were unhappier than men.

I was a little surprised that city residents were happier than suburbanites. I always thought of U.S. suburbanites as affluent and pleased with themselves. I guess that thinking is out of date.

You might wonder how much of this is due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and how much would be true in any year. Nikolai Vladivostok found some other charts illustrating how hard the pandemic has been on different income groups.  Having a low-income job is a risk factor.

The passing scene: Links and charts 8/9/2020

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Some graphs and comments by Tony Wikrent on Ian Welsh’s blog.

UNITED STATES OF INEQUALITY: 2020 and the Great Divide on Capital and Main (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)

Obstacles to a new New Deal

The USA is heading into an economic crisis with evictions, foreclosures, small-business failures and unemployment rates like those of the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, made worse by the pandemic and catastrophic climate change.

But Thomas Ferguson, a political scientist whose specialty is money and politics, said that a second Great Depression will not necessarily result in a second New Deal.

The Great Depression was touched off with a crash in the financial markets.  Banks closed.  Business profits fell.  This weakened both the credibility and political power of big business.

No such situation exists today, Ferguson noted.  The Federal Reserve is propping up the banks and the financial markets.  The super-rich are actually richer and more powerful than ever.

President Roosevelt’s first response to the crisis was the National Recovery Act, a kind of democratic corporate state.  It was only when big business turned against him that the New Deal as we remember it emerged. with Social Security, the Wagner Act and so on.

The impetus for the true New Deal came from the new labor movement organized by John L. Lewis and the CIO.

Conditions today are different. Ferguson said.  Big business is entrenched in both parties and is able to block popular and necessary reforms such as Medicare for all.

There are wildcat strikes and a few militant unions, but nothing as yet like the labor movement of the 1930s.

Ferguson saw some long-range hope in the insurgent movement in the Democratic Party as represented by the Justice Democrats and other factions.  But in the long run, as someone said, we are all dead.  The crisis is not going to put itself on hold until 2022 or 2024.

LINKS

Biden Blurring Almost Everything, an interview of Thomas Ferguson for theAnalysis.com.

Joe Biden’s Platform for 2020: Anti-Populism by Bill Scher for POLITICO.

The Non-Voter by Chris Arnade for American Compass.

U.S. labor’s new strategies for a new century

Freedom of contract begins where equality of bargaining power begins.  (==Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)

A class war is being waged in the United States, and American workers are losing.  For the past 50 years, labor unions, the only institutions whose specific purpose is to defend workers’ rights, have gone from defeat to defeat.

New Deal protections of labor rights have been taken away, one-by-one, through court decisions, anti-labor laws and non-enforcement of labor laws.   Republican politicians, with few exceptions, regard unions as hated

American business is increasingly a network of supply chains, franchises and “independent” contractors,” which are almost impossible to shut down through strikes.  As a result, labor union membership has steadily fallen.

Steven Greenhouse, who was a long-time labor reporter for the New York Times, describes the state of American labor in his new book, BEATEN DOWN, WORKED UP: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor.   

He reviewed the history of U.S. labor’s rise and decline. but the most interesting parts of the book are his reports on successful tactics and strategies of today’s labor movement.

They often operate outside the framework of labor law. I’m not surprised or shocked that unions sometimes defy the law.  Employers routinely break the law, in firing workers for belonging to unions, for example, or not paying workers for all hours worked.

They often bypass being certified as bargaining agents by the National Labor Relations Board or asking for legally-enforceable contracts.   Instead their power comes from their own solidarity and power.

They found allies in the broader community.  They used unconventional tactics.  Saul Alinsky would admire many of today’s labor leaders.  They didn’t confine themselves to strikes.  They organized boycotts, publicity campaigns, mass demonstrations and lawsuits—anything to inconvenience or embarrass their opponents.

But often when they won, management found they were better off treating their workers with respect than as enemies.

A large number of labor leaders and rank-and-file workers quoted by Greenhouse are immigrants, women and people of color.  I don’t think that’s affirmative-action reporting on his part.  It is the nature of today’s work force.

Here are some of the stories he told/

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About 90 percent of fresh tomatoes in the USA are picked in Immokalee, Florida.  Tomato pickers historically worked long hours in the 90+ degree temperatures.

Women pickers were sexually harassed.  Pickers were often cheated of their wages.  A few were actually enslaved—held prisoner and forced to work without wages.

Farm workers are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act, which supposedly guarantees the right to organize unions.

In 1991, farmworker activists founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a coalition that did outreach and education.

The founding group included three Haitians  pickers who’d been peasant organizers in their own country, but were now refugees in the United States.

They followed the Latin American labor tradition of “popular education,” using classes and skits to teach about labor history, U.S. agribusiness and how to educate and organize.

In 1993, they carried out their first strike.  They won minor victories from different growers, but then decided to focus instead on Taco Bell, a principal buyer of tomatoes.  In 2001, they organized a national boycott of Taco Bell.  Twenty colleges barred Taco Bell from campus.

After a huge demonstration at Taco Bell’s 2005 stockholders’ meeting, the company agreed to adopt a code of conduct for its suppliers, which set standards for wages, benefits, working hours and employee safety and also to pay a penny a pound more for its Florida tomatoes.

Lessons of The Killing Floor

I saw a great movie Friday night – a remastered version of the 1984 movie, The Killing Floor, which is about the fight of slaughterhouse workers in Chicago in the 1910s to establish a union and how they were divided and defeated by racial conflict.

It is a reminder of a history we Americans shouldn’t forget and carries lessons for labor and social justice struggles today.

All the characters are based on real people, who supposedly did approximately the same things that the movie shows.

The viewpoint character is Frank Custer, an illiterate sharecropper from Mississippi, who at first is grateful just to find work and doesn’t want to get involved in what he sees as a conflict between white people.

But when Bill Bremer, a German-American union leader, sticks up for him, Custer begins to realize that people of a different race and heritage are not necessarily his enemies.

The union local reflects the culture of the immigrants from central and eastern Europe who make up the majority of its members.  Speeches by union leaders are translated into Polish, and union meetings are following by polka dances.

The white ethnic leaders welcome Custer into their midst, and rely on him and a handful of other black organizers to bring African-American workers into the union.  He becomes a respected member of the leadership.

This was a huge, huge thing for white people to do in the 1910s, when extreme racism was the norm not only in the United States, but throughout the Western world.

But the white leaders do not do what Custer did—get out of their comfort zone and make contact with people who are culturally different from themselves.

Instead they depend on him to represent the union to the black workers, and to represent black workers to the union leadership.  In the end, this proves to be too much to expect.

Custer’s best friend meanwhile goes off to serve in World War One, and comes home to scorn any idea of alliance with white people.  He trusts only his fists and his revolver.

Another black worker, Heavy Williams, resents Custer for the power and prestige he has gained by allying himself with white people.  He helps to sabotage the union’s fragile racial amity.

Following the end of World War One, the United States was torn with race riots—not race riots like today, which consist of black people going on rampages, mainly through their own neighborhoods.

The race riots of the “red summer” of 1919 consisted of armed white gangs shooting up black neighborhoods and wrecking property, while police looked the other way.

A race riot in Chicago was touched off by the stoning to death of a black man for trespassing on a white beach area.  White gangs in blackface set fire to Polish and Lithuanian homes.  Black Chicago neighborhoods are terrorized.

The meat packers used the end of wartime prosperity and the need to create jobs for returning veterans as an excuse to lay off union workers.  Many white union members saw African-Americans as a threat to their jobs.  Many African-Americans saw working as strikebreakers as the only way to get jobs.

The union was defeated temporarily, but gained recognition and a contract in the 1930s.

Robotic jobs, robots and the future of work

A lot of corporate managers, especially in Silicon Valley, have a goal of replacing workers with automated machines.  The path to that goal is to make work as machine-like and automatic as possible..

I always used to feel sorry for telephone operators 25 years ago because very minute of their workday was monitored so that they always gave a specific automatic response.  Now this has become a pattern.

 Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs recently wrote about how this is becoming the new normal.

[A] feature in the Wall Street Journal … shows how new technologies are enabling employers to spy on a fictitious employee named Chet.

Chet’s boss knows what time he wakes up, because his phone detects changes in his physical activity.  

Chet’s whereabouts are tracked at all times, and his employer can watch him stop for coffee before work, and even knows what part of the building he is in and whether he has strayed into any “unauthorized areas.”

Image via Fast Company

The precise time he arrives at work will be logged, all of his emails will be read, and Chet’s work computer snaps a screenshot every 30 seconds so that the employer can verify that he is staying on task.  

His “phone conversations can be recorded, transcribed and monitored for rate of speech and tone,” his interactions with other employees are recorded and analyzed, and his company even tracks his fitness and can use it to adjust his benefits.

An accompanying Wall Street Journal article indicates that these kinds of employer surveillance techniques are increasingly common, and “there’s almost nothing you can do about it.”

And there are even more invasive possible techniques—I recently read an MIT Technology Review article called “This company embeds microchips in its employees, and they love it,” which I liked because nowhere in the body of the article itself is there any quote indicating that the employees do, indeed, “love it.”  

One of them says that you get used to it after a time, which I do not doubt.

Importantly, though, under the philosophy that Free Markets are fair, there is no actual language with which we can object to these things.  

Unless the employees are being kidnapped and enslaved, this is just “freedom of contract.”

If they didn’t want their employer screenshotting their workspace, or taking pictures of their penis in the company bathroom, they shouldn’t have signed a contract that allowed said employer “all possible latitude to do as they see fit to further the interests of the company.”  Sucks for you, Chet.

In the innocent-seeming paragraph about freedom above, then, we can see the seeds of something perverse and disturbing.

The belief that the state shouldn’t “interfere” in “voluntary transactions” actually means that your boss should get to do whatever they want, and there should be “nothing you can do about it.”  

We can see here exactly how workers can be talked into forging their own chains: A well-funded operation convinces them of the Philosophy Of Freedom, and then they find out too late that this just means they have no recourse when horrible invasive things are done to them at work, and every moment of their life is monitored by a powerful entity that does not care whether they live or die.

A new face of organized labor

Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), is an example of what a labor leader should be—one who is unafraid to use labor’s only power, the strike.

Sara Nelson

During the government shutdown, she talked about a general strike in support of Transportation Security Administration workers, who were being forced to work without pay.  Her voice was one big reason why so many airline employees called in sick in the following days, forcing the Trump administration to step down.

Flight attendants, by the way, do much more than serve soft drinks and snacks and give demonstrations of how to use oxygen masks.  They are responsible for safety and security, and are first responders in case of any emergency, including a forced landing.

I learned about her and the AFA-CWA by reading an article about her in The New Republic and the text of a great speech she gave at an annual dinner of the Democratic Socialists of America in Chicago.  If you care about American labor, I recommend you read the article and the speech.

LINKS

Sara Nelson’s Art of War by Kim Kelly for The New Republic.

People Are Ready to Fight, a speech by Sara Nelson to the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and our times

Throughout the 20th century, critics regarded Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) as one of his lesser novels.  It didn’t have the huge menagerie of colorful, memorable characters that most of his novels did, nor did it provide much comic relief from its hard tale..

Hard Times is back in vogue because the philosophy of its central character, Thomas Gradgrind, is back in vogue.  Gradgrind is a schoolmaster and later Member of Parliament for Coketown, a stand-in for the gritty industrial city of Manchester.

Gradgrind’s philosophy is based on the famous fact-value distinction—the idea that facts are objective because they can be proved or disproved, but that values are subjective because they arise from personal feeling.

He operates a school devoted to rote memorization of facts—no games, no art or literature, no appeals to the imagination—and to a philosophy based on the ethic of rational self-interest.

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for.  Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything or render anybody help without purchase.  Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be.  Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter.  And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

This was a living philosophy then, and it is a living philosophy still.  We now call it neoliberalism, and its adherents are to be found throughout Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the economics departments of great universities.

Gradgrind practices what he preaches.  He stifles sentiment and emotion in himself.  He denies himself the emotional intelligence to see through the boastful, hypocritical self-made industrialist, Josiah Bounderby.

He encourages his daughter, Louisa, to marry Bounderby, and his son, Tom, to go to work for him, as does his star pupil, Bitzer.

Louisa has a good heart, but she is morally adrift because she never is given any justification for the promptings of her heart.  Tom, on the other hand, lacks moral intuition, and is not taught anything to make up for the lack.  He is a self-destructive fool because his extreme self-absorption makes him unaware of the possible consequences of his actions until it is too late.

But it was Bitzer who is the most perfect representation of Gradgrind’s teachings.  He is diligent at his job, saves his money, doesn’t drink, smoke or gamble and guides his life by cost-benefit analysis.  When in the end he turns against Gradgrind in order to advance his career, he calmly justifies his decision by citing his old schoolmaster’s “excellent teaching” about self-interest.

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I read Hard Times as part of a novel-reading group hosted by my friend Linda White.  It was published the same year as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, which was our group’s previous book.  Although there is no reason to think the two writers influenced each other, there are remarkable similarities.

Both have morally sensitive heroines with inadequate fathers.  Both depict self-made industrialists in conflict with labor unions.  Both make their noble worker character speak in a hard-to-understand dialect that sets him apart from all the others.  Both have their worker character ask the industrialist for help, and be rebuffed.

But the two novels are very different in both style and viewpoint.  North and South is an effort to give a fair and balanced account of conditions in 1850s Manchester.  Hard Times burns with indignation.

Gaskell’s Margaret Hale has a Christian faith that not only gives her a moral compass, but is a magnetic field that draws others into her influence.  Dickens’ Louisa has the same moral impulses as Margaret, but she has no philosophy or faith that would give her the confidence to act on them.