Posts

Posted on

Blame It On the Solo Career

Ever since “Satellite Rides” failed to make them stars and lead singer Rhett Miller cut loose for a middling solo career, the Old 97s have reunited every four years to record a mellow studio album. Their latest, “Blame It On Gravity,” seems slight and easily dismissible, but so did their last long-player, “Drag It Up,” which turned out to be a real sleeper and is probably the Old 97s record that I listen to the most.

As can be expected from a band with multiple songwriters and a moonlighting lead singer, the sidemen deliver some of the best material here. In particular, bassist Murray Hammond, always one to take a star turn here and there, turns in a pair of crooning country ballads (Pick Hit: “The Color of a Lonely Heart Is Blue”) that serve to remind that the 97’s started out as the band that just might save country music. Otherwise, Miller steers the band towards power pop and VH1-style rock.

Rhett Miller remains a clever songwriter with a gift for wordplay and indelible characters, like the kid who “came from Pheonix in a borrowed VW Bug just to prove that he was on her like she was a drug” (“The Fool”) or the lothario who preys on “girls like you with your flip flop smiles and your big blue eyes on vacation” (“Dance With Me”). Most of these songs, particularly the slow burn of “The Easy Way” and the driving “Ride,” merely hint at the incredible power of this band live. Whatever else are “Blame it On Gravity’s” merits, at least it will put the Old 97s back on tour.

Posted on

Toward Social Justice

One of the greatest revelations of the year for me was seeing Bill Fletcher Jr. speak at New York’s Left Forum this past March. For years I’ve been familiar with Fletcher, who is, perhaps, the most prominent left intellectual in the U.S. labor movement, who was a special assistant to John Sweeney in the early years of this administration and still a trusted figure in the mainstream labor movement despite his socialist barnstorming. But this was the first time I had heard him speak. I was so captivated by the way he could crystalize and articulate the challenges we face and the practical and realistic steps we could take to address them that I attended every panel at which he spoke, which I hadn’t intended when I got there.

Fletcher has just published his first book, “Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice,” co-written with Fernando Gapasin. Centered on the recent split between the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win group, the book features quite a bit of inside baseball reportage on the machinations leading up to the split. Fletcher is highly critical of the “undebate” that took place and focused on marginal and highly technical matters of per capita rebates and core jurisdictions, avoiding a larger reexamination of the role of our labor unions within a wider labor movement. Although Fletcher identifies some key differences in ideology and vision within the union movement, these were not addressed and anyway tend to cut across international union lines. Instead, both the AFL-CIO and what emerged as the Change to Win group, he charges, fundamentally share the same neo-Gompersian framework of “pure and simple” trade union roles and functions that the reason for the split was unnecessary.

One of Fletcher’s most cogent points in this book is that leftists who work in the trade union movement in relatively large numbers have, absent an organized Left, ideologized the mere act of organizing workers into unions, as though this is an inherently radical act. This point hit home for me as I have recently risen to a position of responsibility in my union without any organizational affiliations beyond my union membership and have made organizing workers the most important thing in my life. Indeed, William Z. Foster has become a hero of mine, in his 1919 incarnation, for his sincere belief that organizing mass production workers into the conservative craft unions would necessarily radicalize them and their unions. Of course, Fletcher points out, the real point of organizing workers is to empower them to challenge their employers and improve their jobs and communities, not merely to collect their dues and “represent” them.

The last section of Fletcher and Gapasin’s book is devoted to their modest proposal to transform our trade union movement into a social justice movement that represents all workers, regardless of nation or employment status, and which challenges white supremacy, male patriarchy, U.S. imperialism and the entire global capitalist system. Good luck with that, Bill. In all seriousness, some of Fletcher and Gapasin’s proposals could gain traction among labor movement decision makers, as, for example, their proposal to transform our central labor councils (currently, the umbrella organizations of local unions in a city that gets together for political endorsements and campaigning and occasional strike support) into central workers councils embracing labor organizations beyond “pure and simple unions” and begin functioning like real community coalitions.

However, for the most part, Fletcher and Gasparin’s program is one that needs, as they call for in the proposal itself, an organized Left movement to carry out. At March’s Left Forum, Fletcher made a seemingly oft-hand reference to the need for a real socialist party that inspired very loud and spontaneous applause. During the Q&A, I waited very patiently (and, it turned out, futilely) to be called on and ask: “Bill, I’m with you on the need for a socialist party, and given the applause we heard, I’m not alone. Obviously such a project would not be an easy thing, given our legitimate political differences and the tendency towards factionalism and sectarianism. Still, any process that will move us towards a real organized Left will need leaders such as yourself out front, sponsoring the early calls and meetings. So, in your ample spare time, can you move on this?”

Posted on

Questions Over Union Neutrality

SEIU’s been facing an increasing amount of scrutiny from the press and from the left lately for its unconventional approach to bargaining to organize. This has been prompted in large part by the California Nurses Association’s controversial decision to intervene in a carefully negotiated and long-planned “neutrality” organizing campaign by SEIU in Ohio, and SEIU’s shockingly violent response at the 2008 Labor Notes conference. In the midst of this controversy, the Wall Street Journal reports details of some of these “secret organizing deals.” The website requires subscription, so I’ve posted relevant quotes below:


Two of the nation’s largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize.

The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers’ rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership “that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements.” That includes not disclosing them to union members.

[snip]

The agreements reached with Sodexho and Compass in 2005 give the companies “the right to designate the sites” where unions may try to organize workers, according to a confidential summary of the agreements reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The companies wouldn’t comment on how locations were selected for organizing.

The agreements, which expire at then end of 2008, stipulate the number of employees that the unions can try to organize: 11,000 Sodexho workers and 20,000 Compass workers.

The unions gave up the right to strike and to post derogatory language about the companies on bulletin boards. With Compass, the unions agreed to these restrictions “anywhere in the world.” In exchange, the companies agree not to oppose union organizing at the designated locations.

But limits are also set. “Local unions are not free to engage in organizing activities at any Compass or Sodexho locations unless the sites have been designated,” says the confidential summary.

Mr. Stern said that if workers wanted to join a union at a location the companies had ruled out, having these agreements would enable a union to negotiate on the matter. “If workers want a union we can discuss that,” he said. “Trust me, a lot more workers are coming in than being excluded by the agreement.”

[snip]

The agreements enable the unions to organize workers through a simple card-signing process in which the companies agree to remain neutral, rather than a secret-ballot election. The companies agree to provide the unions with lists of employees and access to workers. The unions give up the ability to strike and agree that they will present issues before a labor-management committee before engaging in leafleting or rallies.

These organizing deals need to be put into the context of the bloody war most employers will fight against a unionization drive, that results, for instance, one in five union activists being fired for union activity. There’s lots of material on the web about how nasty the fight can get and how few true protections workers have these days, so I assume anybody reading my website is familiar with this.

One of the main reasons that employers fight organizing drives so viciously is that with unionization of private sector firms hovering around eight percent, a union contract really can affect a firm’s competitiveness. As traditional organizing tactics have failed to bring employers to the table, unions have relied increasingly on huge (and hugely embarrassing) P.R. and community campaigns to force employers to recognize a union and agree to a contract. Smart employers have begun to take themselves out of the fight by signing the kinds of deals profiled in the WSJ piece. I don’t have any theoretical opposition to these kinds of agreements, and for the most part I think it’s a smart way for union’s to marshall their resources against the truly intransigent employers and to increase density for future bargaining.

The problem that I do have with SEIU’s application of this strategy is that the future always gets further and further away. As noted in the article, the “no strike / no disparagement / no organize” clauses of these agreements have expiration dates. As long as they are relatively brief, workers aren’t really losing much. A bottom up organizing campaign at any worksite with more than 1000 employees can often take two years or more anyhow. If the workers are impatient, the union can potentially re-negotiate the neutrality deal to incorporate a hot shop. Failing that, the workers are free to organize with a different union (although, without neutrality, good luck to them).

Without the ability to strike, unions are only able to win modest wage and benefits improvements and very little in terms of the “work rules” that make the biggest impact on the quality of one’s working life. As long as we’re talking about a two or three year period that allows the union to get its foot in the door at one employer while fighting to drag his main competitors to the table in order to bargain for greater gains at all of the employers in the next contract cycle, what’s the problem? The problem comes from these agreements being stretched out for longer and longer – seven or eight years in some cases – while the union fetishizes “density” at the expense of meaningful contractual gains for the new members it has organized. SEIU, I’m sure, is not unaware of this conflict. In my brief stint as an SEIU organizer three years ago, I worked on a home care organizing campaign that went down in flames. Part of the reason was that some of the employees, who make so little that they work for two or three agencies at the same time – already were SEIU members at their other jobs. They voted as a bloc against the union, in part because they hasn’t felt that being in the union had made an impressionable difference in their lives.

This problem is compounded by SEIU’s reorganization of smaller locals into giant “megalocals.” SEIU is ostensibly aping the structure of the giant corporations it goes up against to better marshall resources against them. Obviously, however, this means a significant curtailing of local union democracy and naturally serves to minimize voices of dissent. Andy Stern and Dennis Rivera, who both had to run insurgent campaigns in order to “take back” their unions, should be more sensitive to this problem. Speaking cynically, perhaps they are all too sensitive to it. Andy Stern aside, neutrality deals such as these should not be dismissed out of hand by trade union activists. They are a good idea, but anyone negotiating such deals necessarily walks a fine line between density and democracy.

Posted on

Christ May Be King, But At Least He Spares Us Monarchistic Thinking

Teachers at ten New York City schools went on strike Friday over the high cost of health care, but their union was not sued, their president not imprisoned and their members not fined two days of pay for every day out on the picket line. What gives?

The teachers in question work at Catholic schools in the archdiocese of New York so their union is not subject to the same draconian law that would apply to the city’s public school teachers. Is their strike not a “disruption” in the lives of the parents who enroll their children there? Do Catholic school-kids not rely on the structure and safety of the classroom as much as public school kids? Of course not. The simple truth is that while Catholic school teachers might arguably have to answer to a higher law, only public school teachers have to report to a Boss that makes the law and has the power of the state to enforce it. Hell hath no fury like Mayor Bloomberg and the Taylor law. It’s one more strike against monarchistic thinking.