Fighting Trump Isn’t Enough—We Must Also Wage War Within the Democratic Party
What reasonable American does not feel some amount of bitterness about the stunning election win of the short-fingered vulgarian scion of an outer borough slumlord, who squandered a billion-dollar casino fortune, and reinvented himself as a reality TV star and racist demagogue?
There’s plenty of acrimony to go around. The cadre of technocratic campaigners, pollsters and pundits trained to campaign on promises of “we’re not as awful as the other guys” is already pointing fingers at millennials, working-class whites, old people and Jill Stein voters.
Then there are those of us who understand that we have a world to win and that we need to actually energize and motivate people to vote for something. We’re pissed that the Democratic establishment—including union leadership—manipulated the primary process to guarantee the human embodiment of “The Establishment” would win the nomination because it was her “turn.” And we’re pissed that she didn’t turn her campaign into a full-throated denunciation of the last half-century of Republican demagoguery against minorities, immigrants, women and the working class because her “get things done” fantasy involved doing shots with John McCain to craft bi-partisan solutions to intractably partisan controversies.
We need to fight Trump’s agenda, but we arguably have a more urgent need to fight a civil war within the Democratic Party. This party needs to campaign on paycheck and civil rights issues, and needs to deliver real wins that put more money in people’s pockets and win them more dignity at work and in their communities.
Left, center or a third way?
I wrote in March about the ongoing realignment of our two major parties. As the Republican Party circles the drain of a toilet bowl of ethno-nationalism and borderline fascism, it becomes a marginal extremist party that can obviously do real damage when it wins. Fortunately, their voters are rapidly dying of old age. And let’s remember, too: The majority of voters have rejected them in six out of the last seven presidential elections.
But—absent our activism—the changing face of the GOP will continue to drag the Democrats further to the right. There are simply too many stockbrokers and single-digit millionaires who enjoy rigging the capitalist system to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us, but also support immigration, gay marriage and gun control. The GOP is no longer a comfortable home for them.
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party welcomed these exiles with open arms. Her “Republicans for Hillary” efforts resulted in a flag-waving, military-saluting George W. Bush-style convention, complete with a prominent role for billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Clinton brought (more of) the moneyed elite into the party. The left has to organize to kick them out.
Anybody whose 2016 campaign strategy involved lowering voters’ expectations must be tossed onto history’s compost pile like the moldy vegetables they are.
Look, I’m not above casting a protest vote, or organizing in earnest for a durable third party alternative. In fact, I managed the Socialist Party’s 2000 presidential campaign. I recruited the candidate, David McReynolds, and I got him on the ballot in—among other places—Florida, where his more than 600 votes eclipsed the official margin between Bush and Al Gore. A framed Palm Beach County sample ballot still holds a place of pride on the wall of my home office.
But our job now is to organize the greatest possible progressive coalition, and third party efforts tend to attract the least serious and least skilled campaigners, resulting in a muddle like the Stein campaign. I did not cast a vote for the Greens last Tuesday. Between dopey statements about vaccinations and Clinton’s e-mails, and the party’s perennial lack of a clear anti-capitalist message, it just wasn’t a coherent protest statement. So, after 16 years of resistance, I finally voted for Hillary Clinton … on the Working Families ballot line.
The Working Families Party is currently the best-organized left opposition caucus within the Democratic Party. Happily, it is also structured to take advantage of opportunities to break with corporate Democrats and run serious third party campaigns down-ballot now, and to build towards becoming a real third party threat after the GOP has been vanquished. It is well worth paying ten bucks a month to join, take a serious role and push the party to raise its ambitions.
Yes, comrades, it is our burden to “fix” the Democratic Party. Like it or lump it, the project of capturing the Democratic Party to organize the largest possible progressive coalition to beat the fascists falls to us.
Tell-tale signs
While we’re sifting through this mound of horseshit, frantically searching for a pony, I offer this: We were likely to face a recession—possibly a global one—in the first two years of whomever’s administration. If that recession happened on Clinton’s watch, the 2018 midterms would have been a bloodbath for the Democrats, and her 2020 re-election campaign would have faced an uphill battle of historical proportions.
Now Trump gets to own the recession (which might be more severe, thanks to his bigly business savvy), and lose the House on his path to one-term ignominy. That’s as long as Democrats reject neoliberalism and run full-throated Robin Hood-style campaigns to take from the 1% and give the rest of us universal health care, free public college, affordable housing and wages we can live on.
Let’s be clear: The majority of voters rejected Trump. Like Bush 16 years ago, he lost the popular vote. Unlike then, we should insist that Democrats reject the legitimacy of his LOSER administration and agenda and punish those corporate Democrats who don’t. Democrats should filibuster Trump’s judicial picks and appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. Any rollback of rights must be vigorously challenged.
Let’s also take heart from the fact that where progressive issues were on the ballot, voters supported them. The minimum wage was raised through ballot initiatives in Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Maine. Voters in Massachusetts rejected a billionaire-backed effort to raise the cap on charter schools. San Jose, California, voted for a fair scheduling law for retail workers. Wake County, North Carolina voted to increase funding for public transportation.
The lesson here is that we on the left should remain on the offensive and press to put progressive issues—not debatably “liberal” personalities—on the ballot. Here in New York, I’m in favor of the CUNY Rising Alliance campaign to make the City University of New York tuition-free and of voting next November to authorize a statewide constitutional convention. Minimum wage hikes, fair scheduling laws, rent control and free public college all seem like winnable issues in our biggest, most progressive cities.
Sadly, union leaders are not likely to lead on this agenda, as Micah Uetrecht has bitterly noted. Most of the big NYC unions are lining up against a constitutional convention out of fear, just as they lined up against the most pro-worker Democratic presidential candidate in decades: Bernie Sanders.
As we prepare to challenge the next president of the United States, we must gird ourselves for those moments when we might have to act in contradiction to official union leadership, and ask ourselves how we rebuild a movement that cannot be so easily derailed by the personal ambitions—or fears—of union leaders, but instead encourage grassroots protests that expand on the wants, needs and frustrations of the coalition that Barack Obama built.
[This article first appeared at In These Times.]
Response to Rosenblum, LaLuz and McAlevey
[New Labor Forum invited Jonathan Rosenblum, José La Luz and Jane McAlevey to respond to my article, “Two Reasons Why Most Unions Don’t Do Large-Scale Organizing”, and then gave me an opportunity to respond back. This is that published response.]
The respondents have expanded the discussion far beyond the parameters of my initial article. I have written elsewhere about union structure, strategy, and legal reform, but my preceding article does not purport to offer an all-encompassing solution to labor’s organizing woes. Rather, I intended to highlight two institutional conflicts that I have seen little open discussion about, and which are clearly impediments to maintaining a commitment to an organizing strategy.
Simply put, institutional priorities matter and I don’t just mean the budgetary commitment to do organizing. Jonathan Rosenblum, for instance, identifies mass organizing as the only choice for labor. Sure. I’d add reviving the strike weapon to our wish list, but both strategies are more easily said than done. The historical reality is that the U.S. labor movement has mostly grown through brief periods of worker-led, seemingly spontaneous mass strike activity. The efforts of the last 20 years to increase union density by gaining new members as quickly and easily as possible was doomed to never live up to expectations.
It would be better to find a balance — and a connection—between smart contract campaigns aimed at increasing the power and membership engagement of existing unions and strategic and potentially iconic new organizing fights that might inspire more non-union workers to think about their power and how best to organize.
The best example of that kind of external campaign is, as Jose La Luz points out, the Fight for $15. The campaign offers a model of unions thinking outside their institutional boundaries, it also enables supposedly powerless workers to experience the power that comes from withholding their labor. Along these lines, an “internal” organizing campaign that gives me hope is Bargaining for the Common Good[4], an effort by public sector unions to line up contract expirations and bargaining demands with community demands like progressive taxation, affordable housing, and government transparency, taking dead aim at the largest banks and power brokers while organizing a very real strike threat.
La Luz is correct that the failure by unions to engage in a “serious ongoing conversation” with members about the organizing imperative contributes to institutional roadblocks. Too many unions limited the conversation about the need to engage in organizing to convention delegates, and then just to get dues increases passed. Among admirers, there’s a fear that SEIU might stop funding Fight for $15 if it doesn’t start producing new members. I think Fight for $15 organizers have been thoughtful about getting existing union members to join the rallies and picket lines in solidarity. Such actions can be the most serious education in why we need to organize.
I must admit that I found Jane McAlevey’s response to be unsporting . She twists a few of my points in order to knock them down as strawmen and only seems to offer do more good organizing as an alternative. Don’t get me wrong; if McAlevey and I were tasked with working together to organize a single bargaining unit, I doubt we would substantively disagree on strategy. But reviving our movement will take more than just running more good single unit campaigns, especially if those campaigns want nothing more of their umbrella organizations than to “stay out of the way of good local leadership.”
Affiliation and federation are proven methods for pooling resources to take on larger employers and industries and connecting local fights to national struggles. They’re a pain in the ass, but retreating to provincialism is the worst possible response to the institutional tensions described in my article.
[This piece originally appeared in Volume 25, Issue 3 of New Labor Forum.]
The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained
The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation.
But the way that the compensation is structured—with current teachers keeping their current 7 percent pension “pickup,” and new hires receiving a salary increase in lieu of a pension contribution—has some critics decrying the deal as a solidarity-killing, two-tier contract. A pickup is the percentage of a worker’s pay that an employer puts directly into a pension fund.
The CTU’s House of Delegates meets Wednesday to deliberate over the tentative agreement and vote on whether to send it to the entire membership for ratification. If the deal is rejected, there is no guarantee that management will agree to more of the union’s demands—or even return to the table.
Two-tier contracts are an emotional subject in the labor movement. Beginning in the 1980s, employers used threats of off-shoring and sub-contracting, as well as their legal “right” to permanently replace striking union members, to force a wave of wage and benefit givebacks across many unionized industries. In order to make these cuts more palatable to the members who would have to vote on their ratification, unions negotiated agreements where current workers preserved most of their pay and benefits while future hires would bear the brunt of the cuts.
There are many epithets for this sort of thing, but the most common may be selling out the unborn. These ticking time bombs blow up years later, as the “new” hires become a larger portion of the bargaining unit and resent their veteran colleagues both for their more generous compensation packages and for the fact that the older workers signed away their younger colleagues’ right to enjoy the same. As the veterans become a minority in the workplace, there is an obvious financial incentive for supervisors to push them out through aggressive discipline. In such a situation, worker unity in future rounds of bargaining is hard to achieve.
To be clear, not all “two-tiers” are alike. The powerful New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council accepted a two-tier wage structure after surviving a 27-day strike in 1985. But the tiers only impacted workers during their first year of employment. By year two, all workers were earning the same pay rate. And, decades later, ending the tiered pay scale remained a union bargaining priority.
The United Automobile Workers (UAW) accepted a two-tier pay scale at Chrysler when the company went bankrupt in 2009. It was so severe that new hires earned only half the hourly wage of veteran employees. When members voted down a 2015 successor agreement that did not go far enough in reversing the double standard, the UAW was able to renegotiate a deal that brings newer workers closer to the traditional pay scale over the course of seven years.
The CTU’s proposed “two-tier” is a bit more of a shell game than those concessions. The fight over Chicago’s 7 percent pension pickup has more to do with symbolism than anyone’s actual paycheck. Pension systems are complicated things that only accountants and union researchers fully understand. But basically, a pension fund needs a certain amount of money coming in every year in order to guarantee a livable retirement income for actual and projected retirees. Currently, the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund has set that target at 9 percent of every pension-eligible employee’s annual income.
Before the CTU won collective bargaining rights in the 1960s, teachers had most, if not all, of their pension contributions deducted directly from their paychecks. Over the years, the CTU was able to bargain for 7 of that 9 percent to be contributed directly into the pension fund, instead of paid as a salary increase and then immediately deducted as a personal pension contribution.
Obviously, the difference between putting 7 percent in pension contributions directly versus rolling it into salaries, and then immediately deducting it, makes no financial difference to the employer. But the 7 percent became a visible target for Gov. Bruce Rauner and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. It was money they could portray to the public and the press as “extra” compensation that teachers get that other workers don’t and demand that teachers give it up. (It should be noted that Chicago teachers aren’t eligible for Social Security, so their pensions are the only thing that stand between them and an old age spent subsisting on cat food.)
Under the tentative agreement the CTU is considering, the pay for new hires would increase by an additional 3.5 percent in two successive years. It’s not entirely clear how soon new hires would be responsible for paying the full pension contribution.
Teachers at charter schools also participate in the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund. Members of the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (Chicago ACTS) at the UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) are currently bargaining over the very same pension pickup, and have set a Wednesday strike deadline.
I was a part of the bargaining team that negotiated the first contract at UCSN in 2013. Because we had a significant amount of bargaining leverage in the wake of a very public insider dealing scandal, we realized that those negotiations were our best shot to get the charter network to pay more than the whole lot of nothing that it had been contributing to teachers’ pensions.
We were successful. That 7 percent was a part of an overall compensation package we were going to win anyway. But by directing the employer to put it towards the pension, we politicized a different figure: the network’s starting salaries. Because charters compete in the same labor market as the district to recruit new teachers, the salaries they can offer are key. If that 7 percent had simply been rolled into base pay, UCSN would be able to quote starting salaries that appear to be larger than what the district offers, but really aren’t, giving the union leverage to raise wages in future negotiations. Now that starting salaries at Chicago Public Schools will appear to be 7 percent larger—if CTU members ratify the deal—the salaries that UCSN offers will appear even less competitive.
As for ratification of their contract, CTU members have to decide how important the symbolism of that 7 percent is and what impact it will have on future rounds of negotiations. The shifting of that 7 percent from one column in a spreadsheet to another strikes me as a last minute ploy to give Rauner and Emanuel a face-saving narrative that allows them to say they didn’t suffer a humiliating defeat in this round of bargaining.
“This is not a perfect agreement,” said CTU president Karen Lewis. “But it is good for the kids. And good for the clinicians. And good for the teachers, and the paraprofessionals.”
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike
As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements.
The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one of the 533 bargaining unit members participated in the strike vote, which delivered a 96 percent vote in favor of strike authorization.