Friends, From time to time, I offer some personal history, because you may have an interest in where my values and perspectives come from and how what I’ve experienced sheds light on what we’re dealing with now. So today I want to talk to you about what was known as the New Left, which I discovered (and embraced) as a teenager in the 1960s. By then, the labor union movement — the heart of the Old Left — was viewed as history. Although my mother’s stepfather (whom I never knew) had been a union lawyer, and my mother’s mother — my grandma Frances — was an activist firebrand, no one spoke of the labor movement as a contemporary phenomenon. The Old Left had faded as a result of Joe McCarthy’s red scare, labor leaders’ concerns about being seen as communist or socialist, and the effects of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. It also faded because soaring prosperity and the remarkable growth of the middle class seemed to make the Old Left irrelevant. The Old Left had focused on material concerns such as employment, wages, pensions, and job security. It had sought to give the working class a larger slice of the economic pie.
The New Left focused on the needs of people fortunate enough to take material comfort for granted — mostly college students, college graduates, and professionals. It sought to protect consumers from unsafe products, reduce pollution, win new rights for women and people of color, reduce dire poverty, and spread participatory democracy. My introduction to the New Left was the “Port Huron Statement,” issued by a group of mostly white, middle-class college students from the University of Michigan. Its main author was a young activist named Tom Hayden, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan and editor of the Michigan Daily, who was then just 21 years old. Hayden went on to become president of Students for a Democratic Society. A friend had lent me a copy. I read it in the summer of 1963 on the front porch of my grandma Frances’s cottage in the Adirondack Mountains. From its very first line, I was transfixed. “We are people of this generation,” it read, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” It seemed to be talking directly to me. I wasn’t yet in college but was planning to choose one that fall. And although reared in modest comfort, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the direction America was taking. Segregationists and white supremacists seemed to be on the rise in reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was then leading a March on Washington for social and economic justice. The previous fall’s Cuban missile crisis had brought the world perilously close to a nuclear holocaust. Vietnam was already becoming a quagmire. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned that pesticides and other toxins put into the environment were having devastating effects. My mother saw herself in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which described suburban housewives trapped in “dependent, passive, childlike” roles. The Port Huron Statement criticized America’s foreign policy, centered on a nuclear arms race that heightened the risk of nuclear war. It challenged the nation’s faith in technology, affluence, and materialism — an American Dream that encouraged consumerism and conformity. “The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with … popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic …. This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism — the object is not to have one’s way so much as it is to have a way that is one’s own.” And it took on university education, asserting that:
In response to all these failings, the Statement called for participatory democracy — across college campuses, in the South, and in inner cities. Seeing the effectiveness of the young civil rights protestors of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the authors believed that ordinary citizens — particularly students — could create change through nonviolent means. It was the most specific and ambitious manifesto I had ever read (with the possible exception of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist one) — proposing an “agenda for a generation.” At just over 25,000 words, it was also the longest. It was eloquent — combining existential longings inspired by Albert Camus, a quote from an encyclical by Pope John XXIII, urgent descriptions of the most serious issues facing humankind (then known as “mankind”), and far-reaching, detailed proposals for how to go about the prodigious task of democratizing the nation and the world. I adopted it as my manifesto. I came to believe that university students and intellectuals were the vanguard of progressive change in America and the world. And that students such as those who drafted the Port Huron Statement would lead such changes. In subsequent years I saw college students such as Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney as the ground troops of the Civil Rights Movement. I believed students like Mario Savio and others at Berkeley were responsible for guarding freedom of speech. And that other students, such as those I would recruit for Gene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, would end the Vietnam War.
But I had left out a big portion of America — the non-college working class. By the mid-1960s, fewer than 10 percent of Americans had graduated from a four-year university. Even now, more than 50 years later, only 40 percent of adult Americans have a four-year college degree. I wasn’t the only one overlooking the vast majority of Americans lacking college degrees. The New Left had relegated the depredations and indignities of class — and the need for strong labor unions to lift workers’ wages, protect jobs, provide pensions, and give workers some modicum of job security — to the backwater of activism. By the late 1960s, the American middle class had expanded beyond anyone’s imaginings. It seemed as if almost all Americans, apart from the very poor, were on the way to enjoying the comforts of modern life. Many working-class people were satisfied with their rising standard of living. As my future mentor and friend John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in The Affluent Society, published in 1958, America had become a society of abundance. As I saw it then, the problem was drab conformity, crass materialism, and the hypocrisy of American ideals — as illustrated in the 1967 film “The Graduate,” where Dustin Hoffman, playing Benjamin Braddock, a newly minted college graduate, is told that the future is in “plastics” and is seduced by the mother of the girl he loves.
Like Tom Hayden and the students who produced the Port Huron Statement, the trail-blazing progressive authors of the 1960s barely mentioned the working class. Betty Friedan’s 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique, grew out of a 15th reunion survey at Smith College, and its message that women should join the workforce was of little relevance to working-class women already there. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring spurred the environmental movement. Ralph Nader’s 1965 bestseller, Unsafe at Any Speed, gave birth to the consumer movement. Michael Harrington’s 1962 eye-opener, The Other America, exposed American poverty and inspired Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But the labor movement was all but forgotten. Not even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society aimed to strengthen and expand the rights of workers. (Initially Johnson intended to repeal part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that allowed so-called open shops, but Johnson backed off when corporate lobbyists attacked the proposed repeal.) By the time I became secretary of labor, the Democratic Party was focusing its efforts on what were then called “suburban swing” voters — mostly college-educated professionals who tended to be liberal on social issues and more conservative on economic ones. Labor unions were still part of the Democratic Party but of diminishing importance; the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector had fallen precipitously from over a third in the 1950s to around 10 percent in the 1990s. Most union presidents were more interested in protecting the jobs of their existing members than expanding membership. By the 1990s, America no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans’ living standards. It had what remained of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement, the consumer movement, and the environmental movement, but no working-class movement. Democratic presidents took organized labor for granted, if they thought about unions at all. When Jimmy Carter had to choose between a bill to strengthen labor unions or a treaty to hand over control of the Panama Canal to Panama, he chose the treaty, and the labor bill died. Bill Clinton didn’t push for labor law reform in his first two years of office, when Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress. Nor did Barack Obama, under similar circumstances. The consequence of all this was that by 2016, millions of American workers — the vast majority of them with no college education and no union to support them — had been left behind. Their wages were stagnant. They could be fired at will. Their lifespans were shrinking. The economy no longer offered them the means of doing better. Politics no longer offered them a voice. Into this void came Donald Trump, who as president gave large tax cuts to the wealthy and large corporations but somehow made the working class — especially the white working class — feel he was speaking to and for them. He channeled their cumulative anxieties and frustrations into bigotry, nativism, and hate toward Muslims, Mexicans, Democrats, bureaucrats, and “coastal elites.” He took a wrecking ball to democracy. He is now running for president again. |
Friday, March 1, 2024
The Old Left, the New Left, and the Left Behind
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
RSN: FOCUS: Amazon's Anti-Union Activities Should All Be Illegal
We are Feeling the Love, But We Have to Have Some Support We are getting many messages of support, and it means a great deal, but we need some donations as well. We're confident that with the size and strength of the RSN community our budget should be a pretty attainable goal. We can do this. All it takes is a few contributions. Thanks to all in advance. Marc Ash If you would prefer to send a check: |
08 March 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
FOCUS: Amazon's Anti-Union Activities Should All Be Illegal
Gabrielle Semel, Jacobin
Semel writes:
In the ongoing union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon is playing a massive role in influencing the outcome of the election. This should be a crime — bosses should be legally prohibited from interfering with their workers' union organizing.
he ongoing union vote by 5,800 Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, has opened a window into the challenges workers face in unionizing. As the public is learning, the boss gets a big role in the process. It shouldn’t be this way.
As Amazon grew at meteoric rates in 2020, adding almost five hundred thousand new employees worldwide — as well as $75 billion to the fortune of CEO Jeff Bezos — its workers began fighting for more equitable treatment. Some signed petitions demanding specific changes, such as paid sick leave and the end of rate-based write-ups; in Staten Island, workers walked off the job demanding the facility be sanitized.
The Bessemer workers, fed up with the company’s intense productivity quotas and relentless monitoring (including of their bathroom breaks), went a step further. They signed authorization cards with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), seeking to form a union. At least 30 percent of the workers at a specified facility need to sign such cards to get a vote for a union at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that administers labor law for private sector workers across the United States.
Once the petition was filed, Amazon called in the union-avoidance storm troopers, hiring a law firm well versed in keeping unions out. Their first task was to create legal issues to delay the actual vote, hoping to use the additional time to convince workers to vote against the union. The RWDSU had filed a petition with the Labor Board to represent a unit of 1,500 workers, mostly pickers and packers, at the Bessemer facility. Amazon’s lawyers, using a well-worn employer tactic, countered that the lawful unit had to include all workers at the facility, including seasonal employees — approximately 5,800 workers in total — about four times the number the union had petitioned for.
Under NLRB rules, a disagreement about who must be in the unit — an “appropriate unit” in NLRB-speak — requires a hearing. Hearings take time. Each job category is evaluated as to whether it is more or less like another job category — is the job in the unit or out? The employer has all the records, which the union has to file subpoenas to get, leading to more fights and costing more time. To make matters worse, hearing days don’t necessarily run consecutively. As a lawyer for the Communications Workers of America, I once did such a hearing that lasted for almost a year.
Employers usually seek a bigger unit to buy time or scare off the union. But sometimes they try to dilute the pro-union vote by arguing that a job classification with a lot of union support should be out of the unit, or a job with little union support should be added. If the board agrees with the company on the larger or different unit, the union might not have enough cards to support the petition, or will walk away because they can’t win.
The Consultants Move In
Even if the board ultimately sides with the union while the parties are fighting all of this out, another wing of the union-avoidance machine moves in: the consultants, often called persuaders. Their job is to convince workers of any combination of the following: you don’t need a union; you don’t want a union; unions can’t help; unions are costly; unions are scary; unions are corrupt; unions don’t care about you; you will end up on strike; you could get fired. And, Vote No!
The more time the lawyers get, the more time the consultants have to hammer home their message. In this case, RWDSU stopped Amazon’s attempt to drag things out by agreeing to the 5,800-worker unit. This ended the big stall, but it also makes victory for the workers and the union much more difficult.
Nonetheless, the persuaders moved quickly. At Bessemer, they’ve plastered “Vote No” signs everywhere, even in bathroom stalls. (“You go to the bathroom for privacy,” one worker told labor reporter Steven Greenhouse. “But then you have a flyer right in your face. That feels like a type of harassment.”) Workers have been required to attend weekly anti-union meetings — called captive audience meetings — where they are told how terrible unions are.
Amazon created a special website for Bessemer workers — doitwithoutdues.com. Animated characters and workers holding their thumbs up assure the Bessemer workers that the company already has them covered with good pay and benefits, and that if they pay dues (alleged to be $500 without any indication of a time period), “it won’t be easy to be as helpful and social with one another.” It then tells workers that they can ask for their cards back and that they should “reclaim” their voices. Much of the information is wrong, misleading, or silly — but providing facts is not the goal. Getting workers to vote “no” is the point.
Workers Alone Should Decide
But why do employers get to have a say in which workers should be in a union? Unions are organizations of workers; they alone should decide. In no other arena does the entity being organized against get to decide who can be in the group fighting them. If you buy a used car that is a lemon and discover the dealer has done the same thing to others, you can create a group to protest the dealer’s practices without the dealer getting to say who can join. In sports, a team does not get a voice in deciding their opponent’s roster or strategy. The Democrats don’t get to decide the candidates of the Republicans, or vice versa.
Who invited the bosses in? Senator Robert Taft, Representative Fred Hartley, and all the Republicans — and some Democrats who voted with them — in 1947. When Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, giving workers the right to unionize, employers believed it was unenforceable and ignored it. A decade later, they had learned otherwise and pushed Congress to pass the Taft-Hartley amendments, seeking to curtail the power of unions and to bring the boss into the process.
By the early 1970s, the union-avoidance industry had become a big business. Lawyers and consultants have since spent decades finding even more weaknesses in NLRB law and procedures, effectively thwarting the desires of workers to unionize. A 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that employers spend $340 million a year on union-avoidance consultants. In 2018, 48 percent of nonunion workers said they would join a union if they could; yet just 10.8 percent of workers belong to a union today. Between those two numbers is the union-avoidance industry doing the bidding of the bosses.
Employers often argue that they are simply exercising free speech. But their role in the process is far more pervasive and destructive than simply giving their point of view during a union organizing campaign. By having an official role in NLRB representation procedures, employers gain influence over every step of the process. With far greater resources and constant access to workers on the job, employers are able to defeat unionization efforts much of the time. Board statistics show that unions win about 50 percent of elections administered by the NLRB. But these statistics don’t include petitions that are withdrawn because a union can no longer win after a prolonged period of endless “vote no” messaging, or after a decision finding only a vastly different unit to be “appropriate.”
Nor is “free speech” a meaningful concept here. Workers do not have the freedom to not listen to management’s endless bombardment of anti-union speech and veiled threats during the workday. Unions and pro-union workers do not have the same free speech rights as the employer: the union cannot enter the workplace and talk to workers; cannot call meetings on company time to talk about the benefits of forming a union; cannot be present at captive audience meetings to counter employer falsehoods; and cannot intervene in one-on-one conversations where supervisors share their personal anti-union messages with workers. Unions also can’t have leaders of the anti-union campaign transferred out of their departments or fired on trumped-up charges — tactics management deploys against union supporters to crush all too many organizing drives.
There is a lot of talk about labor law reform. It is necessary and long overdue. Key to reforming this country’s broken labor relations system is curtailing the role of employers in the unionization process. Unions belong to workers. If the bosses have something to say, they can say it at the bargaining table.
-
04 April 23 Live on the homepage now! Reader Supported News Dahlia Lithwick | Let Donald Trump Cry It Out Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Lithwic...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON Right now, we are standing on the edge of a he...
-
LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON We love making ice cream, but our mission has ...
