Our Political System Is in the Midst of a Massive Realignment. Here’s How the Left Should Respond.
America needs a New Democratic Party. No, I don’t mean a Democratic Party made new by a restored commitment to liberal idealism (although that would be useful, too). I mean an American version of Canada’s NDP: an explicitly socialist party that can win on a regional basis, credibly compete on a national basis and actually win on issues that matter. The leftist debate on electoral activism is depressingly reductive. It’s either be the “left-wing of the possible” within the Democratic party or immediately form a third party, as if we are not capable of sorting out complicated solutions for complicated times. We have a historic opportunity. Whether one realizes it or not, we are in the midst of a profound political realignment that could make a third party conceivable. The right-wing realignment and its pull on the Democrats A political realignment happens when the two main parties significantly alter their […]
The Terrifying Prospect of Trump vs. Clinton
There is no prospective match-up for the November presidential election that is more terrifying than Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. The violence and “Heil Hitler” salutes practiced by his supporters make any semantic debate about whether his politics can be defined as “fascist” kinda moot. Ask yourself why he even bothered to schedule a campaign rally in Chicago when the likelihood of protestors outnumbering Trump supporters was all but certain? How long until the open carry gun activists make common cause with his campaign and make good on his threat to turn out Trump supporters to Bernie Sanders rallies? The man is dangerous and unpredictable. Also unpredictable is what suicidally stupid thing Hillary Clinton is going to say on the campaign trail today. In just the last couple of days we’ve heard her praise the Reagans for starting a “national conversation” about AIDS (by notoriously refusing to utter the word […]
Friedrichs Is Dead; Labor’s Crisis Is Not. The ‘Scalia Dividend’ Is a Rare Opportunity for Unions.
The Friedrichs vs. CTA Supreme Court case, a nakedly partisan assassination attempt on the labor movement, has died with Justice Antonin Scalia. What cannot die with it is the sense of existential crisis within the labor movement. We need a far-reaching conversation about the pathway back to increased activism, membership and power. Like few moments before it, the Friedrichs case sparked a broad consensus within labor that our movement faced an existential crisis and that business as usual was a prescription for assisted suicide. Unfortunately, too many union leaders and staff based out of Washington, D.C. are now at risk of being dismissed as a bunch of Chicken Littles who overhyped a sky that never fell by the people who have the greatest ability to determine labor’s future: the local leaders and disengaged members. It was a mistake to use the Friedrichs case to forge this somewhat rare agreement that […]
With 3 Recent High-Profile Walkoffs, Is the Wildcat Strike Back?
Three high-profile wildcat strikes have caught business watchers and union leaders by surprise in recent weeks. Could they be bellwethers for a rising tide of worker militancy? A wildcat strike is one that occurs with little notice or legal sanction. Wildcats are often organized in violation of a contractual commitment not to strike or a legal prohibition to do so, and in defiance of both the employer and official union leadership. Non-union workplaces wildcat by striking without formally certifying or affiliating with a union. Wildcat job actions have sparked some of the largest strike waves and union gains in American history, and the revitalization of the 21st century labor movement will require a degree of worker organizing that is not dependent on union staff and resources. So spontaneous job actions merit attention. The sudden return of the wildcat Longshoreman at the New York and New Jersey ports launched a classic […]
Could a New NLRB Case Limit Bosses’ Best Anti-Union Tool, the Captive Audience Meeting?
The captive audience meeting, “management’s most important weapon” in an anti-union campaign, is finally being challenged in a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that could help re-balance the scales in union representation elections. Held in all-staff, small-group or one-on-one formats, employers use these mandatory meetings to confuse and intimidate employees into voting against union representation. In a 2009 study, labor relations scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner found that nine out of ten employers use captive audience meetings to fight a union organizing drive. Threatening to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of documented cases, and to go out of business entirely in a staggering 57 percent, these captive audience meetings correlate with an unsurprising 43 percent union win rate when used. Such meetings were illegal under the original National Labor Relations Act. The courts eventually decided that as long as a boss’s threats were merely implicit, it would be […]
How ‘Friedrichs’ Could Actually Unleash Unions from Decades of Free Speech Restrictions
As the spring semester starts up at the City University of New York, union activists continue the painstaking work of preparing for a strike authorization vote. Faculty and staff at CUNY have been working without a contract for over five years. While Governor Cuomo disinvests in the primary college system for working class New Yorkers, management proposes salary increases that amount to decreases after inflation. The parallels between the struggle to save CUNY and the struggle over the future of Chicago Public Schools are obvious, with one major exception: it is totally illegal for teachers to strike in New York. The last major union to violate the draconian Taylor Law, TWU Local 100, was fined $2.5 million for waging a 60-hour strike that shut down the city’s subway and bus system in 2005. On top of that, the union’s ability to collect dues money was suspended for a year, its […]
As Attacks on Unions Continue, Bringing Back the Strike May Be Our Only Hope
On December 14, Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey announced the results of the union’s strike authorization vote. For the second time in three years, the union’s membership voted overwhelmingly to strike if necessary. “Our ability to withhold our labor is our power,” declared CTU President Karen Lewis on the eve of voting. That axiom, that strikes are where unions derive their power, is pretty out of favor these days. A wave of disastrous strikes and lockouts beginning in the Reagan era that helped deunionize much of American industry has left the surviving labor movement skittish about the prospect of full-scale walk-outs. But bright spots like Fight for 15, Bargaining for the Common Good and the Chicago teachers strike have shown that workers can win strikes (if one defines victory as workers walking away from the ordeal feeling more powerful). Labor activists and leaders, particularly as they anticipate a […]
How the Friedrichs v. Calif. Teachers Association SCOTUS Case Could Actually Be a Boon for Unions
As unions file their legal briefs in the epic Friedrichs vs. CTA anti-union Supreme Court case, one clever legal scholar argues that Friedrichs is “an unexpected tool for labor.” University of Chicago Teaching Fellow Heather Whitney’s forthcoming paper in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty makes a compelling case that an adverse decision in Friedrichs would hand unions a first amendment argument to refuse to represent non-members. And, as I have argued, that is a roadmap to union competition at workplaces, competing demands on individual employers and the end of contractual no-strike agreements. Chaos, in other words—and just the sort of chaos that this attack on unions deserves in response. Friedrichs and labor’s response The First Amendment is at the heart of the Friedrichs case. It is a right-wing argument that public sector employers (in other words, the government) violate individuals’ First amendment rights by compelling employees, through contracts […]
Labor Law Is Failing Us. It’s Time To Push for a New Labor Act.
The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was a bad bill, and it is deader than dead. It is time for labor to propose a comprehensive set of amendments to the nation’s primary collective bargaining law, the National Labor Relations Act. EFCA would have guaranteed a union’s right to a first contract, imposed punitive fines on employers that break the law and certified new union bargaining units by card check. EFCA was labor’s stalking horse for years before it effectively died when the Tea Party congress took office in 2011. It was our primary way of articulating to allies and legislators how the law stacks the deck in favor of the boss. It was our main vision for reform, membership growth and power. Our allies look to the unions for our plan to restore workers rights in this country. If we don’t propose a new workers law, they will continue to […]
Why “Comrade?”
A friend and, dare I say, comrade wrote me and asked why I use the word “comrade” so freely, instead of the more accepted “brother” and “sister.” Won’t people associate you with James Bond villains and bomb-throwing radicals when you use that word? And it’s true. I do throw it around a good deal, both as a warm expression of solidarity and friendship and, a little bit, to make people a bit uncomfortable in otherwise stodgy rooms. Fuck it; I’ve already been blown up by Fox News for being dangerously un-American, so why pretend to be a safer person than I am? Besides, saying “brother” or “sister” instead of comrade is one of those bits of American exceptionalism, like not celebrating Labor Day on May 1 or calling football “soccer,” that really ought to be resisted as a matter of global solidarity. Comrade is the preferred salutation of the labor […]