You’re a Sad Scab, Mr. Chait
Is there a German word for when a presumptive scab confirms your lowest expectations?
The writers and editorial staff at New York Magazine have formed a union, joining a veritable organizing wave in digital and traditional news media. Nearly 80 percent of the workers have signed union cards and are asking management to voluntarily recognize their union.
Longtime columnist Jonathan Chait did not sign a union card, and rushed to Twitter this week to lick management’s boots, because of course he did. The liberal-in-his-own-mind columnist has spent the last few years—before Fox News inevitably invites him to be one of its resident “liberals,” where he can ride out his shambles of a career—lazily defending neoliberalism and Nazis’ rights to free speech.
Less than 24 hours after throwing his colleagues under the bus, Chait took again to Twitter to whine that only three scorching hot takes had published about his profile in cowardice. “Feels like the left is really undercovering this issue,” complained the cork-screw soul (to borrow from Jack London’s poetic description of the “awful substance” that makes a scab).
Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but in the 21st century, online trolling is the final cold comfort for the mediocre white man.
Jonathan Chait is a small man in some ways, a small, petty man. In March of 2016, Tyler Zimmer took the columnist to task for a piece for In These Times titled, “Why Jonathan Chait Is Wrong About Marxism, Liberalism and Free Speech.” Chait literally spent the night of its publication cranking out a bunch of tired Cold War basement noise in response, which was published the following day.
So, I have the rare pleasure as a writer of knowing that I have what the union-busting consultants that Chait’s bosses have likely hired call a “captive audience.”
Hi, Jonathan Chait. You’re a scab.
I’m not really going to bother with the substance of Chait’s derpa derping about unions and profit-sharing or whatever. The man doesn’t know what he’s talking about and refuses to actually learn anything about what he’s talking about. He’s the platonic ideal of a dipshit columnist. Ping me when he gets some sort of “woke” epiphany in a sandwich shop.
Instead I’ll say this: In my experience as a union organizer—not just for blue-collar workers who hacks like Chait might condescendingly acknowledge “deserve” a union, like maintenance contractors and hotel room attendants, but largely for white collar professionals like university professors, post-docs and charter school teachers—I’ve found that those who are quickest to carry water for management are usually afraid they will be outed for being overpaid for what little they contribute to the enterprise.
Hilarously, Chait reveals his misunderstanding that pay equity for “lower-earning workers” would come “at the cost of more established staffers like myself.” That’s almost certainly not going to be the case. From professional sports to higher education, the higher paid workers tend to make out like bandits in collective bargaining, even if they sit on the sidelines during the really tough fights.
But, as a part of the collective bargaining process, Chait’s colleagues are going to learn how much money he earns—and it’s going to be laughable compared to how little intellectual rigor he puts in to informing the opinions he’s paid to write about.
Jonathan Chait, I hope you don’t sign a union card. I hope your anachronistic anti-union stand destroys the last few shreds of your credibility. I hope this is when we all collectively agree to start ignoring you.
You demonstrate a remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity for an opinion writer. As the political ground shifts beneath your feet, you steadfastly refuse to engage with the nature of liberalism and capitalism and the actual ideas of those of us who struggle for a 21st century socialist project. Instead you do the lazy middle-aged man thing of believing your opinion to be fact, and backing that up with stuff you half-remember pretending to read in college. Your schtick has worn thin and you are on the wrong side of history.
Oh, what a writer with intellectual curiosity and a deep Rolodex could do with the column inches that are wasted on your left-punching shadow-boxing! The campaigns that could be highlighted! The game-changing activists who could be lifted up!
To the editors at New York Magazine, let this serve as my declaration of interest to take Jonathan Chait’s place. Of course, I would sign a union card, but you should just hurry up and recognize the union before Chait gets the chance to publish another piece of crap. And if you don’t hire me that’s basically an unfair labor practice charge that I’m already drafting in my mind.
AUDIO: On America’s Workforce Radio discussing the mid-term elections and why we should all go on strike.
America’s Great Strike Waves Have Shaped the Country. We Can Unleash Another.
Workers’ power is rooted in the work we do and our occasional refusal to do it. But, until recently, that refusal had become rare: Work stoppages have declined to historically low levels over the past four decades.
There were 187 major strikes in 1980, involving 795,000 workers. In 2017, there were just seven, with 25,000 workers.
How then do we revive the strike when so few workers have seen one, let alone participated?
For one, that may be changing. Teachers in West Virginia shut down all of the state’s public schools for nine days in February and March, winning a 5 percent pay increase, stopping proposed healthcare cuts, and inspiring statewide teacher walkouts in four more states and Puerto Rico. Fourteen thousand AT&T technicians then walked off in May, followed by strikes by thousands of other telecommunications workers against Frontier in Virginia and Spectrum in New York. There are ongoing one-day strikes staged by the Fight for $15, and prisoners across the country waged a 19-day strike for better conditions and against slave wages this past summer. As we go to press, 6,000 Chicago hotel workers are staging the industry’s first citywide strike in a century.
If the current pace continues, 2018 will see the largest number of strikes by U.S. workers in the 21st century. Strikes are once again a strategic option for some unions—and that could become contagious.
Still, this is not what a historian would call a “strike wave”—yet. Strike waves involve hundreds of thousands of workers across thousands of workplaces. In his classic text, Strike!, Jeremy Brecher explains that periods of mass strike—of which there have been only six or seven in our nation’s history—go beyond wage-and-hour demands and often challenge capitalist decision-making authority. That in turn threatens the fundamental rules of capitalism.
A timely book by professor and blogger Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes, details strike waves of previous eras, recasting U.S. history as a continuum of worker protest. Driving both inspiration and lessons from this history is essential to turning the current upswelling of strikes in a wave.
Take the general strike of slaves during the Civil War, recounted by Loomis in chapter two. As soon as the Confederate Army mobilized, as many slaves as were able escaped to Union lines to offer support. Those who remained behind stopped working for their absent masters and turned plantations toward food production for their own needs. This self-emancipation is a historical framework first suggested by W.E.B. Dubois and only recently embraced by a new generation of historians. (Brecher, for example, did not include it in Strike!) It puts the human agency of workers who gained their freedom front and center. Suddenly revealed is the greatest strike wave in American history, hiding in plain sight!
The most storied strike wave is the surge of sit-down strikes of the 1930s that compelled the federal government to intervene with new labor laws that made unions a fact of economic life.
But even that win contained the seeds for our current age of inequality. In the 1938 Mackay v. NLRB Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the new legal protections for strikers, the Court breezily hollowed out that same right. If an employer had not otherwise broken the law, the Court invented the “right to protect and continue his business [while workers are on strike] by supplying places left vacant by strikers” and to put scabs ahead of the line for jobs when the strike is over.
Under the Reagan administration, corporations weaponized the Mackay Doctrine. The era’s most notorious strike may be the 1981 air traffic controllers strike (which Loomis covers), but its importance was mostly symbolic—Reagan’s signal to corporate America that it was game on for union-busting. It was the 1983 Steelworkers’ strike at the Phelps-Dodge copper mine in Arizona that actually created the modern blueprint for corporate union-busting, setting the stage for our current slide in work stoppages. The company bargained the Steelworkers to impasse over pay cuts, reduced benefits and weakened job security, basically forcing them out. Phelps-Dodge got the National Guard to violently remove the strikers from its mine and then bused in scabs from out of state. When enough time had transpired, the scabs voted to legally decertify the union.
This shredding of contracts to dare unions out on economic strikes remains the basic union-busting playbook. This year’s Spectrum strike in New York City, for example, has its origins in March 2017 when the company tore up the IBEW contract it inherited from the purchase of another cable company.
Workers’ right to strike needs to include the right to return to work afterward. That means challenging the Mackay doctrine, starting with demanding that the labor board enforce the actual standard—that the decision to permanently replace striking workers cannot be motivated by anti-union animus and must be necessary to “protect and continue” business. A $64 billion corporation that shredded its workers’ collective bargaining agreement fails both tests.
The Reagan and H.W. Bush labor boards took a dive and never seriously investigated corporations’ union-busting motives and financial bottom lines, which should have determined whether each instance of permanently replacing striking workers was just. Unions haven’t pressed for Democrat-appointed labor boards to revisit the rules. Any time that an employer advertises for scabs, the union should file an unfair labor practice, demanding that the employer prove the economic necessity of hiring permanent replacements.
Unions should start doing so now, anticipating the Trump labor board will dismiss every complaint. We must make this a controversy so the next Democratic labor board knows it must restore workers’ right to strike and then return to their jobs.
We have to use these strikes to shore up the very power to strike. Only that will ensure strikes aren’t relegated to the history books.
[This article originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of In These Times.]
A history lesson on saving labor: Look to how unions rebounded in the 1920s for insight on how they can make progress today
Many obituaries have been written for labor. The anti-union Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision is already being followed by a dark money campaign to convince workers to quit their unions. In the private sector, employers evade the reach of workplace-based union contracts by off-shoring, sub-contracting and freelancing jobs.
Despite occasional bright spots like Missouri voters’ rejection of right-to-work, this is labor’s lowest point in a century.
The parallels between today and the 1920s are striking. Like then, unions faced existential threats and structural challenges with no obvious solutions. Yet that nadir was quickly followed by the wave of sit-down strikes, the passage of laws protecting workers’ rights to organize and an unprecedented half-century of shared prosperity.
This begs the question: what were union activists and allies doing in the 1920’s that set them up for such a dramatic reversal of fortune? And is there similar under-the-radar work we should be doing today?
Perhaps the least-appreciated most-impactful effort came from the labor colleges that served as strategic retreats for union activists. At Brookwood Labor College, in upstate New York, activists got away from the daily grind of their defensive crouch organizing. College leaders, prodded by legendary organizer A.J. Muste, pursued a line of critical inquiry with little patience for easy answers or sacred cows.
They grappled with how to reconcile traditional craft union strategies with mass production and how to revive a movement that’s rooted in our occasional refusal to work at a time that few workers were willing or able to strike. Without them, it’s hard to imagine the sit-down strikes and huge organizing campaigns of the 1930’s would have sprung up in such a briefly revolutionary time period.
That culture of debate and disagreement is badly needed today. Unions prioritize unity but without a real plan to win it can lead to a strategic cul-de-sac, much like the one unions found themselves in a century ago.
In the 1920s, an organized left advocated for “one big union”-style multiracial organizing and contested for leadership within the traditional unions. Where there was no union, they embraced alternative forms of organizing.
These activists had an analysis of what core industries of the economy were essential to be organized. Socialists took jobs in steel and auto factories when no unions were serious about organizing nor was there a clear model for how to do it. Their presence as workplace leaders made them indispensable activists in the 1930s strike wave.
For the past four decades’ corporate assault on labor there haven’t been a lot of socialists around. Thankfully, thousands of new activists are rallying to the red flag.
Witness Democratic Socialists of America, lately seen toppling machine Democrats and ruining the meals of Trumpist baby-snatchers. These activists may be essential to labor’s next upsurge. They must be similarly thoughtful as their ideological forebearers were about where to be organizing.
I don’t know what a successful union campaign would look like in the tech sector. It definitely won’t look quite like the sit-down strikes of 1934 or following the National Labor Relations Board’s rigged election rules, but it will require activists intentionally taking those jobs together and becoming trusted and respected colleagues.
Finally, the 1920s — like today — saw an emerging coterie of intellectuals and reformers advocate for getting out of the boom and bust cycle of periodic economic depressions by empowering unions to do the real Robin Hood work of income redistribution.
They didn’t talk of “making it easier for unions to organize.” Their labor law was a blunter instrument, formally encouraging collective bargaining as the country’s policy by forcing employers to recognize unions and punishing retaliation for or interference with workers rights to organize.
If the only thing that can arrest our country’s slide into barbarism and economic disorder is a robust labor movement we need legal regime that thunders, “there will be unions!” and puts union pay standards, benefits and rights in every workplace.
The biggest lesson of the 1920’s to heed is that while organizing for long-term change, we must also be formulating big demands to democratize the workplace. We’ll have a very brief and unexpected window. Let’s be ready.
[This article originally appeared in the New York Daily News.]