This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!
Watching Jeopardy! is one of my daily rituals. But it still doesn’t sit right with me that Ken Jennings won the gig of exclusive host by crossing a picket line.
Recently a decades-old clip of Jennings making a vaguely populist gibe against corporate bosses made the rounds on social media, prompting a lot of “Based Ken” replies. Like a true Debbie Downer, I felt compelled to point out that “Nevertheless, the only reason he’s the sole host of Jeopardy is that he crossed the Writers Guild picket line when Mayim Bialik would not.”
Most of the responses I’ve received were intellectually lazy and dishonest. I’m not going to respond 299 characters at a time, so I’m firing up the old blog.
What most of the posts defending Jennings’ picket line crossing really boil down to is that people on the left hated Mayim Bialik. She’s a Zionist, vaccine skeptic with weird “mommy” politics. I’ll be honest. When she and Jennings split the hosting duties from 2021-2023, I kinda liked her infectious enthusiasm for the contestants and found his ESPN-style commentary about game play and betting (plus his obvious love for incessant tournaments of repeat contestants) to be slightly irksome. Continue reading “This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!”
“So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV
And now for something…not entirely, completely different. I’ve signed a contract with SUNY Press to deliver a collection of essays next year for publication in 2026.
Call for Proposals
Continue reading ““So Long, Dental Plan!” Unions, Labor Relations and Class Struggle…As Seen On TV”
Searching for Ludwig Lore
I’m back in FOIA hell.
Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a Union in 2006, but I regret that many of the names that I encountered during my research are in the dreaded “third tier of processing” with a decade-long backlog.
“Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not want to be organized?”
The AFL and CIO merged in 1955, and union organizing–particularly measured by union win rates in NLRB elections–began a long, slow decline. Although the labor movement in New York City took an additional four years to unite, when they finally did they pioneered new organizing in the public sector and health care–pointing the way towards a labor movement that could survive Reagan and worse.
I could–and probably will–keep writing different versions of this lede. This is why I found Dave Kamper’s new piece at the Forge interesting. Its main thrust is trying to find reasons to be optimistic about the revival of the labor movement after the Teamsters’ UPS victory, and the relatively successful Amazon and Starbucks organizing. It’s mostly fine; a reasonable amount of navel-gazing, nostalgia and a bit of scientific reasoning of a middle aged guy who’s dedicated his life to the theory that we can’t have political or social democracy without a strong labor movement and worked his ass off towards that end. Which is to say, it’s the sort of thing I would have written if I could have been arsed.