The following is an excerpt from Steven Greenhouse’s book, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1240603
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1240603
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When money equals speech then there is no longer such thing as free speech.
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But today’s political realities make it extremely hard to get Congress to enact union-friendly or worker-friendly measures
This will continue to be the case until the media starts calling out every politician who throws around the term Socialism, and doesn’t understand what the fuck they are talking about.
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…so it will continue to be the case.
The media benefits from that nonsense because Republicans (the ones throwing the term around) give the corporate ownership tax breaks, gut net neutrality and allow media mega mergers.
The last thing the media wants is a Presidential candidate to inspire a just reckoning for the rich and big business.
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When pro athletes wallow in their large contracts, that is the result of organized labor.
The lack of being able to connect dots in this country is catastrophic.
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The first step is to actually care about the working class. The left is losing for a reason.
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Just an FYI: National Labor Relations Act was enacted and designed to protect employees, not unions and not employers.
Unionized workers just have better bargaining power and of mass lay-offs, it is important for workers to have protections not only for their wages or vacations but for healthcare coverage after Cobra expires. Equally important to find a solution is how do you protect the workers in the gig economy wrt to healthcare.
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As much as I can find no fault in any of his recommendations, I certainly find no reason to be optimistic about getting money out of politics anytime soon. And absent any meaningful ability to more immediately counter that money, we are almost left with a Catch 22: we can’t elect politicians that will enact those legislative changes.
I have wished for the likes of Tom Steyer or other progressive Billionaires, to instead of funneling their money in the same pursuit of overpowering the Koch Brothers, instead take some of that money for Union organizing.
My dream is that with a pot of money available to pay McDonalds’ workers to go on strike. Pick a major city and have a dozen Company Stores picketed with the striking workers. Give them an ability to win a battle and create the conditions in which one could finally have sufficient weight in creating a Union.
I’ve said it before, we literally need to lift up the bottom of workers like this if we have any much hope of changing the trajectory of this Economy.
I have seen no reason to expect a break in the Collective Action Dilemma that the pay of these workers are manifestly representing, unless you can get them to work in unison.
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I’m not following the logic here. The left is losing because they do not “care about the working class.” I’m assuming a definition of caring about the working class is forthcoming? Yet, the right, with unpopular anti-union, anti-worker, anti equity, anti-equality legislation in place for the next foreseeable generation is winning and cares? Please inform.
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I disagree with Greenhouse on the order of things. The courts are only going to change (and undo Citizens United) after the rest of the political landscape has changed. Constitutional amendments even more so.
No, we need to win the Senate in 2020 and kill the filibuster in 2021 so union-enabling legislation can be passed quickly. (Even Dems like Manchin have to maintain a gloss of being on the side of the workers v. big corporations, right?) Then reinvigorated unions can help swing the balance of political power in America, and then we’ll have the clout to rein in the power of Big Money.
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They can stop voting Republican.
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Repeal Taft-Hartley.
Progressive Dems should already be all over this. Going after damaging archaic legislation would be a great first step and an easy win for labor.
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I have wondered for some time if we could give campaign finance vouchers for voting. That way you’re not paying people to vote, though I’m not necessarily opposed to that, you’re giving ordinary, non-billionaire Americans a stake in their government. I noticed Gilibrand wanted to give everybody a voucher. Why not make it an award for doing your civil duty? Maybe $150 for voting even in special elections where God knows we need more participation.
Like the GOP cares and yet the white working class has been voting GOP since the Civil Rights Era.
It isn’t us who lost them - they decided they didn’t like equal rights for POC.
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One of the problems here is the business strategies of labor unions. (Yes, I know they aren’t businesses in the sense of Google or GM, but they do have measurable objectives, or should, and strategies to implement them.)
First of all, it’s quite risky to rely on fixing Federal law or the political system. Unions basically made gains between 1930 and 1970 by excluding everyone but white men (and running in the shadow of a perceived Communist threat – note that once the Russians quit becoming a credible option for anyone, unions started declining), and backing corporate-friendly US foreign policy. If you do change laws, you do it in easy-to-understand, discrete steps that are designed to sound popular, and not designed to sound like union proposals. For example: The most powerful union of all: a $15/hour minimum wage. This will win any referendum in any state. It is our answer to the tax cut referenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s (and should be marketed in the same way – not “equity for America’s workers” but “come get yours and screw the bureaucrats in corporate America.”)
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Create shadow unions. You sign up online, pay your dues – first, you get some good benefits, but this is like joining the AARP for the travel discounts. Second, you build up a capability to enact labor slowdowns on the sly. Third, membership is kept anonymous. (It takes a lot of balls to publicly declare one’s allegiance to a union.)
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Get corporate executives down on videotape (covertly, of course) saying what they really think.
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Companies create lists of pro-union workers and trade them with each other. We can identify anti-union workers and managers and do the same thing. A shadow union can help a lot with this by doing (and automating) all of the back end systems, and just basic things like secure email and workflow for organizing efforts. NOTE: for all the hype, corporate America is totally inept at business intelligence/analytics, BPM/workflow, operational data, and the like. Be better than any corporate CIO.
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Build a PAC that makes the NRA and the coal industry look kind and gentle. Democratic activists probably should not be primarying each other. But a leftish PAC (that tries not to identify itself as such) can terrorize incumbents. (Warning: don’t get as extreme as conservatives about this.)
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Make tactical alliances with otherwise hostile corporations: “we’ll make your competitors lives pure hell if you recognize us, and we’ll be reasonable with you.”
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Regular union organizing needs to start using modern operational and sales management methods. First, get that card check passed. (This is more important than getting rid of Taft-Hartley, which we can get rid of at our leisure once the labor community gets itself organized.) Second, pay union organizers substantial incentive compensation for signing up members and lots of, lots of bonuses for organizing a business. Union organizers are full time and are basically paid to produce results. Once you have a union, don’t rely on the company for benefits like health insurance and pensions; run your own and control it. And don’t hesitate to amalgamate plans – you’ll be halfway there to single payer health insurance since you control the cash flow. Oh yes. Once your labor union is financially healthy, consider having everyone be an employee of the union, which creates a whole range of slow-mo labor actions. And, for God’s sake, do a better job with your image. Get your own credit union, your own employee discounts, etc.
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DO a lot of things besides negotiating. Auto makers have a tough time breaking their unions because the skills needed on an assembly line are quite extensive. BTW, most line managers are too stupid to understand any of this. Become a professional organization, and start writing best practices and the like that you control. Become a social organization (please don’t do it in a union hall, it’s not 1930) and make sure to reach out to non-members. (And make those activities fun.)
The problem is that a lot of MSM reporters are, fundamentally, not bright. They don’t know what the term “socialism” is, admittedly the term covers a lot of real estate. The “socialist” parties in Germany and France are neo-liberals, much more so than the Democrats in the US.
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AAWP?
What you are proposing is an organization that is supposed to do exactly the thing that a current organization - the AFL-CIO - was supposed to do.
One thing workers need is their unions - read AFL-CIO - to actually get out and organize.
Labor can’t continue under the delusion that somehow Congress is going to do it for them and invest union dues in paying off Congressmen when the unions are outbid on every significant issue by the 1%.
It was never easy to organize. But that’s no excuse for not trying. I’m tired of union members blaming Democrats for their woes - and who do they see as their Savior? Freaking Trump!
Trumka’s threat that if the Democrats won’t do what he wants - he won’t support them is BS. There are plenty of American Workers in the country, and why Trumka doesn’t spend his money reaching them directly to organize is malpractice.
It could be reversed if labor people stopped voting Republican in the first place.
Sorry, but I just can’t see this as good policy. First, it would make some workers reconsider the idea of joining a union. Second, if such lists should come into the possession of union-hostile companies, there could be the threat of mass firings.