Honoring Labor

I was recently asked to comment on this post at TPM by Nathan Newman in which he takes the lefty blogs to task for not being sufficiently serious about labor issues.  Newman's specific complaint is the absence of commentary on the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Chamber of Commerce v. Brown in which a 7-2 majority of the Court struck down a California law that forbids companies that contract with the state from fighting attempts at unionization with state money.  Newman's broader point is that liberals are taking Obama to task about FISA and other trivial "rights" issues ignoring in the process issues of economic justice on which the candidate is speaking out strongly.  Finally, he is perturbed about the overwhelmingly pro-business bias of the Court, including by members of its allegedly liberal faction like Justice Stevens, and the fact that this is not drawing sufficient outrage within the blogosphere.

Now I take a backseat to no one in my capacity for outrage, particularly in the cause of unions, but Newman's anger in this specific instance seems way out of line to me.  The decision turns on a fairly arcane point of federal labor law, the doctrine of pre-emption, which loosely stated prohibits state regulation of certain areas where Congress has indicated a desire for uniform federal regulation.  Now I practice in this area for a living and this case slipped under my radar screen.  More importantly, it has taken me a lot of years of practice to fully master pre-emption and I still tend to hit the books (how old fashioned sounding) for a while before rendering any opinion associated with it.  In other words, I would not expect a generalist in the blogosphere to have a well informed opinion about the merits of this decision, as nicely stated by Kevin Drum here.

I have actually been rather pleased with the amount of positive attention paid to unions in much of the blogosphere.  When I decided to make unions my life's work way back in the 1980s, it was not what one would describe as consonant with the zeitgeist. Many people who characterized themselves as progressive or liberal were utterly indifferent to the fate of organized labor.  I recall a few ugly drunken rants on my part (I know -- it is hard to believe) directed at putative fellow liberals who gave the classic "unions were great in the 1930s but have outlived their usefulness" line.            

So it's actually a source of great pleasure to me to see young bloggers who understand and appreciate the need for a vital labor movement as an anchor to any kind of progressive politics.  And unlike Newman, I see this expressed not simply as a political and tactical question in the blogosphere, but rather as an important question of social justice. 

The bottom line is that it is crucial that we change politics so that we can have courts and administrative agencies that are not in thrall to business interests and do not reflexively adopt the corporate line in these matters.  A small illustration of this was made evident in yesterday's New York Times article regarding lax enforcement of wage and hour claims by the Department of Labor.   In my daily practice I am aware of gross abuses being routinely carried out by employers -- misclassification of employees as independent contractors, non-payment of overtime, cheating on prevailing wage rate jobs, etc.  If the DOL put half of the energy into enforcing these laws that it does into creating burdensome regulations about union expenses, then employers might be more inclined to obey them. 

In the end, we need both political activity that will create a worker friendly majority and a revitalized labor movement if we are going to achieve the kind of society to which those of us on this side of blogistan aspire. 

   

Comments

[Lisa Simeone]

A worthy endeavor, Sir C. But I wonder if, with increasing globalization, unions are going to have a harder and harder time holding on? I'm sure you've had plenty of conversations about this with colleagues. How can unions be reinvigorated, or even survive, when so many poorer people around the world are in the position U.S. citizens were a hundred years ago, i.e., willing to work for peanuts with next to no rights?

[Sir Charles]

It's very difficult. Fortunately, there are some jobs that can't be "offshored" -- think construction and most services. Moreover, I think there are good and sound reasons to produce things in the U.S. -- an educated and motivated workforce, legal transparency (such as it is)and a lack of official corruption, the cost of transportating goods from abroad, currency risk, political stability, etc. Indeed, our European and Japanese friends are producing a lot of cars here -- they are just going out of their way to produce them non-union by locating in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

[Stephen]

I predict even more union decline for a while; maybe as much as a decade. But I also foresee a strong resurgence, though it might not be in the form of unions as we know them. I just believe that there will come a point where capital will finally overextend itself and labor will come roaring back. Globalization and "free" trade is what will make it happen because Americans will finally get sick of getting paid like shit in order to buy shit.

And there are many ways to make sure that valuable jobs stay in the US: tariffs, fines, publicly caning CEOs that send jobs overseas, laws that require upper management to be paid in a real estate voucher good for 1(one) house and food & clothing coupons and that make them drive their own shitty cars and eat their own shitty food and make their kids play with their own shitty, toxic toys.

Common sense stuff like that.

[low-tech cyclist]

I think the resurgence is already starting to happen, and would be happening more strongly if the Executive Branch weren't actively anti-labor. (See, for instance, the article "Pinkertons at DHS" in this month's Washington Monthly - not online, unfortunately - about employers of illegal immigrants effectively using the immigration cops as their union-busting arm.)

One more reason to elect Obama.

[Stephen]

One more reason to elect Obama.

True. He's not the populist Edwards is, but he's much closer than I ever thought we'd get in our nominee.

(I hope you were sitting down when you read that.)

[Corvus9]

Hey, thanks for posting on this, Sir Charles. I think you covered most of the things that were nagging at me about that post, though I couldn't really put my finger down on any of them. However, I think Newman was being a little intemperate, because that post was really more of an afterword to this post, which I think does a much better job of laying out Newman's critique, which is that in the uproar over FISA the left blogosphere has been ignoring the populist streak to Obama's campaign. This I think is fair, because I never really understood how Obama is any less populist than Edwards. Edwards depicted himself as an advocate or fighter for the people, Obama as a product of the people's will, or a chief organizer. Both seem to be pretty "power to the people" messages, it's really more a question of which appeals to your disposition, and what your theory of political change is.

[Corvus9]

Regarding unions, I also think they will be seeing some kind of Renaissance sometime soon, although, yeah, they might be in a slightly different form. In fact, sometime recently I was daydreaming that maybe the time for Unions is past–not in a neoliberal kind of way, but in the sense that perhaps devoting energy to unions is not the most effective way of maintaining and increasing workers rights. But, I can't remember what the reasoning was, or what I thought you could replace them with, and of course, getting rid of the ones out there now would just be silly: unilateral surrender.

The way to deal with unions in relation to globalization is basically by creating safeguards and encouraging their formation elsewhere. Make unionization a part of trade deals. Come down on people who don't use them (Things Obama supports).

[Corvus9]

Oh, and Stephen, your thoughts on the proper ways of dealing with CEOs are very thoughtful and humane.

[low-tech cyclist]

(I hope you were sitting down when you read that.)

I'll confess that the *pop* you just heard was the sound of my head exploding. 'Scuse me a moment while I scrounge up the pieces, ok?

There were a number of reasons why Edwards seemed to have a better claim to the populist mantle, some substantive, some symbolic. Substantive: his health-care plan was of course the best of the bunch. Symbolic: he was the only one to walk a picket line during the run-up to the primaries. Substantive: unless I'm mistaken, he was the first to advocate raising the minimum wage to $9.50. Symbolic: he'd been making the economic divide between America's tiny economic elite and the rest of America his main issue since about 2003.

A candidate's emphasis is as important as his or her stated positions. Lots of candidates have positions on issues they are barely aware of, and won't chip a fingernail to make progress on once in office. Edwards' emphasis was on the economic divide; it was clearly what he and Elizabeth cared about, and what we could expect him to tackle first, once in office. That wasn't apparent with Obama, to the extent that it was true.