Shaun Richman

March 4, 2007July 17, 2023

Look for My Union Label

I’ve finally rejoined the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1181), the freelancers union. I had been a member when I was the editor of the Five Borough Institute’s newsletter, mainly because we wanted to have a bug on the masthead. I let my membership lapse during my long stint of unemployment, even though I had begun to write regularly for this blarg.

I realize I should be paying lip service to this supposed new media revolution, but truthfully, it’s hard to think of myself as a “Writer” because of a silly blog. I want to be in print. I’ve made sporadic attempts at submitting op-eds to local newspapers. Unfortunately, most of the community weeklies don’t publish opinion pieces. Even the one paper where I was briefly hired and quickly “dooced” doesn’t want actual opinions in their op-eds. I’m hoping that my renewed NWU membership will spur me on to try more seriously to get in print, even if that pesky “full-time union organizer / part-time graduate student” thing gets in the way.

February 25, 2007July 17, 2023

The Champions of “Democracy”

The changed political landscape affords the labor movement opportunities to change laws that make us weaker. These opportunities afford right-wing politicians and management consultants new opportunities to couch their attacks on workers’ collective rights to organize in terms of “democracy.” We have to counter this rhetoric before it becomes standard Newspeak.

First up, Maryland’s House Republican leader Anthony O’Donnell attacking a bill for agency fee for state employee unions: “Forcing people to fund a service that they don’t desire to have is patently undemocratic.” To Mr. O’Donnell, I say, I don’t support the war in Iraq – or indeed any military spending – as a “service.” Am I free, in the name of democracy, to evade my taxes? Employees who are covered by a collective bargaining agreement benefit from the wages, benefits and protections that the union has won, and have available to them a grievance machinery in which the union is required to expend resources to represent all employees. A union is a democratic organization – a government – that all the employees in the bargaining unit belong to, and can take part in. Free riders who don’t pay their dues are benefitting from representation without taxation, a costly drain on union finances that holds us back from further organizing.

Next up, Dick Cheney, announcing the President’s intention to veto the Employee Free Choice Act, declared, “It’s important for everyone in the debate to remember that secret ballots protect workers from intimidation and ensure the integrity of the process.” It’s hard to know where to begin with this one. A comment on the Bush administrations track record on the sanctity of the ballot? How about the administration’s suspension of collective bargaining rights for Homeland Security employees? Or maybe the Bush-appointed NLRB’s decision to suspend union authorization elections for up to eight million workers who have neither the authority not compensation of management as exempt “supervisors.” No, let’s skip the ad hominems and debate the words. Where does intimidation arise in the organizing process? Is it from co-workers appealing to each other’s sense of solidarity to join together, or is it the reign of terror that management typically launches in anticipation of an NLRB election? As our friends at CEPR have pointed out, one in five union activists can expect to be fired during an organizing campaign. The remainder can have their jobs threatened, face “predictions” of plant closure or layoffs and generally have their lives made miserable while waiting for an election. Most of these actions – particularly terminations – are illegal, but the enforcement is so lax and the penalties so slight (a wrongfully terminated employee can expect, on average, $2000 in back pay from the employer) that most employers view the costs as well worth it to keep a union out.

Most unions file for authorization with 60 to 70 percent voting yes by signing union cards. The NLRB conducts a superfluous second election that provides management with a window of opportunity to conduct a reign of terror against its employees. Our oh-so-democratic proponents of the secret ballot while likely claim that this campaign merely provides “the other side” a chance to introduce new facts into the “debate.” The truth is the only new “fact” that management introduces into a union election campaign is the fact that a worker who supports the union is in danger of losing his or her job. It is precisely this kind of intimidation that the Employee Free Choice act will put an end to by allowing employees to vote just once to form a union, in an atmosphere free of intimidation.

February 24, 2007July 17, 2023

Is Fair Housing Flying the Co-op?

The curiosity of a socialist owning real estate inspires much teasing from my friends. But why shouldn’t I own my own home? As our comrade, Barbara Garson has proven in her book, "Money Makes the World Go Around”, unless you stuff your cash in the mattress, you are inevitably invested in evil deeds. So why not invest in an evil that you control, your home? Taking a step further, I’ve been serving on my apartment co-op’s board of directors for about a year now. For a rickety, yet charming, old building our charge is a series of uncomfortable decisions. Should we delay refurbishing the elevator, or raise the monthly maintenance charge? Paint the lobby, or give the Super a raise? I sidestepped our controversial decision to begin eviction proceedings against one of our rent controlled tenants by not having been elected to the board by that time, but I have been a part of nearly half a dozen instances of that most New York real estate process, the co-op board interview and purchase approval.

We’re a pretty chill board. We don’t have any stringent financial requirements. We’ve approved buyers who put down as low as five percent (when just about every other building in the neighborhood requires a 20 percent down payment), figuring that even if you default on your loan, we’ll make our money back one way or the other. We also assume pets innocent before being proven guilty of loudness or aggression, and therefore don’t have a blanket “no pets” policy. And I, for one, don’t care who your sleep with as long as you are sleeping in your apartment with him or her, and not illegally subletting your place.

Not all boards are as good as this one. The NY Times real estate section is chock full of horror stories of boards using tenant applications as political footballs in struggles over power and wealth, as well as less-well documented instances of purchase applications being rejected for reasons of racism or heterosexism. With more than 332,000 households in New York belonging to co-ops, the City Council is taking action to ensure that hard-fought protections against housing discrimination are not gutted by our “stakeholder society,” by requiring boards to provide prompt and specific justifications for rejecting purchase applications. Our building’s management company – a necessary evil – is, like most management companies, organizing to defeat the bill and seeking to enlist the help of our co-op board members. The Real Estate Board of New York’s lobbying letter concludes, in relevant part:

Int. No. 119 of 2006 will drastically restrict the rights of co-op board members, shareholders and property managers. It will also significantly delay transactions which will hurt the coop market as a whole. More important, it will substantially increase litigation in the marketplace, and make it difficult for coops to recruit qualified shareholders to volunteer their time to be a part of a co-op board.

Any discrimination by board members is expressly forbidden in City, State and Federal law. Currently, under the City Human Rights Law, the New York State Civil Rights Law, and the Federal Fair Housing Act, cooperative boards are prohibited from discriminating against a potential buyer on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, military status, sexual orientation, age pregnancy, or disability. There are remedies within each of these statues for a party who believes he has been discriminated against. The legislation does not add to these protections that are already in place.

In response, I have two points. Firstly, individual members of co-op boards are, for the most part, shielded from personal liability for board decisions – which is a fact that our management companies frequently stress while they, for instance, encourage us to evict our rent controlled tenants. More than fear of litigation, fear of the management companies with which we enter into contract is a more likely culprit for intimidating shareholders from serving on co-op boards. Secondly, while there are plenty of anti-discrimination laws on the books, it is nearly impossible to prosecute such cases if co-op boards need not disclose the reasons for rejecting an applicant. Boards who reject applicants for legitimate reasons (for instance, poor finances, dangerous pets or speculative investments) need not fear the extra scrutiny and paperwork. Boards who run their buildings like the Jim Crow South deserve the exposure and financial liability that this bill threatens. The extra work that it will require on my board’s part will be well worth it to ensure that New York City remains a free and integrated society.

February 14, 2007July 17, 2023

Goodbye, Socialist Party

Today I resigned from the Socialist Party after eleven years of membership. This decision has been a long time coming. Indeed, it was made some months ago but I had been waiting to sever my remaining fiduciary responsibilities to the party to announce it. I have given the party tremendous amounts of time and energy as an officer, an editor, a speaker, a fundraiser and a campaign manager and it was a formative learning experience for me. Truthfully, I should moved on a long time ago – back when the crippling faction fights first arose about five years ago – but I was biding my time, hoping that all that negative energy would expend itself. I have come to the sorry conclusion that such fruitless bickering will never go away.

I leave a Socialist Party that is irrationally bureaucratic, where misleaders place a premium on formal charges of sedition, investigation committees and e-mails of denunciation over simple and direct phone calls and conversations. I leave a Socialist Party that makes a fetish of running token electoral campaigns, which blinds it to genuine opportunities for a break with the two-party system, like the Nader and Sanders campaigns. I leave a Socialist Party full of snotty little boys who are blind or indifferent to their white, male privilege. And most galling of all, I leave a Socialist Party whose leadership chooses to vomit the kind of anti-union rhetoric one would expect from management consultants and who would rather play at being a union with the IWW than organize strong, militant and democratic unions where the majority of workers are.

My decision to resign will likely disappoint some of the comrades who hope to “take it back.” I say to them and the others, “take it, it’s yours” (apologies to Paul Westerberg). The Socialist Party had a proud history in the early 20th century, but it should have been left in the history books. I dare say that most of the new members “recruited” to the party drifted in on their own because of an attraction to the writings and actions of Eugene Debs, even though the past three quarters of a century have badly dated Debs’ beautiful but simple rhetoric. Why, even now, in the midst of the current split, one of our earnest young National Committee members is pointing to an article from 1911 by Debs to prove that he has the “correct” position on electoral activity. Never mind the fact that Debs lived until 1926 – an era that is politically closer to our own – and that by that time he was advocating building a mass labor party and had endorsed the Trade Union Education League’s policy of boring from within the conservative AFL craft unions (both are policies much closer to what I advocate in this article). The simple fact is that Eugene Debs, and the Socialist Party of America, was from another era and needs to be put in the proper historical context, predating the New Deal, World War II, civil rights struggle, Black Power, feminist movement, environmental movement and globalization among other changes.

When Eugene Debs wrote in 1903 that “the class struggle is colorless,” it was a beautiful rhetorical challenge to the racists in the movement, but 104 years later, to continue, as he did, to say, “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races” is to be blind to the special persecution faced by black Americans and all people of color in the United States and avoids the work we must do to challenge white skin privilege. Yet, too many members of the Socialist Party still agree with Debs’ color-blind politics. Indeed, they were attracted to the party because of it. This historicism also results in a party that is cool to reproductive rights and gender politics and downright hostile to feminist process and gender-balanced committees. It’s a vicious cycle, discouraging women to join and be active, resulting in even more male-centric politics and a greater discouragement to women. Probably 90% of the party is male at this point, which is regrettable (and not only because the possibility of a slutty convention hook-up is sometimes the only thing that makes those meetings tolerable).

The example of the Socialist Party garnering six percent of the vote for President, and electing Congressmen, mayors and legislators across the country is clearly an inspiration for many of the Party’s newer members, but the Socialist Party cannot win elections in 2007 or anytime soon. The laws and finances have changed, making running such campaigns impossible in most areas. Voters have become much more loyal to the two-party system, and non-voters are much more likely to be right-wing as left in this day in age. Please do not mistake this as a call to endorse the Democrats or to avoid politicking openly as Socialists. As I have previously written, being “the Socialist Party” makes running “Socialist” candidates its raison d’etre, and results in unnecessary sectarianism and an aversion to coalition work. It is, indeed, essential to seek out independent alternatives to the two-party system, and there is often a real value to putting the “S” word on the ballot, but not at the expense of missing opportunities like the Green Party movement, Nader candidacies and the opportunities for boring from within the Working Families party. Only a socialist organization that is emphatically not a party can be open to all possibilities.

Finally, considering my life’s work is in the labor movement, it is disappointing how few comrades I can truly count on in the Socialist Party. As an organizer, I deal with vicious anti-union campaigns from the Boss and too many workers who would rather race each other to the bottom for loss of pay and benefits than unite to win more for all. Every day I am reminded of the dire need for a sane, organized left to carry out meaningful educational work on how the Bosses rob us and the power of coming together, like the old IWW and SPA used to do. Instead, we have a SPUSA and IWW that focus on badly out-dated AFL and “pie card” bashing. The more challenging, but more valuable work, would be for comrades to get their hands dirty as organizers and activists in the large trade unions in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win (regardless of their militancy or whether they endorse Democrats or not), organize, win and change the policy. Sadly, the labor movement is so small these days that a few dozen dedicated comrades could have a real impact on on the unions.

I hold out no hope for the Socialist Party because young men with infantile “leftist” politics will forever be streaming into membership in larger numbers than the tiny organization can absorb and educate. Suffering from delusions of grandeur of being in “THE” Socialist Party, their ridiculous posturing and aggressive factionalism seems somehow noble to them, but sadly, by the time they burn themselves out enough to stop for a moment and learn, they are replaced by the next wave of political infants. Granted, one could count me in this company. If you were to give me a flux capacitor and send me back to 1996 to meet 17-year-old Shaun Richman, I’d want to punch that kid in the fucking face. C’est la vie.

I choose to start over with an organization that is consciously smaller. I intend to use the American Socialist Foundation, a small non-profit corporation I set up, to hold conversations with comrades I respect and trust about what the hell is the matter with the left and what hope there can possibly be for a small socialist membership organization to do meaningful work. There is, perhaps, enough seed money to start a magazine or hold a conference. If there is enough consensus, perhaps then a new membership organization will result. “American Socialist Federation” has a certain ring to it. As of this writing, I am inclined to favor a soft-cadre structure centered around local clubs, with a weak national committee and a central political document that is ratified every few years in the interest of maintaining consensus and unity, as a model worth exploring. However, political principles are more important than structure, and any organization that I am apart of must speak to issues of race and gender within a class framework, must strive to build a mass party of the people and must be an active part of the mainstream labor movement. These are, after all, the areas in which I have been most disappointed, programatically, in the Socialist Party USA.