Making Sense of the 1950’s Teamsters
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in 1955, with big talk and high hopes for organizing the remaining non-union strongholds in the nation’s economy. Three years later, they were laying off organizers on staff and settling into a routine, on the way to a long, slow decline towards a loss of power, influence and bargaining power.
In New York City, though, the newly merged federation approached new union organizing with something like messianic zeal–pioneering new union organizing in the public sector and in health care, and fighting for a labor college and statewide system of socialized medicine–at least until the fiscal crisis.
That broad sweep of history is, in a nutshell, what I’m researching for my next possible book project: a history of the New York City labor movement from the merger until the fiscal crisis. First, though, the AFL and CIO needed to merge. It took the two local labor councils, the AFL’s Central Trades and Labor Council and the CIO’s Industrial Union Council, four years after Meany and Reuther clasped hands to merge at the local level. A lot of the delay had to do with the Teamsters union. Trawling the New York Times archives, it looks like the Powers That Be were convinced that a united labor movement that included a Teamsters union that could enforce solidarity picket lines at any company that needed deliveries by truck would be “too powerful.” They began demonizing the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa with lurid stories of underworld connections, probably accurate stories about strong-arm tactics that involved sabotage, property destruction and a not-insignificant amount of personal violence in order to trigger Senate hearings into labor racketeering that would end with yet-another anti-union federal law in 1959.
Not that Hoffa’s a great guy. He enforced segregated union locals (at his majority white members’ request), earned the highest salary and all-expenses-paid perks, dealt his wife in on business deals with employers against whom he bargaining and generally treated the union like a business. These reasons were why the NYC CIO balked at merger, as the head of the AFL CTLC, Martin Lacey, was also the head of the local Teamsters Joint Council. Lacey was anti-Hoffa, and these years coincide with Hoffa’s power grab for the IBT presidency. In NYC, his proxy was a two-bit crook named John DioGuardi, who “organized” six or seven paper locals to beat Lacey’s re-election (the whole matter wound up stalled in court for years).
Thaddeus Russell’s Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class (Knopf, 2001) doesn’t have any of this. It is, nevertheless, a scholarly and even-handed account of Hoffa as union leader that avoids the lurid “cosa nostra” Mafia bullshit and makes a good case that Hoffa, in competition with social democrat-oriented CIO unions, and pursuing pure business unionism, delivered for his members wages and benefits that were among the best for his era. David Witwer’s Corruption and Reform in the Teamsters Union (University of Illinois, 2003) probably makes a stronger case for how the Teamsters’ coercively (and violently) enforced boycotts and jurisdictional picket lines were necessary to organize industries marked by multiple small employers for which the National Labor Relations Board was mostly unhelpful, and how the sensationalized (albeit, still true) charges of “racketeering” and “union corruption” were almost always politically motivated. (He also has nothing on the Martin Lacey saga in New York.)
AUDIO: ON the Rick Smith Show Talking Amazon JFK8 Union Victory
What we owe gig workers
Labor advocates and allies in Albany are feuding over a draft bill that aims to grant some union rights to precarious workers who toil at irregular hours and less regular wages for app-based “gig” employers like Uber and Lyft. This family feud is all the more frustrating because there’s a perfectly reasonable New Deal-era state law still on the books for when workers slip through the cracks of a patchwork of worker protections and fissured workplaces.
The current bill purports to do the same by creating a system of “sectoral bargaining” for gig workers, while severely restricting the number issues they can bargain over, outlawing their ability to strike and robbing them of their unemployment insurance by replacing their statutory protections as workers with an opportunity to collude as a guild of “entrepreneurs.”
Everywhere from the House-passed PRO Act, which would amend the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to make the process for forming a union fairer and available to misclassified freelancers, to the California legislature’s attempts to plug the holes in the current NLRA by properly classifying gig workers as statutory employees with rights, the app bosses try to codify a third class of worker lacking both the agency to set their own price and hours of labor like a traditional independent contractor and the ability to form democratic unions of their own choosing to bargain — and, potentially, strike — over the working conditions that the app bosses dictate.
What’s crazy is that, unlike the newly passed California law that Uber circumvented through a massively expensive — and deceptive — ballot initiative, New York has had, this whole time, a functioning state agency that will protect the right to organize and certify a union for any private-sector workers that federal labor law leaves behind. Because the Supreme Court had a track record of overturning any protective legislation for workers when New York Sen. Robert Wagner drafted the NLRA, he decided to justify the law’s constitutionality in Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. In 1935, that was defined far more narrowly than today.
For example, a hotel standing entirely within a state’s borders did not count. Therefore, New York passed a so-called “baby Wagner Act” that created a similar regulatory framework for private-sector workers left out of the New Deal. Most of the first 20,000 workers that the Hotel Trades Council won the right to bargain on behalf of in the 1930s and 40s were organized through elections — and card check certifications — conducted by the NY State Labor Relations Board. Stuck with the bizarre constitutional framework of arguing that human rights are rooted in protest activity’s impact on the economy, the civil rights movement expanded NLRB jurisdiction to retail, hospitality and service industries. By the mid-1960s, unions stopped turning to the state Labor Relations Board and in 2010 its responsibilities were assumed by the Public Employment Relations Board. Most people that know of PERB think of it as the state agency that punishes public sector teachers and subway workers for going on strike, but it actually can be an engine for private-sector worker organizing.
Legislative progressives, or a governor willing to exercise some leadership, could settle the gig worker controversy by directing PERB to aggressively protect and encourage the right to organize for all private-sector workers under their jurisdiction. And as the Biden administration wrests control of the NLRB from Trump’s anti-union appointees, we could have two labor boards competing for who offers workers a better deal.
This was the dynamic when I directed the American Federation of Teachers’ charter school organizing division during the Obama years. In blue states like New York and Illinois, we got public-sector labor laws that gave the workers a right to organize through card check. When the NLRB staked a claim to the jurisdiction, the federal agency touted its more robust right to strike. It was a compelling argument.
We live in a time when billion-dollar companies will spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to resist their workers’ attempts to win a couple more bucks an hour. As a campaign director, I struggled with the impulse to strike a deal when a powerful boss signaled a desire to negotiate. And Uber like so many of the gig economy digital platforms — hemorrhaging investors’ dollars, struggling to maintain a workforce with pitiful wages, breaking all kinds of laws — are under enormous pressure to make peace with anyone who will take a settlement. With deep respect and solidarity to the organizers and legislators who are working with Uber on this deeply flawed bill, a better deal is possible if you start from the position that the actually existing labor laws should apply to these digital scofflaws.
[This article originally appeared in the New York Daily News.]
The de Blasio Paradox
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched his bid for president last week, amidst protests and jeers.
On Good Morning America, where he was having what should have been his first softball interview as a candidate, chants of “LIAR” could be heard from a rally outside the Times Square studio. The anti–de Blasio protest somehow united the local cop union and Black Lives Matter protestors, along with housing advocates and anti-poverty activists.
While New Yorkers greet de Blasio’s quixotic campaign with hostility or befuddlement, distant observers might wonder how this is more outrageous than, say, Beto O’Rourke or any number of red-state Democrats with thin records throwing away their shot at statewide office for similarly doomed runs at the White House.
Overlooked in all the grousing is Hizzoner’s actual achievements: Bill de Blasio is one of the best mayors that New York City has ever had. But he lacks that easygoing charm with voters (the kind that mainstream political commentators call “likability” when discussing women candidates). And his candidacy is a victim of the rising expectations of the resurgent progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Ironically, his own successful 2013 campaign for mayor—with its Occupy Wall Street–inspired “Tale of Two Cities” rhetoric—helped nurture a political climate that has rendered his race dead on arrival.
None of which is to say that being one of the city’s greatest head honchos is a particularly high bar. We’ve had mayors literally flee the country to avoid prosecution. But for the last half-century, almost every Big Apple mayor who managed to get re-elected left office with delusions of La Guardia–like status and presidential ambitions. De Blasio, by contrast, actually has progressive bona fides that ought to eclipse less-accomplished mayors like Pete Buttigieg and Julian Castro, who are also currently tilting at presidential windmills.
Take the singular achievement of de Blasio’s first term: the introduction of universal pre-K. Studies show that early-childhood education pays remarkable dividends in student achievement for years. And, as Katha Pollitt noted in a remarkable piece of advocacy in The New York Times, market-rate child care “is one of the biggest costs a family faces.” That expense averages $14,144 per child in New York, which can diminish both family wealth and women’s career progress for years.
When de Blasio launched a universal tuition-free pre-kindergarten program, he made a revolutionary improvement in the lives of 70,000 children and their families. His achievement was twofold: First, he found the money to fund it, establishing a massive program of wealth redistribution. Second, his administration mastered the logistical challenges of expanding the country’s largest public-education system by an entire grade level.
Under de Blasio, New York City did it in two years. Rather than take the extended victory lap that most politicians would for lesser achievements, de Blasio followed up by expanding the program by another grade level. Universal “3K”—preschool for three-year-olds—is in the pilot stage in neighborhoods around the city.
The older of my two kids turned three in January. She’ll be going to school tuition-free in September. Bill de Blasio saved my family approximately $56,546 over the next three years! That’s exactly the kind of “free stuff” politicking that Democrats can run on in 2020.
The de Blasio administration has served as an incubator of progressive policy, and not just his own. Freed from a Republican mayor who believed that the most important quality in a City Council Speaker is “keeping legislation that never should have made it to the floor … from ever getting there,” today the City Council often drafts the first versions of future congressional bills.
Just cause for terminations, banning urine tests, and criminal background checks for employment, and mandating paid vacations: These are just some of the reforms getting a dress rehearsal in New York before they become federal initiatives.
As free child care has become a signature issue of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, so too could any of these de Blasio reforms become national campaign issues.
The de Blasio administration also pioneered universal free lunches (without the stigma of means testing) in public schools, a fair workweek law, and round-the-clock service on the Staten Island Ferry. It curtailed the police department’s stop-and-frisk policy.
That last policy—combined with his balanced statement about the 2014 death of Eric Garner—provoked an unprecedented mutiny from the Police Benevolent Association. In the least effective job action in our country’s otherwise inspiring recent spike in strike activity, officers stopped ticketing for minor nuisances. Quality of life in the city briefly surged, while 80 percent of New Yorkers thought the union was “too extreme.” Still, de Blasio—who is the father of two mixed-race children and made racist police misconduct a signature issue in his first mayoral run—has mostly backed off from being critical of police actions. He’s remained sidelined on one of the major progressive causes of our time, the demands of the black community for respect and police accountability.
That the police officer who killed Eric Garner is only now facing a semblance of due process—five years after Garner’s killing and at the exact time that de Blasio is presenting himself as a progressive hero on the national stage—partly explains the left’s deafening yawn in response to his candidacy.
There’s also the subway system’s ongoing breakdown, which is not technically the mayor’s responsibility but is often uppermost in the mind of every sweaty, late-for-work straphanger who might rightly resent the mayor for not making this his new campaign. Then there’s the city’s public-housing authority, which is leaving its residents in such squalor that even the TrumpWhite House has to respond. And de Blasio’s failure to challenge entrenched real-estate interests has helped spin a tale of one city for the rich while the rest of us are moving to the boondocks because the rent is too damn high.
Compounding his failure to meet the heightened expectations of progressives, there’s also this: He’s a lousy retail politician. He lacks whatever that “it” is that makes voters like a pol. Being a jerk to a press corps that follows him around and hangs on his every word hasn’t helped either. A New York mayor who actually enjoys his job can hold court on a daily basis with dozens of reporters from around the world and advance his political philosophy and naked ambition. Or he can be defensive, brittle, and petulant and inspire those same reporters to dig a fresh grave for him every morning.
It’s not hard to look at the fawning media coverage of a small-town mayor who’s read a lot of books and an ex-congressman who lost an election to Ted Cruz and view de Blasio’s presidential campaign as an act of spite. If these punks get to set our national agenda, he’s probably thinking, why not me?
Term-limited as mayor, de Blasio has just two more years in City Hall. As a lame duck he has little power to whip votes for another landmark progressive victory, as he did for Councilman Brad Lander’s bill to require a “just cause” for discharging fast-food workers or Rafael L. Espinal Jr.’s bill to forbid bosses from making their employees check their work email after clocking out.
Basically, the mayor is bored. Campaigning for a new office is his way of making his daily rounds fun again. Besides, due in part to that deficit of likability, he lacks the political capital to contest either Senator Chuck Schumer or Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2022 Democratic primaries, though progressives clearly yearn for candidates to take them on. The Intercept has published fan fiction masquerading as speculative analysis about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting redistricted out of her House seat so that she simply has to challenge Schumer. And the Working Families Party had to recruit a TV star to run against the vindictive and still unpopular Cuomo last year.
De Blasio is New York’s mayor because in 2013, no other left-winger thought it was possible to beat back the city’s developers and real-estate interests and whomever they would anoint to perpetuate Michael Bloomberg’s dubious legacy. Still, he was a long shot in 2013, too—until former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s and former Congressman Anthony Weiner’s campaigns both ran aground (for very different reasons). So who can blame the man for thinking he’s got a shot this time, too? But also, who can really blame him for finally taking a victory lap for having re-injected rich vs. poor rhetoric into Democratic politics—two years before Bernie Sanders first ran for president—and putting issues like universal pre-K on the national agenda?