May I have a word with you? ROBERT REICH JUN 30 Friends, I want to try to reassure you about this country. I know that you’re worried and upset. You have every reason to be. Donald Trump is a vile human being, and he got away with a tsunami of lies Thursday night. Joe Biden didn’t come across with the vitality he needed to show. I have no idea whether Biden will get his mojo back or the Democrats will find someone else to take on Trump. But I have an abiding faith in the common sense and good-heartedness of most Americans. Although we’re horribly divided right now, the fact is, again and again, we’ve rejected vicious haters and demagogues — Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace, to name a few. We’ve made a few bad mistakes in our choices of president, to be sure, but we’ve corrected them as soon as we could. We elected James Buchanan in 1856, but he was out in four years. We allowed Andrew Johnson to become president following Lincoln’s assassination, but we impeached him. We elected Richard Nixon in 1968 but sent him packing in 1974. We elected Trump in 2016 (although most Americans voted for Hillary Clinton), and we didn’t reelect him in 2020. There have been times when I doubted America. I think the worst was 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and then Bobby Kennedy, the riots and fires that consumed our cities, the horrific Democratic convention in Chicago along with protests and violent police response, the election of the dreadful Nixon, and the escalating carnage of Vietnam. It seemed to me then that we had utterly lost our moral compass and purpose. But the Watergate hearings demonstrated to me that we had not lost it. Democrats and Republicans worked together to discover what Nixon had done. I had much the same feeling about the brilliant work done by the House’s special committee to investigate January 6, 2021. Washington, D.C. is not the Gomorrah portrayed in the media, and I think it important not to become so consumed with its failings or its Republican crazies that we overlook the many good things happening there, particularly under Biden — the most aggressive use of antitrust and most pro-union labor board I remember, and Biden’s extraordinary legislative accomplishments. When I think about what’s good about America I also think about the jurors and prosecutors and the judge in Trump’s recent trial in Manhattan, who took extraordinary abuse. Their lives and the lives of their families were threatened. But they didn’t flinch. They did their duty. I think about our armed service men and women. I think about our fire fighters and police officers. I think about our teachers and social workers, and our nurses who acted with such courage and dedication during the pandemic. I think about all the other people who are putting in countless hours in our cities and towns and states to make our lives better. And all the people who are working their hearts out right now to make sure Donald Trump stays out of the White House. (I assure you, I’m doing the same, and I hope you are as well.) A few nights ago I had dinner with an old friend whom I haven’t seen in many years. He’s now a United States senator. He works extraordinarily hard. He cares deeply about the country. He shares many of our values. He told me that he seriously doubts Americans will elect Donald Trump. I agree with him. We are so much better than Trump.

RSN: FOCUS: Hamilton Nolan | If Democrats Want Votes, They Should Rain Fury on Union-Busting Corporations

 

 

11 August 22

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FOCUS: Hamilton Nolan | If Democrats Want Votes, They Should Rain Fury on Union-Busting Corporations
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company's history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store."

We supposedly have the most pro-union US president of our lifetimes. Let’s see him act like it

In June, workers at a Chipotle restaurant in Augusta, Maine, became the first in the company’s history to file for a union election. Less than a month later, the company closed the store. In shutting down a location that was set to unionize, Chipotle was keeping company with Starbucks, which has suddenly undertaken a campaign to shut down several unionizing locations from coast to coast due to “safety” issues, and the health food company Amy’s Kitchen, which last month closed an entire factory in California where workers were organizing. It is, of course, impossible to “prove” that these companies closed these locations to try to crush the union drives, in the same sense that it is impossible to prove that a schoolyard bully meant to punch you in the face: he claims that he was merely punching the air while you happened to walk in front of his fist. Who’s to say what’s true in such a murky situation?

Plausible deniability aside, this is an extremely serious problem. Not just for the underpaid, overworked employees at all of these low-wage jobs, desperately hanging on to financial survival by their fingernails, but for all of us. America is mired in a half-century-long crisis of rising inequality that has been fueled, above all, by the combined erosion of labor power and the growth of the power of capital. The American dream enjoyed by the lucky baby-boom generation – buying a home and sending your kids to college on one income – is dead and gone, replaced by a thin crust of the rich sitting atop a huge swamp of once-middle-class jobs that no longer offer enough to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

The power of workers relative to the power of the investment class must be rebalanced. Rebuilding the power of unions is the only way out of this trap, unless you are credulous enough to believe that we will all be rescued by the sudden radicalization of the tax policymakers on the House ways and means committee. If you ever want to live in a country where the American dream is more than a cruel, tantalizing joke, you have a stake in the revival of organized labor.

So when you see a big company closing down operations because workers there want to unionize, you should be pissed. Such coldhearted retaliation against people exercising a fundamental right on the job goes to the very heart of how we got all this inequality in the first place. It is meant not just to derail one union drive, but to strike fear in all the other workers who see it happen: if you ask for what you’re worth, this could happen to you. Shut up and eat your gruel, and be happy that the kindly billionaire CEO is allowing you to earn enough not to starve today. Even if you don’t work at a fast-food outlet or a factory, this should enrage you, as a human being. It is an assault on human dignity.

America’s convoluted and hostile labor laws actually do allow a business to shut down in response to unionization, unless (and this is important) the company is doing so in order to scare its remaining employees out of unionizing – in other words, exactly what big employers like Chipotle and Starbucks would be doing by closing stores where workers have organized, as workers at many other stores across the country looked on. (Government regulators have not yet ruled on the legality of the recent closures by those companies.) Unfortunately, the evil, high-priced union-busting attorneys these companies hire are well aware that the gears of justice in labor law grind so slowly that even on the off chance that they were found to have closed the stores illegally, it would be far too late for it to mean anything to the workers who were laid off and forced to go find other jobs. The scary, unsubtle message to the company’s workforce would have already been sent.

That’s why this stuff is not really a question of law, but of power. The working class, galvanized by the near-death experience of the pandemic, is busily organizing in new industries across the country; the labor movement today is as energized as it has been in two generations. Corporate America is determined to stop this. In the mid-1950s, one in three Americans was a union member; today, that figure is one in 10. Companies know that their ability to extract excess profits will go down as union density goes up. This is going to be a hard, nasty fight. As all of those recently laid-off Chipotle and Starbucks and Amy’s Kitchen workers know, it already is.

It is also a golden opportunity for a Democratic party that has spent the last six years wringing its hands about losing working-class voters to the pseudo-populist (and racist) appeal of Trumpism. Want to get working people enthusiastic about Democrats again? Then the Democrats should help working people. National Democratic politicians should be holding press conferences decrying the greedy chief executives closing these stores just because workers tried to stand up for themselves. Joe Biden should be screaming his head off about billionaire Starbucks chief Howard Schultz’s disgusting union-busting at the same volume that Ron DeSantis is blathering about “woke corporations”.

Republicans are insincere ghouls who want to harvest working-class votes while their policies stab working-class people in the back – but Democrats are ceding the terrain to these scumbags by failing to match their fervor. We don’t need our politicians making anodyne statements about how unions are nice. We need a rain of zeal and fury emanating from Washington, to terrify companies away from closing down their union stores with threats of merciless retributions from the state.

History shows that organized labor thrives when it has the government’s support, and suffers without it. We are supposedly living under the most pro-union president of our lifetimes. So? Let’s hear some damn fire, man. The only reason companies feel so free to abuse their workers is that they don’t believe anyone will make them pay for it.

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