Category: The Washington Post

[This article was co-written by Erik Loomis.]

Our commander in chief, noted admirer of military parades, might finally have his war: a trade war. Victims will include cheap domestic beer and foreign trade in motorcycles, blue jeans and bourbon. Whether Trump is destroying American manufacturing to “save” it remains to be seen.

Before proclaiming new tariffs on steel and aluminum last week (which he formally imposed on Thursday), Trump loudly initiated a process to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. These stunts highlight a continuing weakness of Democrats hoping for a blue wave in the midterm elections and beyond. Trump’s posturing on blue-collar jobs is a strong contrast to the Democratic Party’s seeming indifference to the working lives of industrial communities.

Trump is known to brag about job creation and take credit for the economic growth generated in the Obama administration, but his big talk is mostly empty. Despite his bluster about saving jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana, the company has continued to move jobs to Mexico over the last year. Yet Democrats have struggled to counter Trump with any agenda on trade or jobs that touches the heart of working-class voters. For example, the earliest version of their “Better Deal” slogan (“Better Skills, Better Jobs, Better Wages”) was killed on Twitter by angry millennials for its victim-blaming implication that going to school for even longer will somehow make everything better.

Only through a vigorous program aimed at creating and protecting good jobs will Democrats build upon their recent special elections victories and win back the working-class voters they need to win in states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

So-called free trade was only one of many reasons industrial jobs left these communities. Squeezing more seconds out of every minute and more hours out of every day of the workers remaining on payroll, replacing the rest with machines and shifting production to southern states to avoid the reach of unions arguably claimed more jobs than foreign competition. But coming in the middle of 40 years of this sustained corporate attack on good jobs, NAFTA has become emblematic for many Americans about how the rules of the system are rigged against them.

Adding insult to injury, the solutions that free trade evangelists peddled for how workers should adapt to the loss of jobs that provided decent incomes and retirement benefits have been haughty and tone-deaf. Relocate to where the “good jobs” are, like digital-era Okies! Borrow a ton of money and get a degree in computer science! It’s hard to overstate how furious people are at this kind of blithe disregard for their homes, their communities and their version of the American Dream. The Manhattan Institute’s Aaron M. Renn has noted the “rage of those left behind.” He concedes that arguments for the virtues of continued free trade “have no obvious connection to the daily experience of those living such a precarious existence that they can’t come up with $400 in emergency cash.”

Democrats went into the 2016 elections without a basic understanding about what an absolute curse word NAFTA is in many parts of the country, much to their peril. Most national polls show a narrow majority of voters have a favorable opinion of NAFTA, and college-educated and suburban voters whom Democrats counted on in 2016 seem broadly more supportive. But, according to Public Citizen, when the conversation is shifted to “outsourcing” of jobs, 60 percent hold a negative opinion, “with nearly half intensely negative.”

Trump understood and has exploited this rage by redirecting it at his favorite targets: foreigners and immigrants. The tariffs reinforce the mentality of too many working Americans that their ability to live a dignified life is under attack from nefarious foreigners. Regardless of the complexity of deindustrialization and trade policy, for many voters, this is a fairly simple question over what it means to be an American. Trump tapped into that in 2016 and could again in 2020.

To create an economic populism that can counter Trump while not demonizing foreign workers for American economic problems, Democrats need an easily understood set of programs that workers can believe in. That should start with a push for job creation for working-class people where they live. Young people growing up in Peoria and Youngstown need to have job opportunities in their communities. The original draft of the 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act — which commits the federal government to full employment — had a clause where workers could sue the government if they could not find a job. It is worth revisiting the full-employment ideas of the recent past as serious policy proposals for the future.

And there’s no shortage of work that needs to be done. Government investment in rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure should create high-paying jobs around the nation. Fighting to prioritize union labor for this infrastructure must be a priority. Building a green energy grid could both mitigate climate change and help rebuild the working class if union workers produced the steel in the turbines, built the energy grid and ran the daily operations.

Similar investment is needed to expand access to child care and elder care. Those could be good jobs, too, as could the millions of existing jobs in retail, hospitality and the service sector — if we raised the minimum wage and fixed our labor laws so that employers can’t run away from union wage and benefit standards. That would be a war worth fighting.

Beyond racial demagoguery, Trump’s approach to saving and creating jobs is all flashy announcements that do nothing to improve workers’ lives, taking credit for jobs and raises that were in motion before him and, of course, massive corporate giveaways. Yet, this could prove effective if voters in key states believe the president is fighting for them. Trump’s “handling” of the economy remains the one bright spot in his national polls. Despite his low overall approval ratings, his reelection prospects will likely revolve around the same small number of critical states as 2016, many of which Trump is targeting through his nationalistic trade agenda.

In an election that is really 50 mini-elections, a Democratic inability to articulate a strong jobs agenda could once again put Trump over the top in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, handing him an electoral college win even if he loses by even larger margins in California and New York. This could be true even if Trump’s agenda brings no steel jobs back to the United States — and it almost certainly will not. Moreover, in this year’s midterms, especially with Pennsylvania redistricting creating a number of newly competitive seats, a close race for control of the House could well rest on how Trump’s tariffs play in the steel communities of the Keystone State.

Democrats would be foolish to fall into the trap of offering voters a Trump-lite alternative on jobs. Tax breaks for corporations to “create” the jobs they need to hire anyway, retraining programs for jobs that don’t exist or pay poorly, and breast-beating posturing in front of shuttered factories are go-to’s for too many politicians — and underline much of the Senate Democrats’ current proposal for a “Better Deal” for workers. For the working class to once again identify as Democrats, the party needs to provide real solutions to their communities that center on creating and protecting good jobs where they live and make people believe the government cared about their lives once again.

[This article originally appeared at the Washington Post.]

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the case Janus vs. AFSCME, with the fate of the labor movement seemingly in the balance. At stake are agency fees — public sector unions can collect fees for service from employees who don’t join the union that represents them, which the plaintiff argues is an unconstitutional act of compelled speech.

The deep-pocketed backers of Janus aim to bankrupt unions and strip them of whatever power they still have, but if the court rules that an interaction a union has with the government is political speech, they might not be so happy with the results. Many have noted that such an overreaching and inconsistent decision could have unintended consequences by granting a heretofore denied constitutional right to collective bargaining and transforming thousands of workplace disputes into constitutional controversies.

What the Janus backers (and most commentators) miss is that agency fees are not just compensation for the financial costs of representation, but for the political costs of representing all the members in the bargaining unit and maintaining labor peace. As AFSCME’s attorney pointed out in his oral arguments, the agency fee is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in most union contracts. Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and discord on their hands.

American labor laws, and the employers who benefit from them, prefer that if there’s going to be a union, only one should serve as the exclusive representative of all eligible employees in a workplace. That scheme imposes on unions a legal obligation to fairly represent all members of the bargaining unit, and a political imperative to defend the terms of any deal as “the best we could get” (even if it includes concessions on benefits and work rules). It rewards the unions with a guaranteed right to exist and a reliable base of fee-paying membership. But it rewards employers with the far more valuable guarantee of the right to direct the uninterrupted work of the enterprise while union leadership has to tamp down rank-and-file gripes and discord for the length of the contract.

The combination of exclusive union representation, mandatory agency fees, no-strike clauses and “management’s rights” are the foundation of our peculiar labor relations system. No other country structures its labor relations system quite like this. Knock one part out, as the Janus plaintiffs aim to do with agency fees, and the whole system can fall apart. Employers will not like the chaos that this will bring.

Before this system evolved during the New Deal, multiple unions did compete in individual workplaces for dues-paying members and shop floor leadership. They would compete over who made the boldest wage and hour demands and who led the most disruptive job actions, as well as who could forge a more productive relationship with management or just flat-out take a sweetheart deal. But no deal could bring lasting labor peace, as any union cut out of the deal had a political need to disparage its terms and agitate for a fresh round of protests. In the New York City hotel industry, for example, rival anarchist and Communist unions competed with a number of craft unions. Their one-upmanship resulted in half a dozen industry-wide strikes between 1911 and 1934, until the industry voluntarily recognized one merged union council in 1938.

World War II strained this system. As a show of patriotism, unions pledged not to strike to maintain defense production, but were rewarded with federally enforced wage freezes to combat inflation. Workers who were squeezed by rising consumer prices found themselves unable to file a grievance if they were fired for engaging in wildcat strikes; many chose to quit their unions in protest. With their leadership and revenue under threat, union leaders considered abandoning their no-strike pledge.

To maintain production and labor peace, federal arbitrators began granting unions a “maintenance of membership” clause in contracts, which compelled union members to continue to pay dues during the terms of a collective bargaining agreement. That evolved into today’s union shop and agency fee. Public-sector labor laws, which are immediately at issue in Janus vs. AFSCME, are modeled on private-sector labor law and ruled by the same bargaining dynamics.

If the Supreme Court rules against AFSCME in Janus, many unions will abandon exclusive representation altogether. Their primary motivation will be avoiding the “free rider” problem — being required to expend resources on workers who opt out of paying anything for those services. And new unions will form to compete in that abandoned space.

The first unions to compete will probably be conservative. In non-bargaining Southern states that do not recognize formal union representation, organizations already exist that vie with teachers unions by offering minimal services and the promise to refrain from political activity. And right-wing foundations are paying for “organizers” to go door-to-door to convince union-represented workers to stop paying dues where they no longer have to. Would anybody really be surprised if rich and powerful funders encouraged new anti-union “unions” to more closely align members with the GOP agenda?

Those will eventually be followed by new unions that are more left-wing or militant (or at least crankier). They will not be satisfied with the current work rules and compensation and will have little incentive to settle.

Under the current scheme, those kinds of differences of opinion are aired in winner-take-all leadership elections between competing factions. A post-Janus system of voluntary representation would encourage many opposition caucuses to break away and form alternative, minority unions for their members only.

The solicitor general of Illinois — indirectly a party to the Janus case — warned in Monday’s oral arguments “that when unions are deprived of agency fees, they tend to become more militant, more confrontational.” And AFSCME’s counsel warned about the thousands of contracts that would have to be renegotiated in a climate where an agency fee is no longer a trade for a no-strike pledge, raising “an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”

Although Janus vs. AFSCME applies to public-sector unions, this same logic applies to the majority of states that have passed “right to work” laws prohibiting mandatory union fees in the private sector. And the big-money, right-wing plotters who have been pushing Janus are gunning for the blue states, too.

“No-strike” clauses buy employers a period of guaranteed labor peace. They would be basically unenforceable if workers could quit a voluntary association to engage in a wildcat strike, or join an alternative union that eschews signed agreements to have the freedom to engage in sudden unannounced job actions.

Many union organizers, frustrated by the unequal application of constitutional rights in labor relations and hungry for breakthrough strategies to revive the labor movement, will welcome this kind of chaos. Conservatives who just want to deprive unions of financial resources for short-term partisan gain should think twice about this attack — if the court rules their way, they will not like what comes next.

[This piece originally appeared at the Washington Post.]