Take This Bullshit Job and Pretend to Love It
The British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” What kind of misery is it, then, if your particular form of exploitation is being asked to do nothing particularly useful?
David Greaber explores this question in his thought-provoking and hilarious new book, Bullshit Jobs. Five years ago, he wrote an essay for the radical magazine Strike!, asking why people in the United States and England are not working the 15-hour weeks that John Maynard Keynes had predicted would be the result of technological advancement? In our post-scarcity society, he argued, only a tiny fraction of the population actually has to labor in order to provide for the material needs of all. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” he wrote.
The essay went viral. Millions of people read it and thousands wrote him to vent about their own pointless jobs. Those first-person accounts enliven and flesh out Graeber’s book.
He breaks down these jobs into five major categories: Box-tickers, Duct tapers, Taskmasters, Flunkies, and Goons. While humorous, it’s also a well thought-out system of categorizing pointless work by the dynamics that create them. A Duct-taper, for instance, is hired because an existing employee (very likely a full-of-it supervisor) either skips or botches one essential part of his assignment and so an entire extra employee is hired to make sure that that one small task gets carried out. That task may be essential, but it hardly amounts to a full-time assignment.
A Box-ticker, on the other hand, exists mainly so an organization can claim it is doing something that it doesn’t actually take seriously. Much of this involves researching and compiling reports no one will read to comply with a regulation or to document progress on a mission or goal.
Flunkies, meanwhile, are employees hired purely to make their supervisor appear more important. A receptionist whose main function is to place phone calls for a middle manager just to say to the party on the other line, “Please hold for Mr. ____,” is a perfect example.
These bullshit jobs make up an astonishingly large portion of the global economy. Inspired by his initial essay, one U.K. poll found that 37 percent of respondents did not believe their job made “a meaningful contribution to the world.” A similar poll of Dutch workers found that 40 percent of workers didn’t think their jobs served a useful purpose.
Barraged by right-wing talking points, much of the public has come to believe that pointless, self-created bureaucracy is uniquely a public-sector malady. But Graeber found many times more private- than public-sector workers reaching out to him to complain—in detail—about their salaried jobs, which they said would make no discernable difference in the world if they quit and the posting was left vacant for several months (or years). Many of these were in financial and legal firms, where the bloat was by design. The purpose (for a law firm) might be to whittle away a chunk of a large class-action settlement on administrative expenses, or to make a manager seem more important by virtue of the number of employees reporting to him. Usually, it was some combination of the two.
The real difference between the public and private sectors isn’t—to borrow a line from Ghostbusters—that “in the private sector; they expect results.” Instead, Graeber finds, it’s that corporate firms expect every employee to actually show up each week for his or her 40-plus hours of “work” and to “look busy” while doing it.
Picture here the Seinfeld character George Constanza, who, after years of temp jobs and unemployment lands a cushy job in the New York Yankees’ back office. Well-paid and in delightful proximity to the heroes of his youth, he nevertheless suffers anxiety from the fact that he doesn’t understand what his job is supposed to be and nobody at work seems to be sweating him about assignments or deadlines. His stroke of brilliance is to furrow his brow and squint his eyes in a way that makes him “look busy” to his colleagues.
It’s funny in a sitcom but borderline tragic in real life. Why a bullshit job would be regarded as daily torture instead of a paid vacation might be confounding to anyone who hasn’t spent the lions’ share of her waking life pushing a boulder of Outlook calendar invites up a mountain of pointless conference calls on mute. As explanation, Graeber points to the early 20th century work of psychologist Karl Groos. Studying early childhood behavior, he noted infants’ delight at being the cause of an effect that they were able to repeat through their own actions—as well as their rage at being denied the continued ability to alter the world through their own actions. He called this “the pleasure at being the cause,” and time and research have shown that is elemental to human happiness.
Much of the “bullshitization” of white-collar work is purely accidental, but Graeber argues that capitalists couldn’t have designed a more effective pecking order of oppression if they’d tried. At the bottom, you have millions of workers striving to work longer hours and fighting for a couple more dollars an hour that might lift them out of literal poverty. In between the desperate lumpen and the de facto rulers of the world is a massive segment of the workforce who secretly suspect that maintaining a decent standard of living doesn’t correlate with useful or productive work (or, indeed, any work at all!). But challenging the system could imperil their relative comfort.
They are more likely to resent people whose jobs are easily explainable to their family and neighbors—but who nevertheless demand better wages and working conditions—than to make common cause with them.
Graeber points to autoworkers and teachers as workers who achieve a tangible degree of satisfaction from their work and who are frequent targets of the public’s ire for expecting that and decent wages. I think more of all those amateur chefs on Chopped, hoping to win a $10,000 purse in order to buy a food truck. How many thousands of people are living an essentially monastic lifestyle because they want to make a living feeding people? In a world filled with well-paying but meaningless work, or poorly-paid drudgery that a robot could (and may soon) do, is it any wonder that so many people yearn for a meaningful life spent cooking for people and watching them enjoy the literal fruits of their labor?
What I particularly love about Graeber’s book is how it contributes to the revival of the kind of labor lit that flourished in the 1970s. The last 40 years of globalization, automation, and the gutting of our labor laws has narrowed the focus of too many labor writers to questions of how workers can get enough hours at a high-enough minimum wage and with decent enough benefits to reverse an inexorable slide into poverty.
In the ‘70s, books like False Promises by Stanley Aronowitz or Barbara Garson’s All the Livelong Day, and especially Studs Terkel’s Working shined a light on the meaning that people struggle to find in their lives through their labor.
Interestingly, each of these books devoted some discussion to Lordstown, Ohio. That’s where General Motors had recently built a factory staffed with a bunch of hippies and Vietnam vets. These workers managed to turn the company’s pioneering “small car”—the Chevy Vega—into a notorious lemon through their protest campaign of wildcat strikes and sabotage. Despite generous and rapidly rising wages, the workers rejected not just the inhumane pace of the assembly line but also their alienation from any pleasure at being the cause of an actual car driving off at the end of production.
They wanted not just to slow down the pace of the assembly line, but to spend more time with each car as it was assembled. They wanted to experience more of the pleasure at being the cause.
Contrast all that with this juicy quote that Graeber digs up for what I don’t doubt was a sincere objection by President Obama to the push to expand Medicare for all:
Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, “Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork.” That represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?
Absent a vivid socialist imagination, how can we justify all of these millions of office drones affording food, shelter, and clothing if we couldn’t make them spend 40-to-60 hours a week making every doctor and patient they deal with miserable and furious?
The closest contemporary cousin to Graeber’s book is Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government, which questions why we surrender most of our constitutional rights at the boss’ doorstep and don’t even notice that we are doing it.
Like Graeber, she looks back at the value systems of the pre-industrial era and how they got twisted and confused during the revolutionary rise of capitalism and the nation-state. Anderson is a philosopher by training, and Graeber is an anthropologist—which highlights how important it is for labor studies to embrace its interdisciplinary nature.
Being an anarchist, Graeber is loath to suggest specific policy solutions. Still, he can’t help but talk about the policy that is most frequently advocated by the nerds who talk about the post-scarcity society: the universal basic income. Obviously, he sees value in decoupling the deservedness of food, shelter, and clothing from how one spends the majority of her waking hours. There simply isn’t enough useful work to go around for each of us to trade an hour for a loaf of bread.
The alternative progressive policy proposal—a federal commitment to full employment—is touted as more pragmatic and winnable. It’s a reasonable appeal to the god, mom, and apple-pie Calvinist work ethic. And, after all, there are a lot of roads and bridges that need to be rebuilt, a lot of child and elder care that should be compensated as the very real work it is, and well, who wouldn’t love to see a lot of WPA-style public artwork going up around the world? But, Bullshit Jobs should serve as a warning that a continued fidelity to the notion that one must work for one’s supper would likely condemn many of us to box-checking and duct-taping, as the machines take over and make most of us redundant.
[This article originally appeared at the American Prospect.]
Republicans Are Hard at Work to Turn Staten Island Blue
Is Donald Trump an albatross around the neck of congressional Republicans? By appealing to his base and embracing the polarizing strategies that he has brought to new heights, will they cost themselves the last few swing districts in Trump-abhorring blue states?
We New Yorkers might have the best view of the GOP’s struggle to stay afloat in America’s big cities right here on Staten Island. Republican Dan Donovan, who has represented New York’s 11th Congressional District for all of a term and a half, is in the fight of his political life in the June 26 GOP primary.
Our ex-con ex-Congressman, Republican Michael Grimm—fresh out of jail—is running against Donovan to reclaim his old job. Grimm has gone full fascist in order to win the backing of former White House consigliere Stephen Bannon, as part of Bannon’s effort to destroy what’s left of the Republican establishment.
Grimm gushed over Bannon’s early and enthusiastic endorsement. His campaign materials studiously avoid any policy stances of substance. Instead they emphasize his past military and law enforcement credentials and—of course—putting America first. He has pledged—and maintained—fidelity to what he calls “President Trump’s agenda,” adding, “Anyone that’s against that agenda needs to get out of the way.”
On the Democratic side, Purple Heart veteran Max Rose is leading a crowded field. He has more cash on hand than any candidate vying for New York’s 11th District, raising three times as much money as Donovan this year. (Full disclosure: I knocked on doors to get signatures to put Rose on the Working Families Party ballot line. I found a lot more enthusiasm for him than my Republican neighbors demonstrate for Donovan.)
In recent weeks, Donovan has been scurrying to the right. His latest “Hail Mary pass” was to introduce a bill in Congress banning so-called “Sanctuary Cities” from receiving federal funding, despite having voted against a similar bill last June.
Indeed, until recently Donovan had been doing all of the things a moderate Republican would traditionally do to win re-election in a swing district in a blue state. This time last year, he was co-authoring an op-ed in The Washington Post with a Dreamer, grasping for “common ground” with the most sympathetic of group of undocumented immigrants. He’d even won the backing of the state AFL-CIO.
That was before Grimm began taunting him in the Staten Island Advance as “Desperate Dan” and initiated a juvenile slap war in which each besmirched his rival as a “liberal.” In far-right Bizarro World, each had committed the unforgiveable sin of not always voting in lock-step with John Boehner and Paul Ryan to keep health insurance as expensive as possible for working people.
These attacks seem to have made Grimm the favorite of the party’s shrinking base. A recent poll commissioned by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee showed Donovan trailing Grimm by ten percentage points in the upcoming primary. Donovan’s camp has dismissed the polling as so much fake news, but his complete about-face on immigration issues suggests the poll is a lot closer to the truth than they’re willing to admit publicly.
Hence his complete reversal on immigrants and sanctuary cities. And a costly reversal it is: His attempt to save himself in the primary will make it exquisitely difficult for him to win in November—should he even make it that far.
I realize that Staten Island has a national reputation as a conservative enclave in perpetual rebellion against the rest of “liberal” New York City—but the reality is a lot more complicated. There are more than twice as many registered Democrats and independents (even a sprinkling of socialists) on Staten Island than there are Republicans. One in five residents were born in another country, and anti-immigrant rhetoric still sounds anti-immigrant to the documented and undocumented alike.
The ongoing demographic “big sort”—where people choose to live in communities where their neighbors are more likely to share their values—encourages the political parties to campaign to their base and focus on turnout. That probably means that the Democrats’ best hopes for retaking the House lie in California, New Jersey, and—yes—Staten Island, NYC.
As the GOP’s rural voters increasingly embrace an extremist and reactionary agenda, the party becomes more of a fringe movement in diverse working-class communities like Staten Island’s north shore and the Brooklyn neighborhoods that have been saddled with us in NY 11. Winning the majority of a Republican minority is not going to be enough to win elections in a district like ours.
Whatever your opinion on Sanctuary Cities policies—which commit local law enforcement to do the barest minimum of cooperation with federal immigration authorities seeking to deport law-abiding undocumented residents—the fact is that it is currently settled law in New York City, and that is not an issue that is on the ballot in November. Yet Donovan’s bill proposes to deprive his constituents of a lot of our federal tax dollars. How do you stand before the voters in a general election on that kind of track record?
Grimm—the apparent GOP primary frontrunner—has long been a national embarrassment for Republicans. You might remember him from the time he threatened to “break” a reporter “like a boy” on live camera. He was under a cloud immediately after he won his first election when suspicious cash bundles raised by a foreign national quickly sparked a federal investigation.
Grimm’s former girlfriend got a slap on the wrist conviction for the clumsy violation of campaign-finance law. She didn’t roll on her former paramour, however, so he didn’t get convicted for that particular crime.
But the FBI investigation revealed a sordid history of tip-stealing at his Upper East Side health-food store. He was indicted on 20 counts ranging from tax evasion, lying under oath, and hiring undocumented workers. He eventually pled guilty to one count of tax evasion and served eight months in prison (but not before he won re-election in a 2014 race that the national Democrats also had high hopes for).
Would Grimm’s ignominious presence as the once-again standard-bearer for the GOP cause the establishment to beg Donovan to stay in the November race as a kind of “Never (Again) Trump?” Unless he withdraws, Donovan’s name will be on the ballot in the general election no matter what. Thanks to New York’s fusion voting laws—which allow third parties to co-endorse candidates as a kind of ideological “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval—his name will appear on the third- and sixth-place lines—the Conservative and Independence parties—on the November ballot. The choice for the Republican establishment may well come down to their deciding to split the vote of their diminished legions or let ex-con Grimm carry their banner in an ugly—and presumably embarrassing—defeat in November. There are not a lot of scenarios here that look good for the GOP retaining a toehold in NYC.
[This article originally appeared at The American Prospect.]
Fletcher & Richman Discuss What the Revival of Socialism in America Means for the Labor Movement
Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Shaun Richman are contributing writers to In These Times, as well as veterans of the labor and socialist movements. Both have worked for several labor unions, with Fletcher having served as a senior staffer in the national AFL-CIO and Richman as a former organizing director for the American Federation of Teachers. Both came of age during different eras of left politics. In this conversation, the two writers and organizers examine what a revived socialist movement could mean for unions—and the broader push for workers’ rights and dignity.
Shaun Richman: We’re in a political moment when tens of thousands of Americans are declaring themselves to be socialists and joining and paying dues to socialist organizations. It’s not just Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), although DSA is growing the largest and the fastest. The entire alphabet soup of the Left, basically any socialist group that isn’t a weirdo cult, is experiencing an influx of new members and activity. In the context of the “Organize or Die!” union push of the last 30 years, this is new and potentially a game-changer. There are now organized socialist groups that exist in significant numbers and are trying to figure out what their labor program should be, how they relate to a labor movement, and how they can be helpful. And it’s not obvious what they should do. Bill, what are the opportunities and pitfalls, and what does this growth mean for labor?
Bill Fletcher: It is useful to contrast this growth with what took place in the Left during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Left, at that point, saw a project that was necessary within the working class. And so there was a whole wave of people, myself included, that went into workplaces, if we weren’t already there, as a way of organizing to rebuild a vibrant labor movement and to lay the foundation for a working-class-based radical political movement that would, hopefully, result in the construction of a new political party of the socialist Left.
That’s different from what I’m seeing right now, which is the growth in interest in socialism, broadly defined, among a large number of people, particularly younger people. That is fantastic! But it is far from clear that they are wedded to a class project, except in a very abstract sense. And that difference is fundamental. It’s not just an ideological question; it is also a strategic question. Where and how does a reborn socialist movement build a base?
One of the tendencies that we began to see in the late 1980s and early 1990s was an orientation among many younger leftists that assumed that the work they did organizing the working class had to be done via staff positions: staff for unions and staff for workers centers. So the workplace-based organizing became less and less of a priority and activity. We need to unpack this a bit.
Shaun: One challenge of organizing workers currently is that most people out there—even union members—don’t really understand what a union is. They understand them as some sort of abstraction. The way some budding left critics of unions talk, it’s like, “Well why won’t ‘the unions’ break with the Democratic party?” Or, “Why are they so loyal to the companies they represent?” This reflects a lack of understanding of how heavily regulated unions are and the structural trap that unions find themselves in.
Another problem is the one you note. I’ve been doing a lot of recruiting of new union organizers in the last decade. There are these moments that flare up when you see tremendous interest from new activists: maybe it’s Wisconsin, maybe it’s the Chicago teachers’ strike. There was definitely a big influx of new organizers coming out of the 2008 Obama campaign. People had that lightbulb moment when they wanted to get more involved in social justice, and they decided to go straight for a staff job at a union.
Almost no one paused to ask how to stand in place and fight for a union at the job they were in. And one of the pitfalls of the staff model is, obviously, there just aren’t that many staff jobs, and they’re dwindling. The opportunity of an organized socialist movement is that it provides a different way to get involved and to do something at your workplace, or find a new workplace where you have comrades and you can maybe start pushing in the right direction and laying the seeds for labor’s next uprising.
Bill: Left politics need to unite with workers—and the lives and activities of workers. And there are different ways that that’s going to happen. One aspect of that work is the building of unions.
But even when it comes to building unions—if you think back on the work that the Left did in the 1930s, whether it was the communists, the Trotskyists or whatever—the process of building those unions was a major priority of the Left. And cadres were made available to help to build unions. In addition, building a presence of the Left in the working class goes beyond the workplace and includes communities. That’s what today’s socialist left really needs to be thinking about.
Shaun: I prefer to look at the 1920s. First of all, from a power perspective, they seem very analogous to our era. But there’s also an element of optimism: If this is our 1920s, what can we do to get to our 1934?
There were really interesting projects during the 1920s socialist Left that helped change the environment and made the 1930’s uprising possible. One is the Trade Union Education League (TUEL). They developed a smart way of addressing the problems of union structure—how the craft model sometimes got in the way of solidarity. They also got past that earlier Wobbly thrust of just quitting the AFL to create new “perfect” organizations that would compete against and “defeat” the craft unions.
“Amalgamation” was the watchword, and the principle was that we can put structural rigidity aside while we figure out a model where every union that claims jurisdiction gets those members, as long as all members are fighting within the same collective bargaining framework. But the important thing is to go into the unions where the workers are, instead of being the perfect union hanging off to the side. “Go where the workers are,” seems to be a pretty good and long-standing rule of socialist organizing.
They still wound up getting accused of being “dual unionists” by existing leadership, which felt threatened by these folks who were organizing as caucuses. Many were expelled from those unions. The peril of that sort of model— which modern-day socialists fall into a bit too easily– is succumbing to knee jerk oppositionalism. Without a real analysis of the structural, legal and organizing challenges to unions, you fall into the mindset of, “If only this person was in charge instead of that person,” or, “If only these people weren’t the ones on staff but these other people were.” Then you’re just “the opposition.”
First of all, we’ve got at least 30 years of experience here, where just replacing folks at the top, or just replacing the staff with more “dedicated” people, is clearly not the breakthrough strategy. But more strategically, if DSA or if any of these groups are able to be painted as knee-jerk opposition caucus joiners, you could very quickly find yourself blacklisted or marginalized, and that would be a waste of this opportunity. Which is not to say don’t ever engage in opposition (if you can win). But, it’s telling how much people point to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), because it’s the best example of where new leadership was needed. That new leadership organized the membership in a real and meaningful way and has improved the state of the union. But the fact that that’s the example everyone talks about should tell you that it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Bill: There’s an assumption implicit in what you were saying that I would challenge. Based on my own experience, I can tell you that one does not have to be in direct opposition in order for the traditionalists or the pragmatists in the leadership of organized labor to red-bait or otherwise marginalize you. We have had segments of the Left that decided to tail the union leadership in order to—in their own view—build alliances. In other cases, they may have hoped that, through building such a relationship, they would increase the opportunity to be in a position of influence and power.
On the one hand, you have the opposition caucuses. As you note, they can be very sectarian and unproductive. Although in cases like Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and the reform movement that took over the CTU, they can be really important. The challenge for leftists is that even in the absence of a reform caucus, to the extent that you’re trying to push the envelope, even when you have absolute displays of loyalty, you still can be perceived as a threat. So people should not think, “Well I’m not going to be a sectarian ass, and therefore people will listen to me, I’ll be able to serve a productive role.” I wish it worked that easily.
I have argued for a long time that people on the Left can’t treat the labor movement as a panacea nor as some sort of hideous creature. It’s complicated. It is also a strong argument for why we need Left organizations rather than leftists relying only upon themselves as individuals.
Shaun: Working for unions as staff is not for everybody and shouldn’t be the default position. If you can do it, the pay and benefits will be good, you’ll learn some stuff, but you also might hit a limit of what you can learn. The role of movement is to help you to figure out where the next smart place to go is.
Back to the TUEL, one thing they did is that they didn’t just focus on where unions already existed, which—like today—was in only a handful of industries that they were able to hold onto. It was clear there were growth industries where workers had to be organized, but there weren’t any unions that were seriously trying to organize—the auto factories being the best example. So TUEL activists took jobs in those auto factories and focused on just getting the job, making friends, becoming trusted co-workers and showing shop floor leadership. All the while, they were puzzling out with each other what serious union organizing would look like in mass production factories. And they wound up being a very crucial base of cadre when the UAW came along in the 1930’s.
So one of the exciting things about there being organized socialist groups is the idea of salting. When I was running the AFT’s charter schools organizing program, I probably had a different take on this. Back then, I needed folks who were ideologically committed and willing to go work at a non-union charter school and help us organize it. An inside organizer makes a massive difference.
My wife salted a charter school, and she managed to organize the place in three weeks. But now that I’m not currently running any union organizing division, what I see more is that the members of these socialist organizations already have jobs in the industries that we know we need to organize but nobody currently knows how.
I’m sure there are a ton of IT workers and freelancers who are now card-carrying socialists. I think salting looks more like tapping into socialist membership networks on the job. Find each other, and get a book club together, start reading together, start meeting together, and start thinking what would workplace action look like. Don’t model this on what the current unions look like, because however we’re going to organize IT, it’s never going to look like the UAW. The industry is just vastly more complicated by design.
Bill: The same model was implemented in various forms and on a different scale in the 1970s, but the Left as a whole was smaller then. Let’s dissect this word “salting” a little bit further. There’s salting that refers to sending people into workplaces in order to lay the foundation for new organizing of a union, and then there’s salting in the sense of in-shop organizing that aims at playing a transformative role within existing unions.
When I went to work at a shipyard in the 1970s, there was already a union, but it was a very conservative union. With other people on the Left, we built a reform movement that aimed to change the power situation within that local. We need people who are prepared to go into workplaces where there’s already organization. But we also need people who are going to be going into new places.
Here’s where it gets more complicated. Much of what needs to be organized is very low-paid work. The entry-level rate at the shipyard was low, but it was still something that I could live on. Many people shy away from salting precisely because of this. It’s not an obstacle, but it is a challenge.
Shaun: Much of this depends on who is willing and able. If you’re a footloose college senior who has that freedom and isn’t tied down by a family or a mortgage, who can take a front-desk job at a non-union hotel, that’s a special kind of help you can provide. But given just how much of the economy is currently unorganized, I think a lot of people are already in jobs that need to be organized. Again, I’m sure that there are tons of card-carrying socialists who work in IT. They shouldn’t leave that job. They should stay and fight, and they can contribute tremendously by finding each other and by thinking about what are the actions, the concerted activity, that we could take together that can demonstrate some power and inspire more coworkers to join.
I became a teenage socialist in the 1990s. I only heard about that 1970s push to “go into industry” as a cautionary tale. What I heard was the Socialist Workers Party told all their members who had built careers as academics or as writers to go into industry—basically upend your professional life. It kind of tore the party apart and left it as a tiny sect after what had been a fairly rich history of movement building.
And, yes, sacrifices will have to be made, but I do think that we have an opportunity just because of how disorganized the economy currently is. Many people are already in a job that needs to be organized, and just by talking, reading, thinking and planning small actions with comrades, they move the needle.
Bill: The role of organization becomes very important here—specifically, the type of organization. One of the things about the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s was that they had an analysis of strategic sectors of the economy—mining, steel and auto—that needed to be organized.
One of the central tasks of organized socialists, as opposed to individuals, is to really examine the economy and think about where we need to be, including organizing the unemployed and informal sector. Not just organizing unions, but how do you build a left presence in these sectors? Do we have to do it in a different way? Is this one of the reasons or one of the ways that we need to be thinking about workers centers, for example, or other organizational vehicles, as ways of penetrating sections of the workplace that we haven’t been otherwise able to penetrate?
Shaun: That takes us to one of the other left projects of the 1920s that we need a 21st century model for: the labor colleges that sprang up. I’m thinking of places like Brookwood Labor College in upstate New York, Work People’s College in the Midwest and Commonwealth College down south. The model of the schools was, first of all, everyone was in the room: people from different industries, different unions, or non-union workers, people with different educational attainments. The point was to step back from the daily work and to evaluate—with no sacred cows—the law, the union structure and the industries.
Our current labor colleges are great. I’m a big fan of the University of Massachusetts Union Leadership and Activism (ULA) program for doing some of this, but it’s a masters program so it’s sort of inherently elitist. We need PhDs in the room with high school dropouts as equals, electricians in the room with non-union IT workers, teachers in the room as students. It shouldn’t be tied to college credits, although if you can find a way to incorporate that, that’s always helpful.
The way labor education is funded now makes it hard to not have sacred cows. The 1920s labor college leaders, like A.J. Muste and Kate Richards O’Hare, really drove a process of never simply accepting “it is what it is” as an answer to anything. They were crucial for getting past the abstraction of craft union structure versus pure industrial union, and coming up with newer models of worker representation and protest. They examined critical questions: How do we not let our picket lines get smashed? What if we locked ourselves in instead of letting ourselves get locked out?
As you noted, these conversations can be threatening to union leadership, but it’s not like someone made a mistake. It’s not like William Green and John L Lewis and Sidney Hillman all sat down at a table and took a vote on the best framework for collective bargaining. The combination of exclusive representation, the duty of fair representation, agency fee, and enterprise-level bargaining is the product of a series of historical accidents. We need to understand how this came about by accident, how this system worked, when and why it worked, and start to develop ideas about how to replace it. Increasingly, it’s not working for us. Certainly it’s not working for the non-union segment of the economy, which is most of it now.
Bill: The AFL-CIO went through a process of building a National Labor College (NLC), when John Sweeney took over as president of the AFL-CIO in 1995. It was a controversial decision, because there were many labor academics and labor studies programs that felt threatened by the idea of what the NLC might mean for their respective programs. It was very unfortunate. That eventually calmed down.
There was the question of whether education was mainly going to be found at brick-and-mortar institutions that labor unions set up, like the NLC or the United Auto Workers’ iconic site at Black Lake Michigan. Alternatively, there was the question of whether the education offered by unions would be through programs and initiatives that were getting out into the field and developing programs where the members were. Another question was whether it should be a BA and Masters, versus developing our own West Point where we would be training the upcoming ‘generals’ and ‘colonels’ of the movement. That discussion never came to fruition.
Through cost overruns and several other problems—including the split in the AFL-CIO, which led some unions that had split off to stop using the Labor College (apparently because they wanted it to collapse)—the Labor College found itself in a crisis.
But there was also a lack of consensus at the leadership level as to what priority it should be and whether it was worth the expense. Leaders of affiliated unions, by and large, went along with Sweeney’s proposal, but I’m not even sure that Trumka was all that enthusiastic about it. This lack of consensus, I have concluded, was the ultimate demise of the NLC.
All of the educational efforts that you’re pointing to during the early part of the 20th century—and to which I would add the Highlander Center—were central in terms of offering advanced education for labor intellectuals. I use that term very broadly and do not mean just labor academics. These institutions helped to train and shape the thinking of people who would play major leadership roles in the new labor movement. At this point we need to look at the form and content that worker-centered, movement-building education should possess.
Shaun: Certainly, in the year 2017 it’s folly to try to run labor education out of the unions. They’re facing an existential threat from Janus. Nobody has an appetite to fund it. So it has to be independent. Is it done at the universities—at UMass, Murphy, Rutgers and the rest? Yes, obviously, and all of those institutions are doing good work. Some are finding ways to grow in this moment and to bring in new revenue to do interesting programs. But there is still a need to build an institution of labor education that is independent and not based on a traditional tuition and credit model. Book clubs, like the Jacobin reading groups, seem like a really smart thing to do right now. All you have to do is find a library reading room, or somebody’s living room, and buy or borrow the books. So it’s fairly low investment to get started.
But those have to start getting connected to each other, so that the conversation that’s happening in the Bronx gets connected to the conversation that’s happening in Chicago and in Raleigh-Durham. But if you have maybe 100,000 card-carrying socialists putting money into a pot, you start to be able to develop something that possibly looks like the Socialist Party’s Rand School, to go even further back in time.
Back to the 1920s, the third interesting project to me that cries out for a 21st century analogue is the International Labor Defense organization that was led by James P. Cannon. Back then, union leaders would get jailed on trumped-up charges of conspiracy, like inciting riots on picket lines. The infrastructure to raise money for bail and defense lawyers was a literal life saver. We’re not yet facing those kinds of fights, thankfully, but folks lose their jobs in organizing all the time. And there’s a lot of money that needs to be raised. The interesting question is what does an International Labor Defense look like in the GoFundMe era? The Silicon Valley capitalists have created the technological infrastructure that we can either use or steal.
I’ve put out this report, Labor’s Bill of Rights, which argues that we should be using more constitutional challenges to the laws that really restrict workers’ activities, which will involve breaking the law. Look at the Jimmy Johns workers in the Twin Cities area who got fired for hand-billing about the fact that they could not take a sick day unless they found a coworker to replace them. The company’s rule was come into work sick if you can’t find someone to fill in for your shift. They put out leaflets making common cause with the customers. I would want to know if the people making my sandwich were possibly contagious. The activists got fired, and now we have a Circuit Court decision that says that they deserved to be fired because they were being disloyal to their employer.
There is a major black hole in free speech law around workers. We’re going to need more fights like this, and I would point out that was an Industrial Workers of the World organizing effort, which suggests the value of outsider activist strategies and relatively small organizations that think differently and are nimble. But you can’t ask somebody to take a risk like that unless you can offer them some sort of support, and again that’s where fundraising for workers’ defense as a socialist project would be huge. Folks are already doing this, but there’s an opportunity to do it in a more organized manner, tap into social media and make it more visible.
Bill: There are actually two issues here. There’s the question of organizing legal defense and the broader matter of strategy in the workplace around authoritarianism. It’s conceivable that a 21st century version of International Labor Defense could be constituted. There are organizations that take on some cases, particularly around union democracy issues, like the Association for Union Democracy. The problem is that you will quickly encounter “donor fatigue.” This is something that we see particularly in responses to disasters. People can be affected in the beginning, and then after a while they start getting tired. And so you have to be very careful about how you move such efforts. One should not assume that each and every injustice will result in a mass campaign. It’s going to have to be very strategic. And that will mean that some people will get help, and other people won’t.
But the deeper strategic and programmatic issue is something that I think that organized labor and much of the left have largely abandoned. That is what Barbara Ehrenreich talked about back in 2000 and what Rand Wilson have been raising since the 1980s: the authoritarian nature of the non-union workplace. The fact is that workers give up their rights when they’re walking into non-union workplaces. I am convinced that taking on that struggle would be electrifying for several reasons. One is the idea of being protected against wrongful termination means more than the current situation in the United States, where if one gets fired in a non-union workplace, one has few options other than trying to get unemployment compensation.
“Just cause” dismissal means developing institutions, such as labor courts, as you have in much of the rest of the world. Now at the level of strategy, it’s seemed to me for a long time that this is something that should be pursued, particularly in so-called “right to work” states. We should be advocates of rights at work and use that to flip the script.
Shaun: I agree, and we’re in a moment when these notions are bubbling up—at elite levels, at least. First of all, for any socialist book clubs that are starting out there, I would highly recommend Elizabeth Anderson’s new book Private Government. It makes a really clear and fairly deep argument about why we don’t even see how we give up our rights when we walk through the boss’ door and why that needs to change. There was a write-up in The New Yorker this weekend, and she had a piece in Vox: It’s getting out there. I included Just Cause as one of the ten parts of Labor’s Bill of Rights, and I’m getting some interesting feedback about that.
Bill: Like what?
Shaun: I had a conversation with the staff of a well-respected progressive in Congress, where they expressed interest in doing something as bold as introducing a Just Cause bill, particularly if it would spark state-level efforts. I heard that some of the alt-labor groups in California were thinking about it as a potential ballot initiative after we saw in November that progressive ballot initiatives win even when right-wing politicians win. When you put workers’ rights and workers’ pay on the ballot, workers are going to vote for that.
There are two bits of pushback that I get on this. One is folks say, people actually assume that they can’t be fired for just about any reason, and they only find out after they lose the job. I’m not sure that that’s the case. First of all we’re seeing a lot of Nazis getting fired after they had their pictures taken at Charlottesville. We see people get fired for things they say on social media. But there’s still that pushback that workers don’t understand they don’t have these rights. Well that seems like a project of popular left education, to make sure workers understand what their rights are (and aren’t).
The other pushback is a feeling among a lot of union people that if every worker had job protections, why would workers form unions? And that’s just a lack of imagination. If every worker in a state had just cause protection, and there was some sort of recourse to a labor court, or arbitration, then you have lots of workers who would understand the good sense of paying for representation. You have right now millions and millions of workers who would like to join a union tomorrow but can’t, because they need to convince a majority of their coworkers to vote for it. But if there were just cause protections, I think there are tons of unions that could go out there and say, join us and we’ll be there for you.
And then there are all these other things you get by being a part of the union, including, one would hope, some more popular education around economics and workers power. So it seems like a potential pathway back not only to worker power but to union power. And again we’re in a moment when people are just starting to talk about it. So we should push on it, so yeah it’s time that we joined Europe on this.
Bill: Exactly. Not just Europe–other parts of the world. The objection that you heard, I’ve been hearing since the 1980s, when I first got involved in the issue of wrongful termination. Trade unionists were saying, why would people join unions? As if that’s the major obstacle that we face now. I mean, it’s so absurd, so small-minded, that it almost doesn’t deserve a response. But I think that your response is a very good one.
Shaun: It gets back to having a structural critique. We should be looking at what is keeping us from growing into areas of the economy where we need to be, what is diminishing union power, and we need to think about breakthroughs. A lot of the breakthroughs have to come through changing the law, and breaking out of this model of NLRB-certified, enterprise-level bargaining. I’m not saying get rid of it, but it can’t be our model for growth. We’re not going to grow back to 33 percent union density through that model—not with card check, not even with repealing Taft-Hartley. We’re just not going to grow to the high-water mark of union density under a model collective bargaining centered around atomized workplaces.
We need something that gets us to have a voice in industry, and in entire sectors, all at once. And sectoral bargaining—or sectoral rule-making, even—is another idea I see bubbling up, also at more elite levels, in think tanks and labor colleges. But it is something that workers and members of socialist book clubs should be talking about too.
The pushback is that it’s pie-in-the-sky when we had a triple-crown Democratic government and couldn’t even get card check passed. But opportunities for change sometimes come at you faster than you expect. God forbid 20 million workers sat down at the job tomorrow and created the crisis that would actually get Congress to change our labor laws. What would we win? Card check, because that’s the last idea we put on the table? We should be discussing ideas that are big, that are utopian, that seem hopeless. Otherwise, when the moment arises to actually make a gain, we’re going to be caught flat-footed.
Bill: Absolutely. You know we have to be advancing new and exciting ideas. And one of the ideas that is important for organizers to appreciate and certainly for the left to appreciate, is that when people are actually inspired by visionary notions, they are capable of extraordinary accomplishments. When there is a lack of inspiration, something different happens, and that is that people tend to fall back into their everyday lives, and their everyday problems, and get held down, smothered by them. If we’re attempting to build a new movement and going on the counter-offensive, we must ensure some level of inspiration. And that doesn’t mean providing all the answers, it doesn’t mean detailing the ultimate utopia. It means that we’re laying out an idea about how change can happen and the difference that it actually can make.
Shaun: I agree, and that might be a good note to end on. This moment presents an opportunity to gain some new ambition and to think a hell of a lot bigger than we’ve been thinking for decades now.
[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]
Bernie Sanders Wasn’t Our First Socialist Mayor: Remembering Milwaukee’s Socialist Party History
As the country’s politics take a right turn, an unlikely progressive wins office as mayor of a major U.S. city. In an era marked by conformity and the primacy of business interests over the common good, he has the temerity to call himself a socialist. Both locally and nationally, his example serves as a beacon of hope for the waning left and a lightening rod of criticism for the resurgent right. His fundamental decency and fealty to the democratic process and the public good see him continually reelected, with most voters regarding him on a first-name basis. He goes on to run a quixotic campaign for President.
If this sounds familiar to fans of Bernie Sanders’ career, it should. But I am describing Frank Zeidler, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee who served three terms from 1948-1960. When the producers of the television series Happy Days wanted to cast a nostalgic look back on the supposedly placid 1950s, they chose to base their sitcom in Milwaukee. Of course, no mention is made that not only is the mayor a socialist, but the state’s junior Senator is the demagogic anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy.
This is a history that’s been hiding in plain sight, given focus by a new book from the University of Illinois Press’ Working Class in American History series. Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee, by Tula A. Connell, explores the record of a socialist administration in an era that is popularly thought to be when Americans definitively turned against socialism and abandoned urbanism.
But there was, nevertheless, a right turn in the 1950s, and Connell’s book is a vital study of the roots of modern American conservatism. The election of Scott Walker and the battles over his anti-union attacks and the subsequent recall effort revealed to many outsiders the extreme polarization that have marked Wisconsin politics since before Zeidler and McCarthy shared the stage (A polarization that can be seen in Tuesday’s primary results, where Wisconsin Democrats went strongly for socialist Bernie Sanders and Republicans chose Ted Cruz because he is more reliably conservative than Donald Trump).
Connell’s history documents how Milwaukee business and suburban interests inveighed against the expanded role of government in as an attack on “American free enterprise” and used racial demagoguery to peel off voters from the New Deal coalition. This local right-wing pushback became part of a national network that gave rise to Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan. If Wisconsin DNA is so central to modern conservatism, then today’s polarization of national political discourse was seemingly inevitable.
The public good or the virtue of selfishness?
Milwaukee was an early stronghold of the Socialist Party, furnishing the party with wins for mayor, council, state legislature and even a seat in Congress. In city government, they emphasized honest government and effective public services. Critics on the party’s left derided them as “sewer socialists.” The Milwaukee Socialists wore the term as a badge of honor.
Although, to this day, the Socialist candidate can draw upwards of 20% in first round balloting in Milwaukee’s non-partisan mayoral elections, Zeidler’s election was something of a last hurrah for the party. He ran as part of a liberal coalition and benefited as much from name recognition (his older brother’s tenure as mayor was cut short by his WWII casualty) as it did lingering voter loyalty to socialism.
But his record in office nevertheless contributed significantly to the city’s socialist legacy. Milwaukee’s stock of public housing was expanded dramatically; a lucrative new channel of newfangled television broadcasting was reserved for public education programming; and the city’s tax base was preserved through an aggressive campaign of suburban annexation.
Zeidler’s annexation agenda was particularly crucial for Milwaukee, and represents a road not taken for too many other post-war cities. The combination of white flight, highway construction, suburban development and tax breaks for mortgage interest is a uniquely American tragedy that left great cities blighted and broken down. Zeidler refused to accept that suburbanites could just cut themselves off from responsibility from the wider society. His office organized over 300 annexation votes that incrementally expanded the city by more than 35 square miles. Zeidler’s preferred method to win these votes was through education campaigns about the benefits of pooling resources and the efficiency of Milwaukee government, but he was also not shy about engaging in water wars. Suburbs that insisted upon independence were denied Milwaukee city water and sewer services, among other benefits.
Of course there was a backlash. The suburbs sued, right-wing elements pushed state legislation to make annexation more difficult while some townships merged to form “cities” of their own to forestall annexation by Milwaukee. An “iron ring” of rich suburbs encircled Milwaukee, ultimately producing the same racial tensions and defunding of public services that plagued other American cities.
In fact, much of Zeidler’s agenda was vociferously opposed by a rising right-wing movement. This subject is the heart of Conservative Counterrevolution. Author Tula Connell calls the post-war consensus around full employment and living standards that rose with productivity “a mirage” and documents how modern conservatism “was not newly generated in the 1950s or 1960s but rather represented a resurgence of a deep current in America’s history.”
It is perhaps not surmising that it was small and mid-sized businessmen who first chafed at the New Deal, and were in the vanguard of right-wing opposition. Conservative Counterrevolution’s bête noir is William Grede, who operated a Milwaukee area steel foundry that he (of course!) inherited from his dad. Grede was a viciously anti-union boss, who took the then uncommon step of hiring permanent replacement scabs when his employees went on strike in 1946.
Grede served a term as the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and, according to Connell, “had a fundraising finger in nearly every organization that challenged perceived encroachments on free enterprise,” including Americans for Constitutional Action, the National Association of Businessmen and the John Birch Society. His philosophy – which can be efficiently summed up by the title of the book he never finished writing, The Virtue of Selfishness – remained far outside the mainstream of Republican policymaking during his lifetime. Today, his brand of selfishness has utterly captured the GOP, thanks in part to the deep pockets of odious men like the sons of Grede’s Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch.
Although Grede’s and others’ opposition to Zeidler’s public housing program was rooted in a fear of “creeping socialism” and a desire for private profit, his opponents resorted to the most base racism in order to win voters over. His opponent in his third and final election, Milton McGuire, waged a demagogic campaign that focused on the rising number of African-Americans moving to the city. McGuire accused Zeidler of placing billboards throughout the south, to attract new black residents with promises of low cost public housing. Zeidler won re-election handily, but had decided that his third term would be his last.
“The greatest living American”
Zeidler was succeeded by Henry Maier, a conservative Democrat who won office by race-baiting his opponents. His administration abandoned public housing construction, slow-walked civil rights, responded to 1967 riots with a law and order agenda and consolidated power. He remained in office for an unprecedented seven terms. By 2002, research showed that Milwaukee’s racial disparities were the worst in the nation.
One of the reasons Frank cited for not running for re-election in 1960 was his frail health. He was always in poor health, and yet he somehow lived to the ripe old age of 93. He even ran for President as the standard-bearer of the reconstituted Socialist Party in 1976! It was in his capacity as the party’s chairman emeritus that I had the pleasure of getting to know Frank. I always found it fascinating to visit Milwaukee while Frank was still alive; it was a bizarro world where the Socialist Party’s leader was revered as a statesman and warmly greeted as a neighbor. To whit: when I was doing press for the party’s 100th anniversary conference in 2001, a reporter for the Journal-Sentinel asked me what socialists in other parts of the country thought of Frank. I answered that most of us think he’s a really great man. The reporter naturally heard that as “the greatest living American” and put it in the story, embarrassing Frank slightly.
With the racial strife and economic decline of the city that came later, it’s not hard to see how Milwaukee residents look back on the Zeidler years as, indeed, happy days.
[This post first appeared at In These Times.]