<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 8:04 AM<br>Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: Why Workers Won’t Unite - The Atlantic<br>To: "<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>" <<a href="mailto:CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk">CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES@jiscmail.ac.uk</a>>, Debate is a listserve that attempts to <div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div>
<p><span>On a gusty </span><span>April morning</span>
in <a href="tel:1914" value="+661914" target="_blank">1914</a>, a gun battle broke out between Colorado National Guardsmen and
a group of striking coal miners. The strikers had been living in tents
in a field after being evicted from their company-owned homes in town.
Several miners (including a 12-year-old boy) were shot to death, and
when the canvas shelters caught on fire, 11 children and two women were
killed by the smoke. Nor did the guardsmen, buttressed by private
security guards, remain unscathed: four were killed over the course of
the day, and more in the week that followed.</p>
<p>The Ludlow Massacre, as it became known, was but one
skirmish in a protracted, often violent conflict that raged throughout
the United States during the early years of the 20th century. A radical
social change was at stake: Would the miners, meat-packers, silk
workers, garment makers, and steelworkers of the newly industrial nation
be able to join labor unions in order to bargain over the terms of
their work—their wages, their hours, the safety of their jobs? One
contemporary journalist described the tent colonies as “the outward sign
of civil war.”</p>
<p>Almost 100 years later, the attention of the country was
once again galvanized by a tent city—this one in Zuccotti Park, a few
blocks away from the New York Stock Exchange. Initially the inspiration
of a few activists determined to call attention to poverty in the midst
of New York’s extreme wealth, Occupy Wall Street—like the early labor
movement—tapped into a widespread sense of dispossession and fear, this
time in the wake of the 2008 financial panic and the recession.</p>
<div>The labor movement helped create the confidence in mobility that we associate with being middle-class.</div>
<p>The Ludlow strikers, were they able to time-travel to Lower
Manhattan in 2011, would have found much that seemed familiar, starting
with the statistics about economic inequality: the richest 1 percent of
the nation controls 40 percent of the wealth and earns 20 percent of the
national income, proportions similar to those in the early 20th century
(and up from about 25 percent and 9 percent, respectively, in the
1970s). The miners would have recognized, too, the anger about
widespread unemployment, the spectacle of lavish upper-crust
consumption, and the increasing influence of private money in politics.</p>
<p>But they might well have wondered: <i>Where are the unions?</i>
Even though it got some support from labor groups, Occupy Wall Street
was more directly focused on unemployment, student-loan and consumer
debt, and the generous terms of the 2008 bailout for the financial
sector than on specific issues related to working conditions. The Occupy
movement has unquestionably had an influence on activism in New York
and elsewhere (even helping to mobilize demonstrations in response to
the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner). It has also played a key
role in revitalizing debates about income inequality. But these
accomplishments have not translated into a revival of workplace
organizing.</p>
<p>The rolling one-day strikes staged last year by low-wage
workers at fast-food restaurants and convenience stores demanding $15 an
hour and a path to union recognition were a reminder of what’s missing.
In 2014, only 6.6 percent of the private-sector workforce belonged to a
union—about the same rate as in the era of Ludlow. Among public-sector
workers the figure is higher (about 35 percent), but a lower proportion
of the total workforce is unionized than in any other period since the
late 1930s, shortly after the signing of the National Labor Relations
Act. In <a href="tel:1914" value="+661914" target="_blank">1914</a>, the labor movement stood at the beginning of what would be
a long upswing; now its gains have been almost completely reversed.</p>
<div>Today, the labor movement’s decline is widely considered an irreversible reality.</div>
<p>As anxiety about inequality and the erosion of the middle
class rises, so does awareness that still more seismic changes are ahead
in a landscape of work where long-term employment is on the wane.
Today, both professional and low-wage jobs are dominated by an ideology
of “flexibility”—and by a reality of transient relationships between
employers and employees. Those ties are getting only more tenuous as the
“on-demand economy” takes off, with the spread of Uber-style instant
consumer services. A media beat that had all but disappeared seems to be
making a tentative comeback. Politico has started a section devoted
entirely to labor issues in response to reader interest. The Huffington
Post now employs a full-time labor reporter.</p>
<p>So far, though, the fraught future of labor in the U.S. has
notably failed to generate public protest on a significant scale.
Nothing in American politics compares with the civil-rights crusade, the
movement against the Vietnam War, or the labor wars of the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. Could that change? Might the future possibly
hold a resurgence of the indignation about class disparities—and about
the labor and economic circumstances they reflect—that was once focused
on the workplace?</p>
<p><span>Today, the labor movement’s decline</span>
is widely considered an irreversible reality—the inevitable outcome of
globalization and automation, and the norm for a postindustrial economy,
hardly worthy of comment. When discussions turn to the glaring and
still growing imbalance of power between working-class and elite
interests in our political system, Republicans celebrate the free market
and certainly don’t invoke a return of unions. But neither do most
Democrats. Why this is so, why it’s a problem, and what if anything
might be done to revive the politics of work—these issues are the
subject of two very different books: the historian Steve Fraser’s <i>The Age of Acquiescence</i> and O<i>nly One Thing Can Save Us</i>, by Thomas Geoghegan, a longtime labor attorney.</p>
<p>Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison
between, on the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the
first Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political scene.
Geoghegan undertakes a far more personal assessment. In the disarming
style of a self-deprecating lawyer in a beleagured field, he describes
his experiences representing workers in Chicago, which he treats as a
microcosm of the problems that labor faces across the nation.</p>
<p>Both authors make a case that grappling with
inequality in a meaningful way will require more than overhauling taxes
on the rich or government programs that aid the poor. The current
liberal roster of solutions for income stagnation—Thomas Piketty’s
notion of a global wealth tax, Elizabeth Warren’s push for cheaper
college loans, the economist Austan Goolsbee’s proposal to direct 3
percent of GDP to educational opportunities, from preschool to community
college—can’t help sounding wishful in the current political climate.
In any case, Geoghegan emphasizes, a narrow focus on skill building is
an inadequate approach to tackling inequities, especially in an economy
increasingly premised on short-term employment.</p>
<p>In a system as skewed as ours currently is toward elite
interests, he and Fraser urge a return to “the labor question” as the
key to confronting not just the economic gap but its political and
cultural consequences. To begin to restore some semblance of the
democratic culture and values that inequality erodes, we need to pay
attention to work itself, and to the economic leverage and the political
and social solidarity that can grow out of the workplace.</p>
<p>Fraser and Geoghegan are well aware of the paradox they’ve
set for themselves: the very place they herald as a potential crucible
of power for Americans struggling for security has been hollowed out,
and the realm of work has been transformed in ways that the Ludlow
miners likely wouldn’t recognize. Those strikers, a diverse array of
colliers from around the world, were exploited in the crudest physical
way and still forged a common culture in the dark spaces of the mines.
The absence of such a shared sensibility is a hallmark of today’s
workforce of temps, freelancers, and would-be entrepreneurs. Yet without
it, as Fraser and Geoghegan are not alone in wondering, where is a
crucial impetus for challenging the politics of inequality going to come
from? The story of the rise and fall of the labor movement offers
unsettling insights, and no assurances, about a revival. Then again, as
both authors would hasten to say, gauzy nostalgia is not what the
country needs.</p>
<p><span>Class warfare,</span> America’s
exceptionalist credo holds, is something that happens elsewhere. This
is, after all, the country that likes to take credit for inventing the
idea of the middle class. With no history of royalty and no hereditary
social orders, everybody is supposed to have an equal opportunity to
rise. In the 1950s, the political theorist Louis Hartz wrote that
because the United States had never known feudalism, it was immune to
socialism. The historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that open class
conflict went against the grain of the American political tradition.
Even Karl Marx (while acutely aware of racial slavery as a class system)
didn’t bet on the emergence of an impoverished proletariat in the U.S.,
given the country’s abundance of land.</p>
<div>As notable as the collapse of union membership is
the rapid rise of workers who have only an attenuated connection to
their jobs.</div>
<p>Fraser and Geoghegan don’t envision a sudden surge of
socialist sentiment in the U.S. either, but Fraser takes pains to point
out—drawing on the scholarship of a generation of labor historians—that
the story of America’s industrializing era in fact features plenty of
class struggle. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw fierce
confrontation over the economic future of the nation. Workers had no
protected right to organize, and employers were not compelled to
recognize unions. Yet workers in voluntary organizations (and sometimes
even nonmembers) were able to stage strikes that shut down much of the
national rail system and roiled the largest factories. Strikers were
frequently confronted by employers’ private armies as well as by state
militias and the National Guard. Industrial sabotage wasn’t uncommon.
Although the class contest raging in the workplace was only
intermittently felt in national elections, from New York City’s Lower
East Side to Colorado’s coalfields it fueled a radical culture openly
skeptical of capitalism. All of this, Fraser argues, is markedly absent
today. We live in an “age of acquiescence”—unhappily facing similar
problems, but no longer believing that we have any power to create or
even imagine an alternative to the ascendancy of elites in an era of
global competition.</p>
<p>To explain what’s changed, Fraser turns to the very
structure of the American economy. A century ago, the United States was a
developing nation, eagerly devouring the raw materials of the natural
world. It was turning trees into lumber, iron into steel, the expanse of
prairie into cash crops of wheat and corn. Many of its laborers were
barely a generation removed from preindustrial life. They (or their
parents) had been self-sufficient artisans, peasants, or small farmers
before being swept into the massive new factories of the Gilded Age. The
emerging capitalist system shattered their traditional communities, and
thus seemed “intolerable to many of those violently uprooted by its
onrush.” Accustomed to their independence, they were haunted by the
nightmare of becoming wage slaves. The fear of disempowerment, as other
labor historians have argued, drew partly on an embattled masculinity,
but women, too, were active in building unions and striking to challenge
the authority of their employers; the famous “Uprising of the 20,000”
among garment workers in Lower Manhattan began 16 months before the
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in <a href="tel:1911" value="+661911" target="_blank">1911</a>.</p>
<p>The new proletarians longed to restore the economic autonomy
they had once taken for granted—and, not yet steeped in the culture of
the marketplace, they believed this was possible. The factories,
corporations, markets, and banks that they viewed as their oppressors
were still so new that their endurance hardly seemed assured. Many
workers imagined that sweeping transformations would continue. They felt
that the horrific world they saw around them could not last, that they
had the power to help usher in a more humane and egalitarian social
order.</p>
<p>Fraser’s key insight is that their preindustrial heritage,
combined with an acute awareness of the dynamism of the new economy, may
have left the workers of the last century far more “audacious in
envisioning a noncapitalist future” than people are now. Moved by their
utopian hopes, the growing ranks of workers in the fast-developing
industrial system found the courage to challenge the inequities
surrounding them—a spirit of bravery that Fraser suggests has now
largely evaporated.</p>
<p>He and Geoghegan emphasize a pragmatic, rather than a
romantic, perspective on a labor movement that proceeded to grow and
that, despite its roots in a culture fiercely critical of the market,
ended up firmly entrenched within capitalism. The campaign for better
conditions in the workplace slowly made inroads on the state level in
the early 20th century. Many of the crucial goals of the Progressive
years—the rights to a minimum wage, a limit on hours, unemployment
insurance—weren’t enshrined at the national level until the 1930s. Other
benefits—health insurance, pensions, paid vacations—were won only
through collective bargaining between employers and the newly recognized
unions in the 1940s and ’50s.</p>
<p>By the early 1950s, more than one-third of all workers were
union members. Any company at which a majority of employees voted to
form a union in a federally supervised election had to sit down at the
bargaining table. Unions also guaranteed a measure of real independence
on the job: the clear rules and procedures of the contract protected
workers from the arbitrary power of managers.</p>
<p>This institutional regime meant that companies were
compelled to share a greater proportion of the wealth they generated
with the people who contributed to its creation. The leverage exerted by
unions may have helped keep executive pay in check. Union clout made
possible regular wage increases that allowed factory workers to purchase
their own homes, as well as some of the expensive goods—cars,
refrigerators, television sets—they helped produce. As the scholar Jack
Metzgar wrote in his memoir of growing up as the son of a union
steelworker in the 1950s, “If what we lived through in the 1950s was not
liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.”</p>
<p>Unions also mobilized people to vote in support of
government measures that served to redistribute wealth (such as notably
high taxes on the upper income brackets in the postwar years, and
regular increases in the minimum wage). To a large degree, the labor
movement created the economic stability, social independence, and deep
confidence in the promise of mobility that we associate today with being
middle-class.</p>
<p><span>Fraser and Geoghegan’s </span>recognition
of the accomplishments of postwar labor doesn’t blind either of them to
the movement’s shortcomings. The “New Deal order,” as Fraser calls it,
was very regionally defined (bypassing most of the South) and excluded
large numbers of people. Many nonwhite workers, in particular, were left
out of the postwar social bargain. Service-sector industries that
employed disproportionate numbers of women were never well organized.
Postwar unions fully accepted the culture of mass consumption. That
meant rejecting the morally charged politics of the earlier labor
movement, which emphasized democratic participation and the dignity of
work. After years of struggle, labor leaders were thrilled to have won a
proverbial seat at the table at last. But the new ethos also helped to
produce a union culture that made inclusion in the Establishment a
higher priority than continuing to fight for weaker social groups.</p>
<p>At its worst, self-interested complacency encouraged
corruption within the Cold War labor movement. The Teamsters were the
most famous example, but not the only one. The United Mine Workers, the
union that the Ludlow strikers had once fought to build, descended into
autocracy; its disastrous low point arrived in <a href="tel:1969" value="+661969" target="_blank">1969</a>, when the dissident
Jock Yablonski was murdered in his home, along with his wife and
daughter—victims of hit men hired by the union president. (As a college
student and then as a young labor lawyer, Geoghegan worked with Miners
for Democracy, an organization created in the wake of Yablonski’s death
to fight for reform—an experience he chronicled in his <a href="tel:1991" value="+661991" target="_blank">1991</a> memoir, <i>Which Side Are You On?</i>)<i> </i></p>
<p>Labor’s sclerosis left it ill-prepared to grapple with the
structural and political changes of the 1970s, as the global position of
American manufacturing faltered. The country’s industrial
infrastructure was already on weakening ground by the 1950s. As Fraser
argues, the late 20th century brought its steady disassembling.
Intensifying competition from Europe, Latin America, and Asia in the
1970s and ’80s pressed companies to move abroad in search of workers who
lacked the protections common in the United States, continuing trends
that had begun in the postwar years. Corporations in which labor had
made modest inroads now mobilized against unions. The use of
professional union-busters spread. So did automation and production
speedups. Retail and service companies (such as Walmart) built their
economic plans around cheap prices, made possible by easy access to
low-wage, nonunion labor both in the stores and at suppliers.</p>
<p>Unions could do little to assuage a mounting, very realistic
fear among working-class people. Labor pushed an alternate agenda:
expanding public-sector jobs to fight unemployment, developing training
programs for laid-off workers, making sure trade policy favored
industry. There was a wave of strikes in the early 1970s. But years of
defeats and a declining base left unions struggling to gain much support
in this defensive stance. (A few prescient unions had earlier made
various proposals to discourage capital flight—none of which gained much
traction.) At the same time, new business groups, such as the Business
Roundtable, were blaming the labor movement for inflation, and the new
right attacked unions and government with equal fervor. President
Reagan’s breaking of the air-traffic controllers’ strike in <a href="tel:1981" value="+661981" target="_blank">1981</a>
symbolized the beginning of a new era. The use of strikebreakers—once
rare—became common.</p>
<p>Even unions less crippled by internal conflicts would have
been challenged by the sheer scale of the economic transformation in the
late 20th century, which turned once-vibrant industrial cities into
ghost towns. The dynamism and expansion 100 years earlier, which had
stoked workers’ sense of their own strength and capacity, gave way to
stagnation and fatalism, and a resigned timidity at work. Today, strikes
have almost vanished from our economic landscape: in 2013, a scant 15
strikes involved more than 1,000 employees each (down from 187 in <a href="tel:1980" value="+661980" target="_blank">1980</a>,
the year Reagan was elected). Unionization has fallen sharply even in
parts of the economy where it was once ubiquitous, such as the
manufacturing sector.</p>
<p>Many of the unions that are hanging on—including those in
the auto industry, once the standard for union power—have adopted
two-tier contracts, so that new hires are paid according to a different
pay scale. Geoghegan suggests that such bargains, though they may rescue
unions from extinction in the short term, generally serve to erode
whatever workplace solidarity might remain: to have workers earning $14
an hour toil beside those making $28 an hour does not promote a sense of
common interest. De-skilling in industrial companies, he observes,
undermines workplace mobility, too: where foremen were once drawn from
the rank and file, today they are college-educated supervisors,
monitoring workers who have no chance of ever moving up.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the unions that have managed to remain
strong—most notably in the public sector, which was organized amid
civil-rights ferment during the 1960s—hardly enjoy the role of vanguard.
Civil servants such as firefighters, postal workers, and teachers have
found it difficult to counter the widespread perception (fed in large
part by constant attacks from the right) that they are protecting their
own wages and comfort at the expense of others. In the context of
economic decline, whatever limited power labor might possess breeds
resentment more than admiration.</p>
<p>By now, as notable as the drop in union membership is the
rapid rise of workers who have only an attenuated connection to their
jobs—because they are on temporary contracts, work fewer than 35 hours a
week on ever-changing schedules, or are defined as “independent
contractors” rather than employees. One way to think about what’s
happened in recent years is that the precarious economic position of
nonwhite or female workers in postwar America has become closer to the
norm for all workers.</p>
<p>About one in 10 American workers is self-employed (the most
rapidly growing groups in this category are maids and housekeepers,
carpenters, landscapers, and hairdressers—a far cry from the farmers of
yesteryear). Part-time workers make up 17 percent of the labor force.
Workers hired as independent contractors—as are many at FedEx, for
example—aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance, don’t have the right
to organize a union, aren’t guaranteed overtime pay or the minimum
wage, and lack access to the employment protections afforded by the
Civil Rights Act. Their employers don’t have to contribute to Social
Security. (Some FedEx drivers have successfully challenged this
employment classification in court.)</p>
<p>With the on-demand economy thriving, the ranks of
freelancers are growing—one can now hire a lawyer, doctor, computer
programmer, or run-of-the-mill office worker for short-term service via
the Internet. They, too, generally lack the basic perks of stability,
such as a retirement plan and health insurance. Describing one boss who
compelled his workers to set themselves up as legal corporations so the
company could avoid the cost of employee benefits, Geoghegan writes,
“Sometimes I think: one day, every American worker will be a John Smith,
Incorporated, every cleaning lady, every janitor, every one of us—it
will be a nation of CEOs in chains.” His bleak vision captures the
culminating challenge facing a labor revival. That hurdle is rooted in
the contemporary ethos of work itself, never mind global and
technological factors: how to liberate wage slaves who are, however
perversely defined, their own masters.</p>
<p><span>In the 19th century,</span> anger at
lost autonomy brought workers together to organize, to reassert a sense
of independence and dignity threatened by the rise of giant
corporations and new workplace hierarchies. Key to claiming rights and
clout for themselves was solidarity with others. Just as important for
them, and for their successors, was an experience of group bargaining
power, not only in their companies and factories but also in a
democracy: participating in the labor movement was inseparable from
becoming actively engaged more broadly in political life.</p>
<p>Today, even as jobs get more precarious, the ideal of
independence endures, and a seductive language of artisanship
flourishes, promising opportunities for self-realization and freedom
from the routinized, bureaucratic workplace of yore. What today’s
workers are missing is the pull of collective action. The rising
generation grew up not with the memory of labor’s early tenacity and
vigor, but with the reality of unions under attack from without and in
disarray within.</p>
<p>Tackling inequality is clearly going to require more than
technocratic fixes from above. It isn’t likely to succeed unless workers
themselves can reclaim some bargaining power, and the sense of
political and social inclusion that can go with it. For Geoghegan, that
cultural shift is the crucial goal, though he is also armed with
economic arguments about the importance of unions in achieving
structural change.</p>
<p>Drawing on Keynes, he makes the case that worker
organizations, exerting pressure from below within corporations, will
more effectively contribute to the redistribution of wealth than
rejiggering taxes or government spending can hope to. Such an approach
could create new domestic markets, fueled by rising incomes rather than
by debt-driven spending. (Even today, despite the weakness of organized
labor, median weekly earnings for unionized workers are about $200—or 27
percent—more than for nonunion workers.) The result would be an economy
less prone to destructive boom-and-bust cycles. Expanded markets might,
he suggests, lead to lower trade deficits as investors put money toward
productive uses, rather than toward financial speculation. Higher
incomes for working-class Americans might also reduce the intense
antagonism toward taxes; the government could more easily invest in
infrastructure and social programs—even education.</p>
<p>But the heart of Geoghegan’s case isn’t his upbeat,
Keynesian vision of union-catalyzed economic change, which will
inevitably prompt debate. (So will his celebration of Germany’s
economy—17 percent of the workforce is unionized and labor is
represented on corporate boards—given that he barely mentions the
country’s role in enforcing austerity throughout the rest of Europe.)
Above all, he looks to worker organization as a force for political
change. He heralds it as the route to counterbalancing the power of
elites by spurring democratic participation, and securing representation
for the interests of workers (and the middle class).</p>
<p>Burnishing his credentials as a critic of an older unionism
focused only on collective bargaining, Geoghegan invokes as models
unions like National Nurses United and the Chicago Teachers Union. Both
have sought to position themselves as leaders in social movements, not
just as the representatives of their members’ immediate financial
interests. Each aims for a broad political coalition and embraces a big
agenda.</p>
<p>For National Nurses United, that means urging a greater say
for nurses in how hospitals operate. The Chicago Teachers Union, which
staged an unexpectedly popular strike in 2012, connected teachers’
concerns about health benefits and the ways in which their work would be
evaluated to larger questions. The union broached the topics of funding
for education, privatization of public schools, overly large class
sizes, and the lack of support for art, music, and special education. At
stake was the whole question of teachers’ role in determining
educational policy. It’s no accident that such unions represent
service-sector professionals, disproportionately women, whose labor
serves a greater public good; trained in professions that have their own
ethical codes, these workers are pushing for more socially engaged
autonomy. Such unions weigh in with confidence against corporate
interests, committed to the idea that participatory activism counts.</p>
<p>Nurses and teachers might seem to have little in common with
low-wage, blue-collar, or temporary workers, whether farmhands or
clericals. Still, Geoghegan sees these unions as important and relevant
examples of a willingness to depart from the mid-century template for
collective bargaining. Any real revival of organizing, in his view, is
bound to require a jettisoning of older models. There is little
alternative, given the right-to-work laws on the books in 24 states and
the hostility toward union-election campaigns: winning a majority vote
is an uphill battle even if many in the workplace want a union.</p>
<p>Geoghegan suggests that unions could give up on the old
insistence on “exclusive representation”—the idea that a majority of
workers must vote to support a union, which then must represent everyone
in the workplace in collective bargaining. Instead, workers could
jockey to form organizations that would be empowered to bargain for any
who chose to join and pay dues. To counter employer discrimination
against union supporters—who are often threatened with being fired or
demoted for wearing a union button or talking about organizing—Geoghegan
proposes a push to get union allegiance defined as a civil right that
deserves legal protection, like race and gender. Workers punished for
their pro-union sentiments would be enabled to sue through the courts
rather than be limited to an appeal to the National Labor Relations
Board. Or unions could stop focusing on their contracts and aim for more
say over corporate management. State governments, he suggests, could
offer tax breaks for firms that allow union representation on their
boards—another weapon in the arsenal of incentives that states already
use to attract business.</p>
<p>Where there are union stirrings, workers are indeed
experimenting with new strategies. At companies such as Walmart,
employees have struggled to join forces to advocate for better pay and
more-stable schedules so that they aren’t forced to rely on food stamps
and public assistance to supplement their low wages. Aware of how hard
the company will fight formal union recognition, they aren’t seeking to
hold an election anytime in the near future. Instead, they welcome
whoever wants to join them in pressuring the company through
demonstrations, strikes, and Black Friday protests. The “Fight for $15”
campaign by fast-food workers, airport employees, and home health aides
(supported by the Service Employees International Union) has adopted
similar moves. Participants have simply taken to the streets to make a
moral appeal to the public and demand change. For the moment, they’ve
bypassed the lengthy, often futile process of filing for an election,
winning union recognition, and bargaining over a contract.</p>
<p>Geoghegan knows full well that some leaders in the larger
world of organized labor may be reluctant to adopt such confrontational
tactics in their own unions, and that employers generally have met them
with fierce resistance. Despite tentative signs of life, the prospect of
a new labor movement sweeping the country—unions fought for by baristas
and waiters, janitors and temps, day-care workers and grad
students—still seems as remote and romantic as imagining the steel mills
reassembled from their ghostly remnants on the South Side of Chicago.
But neither Geoghegan nor Fraser has given up on a spirit of rebellious
imagination, because the alternative, as their clear-eyed accounts
refuse to gloss over, is immersion in a different kind of dream.</p>
<p><span>Today, the expectations </span>associated
with a middle-class identity—homeownership, a college education, and
health care, as well as the secure social position that they make
possible—linger on, even though the historical context that once made
those markers realistically attainable for many has long since
disappeared. The political culture of equality engendered by the New
Deal and the postwar order no longer exists. Nor do the economic
institutions that thrived during those decades—more-affordable higher
education, labor unions, and a growing social safety net. But those
markers of middle-class arrival continue to beckon as integral hedges
against losing ground (which indeed they are, perhaps even more now than
in the past). And when they prove out of reach, people feel
aggrieved—aggrieved enough to take on risk in a gamble for security:
they are willing to borrow heavily on credit cards, take out chancy
mortgages, or borrow against their homes if that’s their only recourse.</p>
<p>Economically, some may argue that a nation so starkly
divided between rich and poor is prone to frequent recessions, high
levels of unemployment, and debt-driven panics and crises. But the
deeper problems, as Fraser and Geoghegan suggest, are moral and
political. The stark hierarchies of the material world generate a
culture of defeat and paralysis. At every level of our society today,
the idea that only people with money matter is confirmed daily. From the
kind of health care that we receive, to the schools our children
attend, to the parks near our houses, our segregation by wealth renders a
common social experience nearly impossible.</p>
<p>Organizing in the workplace isn’t enough, alone, to close
those gaps. It can, though, give people a way to see themselves as
something other than disempowered individuals. It can help instill the
sense that they are part of society, linked to others around them,
bearing mutual responsibility for the circumstances they inhabit, not
just as workers but as citizens. What’s at stake is more than paid
vacations or even health insurance or higher wages. When people organize
at work, they alter something larger than any particular policy. They
change the balance of power itself—on their jobs, and also potentially
in their cities and states, and in Washington.</p>
<p>Without this larger vision of workplace democracy and
political engagement, unions stand no chance of revival. A claim on the
moral imagination has always been crucial to labor’s success. Hard
though it may be to grasp in retrospect, the labor movement of 100 years
ago, as Fraser writes, was “as much a freedom movement as the
abolitionist movement had been or [the] civil rights movement would
become.”</p>
<p>Whether it is possible to animate work with this meaning
today is an open question. Near the end of his book, Geoghegan commits
the equivalent of heresy for a labor lawyer: totally committed though he
is to fending off the destruction of those unions that still exist (and
represent 16.2 million people), he admits that a small part of him
can’t help hoping that the right will continue its legal assault on
organized labor until the entire rickety apparatus born of the New Deal
collapses.</p>
<p>Unions would then be forced back into the streets, into
relying on the active support of the people they seek to represent, as
well as of the larger public. People might be jolted into recognizing
that they’ve forgotten how to insist on their rights and freedom as
workers. They would need to find ways—as people did a century ago—to
speak about their aspirations in a political language that lays claim to
democratic principles and counters the illusion that the world must be
divided between a superelite and those whose mission is to serve it.</p>
<p>Labor has grown so weak by now that whatever form of
organizing might come next will have to start almost from scratch
anyway, to build something entirely new. Such an idea may seem
daunting—but no more so than it must have appeared to the miners in
Ludlow. What that something might be—what it will look like, and how it
might help us remake our society together—is an unavoidable question of
the 21st century.</p></div>
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<br></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://commonstransition.org" target="_blank">http://commonstransition.org</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div></div></div></div>
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