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.
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.
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England during the reign of Queen Victoria was the world’s first and greatest industrial power and the center of a global empire that governed a quarter of the world’s population.
Yet you would hardly know this from reading most Victorian novels. They’re typically set in London or in rural southern England, often the most backward parts. Industry and empire are offstage.
One exception to this is Elisabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), which I recently read as part of a novel-reading group hosted by my friends Linda and David White.
Mrs. Gaskell did not just lament slums and poverty. She took the trouble to try to understand newly-industrializing England—how the textile mills operated, the economics of the textile industry and the Issues at stake in the conflict between capital and labor.
Her viewpoint character is 20-year-old Margaret Hale, who is forced to relocate with her family from the sunny agricultural and aristocratic South of England to the grimy, slum-ridden town of Milton (Manchester) in Darkshire (Lancashire) in the North.
There she encounters John Thornton, a self-made industrialist who, at the age of 30, has risen from low-paid employment as a draper’s assistant to the owner of a manufacturing business that does business worldwide, and Nicholas Higgins, a worker in Thornton’s factory, who is driven by poverty and need to organize a strike.
Thornton is handsome, energetic and articulate. He could easily be a character in an Ayn Rand novel. He feels beholden to no one, asks nothing of anyone and refuses to accept dictation or advice from anyone, including the workers in his factory, whom he regards as antagonists.
Competition from American factories causes him to cut wages—but he does not feel he needs to justify this to his workers or anybody else.
Inspired by Nicholas Higgins, the workers go on strike. Most of the major strikes in the 19th century UK and US were, like this one, in response to wage cuts, not demands for wage increases.
Thornton imports strikebreakers from Ireland, with a priest to keep them under control and guards to prevent them from communicating with the strikers.
The strikers probably would have lost anyway, but some of the workers disregard Higgins’ advice to remain nonviolent and stage a riot in front of Thornton’s house, which gives him an excuse to call in the police.
The textile mill owners hire the strikers back, if they pledge not to join a union. Higgins refuses to do this.
He asks Margaret to help him move to the South and get a job as an agricultural labor. But she tells him this is not realistic. Bad as conditions in the factories are, the plight of agricultural workers is worse. They do nothing but eat, sleep and work, she says; they are incapable of the comradeship of the workers in the North.
The same is true of the servant class in the South. The Hales find it difficult to hire servants in Milton. Factory girls would rather work 10 hours a day and have the rest of their time free than endure the life of a servant, which means being on duty 24/7 with maybe one Saturday afternoon off every couple of weeks.
In the South, some servants find this endurable because they regard themselves as members of their families. But this is not the spirit of the go-getting North, where everyone is out for themselves.
So far, so realistic.
But Mrs. Gaskell then veers from her realism in order to bring about a happy ending.
Garret Keizer wrote about the desperate plight of American labor unions in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine. His thinking is the same as mine. In the following passage, he quotes himself.
“I grew up with the assumption that there was labor and there was management,” I tell him, “and they’d always be locked in this struggle, and sometimes labor would win and sometimes, probably most of the time, management would win, but they’d be wrestling back and forth, and that’s how it would go on, and in some ways that would be how society progressed.
“And now I’ve started to wonder whether that’s the right way of thinking about it, whether it isn’t a wrestling match but a fight to the death and there are only two possible outcomes.
“One is that labor, not by itself but in a coalition with other groups, prevails to the extent of being able to restructure society in some basic ways.
“Or management, or whatever you want to call it—the One Percent—will destroy all unions and basically there will be masters and slaves.
“What’s wrong with that construction? What am I missing?”
His question is addressed to Larry Cohen, former president of the Communication Workers of America and chairman of the board of Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution movement.
“Nothing,” he says.
During the 20 years I reported on business for the Rochester (NY) Democrat and Chronicle, I was surprised at how many people were afraid to speak freely because of the consequences to their careers or chances of getting a job.
About the only people I ever met who were willing to speak as if they were free Americans were:
Many years ago I read David Kearns’ memoir of his years as CEO of Xerox Corp. (I no longer have the book and don’t remember the title). In one chapter, he described a meeting he held with workers at Xerox’s Webster, N.Y., plant about problems with a new model of copier.
He told how the president of the union local replied, “Why didn’t you ask us, Dave? We could have told you it was no good.”
My impression is that Kearns thought he deserved credit for not getting angry at the union representative. But, actually, what he should have done was to arrange to meet with him once every six or twelve months.
If you are in a position of authority, someone who will tell you the truth is invaluable. But few in a position of authority want to hear inconvenient truths. Hence functional stupidity.
Grant that extreme economic inequality is a bad thing. Grant that ever-increasing economic inequality is a bad thing.
Grant that complete equality of incomes is not feasible and maybe not desirable. How much equality is enough?
The economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom (as I recall) that it is impossible that people could reach a consensus on what each and every person deserves. Once you reject complete equality, he wrote, the only acceptable distribution of income is what results from the impersonal working of the free market.
A democratic government could never determine a distribution of income that is satisfactory to everyone, or even a majority, Hayek thought; if it tries, the result can only be gridlock and a breakdown of democracy.
But there are ways to reduce inequality that neither set limits on any individual’s aspirations nor give some group of bureaucrats the power to decide who gets what. Some that come to mind immediately are:
What are your ideas?
Leaders of organized labor in the United States face in Donald Trump what may be the most anti-union administration since before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The New Deal gave labor unions a legal right to bargain collectively and enter into binding contracts. Subsequently so-called “right to work” laws imposed on unions the obligation to bargain collectively even for workers who choose not to join the union.
Many observers expect the Trump administration and Republican Congress to enact a national right to work law. Under such a law, workers could join a company with a union contract, refuse to join the union or pay dues and enjoy all the benefits of the contract. Why, union leaders ask, would anybody join a union if they could enjoy all the benefits of union membership without any of the obligations?
Trump’s likely choice for Secretary of Labor is said to be Andrew Puzder, head of the parent company of the Hardee’s and Carl Jr. restaurant chains. He is an outspoken opponent of minimum wage increases and of Obamacare.
Other contenders who’ve been mentioned in the press are Victoria Lipnic, one of two Republican members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and Scott Walker, the fiercely anti-union Governor of Wisconsin.
President-elect Donald Trump is an enemy of organized labor.
He favors “right to work” laws, by which employees can enjoy the benefits of a union contract without having to pay union dues.
Source: International Business Times
He once said that the U.S. economy is un-competitive because wages are too high, although he later backtracked.
He promised to appoint a Supreme Court Justice with the same philosophy as the anti-union Antonin Scalia.
He promised to revoke every executive order issued by President Barack Obama, which presumably includes orders enforcing wage standards for federal contractors and new rules for overtime pay.
So it’s not surprising that American labor unions made an all-out effort to defeat him in the recent. Labor unions donated $135 million to anti-Trump political action committees, and spent an additional $35 million to get out the vote and other political activities. AFSCME, the NEA and other unions sent out nearly 4,000 canvassers, who knocked on an estimated 9.5 million doors.
Exit polls indicate that Hillary Clinton carried the vote of union families by an 8 percent margin. But this is not as good as it seems. Four years before, Barack Obama won the vote of union households by an 18 percent margin. In other words, Clinton was down by 10 percentage points.
Donald Trump did better than Mitt Romney among union voters, but his gains were less than Clinton’s losses. A large number of union families either didn’t vote or voted for small-party candidates.
What wasn’t Clinton able to hold more of the union vote? First, Trump made a direct appeal to them for votes of union members, which Republicans haven’t done in recent elections. Clinton tried to appeal to college-educated moderate Republicans, which she did with some success, but not enough to offset the erosion of majorities from traditional Democratic constituencies.
Second, Trump made an issue of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement, North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade agreements. Clinton promoted the TPP as Secretary of State, but opposed it as a candidate. Many factory workers blame the TPP, NAFTA and other trade agreements for loss of jobs to foreign countries.
I did not vote for Trump, but I think he is right about the TPP. If he hopes to be re-elected, he’d better not break his word about opposing the TPP as he has so many other campaign promises.
Source: Center for American Progress.
A new bill—the Workplace Action for a Growing Economy Act, aka the WAGE Act—would make the right to join a labor union a civil right.
Workers who are fired or discriminated because they are union members would have the same rights as workers who suffer racial or sex discrimination.
This would be a big change. It would give individual workers a much stronger legal position than under existing labor law—in some
Labor union membership has been steadily declining—not, in my opinion, because American workers are satisfied with their wages and working conditions, but because they fear retaliation from employers.
Without the union voice, wages (adjusted for inflation) are stagnant and inequality is increasing. If everybody who wants to join a labor union could do so without fear, I think this could turn around.
The WAGE Act was introduced by Senator Patti Murray, D-WA, and Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, D-VA. It was co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and has been endorsed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The middle class is the middle 60% of income earners
The bill has virtually nil chance of getting through Congress this year. A similar bill introduced last year by Rep. Keith Ellison, D-MN, and John Lewis, D-GA, failed. But it’s only by keeping the issue on the public agenda that this right can be won.
Firing an employee for union membership is at present an unfair labor practice under the National Labor Relations Act. The best that an employee can hope for from the NLRB is reinstatement in the job and partial back pay years later, and the odds are against even that.
Under the WAGE Act, employees would have the right to sue in court and ask to be put back to work with no loss of pay or benefits while the case is pending. If they won the case, they would get triple back pay, while the employer could face a $50,000 fine—$100,000 if it was a second offense.
During the past 40 years, the productivity of American workers has continued to increase but their wages (adjusted for inflation) have barely increased at all.
Labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan, in his new book, Only One Thing Can Save Us, says this is because corporate America has decided that it doesn’t want highly-skilled, well-paid workers; it wants low-paid, replaceable workers.
The middle class is the middle 60% of income earners, between the top and bottom 20%
Many evils flow from this. Working people and the middle class have take on more debt in order to buy homes, pay for higher education or maintain their material standard of living.
Bankers and financiers find it more profitable to invest in debt than in the production of goods and services.
This results in the financialization and hollowing-out of the U.S. economy.
Geoghegan thinks the one thing that can save us is a labor union movement strong enough to win wage increases sufficient to keep up with the increase in the production of wealth.
This will give working people and the middle class enough buying power to generate a real economic recovery.
It will enable them to pay down debt. Shrinking the debt industry will free up money to be invested in producing real goods and services.
Labor union contracts will make it harder to lay people off at will. This will give employers an incentive to invest in training to make their workers more productive, which union apprenticeship programs can help with.
With more Americans earning good incomes, tax revenues will increase and governmental budgets will be more in balance. With fewer jobs being shipped overseas, the U.S. trade deficit may shrink.
A politically powerful union movement will bring American politics into balance. The USA will have both a left wing and a right wing rather than, as at present, only a right wing.
He advocates reforms to strengthen labor unions, including:
1. Making union membership a civil right.
2. Allowing members-only unions without NLRB elections.
I was a member of Local 17 of the Newspaper Guild in Rochester for 24 years, and I’m still a strong supporter of the labor union movement.
Labor unions have their faults, just as churches, political parties and other institutions do, because they’re merely structures in which people can operate, for good or ill.
But they’re the only structure created for the specific purpose of defending the rights and interests of working people. Without a strong and independent labor movement, there’s little to stand between individual working people and the structures of corporate and governmental power.
Even a weak labor union, if truly independent, is better than none. Local 17’s contracts with Gannett Newspapers were highly favorable to the company, but the fact that there was a contract meant that the company could not operate arbitrarily. Even if the company wrote the rules, it had to follow these rules.
Another thing that helped us was the strength of the International Typographers Unions and other printing trades unions, until they were wiped out by new technologies that didn’t require their skills. Their high wages and good benefits set a benchmark that benefited all other employees in the building.
A lot of people used to take the gains won by labor unions for granted. They thought that the eight-hour day, overtime pay, paid vacations, sick pay and medical insurance were something that employers granted out of the goodness of their hearts. Now that all these things are under attack, I think some of these people are reconsidering.
Most Americans in labor unions are better off than Americans not in labor unions. I hear non-union workers ask why the union members should have benefits that they lack. I think they should ask themselves why they themselves shouldn’t have these benefits.
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Here are some articles about American labor and labor unions that I read recently and recommend. If you have the time and interest, they might make for good reading over our Labor Day weekend.
Ronald Reagan’s attacks on the minimum wage, families being helped by welfare, those receiving unemployment insurance when the economy failed, became racialized attacks, and not viewed as attacks on the foundation of worker survival.
So in the 1980s, the real value of minimum wage drifted to unprecedented lows, states rolled back eligibility to, and benefit levels for, unemployment insurance and the foundation was laid to attack women who needed help in raising their children to force them into low-wage work.
Without providing any gains to American workers, Reagan mastered the appearance of worker advancement by succeeding not by having wages rise with productivity, as had been the case, but by having wages rise relative to the poor who could not find jobs, or could only find minimum wage jobs.
The silence of the labor movement in the sinking fortunes of the poor meant there was political space, for the first time since the 1930s, to have the economy improve and expand while the poverty rate increased.
==From A Future for Workers: A Contribution From Black Labor. (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)
Seven Myths about the Greek Debt Crisis by Stergios Skaperdas, a University of California economics professor. (Hat tip to naked capitalism).
An economist argues that (1) default would not be the worst outcome for Greece, (2) the troika (European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, European Commission) is not trying to rescue Greece, (3) Greece’s problems are not caused by corruption and bad policy, (4) no Greek government could have carried out the troika’s policies, (5) the troika’s policies would not have benefited Greece, (6) exiting the Eurozone would not be catastrophic for Greece and (7) the Greek government in fact does have bargaining power.
Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Care That Much About Abortion Rights by Ted Rall for Counterpunch.
Instead of trying to persuade judges that abortion is a constitutional right, why don’t Hillary Clinton and other liberal Democrats support legislation to guarantee abortion rights? Ted Rall thinks Democrats hold back because they cynically want to keep abortion alive as a issue. But maybe they’re just timid.
Clown Genius by Scott Adams. (Hat tip to Rod Dreher)
The creator of the Dilbert cartoons thinks most people probably would buy a used car from Donald Trump because his campaign demonstrates mastery of the classic techniques of salesmanship.
Sam Seder’s interview of Thomas Geoghegan is about 45 minutes long.
The rest of the running time is a repeat.
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Thomas Geoghegan says American labor needs a new strategy, which would include the following.
American labor unions have been unable to stop “right to work” laws from being enacted in state after state—even in Michigan.
These laws forbid labor-management contracts in which an employer hires only labor union members, or requires new employees to pay dues to a union. Yet, by law, the union contract must cover all the employees in the bargaining unit, regardless of whether they join or pay dues.
Thomas Geoghegan wrote in Only One Thing Can Save Us that it may not be possible to stop right-to-work from becoming national law. To the average person, it doesn’t seem right that they should be forced to join an organization or make payments to it against their will. And as fewer and fewer people have any experience with unions, the counter-argument becomes harder to make.
But if unions lose that battle, as well they might, all is not lost. It is much easier to make the case for the right to join a labor union if there never are any circumstances in which union membership is compulsory.
Source: The Atlantic.
Senator Rick Santorum was right, or at least partly right. Only a snob would think that you have to be a college graduate to be a success in life.
Now President Obama didn’t exactly say that in the 2012 campaign, not in so many words, but the focus of his policy is that high schools should make their graduates “college-ready” and that a college diploma is a key to economic success.
This is a red herring. It is a diversion from the real economic problems, especially the erosion of the wage-earning middle class.
Thomas Geoghegan pointed out in his new book, Only One Thing Can Save Us, that when the President says lack of higher education is the cause of economic inequality, he is writing off the 68 percent of Americans age 24 to 64 who don’t have college diplomas and never will.
Suppose, he asked, that Obama and the Democrats succeed in pushing the college graduation rate up to 35 percent or even 40 percent, which would be hard to do. Obama is still writing off the majority of working-age Americans.
The President is in effect telling high school graduates that the reason it is so hard for them to find decent-paying jobs is that they didn’t go to college. And as for the the one in five male college graduates and one in seven women graduates whose income is less than that of the average high school graduate, it is because they attended the wrong college or majored in the wrong subject.
I grew up with a stereotype of the Germans as prisoners of hierarchy, bureaucracy and rules, who would never be a match for us democratic, freedom-loving practical Americans.
But if that ever was true, our two countries have since traded places.
Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer whose writings I admire, wrote a book in 2010 entitled WERE YOU BORN ON THE WRONG CONTINENT? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life about how Germany is an economic role model for the United States.
He still says so in his newest book, ONLY ONE THING CAN SAVE US: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement.
In Germany, Geoghegan wrote, the laws, strong labor unions, worker representatives in management make it difficult to fire anybody. So layoffs are a last resort, not a first resort.
German management is forced to concentrate on figuring out how to get the most out of the work force, not on making workers powerless and replaceable. The result is that German corporations invest in lifelong learning for their workers, on the justified assumption that they’re going to remain with the same employer and become permanent assets to the firm.
CEOs of American companies complain of a lack of skilled workers and the lack of job training.
But if you look at what most of them do, and not what they say, they don’t really want productive workers. They want replaceable workers.
So argues Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, in his outstanding new book, ONLY ONE THING CAN SAVE US: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement.
One obvious example of this is Boeing’s decision to have its new Dreamliner made by inexperienced, low-paid workers in South Carolina rather than members of the International Association of Machinists in Seattle. They had production and quality problems in South Carolina, but their priority evidently was to get away from the union.
Now the same management philosophy is being applied to public schools, universities and hospitals. Well-trained, well-paid professionals are harassed, laid off and replaced with inexperienced newcomers.
If you define efficiency as that which is most convenient for managers, there is something to be said for this. An ignorant subordinate is less likely to give you an argument than an experienced and skilled subordinate. It is easier to treat people as replaceable parts if they lack knowledge and opinions.
The New Deal is regarded as the emancipator of the American labor union movement. By giving Americans a legal right to bargain collectively through labor unions of their own choosing, the National Labor Relations Act gave unions a recognized place in society.
Under the NLRB umbrella, American labor unions in the 1930s and 1940s became greater in size and power than they ever were before or have been since.
But Stanley Aronowitz in his new book, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AMERICAN LABOR: Toward a New Workers’ Movement (2014), said that the NLRB in the long run proved a trap.
Aronowitz said that unions agreed to restrictions on their only weapon, the strike. During the course of a contract, unions themselves were responsible for suppressing unauthorized strikes.
Employers became adept at using the NLRB to thwart union organizing. In the interim between a petition for a union election and the election itself, they could weed out the union supporters (although this was technically illegal) and threaten and propagandize the employees.
Labor leaders gave up the goal of transforming society in return for place at the table where decisions about the U.S. economy were made. But they didn’t even get a place at the table.
Over the years, new laws weakened union rights and imposed new restrictions. Union leaders became less and less able or willing to use their basic weapon—the strike. Union membership is below 11 percent of the American work force, the lowest level since before the New Deal.
Aronowitz, a professor at City University of New York and a former factory worker and union organizer himself, wrote that if the labor movement is to survive, workers and labor leaders must break out of old ways of thinking.
They need to engage in direct action, outside the NLRB framework, as has was done in the recent Walmart and fast-food walkouts.
Aronowitz noted that these actions were taken without union recognition or expectation of a contract, but were effective nonetheless in forcing management to respond to workers’ demands.
Unions should not agree to contracts with no-strike provisions, he wrote. Or, if they do, only as a last resort and for a limited time.
I always thought that the Walmart and fast-food workers, who are continually at the brink of destitution, showed great courage by defying their employers like that. I wouldn’t have thought it possible if it hadn’t happened. Maybe in this case freedom really is just another word for nothing left to use.
Scavengers by Adam Johnson for Granta.
Adam Johnson walked down the stairs of his North Korean tourist hotel because he did not trust the elevator, and discovered that most floors of were unoccupied and scavenged for furnishings in order to keep up appearances on the few floors on which the tourists stayed. This is one of the glimpses his article provides of the reality of life in North Korea.
Remembering the Russian Orthodox Priest Who Fought the Orthodox Church by Cathy Young for the Daily Beast.
Father Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest who died on Christmas, fought for democracy, Christian values and freedom for all religions against Communist totalitarianism and Putinist corruption. He was defrocked twice for protesting and exposing the ties of the Russian Orthodox church with the Soviet government.
Religion in Latin America by the Pew Research Center.
Pentecostalism is on the rise in a historically Roman Catholic region. The worldwide spread of Pentecostalism may be the most significant religious development of our time.
Tayloring Christianity by Matthew Rose for First Things.
A Secular Age? by Patrick J. Dineen for The American Conservative.
Secularism in the USA does not war on religion, the way anti-clericalism has done in France, Mexico and other countries. American secularists simply want religion to be an individual matter rather than the organizing principle of society. In a way, American secular liberals are the ultimate Protestants.
The Republican Party leadership is explicitly anti-union because they recognize that unions are a key support for the Democratic Party and a key opponent of the right-wing corporate agenda.
It would seem logical to think that President Obama and the Democratic leaders would defend organized labor, one of the pillars of their party, but they don’t.
As Thomas Edsall pointed out in his New York Times column, the Democratic leadership has been not only indifferent to labor’s goals, but sometimes actively hostile.
Republicans such as Scott Walker and Chris Christie have persuaded the public that low wages, job insecurity and lack of benefits are normal, and that a policeman who gets a pension enjoys an unfair privilege at the public expense.
Democratic leaders do little or nothing to counteract this.
The problem is not that Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi or the other Democratic leaders are naive or weak, or that the Republicans are obstructionist (they are, but that’s not the problem).
The problem is that the goals of the Democratic leaders are different from what they say and from what their core supporters want.
Labor Day, like Martin Luther King Day, arose out of a struggle for human rights—the right of workers to bargain collectively for better wages, hours and working conditions.
Thanks to the struggle of labor unions, we Americans (some of us) have an eight-hour day and 40-hour week, weekends off, paid vacations, workers compensation for injury on the job and contracts defining the obligations of employers and employees. And if fewer and fewer of us enjoy these rights, it is because of the eroding power of organized labor.
Here are links to articles on the history of Labor Day and North American labor struggles.
Labor Day History: 11 Facts You Need to Know by Nate Hindman and Craig Kanally for Huffington Post.
When Labor Day Meant Something by Chad Broughton for The Atlantic Monthly.
The Forgotten Meaning of Labor Day by Jack Marshall on his Ethics Alarms web log.
The First Labour Day in Canada on the Canada’s History web site.
Debunking the Myth: The True History of Labor Day by Eugene E. Ruyle for Popular Resistance. Why the U.S. labor holiday is not on May Day.
Organizing “The Organized” Is Now the Key to Union Survival by Steve Early for Counterpunch. (Hat tip to Bill Harvey)
At first glance, it seems wrong to require people who don’t believe in labor unions to pay union dues just to be able to work for an employer with a union contract. Here’s how I see the logic.
Should workers have the right to bargain collectively and make contracts with employers? Under U.S. law, workers have that right. It would be absurd to say that investors have the right to join together to form corporations, but workers do not have the right to join together to form unions.
If there is a union contract, should the union have the power to say who is hired and who isn’t? Under U.S. law, unions do not have that right. If they did, they would, in effect, be the employer.
Should everyone who is hired by a union employer be covered by the union contract? Under U.S. law, they are. If not, the contract would be meaningless.
Should someone who gets the benefit of a union contract pay the same dues as fellow employees for union representation. I would say, “yes,” but yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court said “no,” at least as regards home care workers and public employee unions.
LINKS
Supreme Court rules against home care workers unions by Laura Clawson for Daily Kos.
Supreme Court: It Could Have Been Worse by David Cole for the New York Review of Books.
Alito and the expected pretzel on Psychopolitik.
Six Groups That Are Reinventing Organized Labor by Josh Israel for Think Progress. In the light of recent Supreme Court decisions restricting labor and empowering business, some worker groups are organizing without the protections and restrictions of U.S. labor law.
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