Joe Kenehan Center

2003-07-24T00:11:00.000-07:00

We've Moved
The Joe Kenehan Center is packing up and making changes. The new site is here.

2003-06-30T21:21:00.000-07:00

As The Sun Goes Down
Mystery writer and former Baltimore Sun journalist Laura Lippman’s Slate diary week happened to coincide with the week that her ex-colleagues at the Sun were forced into a corner in their contract negotiations. They voted to swallow a concessionary contract.

Lippman vividly describes the hard choices that American workers—including well educated, highly-skilled professionals—are asked to make these days. Here’s Lipmman on the Sun’s plan to introduce a merit pay system. Under this system, the newspaper could:

“[F]or example, assign me to cover a courthouse where cameras aren't allowed, then give me a lukewarm job evaluation because I didn't produce enough feature stories with photographs. (This really happened to a friend at the Sun a few years back.) One manager—fondly nicknamed the Reich Marshal—is chatting up reporters, insisting they would benefit under the new system. I'm not sure about my friends, but I know the Reich Marshal would be happier. After all, his craven style would be less noticeable in a newsroom where everyone had to suck up.

Here are her Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday entries.

2003-06-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

Why Are Janitors Are Getting Ahead?
As Harold Meyerson points out in this important op-ed, janitors in some major cities are expanding their access to affordable health care at a time when most working people are watching their employer cut and slash their health coverage.

Why? Because the janitors are united in a union and they are moving ahead with a long-term strategy for building clout in their industry.

Why Can’t More Workers Get Ahead?
I was away a little last week and I missed an interesting exchange in the blogosphere on why American workers have such a hard time joining unions.

Calpundit asked the initial question. Nathan Newman responded here and here. But the most interesting strand of the discussion is on Calpundit’s comments thread. It’s long, but it’s worth scrolling to read about the experiences of some ex-Amazon.com employees who thought about forming a union.

2003-06-24T22:52:00.000-07:00

The Bottle Let Me Down
Interesting article in about beer and commercialism in the New York Times magazine.

The piece documents how young urban cool kids are adopting venerable Pabst Blue Ribbon as their brand of choice for cheap American beer. Pabst is quietly cultivating these drinkers with an anti-advertising campaign that deliberately eschews the shouts and rants that make up most of the frat-boy targeted marketing for beer like Budweiser, MGD, and Coors Lite.

Like an ambitious politician, PBR is now positioning itself as populist outsider that’s true to authentic American values.

Sadly, this pose isn’t any more genuine than Anheuser-Busch’s talkin’ lizards. As the piece notes, PBR is barely a “real” beer anymore. The company outsources its actual brewing to various megabreweries. PBR closed its actual brewery in Milwaukee years ago and then yanked away basic health care benefits that had been promised to its retirees.

Pabst now manages a stable of old local beer brands—including the Pacific Northwest’s Rainier and Olympia brands—although it sold off or closed the actual breweries, including plants up here in Seattle and Olympia.

It's easy to read the piece with mixed feelings. It's not surprising that people are getting sick of watching millions of dollars get wasted advertising for beers that taste exactly the same.

And it's heartening that it's become bike messenger chic to look back warmly at an era when most cities had locally owned breweries producing union-made beer for guys who had decent union jobs.

It's sad that those local beers are just shells now.

Maybe the only consolation is that at least some of the "local" beer that gets made at large corporate breweries is still produced by union workers.

2003-06-13T00:17:00.000-07:00

Get Tough On The Lucky Duckies!
Conservatives would be far more convincing with their outrage about tax refunds going out to “people who don’t pay taxes” if they’d made a peep back when a corporation called Enron was getting gigantic refunds even though it also was one of those ungrateful scofflaws who don’t pay any income taxes.

Citizens for Tax Justice dug through Enron’s returns and discovered that during four of five years between 1996-2000 Enron paid no income taxes. Yet Kenny Boy and company received $381 million in refunds over that period. Indeed, CTJ learned than many major American corporations are “lucky duckies” in the freeloading non-tax paying class.

2003-06-01T22:45:00.000-07:00

Back In The City Of Angels
Harold Meyerson may be a big shot semi-regular on the Washington Post op-ed page these days, but he still keeps it real by checking in on what’s happening in his old hometown of Los Angeles.

In this LA Weekly column Meyerson reports on the recent election of Antonio Villaraigosa and Martin Ludlow to the city council and what that means for Los Angeles politics and the labor movement there.

Unions In Uniform
Here’s a NYT/Greenhouse piece on the campaign by workers at Cintas,, a large national commercial uniform service, to form a union with UNITE. What’s heartening about the campaign is that the union appears ready to dig in for the long term and help Cintas employees fight, for years if necessary, and that it wants to avoid the outdated and ineffective National Labor Relations Board election procedures—choosing instead to advocate for a process that ensures employees have a chance to form a union without interference from Cintas management. As the story poins out, Cintas can’t ship its laundries to China, so at least one common anti-union tactic won’t work in this case.

2003-05-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

On The Air

For years, I’ve faithfully listened to conservative talk radio.

Mostly it’s because I like listening to people talk about politics, even if I disagree with almost everything they say.

I’ve never called in. But driving home from work the other night, tuned to Seattle’s KVI-AM (“Rush in the mornings, Hannity in the afternoons”), I’d had enough.

I decided to challenge some assumptions.

For the umpteenth time, host Bryan Suits was predicting that Boeing is going to leave Wasington and was dragging out his usual straw men—unions, Washington state’s allegedly liberal government, and the state’s supposedly “anti-business” culture—as the reasons why.

I pulled over, called in, and told the screener that I wanted to say something about the unions. “Good. We’ll get you on,” he assured me.

I was the third caller of the segment. I pointed out that it doesn’t really make sense to blame Boeing’s union workers for making things tough for Boeing, because its main competitor, Airbus, builds planes in Western Europe, where taxes are higher and unions are much stronger. (I’ve blogged about this before.)

Suits seemed stunned for a second. But he quickly recovered and blurted out something about Airbus’s “unfair advantages” because it receives government subsides.

This is a lame argument for lots of reasons, which I started to spell out.

“Boeing is also subsidized,” I said. “What do you call the tanker deal?” (The U.S. Air Force recently agreed to lease some new 767s for use as tankers in a deal that includes terms that are, ahem, extremely favorable for Boeing.)

“Well, that’s corporate welfare,” Suits stammered.

“Which is a subsidy,” I reminded him. We went back and forth for awhile, Suits pouting that it’s not fair to compare Boeing to Airbus, me pointing out that Boeing has long benefited from direct and indirect government subsidies, including massive investment in military and space research and development. Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson practically made a career out of securing subsidies for Boeing, I said.

More than that, Boeing also gained advantages from the state and federal support of the University of Washington, which produced thousands of great engineers for the company. It’s not an accident that Boeing’s first wind tunnel was on the UW campus. Boeing also benefited from public investment in everything from highways to public power, with the Bonneville Power Administration providing reliable, inexpensive power for Boeing and other manufacturers in the Pacific Northwest.

All of this was a good thing for Washington State, I explained to Suits, because it created a lot of good jobs and allowed Boeing to grow and succeed.

I waited to hear Suits’s reply, but my cell phone fell silent. It took a moment to realize that he’d hung up me. By the time I got my radio back on, he’d moved on to another caller, so I’ll never know what his final word was.

But they weren’t done with me yet. The next caller was ready with what I hoped would be a more substantial counterpoint.

I was to be disappointed.

"That previous caller, the socialist," he sneered, "well, he must be French."

"Yeah," said Suits. "That guy can just move to Sweden and get his free health care or whatever."

I swear to God that was the best they could muster. It wasn't, obviously, one of finer moments the history of conservative political debate.

Which really was a letdown, because Suits often is a smart and funny guy.

And it’s even sadder because Boeing probably is going to leave Washington, partly because it’s greedy and it thinks that skimping on its workforce is one way to beat Airbus.

But also because our state’s transportation system is a mess and our political leaders are too timid to make needed changes to improve it. Those kinds of changes, after all, would involve taxes. And because of kneejerk anti-government sentiment that gets whipped up on a daily basis by folks like Tim Eyman and the hosts on KVI, Washington government is paralyzed when it comes to making any investments for jobs and growth.

Some good reading . . .

Looking ahead to 2004.The invaluable Harold Meyerson on a new effort by unions to encourage a broader movement of voters from working families—not necessarily just union members—and some of the obstacles that effort is facing.

Looking back at 1944. Cass Susstein remembers FDR’s attempt to expand economic freedom, not just political freedom. It’s a concept that certainly isn’t familiar to my friends at KVI-AM.

ULLICO. Republicans are getting ready to attack unions with hearings on ULLICO. BusinessWeek’s Aaron Bernstein explains why ULLICO is actually a model example of the right way to correct corporate misconduct.

Team Members of the World Unite. There’s got to be a special section in hell reserved for hypocritical liberals, especially the kind who run so-called “socially responsible” businesses. This article is a good rundown on the campaign by workers at Whole Food Markets to form a union and the company’s vicious attempt to stop them. (Most self-contradictory anti-union argument: Whole Foods says a union would hurt the company's flexibility and the character of individual stores. For example, a union might make it harder to impose an inflexible company-wide dress code.)

2003-05-20T22:56:00.000-07:00

Bargaining for the Long-Term
The United Auto Workers are getting ready to negotiate major new contracts and the union seems to making some interesting, smart choices for the future.

According to this article, the UAW is ready to sacrifice some temporary wage concessions in exchange for protections for nonunion autoworkers’ right to join the union without pressure or interference from their employers.

By making it easier for more workers in nonunion plants—especially in subcontracted parts assemblers—to join the union, workers in the auto industry stand to gain back a significant amount of the bargaining power that they’ve lost over the past several decades.

Why would the auto industry agree to changes that will strengthen the union in the long-term? In this instance, I think that business’ obsession with quarterly profit will work to benefit the workers. In the short-term, companies might boost profits by winning wage concessions. Today’s executives will let somebody else worry about a resurgent union later on, hopefully (from their point of view) several years down the line. By then, it’ll be somebody else’s problem.

For an interesting study of this kind of short-term corporate thinking, check out Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers by Robert Jackall.

The Union Primary
LA Times political analyst Ronald Brownstein on the Democratic candidates’ race to win support from the union movement and how that race is different now than it was in 1984.

Other union news . . .
GE employees might strike for affordable health care.

More NYT/Steven Greenhouse on the new leader of ULLICO.

And also, the NYT/Steven Greenhouse’s nostalgic look back on New York labor in the 70s.

When Unions Became Constitutional
For an unconventional look back at the moment when American workers finally won the right to form unions, I recommend The Forgotten Memoir of John Knox: A Year in the Life of a Supreme Court Clerk in FDR's Washington.

Knox served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice James McReynolds during the crucial Supreme Court term of 1936-1937, when the Court’s unstinting opposition to the New Deal ceased. Among other major decisions, the Court ruled that the Wagner Act -- which established the right to form unions as a federal right -- was constitutional. In doing so, the Court reversed course from many previous rulings, deciding that government has the right to protect basic wage and workplace standards after all.

But politics aside, the Knox memoir is most rewarding in capturing a moment in the history of the Court and the history of Washington, D.C.

Justice McReynolds was a deeply conservative Kentucky Democrat who was openly anti-Semitic and viciously racist. During Knox’s time with McReynolds, the justice refused to move into the new Supreme Court building and instead continued to work from his luxury apartment at 2400 16th Street NW, in a building that’s now called the Envoy.

Knox, an ambitious young lawyer freshly graduated from Harvard Law, struggled to serve the McReynolds in the face of the justice’s unstinting coldness and impetuous arrogance.

Knox recounts how closely he worked alongside McReynold’s African-American household staff: a messenger named Harry Parker and a cook named Mary Diggs. Parker and Diggs, long accustomed to dealing with the Justice, help Knox adjust and respond to McReynold’s moody demands. Knox comes to admire and respect Parker and Diggs enormously, despite McReynold’s warnings about becoming too close to “darkies.” (In a telling detail, no other members of the Supreme Court attended McReynold's funeral. Several attended Harry Parker's.)

Knox’s writing is wooden and maladroit, but even so his memoir is vivid portrait of a different and in many ways much worse America. David Garrow and Dennis Hutchinson bookend the memoir with a foreword and afterward that provide valuable insight and context.

2003-05-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

Yet Another Reason to Revere Willie Nelson

Now I'm even happier that I shelled out for tickets to see Willie this summer. He sent bandanas, whiskey, and a "Way to go. Stand your ground" message to the Texas Democrats on the run from the Department of Homeland Security.

The man is a national treasure as valuable as Louis Armstrong or Mark Twain. He's on tour at age seventy and if anything he's a more vibrant performer than a lot of artists who are less than half his age.

2003-05-05T22:42:00.000-07:00

Outrage at CEO Pay, Part 37
Voices in the mainstream media are taking up another round of handwringing over the obscene compensation packages American executives award themselves. These days this seems to happen every 6-8 months or so. Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein’s take—concentrating on how shaky the market-based explanations for the continuing rise in executive pay are—is here.

Pearlstein later participated in an online forum on the topic. Several participants offered vaguely left-liberal solutions, including higher income taxes for the super-rich or mandated limits on CEO pay. Unfortunately, nobody thought to mention the real solution: labor law reform. By making it easier for American workers to join together in unions, the government could empower them to hold their leaders more accountable.

It’s not a coincidence that the explosion in CEO pay has occurred at exactly the same time the labor movement in the private sector has pretty much collapsed. Over 90 percent of Americans who work for a private corporation are not in a union.

The shady antics of American Airlines’ executives got a lot of attention a few weeks ago. I heard several commentators note that American’s executives were really just following the lead of Delta Airlines’s top corporate team, which awarded itself similarly ridiculous increases. But because Delta is largely nonunion, there wasn’t really anybody who could raise doubts about the deals at Delta.

The Virtual Sucking Sound
I was at a union conference this weekend and saw an amazing presentation by a group of union activists from Washtech, the fledging tech workers union that got its start among Microsoft permatemps.

They have been organizing around the issue of IT jobs being exported to countries with highly-skilled workers but low pay standards, like Ireland, Pakistan, and India.

During the long decline of American manufacturing, market fundamentalists would roll their eyes when anyone raised the question of the job base and insist that people who were willing to keep their skills current would always find good work.

But with large employers finding new ways to drive down pay and benefit standards for the jobs "of the future," a new hole could be blown in the American economy. (Washtech’s web site includes a leaked Powerpoint presentation from Microsoft touting the benefits of moving tech jobs offshore.)

Are the DLC's traditional solutions really going to work when Office Park Dads' jobs are just as vulnerable as a Ford assembly line worker's?

2003-04-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

Streaming Krugman
Paul Krugman gave a talk at the New School that's archived here. Like his column, a lot of straight talk about the intellectual dishonesty of Bush's economic policies and the widening economic gaps in the U.S.

2003-04-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

CEOs On The March
Harold Meyerson, who's on the Washington Post op-ed page a lot these days, has a good summary of the continuing antics of America's business elite, focusing on the shenanigans at American Airlines. You know it's getting bad when Fortune, of all places, has a vicious piece attacking the excessive compensation of U.S. executives, complete with pigs feasting at the trough imagery.

2003-04-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

Kevin Arnold's Big Brother: Health Care Decision-Maker
The story of HealthSouth was depressing enough, with Enron-like ethics seeping into the health care system, with hundreds of people losing their jobs, and with all of us, probably, getting ripped off through massive Medicare fraud. All to make Richard Scrushy, HealthSouth’s famously wealthy CEO, even richer than he already was.

But then the tragedy turns into, well, tragi-comedy, I guess.

Yesterday's New York Times story on Scrushy revealed that at the height of his run at HealthSouth, Scrushy hired on Jason Hervey as a "sidekick and marketing guru" who appeared on a weekly radio show with Scrushy underwritten by HealthSouth.

Hervey, for those of you who didn't watch enough television during the late 1980s, is an actor who played Wayne Arnold, Kevin/Fred Savage's jackass older brother on coming of age tearjerker "The Wonder Years."

Keep this in mind the next time a conservative tells you that Canadian-style health care is evil and that Americans can trust the market to make sure our health care system is running smoothly and efficiently.

Other items . . .
Good E.J. Dionne column on the Bush GOP's agenda to cripple the union movement, including a smart discussion of the ULLICO foolishness. Clearly, it's time for Robert Georgine to go. That said, it's more than a little annoying that Republicans now point to Georgine as proof that unions are inherently corrupt given that Georgine so totally embodies that kind of conservative, politically-inert unionism that conservatives like Linda Chavez claim to support.

2003-04-03T23:30:00.000-08:00

The Sad Spectacle of Linda Chavez
Linda Chavez, the neoconservatives’ token Latina and would-be Secretary of Labor, has resurfaced at the helm of Stop Union Political Abuse, an obscure anti-union group staffed by earnest young Christian rightists.

The group’s centerpiece ideological manifesto is an anti-union diatribe Chavez delivered a while back in a speech at the Heritage Foundation.

Chavez’ speech is worth reading only because it’s a stark example of a peculiarly bizarre interpretation of the history of American labor movement that has somehow become near dogma among neoconservatives.

According to Chavez (and many of her friends—Peggy Noonan wrote a similar piece not long ago, and Max Green wrote an atrocious book-length version of this same argument), American unions didn’t entangle themselves with politics for most of their history and were only dragged into the orbit of the Democratic Party when hippies and New Leftists supposedly started to take them over in the early 1970s.

Chavez and her friends seem to believe that the Republican Party and American business didn’t really bother oppose the union movement before 1972 and were only forced to get tough on the unions because a bunch of pinkos took control of the AFL-CIO. It’s a rehash of Reagan’s “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me” foolishness.

Of course, Chavez’ interpretation of the history of American unions is so colossally inaccurate it’s almost ahistorical. Somehow she ignores the 1930s, the New Deal, the CIO, and gigantic influence within the Democratic Party of labor-leftists like Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther, and Phillip Murray.

Republicans in 1946 certainly would’ve been startled to learn that unions were strangers to politics before 1970. In the off-year elections in '46, the GOP made unions a central issue in their successful campaign to win back control of Congress and halt the New Deal once and for all.

It’s a little sad. I think the neoconservatives who left the labor movement can’t bring themselves to believe that they’ve joined forces with the anti-democratic economic elitists who their parents and grandparents bravely fought against to build the union movement in the first place. So they desperately try to convince themselves that they didn’t lose faith. Therefore, they claim that either need for the unions has disappeared (never mind if Enrons and HealthSouths still happen now and then) or that the unions switched sides in politics, not them.

What's Wrong With Wal-Mart
Worth reading: an executive with a medium-sized grocery chain in the Pacific Northwest makes one of the better arguments I've ever seen about how Wal-Mart shortchanges communities.

2003-03-12T00:37:00.000-08:00

Judged Poorly
People who casually proclaim that there’s no discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans should take a look at this article on a Bush judicial nominee (who’s not named Estrada) who has made it clear that she aims to do everything in her power to comfort the powerful a federal judge. Even if the Democrats can stifle Estrada’s nomination, others will make it through and Bush is going to put lifelong power into the hands of some awful jurists.

Reviving the New Voice
Unionists are buzzing over this Business Week article about changes at the AFL-CIO made during its leadership meetings in Florida. The New York Times covers the same ground here. (For background, read this.)

The Union Difference
This is a must-read column stemming from the Yale strike last week. It’s rarely talked about, but one of the most basic changes that happen when working people form unions is that it changes their standing with people who are used to ignoring them. On the status-obsessed campuses of elite universities, this is not a small thing. Yale alumnus Corey Robin makes the point as well as anyone I’ve ever heard.

If A Manufacturer Doesn’t Actually Make Anything, What’s The Point?
That’s the question an internal paper at the Boeing Corporation raises. It’s something that a lot of Boeing workers have been morosely curious about lately.

2003-03-05T22:50:00.000-08:00

More Good News . . .

2003-03-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

Good Day in LA
Charismatic labor-liberal Antonio Villaraigosa survived the negative campaign launched against him and won a city council seat in Los Angeles. Martin Ludlow, another strong labor-liberal and Villaraigosa's former field director, made it into a runoff for another council position.

2003-02-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

Following the Masters
Labor secretary Elaine Chao appears eager to copy the Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Cheney style of alienating friends along with foes as often as possible. Union activists are livid over Chao’s clumsy, rude performance at the AFL-CIO meeting in Florida. Here’s the New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse on the details.

The only purpose Chao’s remarks will serve might be to further unite labor leaders--including the Teamsters’ Hoffa--in their determination to defeat Bush in 2004.

Also datelined Florida: a Washington Post article includes more details about the Partnership for America’s Families, the new labor-backed political organizing group headed by former AFL-CIO political director Steven Rosenthal.

Lincoln vs. Bush
Watching Bush/Rumsfeld/Rice/Wolfowitz/Cheney’s hamhanded attempts to rally the world against Saddam, my emotions range from dismay to outrage to loathing to dread and back again so often it’s heartbreaking. I love this country but it’s disgraceful how the Bush Administration seems almost gleefully unconcerned about running down our standing in the world community.

Social democratic writer Paul Berman (who is nominally for the war, remember) describes far more eloquently than I can how depressing it is to watch Bush turning his back on our American ideals. Berman compares Bush’s vision of casual preemptive projection of power with Lincolnian ideals of careful, vigorous defense of democracy in absolutely necessary cases.

From the piece:

But our government has for some reason disarmed itself unilaterally in the realms of persuasion, inspirational example, philosophical clarity, and moral leadership. How did this happen to us? It has happened to us. Tocqueville thought that liberal societies could not wield power, and Lincoln proved him wrong. I am terrified that we are in the process of proving Lincoln wrong--that we are wielding power without liberalism, which will turn out to be no power at all.

Also, Berman’s recent slapdown of Michael Kelly shouldn’t be overlooked. About a year or so ago Berman wrote a gigantic New Republic piece (no longer available for free online) about the ideological journey of Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and Green Party leader. Berman chronicled Fischer’s exodus from an ultra-sectarian New Leftist to pragmatic supporter of NATO military intervention against Milosovic.

Kelly’s diatribe--so crude I suspect he composed it in crayon--managed to ignore completely the point of Berman’s essay by lazily condemning Fischer for being what he isn’t, as Berman patiently explains.

Music Notes
They didn’t have any time at all at the Grammys to mention the fans who died in Rhode Island ? . . . It was nice to see the Dixie Chicks let Lloyd Maines come up to the micophone with them for recognition from the national TV audience. If nothing else, Maines deserves some sort of special achievement award for his masterful steel guitar work on Uncle Tupelo's Anodyne album . . . David Hadju has a fascinating profile of Wynton Marsalis that shows hims struggling at mid-life to help keep jazz relevant.

2003-02-18T14:11:00.000-08:00

Don't Call It A Comeback
Antonio Villaraigosa, former speaker of the California state assembly and the state's most charismatic progressive political leader, is mounting a comeback effort after his attempt to become mayor of Los Angeles fell short in 2001.

Villaraigosa is running to win a position on the LA City Council, aiming to unseat incumbent Nick Pacheco. The LA County Federation of Labor is gearing up its formidable turnout operation to support Villaraigosa.

Pacheco is a generation younger than Villaraigosa and positions himself as a DLC-style, post-ideological centrist. Despite his carefully constructed "Boy Scout" persona, Pacheco and his political allies are also known for their penchant for savagely negative campaign tactics and Nixonesque dirty tricks.

Both sides promise a clean fight but given the ample bad blood between the two camps it's likely this will be a bruising battle.

Here's an LA Weekly piece on the race.

Here's a Marc Cooper piece from The Nation.

World Bank Says Unions Work
Actually, the Bank said that "economies perform better in coordinated labor markets," but that's what they meant.

In a new report the Bank admits that "workers who belong to trade unions earn higher wages, work fewer hours, receive more training, and have longer job tenure on average, than their non-unionized counterparts."

Kerry On The Trail
LA Weekly/American Prospect scribe Harold Meyerson reports on a John Kerry event in Iowa. It looks more and more like John F. Kerry is the frontrunner.

2003-02-10T22:01:00.000-08:00

DeLay: If Unions Exist, The Terrorists Win
Tom DeLay’s appalling fund-raising letter for the National Right To Work Committee was so far beyond the pale that The Hammer is “distancing himself” from it, as they say. (Read the New York Times story or the Washington Post story for background.)

I saw a copy of the letter last week, printed on handsome “Tom DeLay, Majority Leader” letterhead, and it’s really poisonous stuff.

DeLay’s shrill attacks on the union movement basically imply that holding a union card is morally equivalent to spending time an al Qaeda training base.

The tone of the letter makes David Horowitz’ endless attacks on the loyalty of anyone even mildly liberal seem perfectly calm and reasonable. Somehow, DeLay and the NRTWC find a way to question whether union firefighters are patriotic Americans, for goodness’ sake.

But Delay and the NRTWC aren’t content to question the loyalty of today’s union members -- they actually go back in time to attack the workers who made America an the “arsenal of democracy” during World War II.

According to DeLay/NRTWC, union workers “notoriously exploited the Second World War and other times of crisis to expand dramatically [their] power at the expense of the war effort.”

Which, of course, is utter crap. The ranks of the union movement did indeed swell during the war, but that’s because so many men and women went to work building the weapons needed to defeat fascism and militarism. That probably comes as a shock to the NRTWC and DeLay, who seem to think that a small group of anti-New Deal libertarian entrepreneurs built thousands of Sherman tanks and B-17s all by themselves.

Union leaders like Phillip Murray and Sidney Hillman worked with the government to help improve productivity, with the ultimately unrealized hope of creating a better system of training, investment, and planning to build a durably healthy economy after the war. It should be remembered that they supported the war while the ideological forebears of Delay and the NRTWC were asking what was so bad about this Hitler fellow.

Roach: Send This Memo Or I’ll Shoot
Pam Roach, a legendarily vicious Republican legislator in Washington State, is endangering her political career with a spectacular display of bizarre antics.

Two members of her state senate staff abruptly resigned a few weeks ago. It’s unclear exactly why, but Roach apparently pulled a gun on one of them recently. Roach then thumbed through her staff’s e-mail accounts to find dirt to discredit them.

Roach’s explanations for all of this are varied and changing. It’s gotten to the point where other senators in the GOP caucus think she needs help.

Roach is obviously a tough boss (another former staff member persuaded the Senate to pay for counseling to help her recover from the trauma of working for Roach), but her employees can take comfort knowing that she’s just as mean to her political opponents.

In her 2001 bid to capture a seat on the King County Council, GOP consultants tried to surreptitiously draft a Green Party candidate to weaken Julia Patterson, Roach’s Democratic opponent.

When that didn’t work, Roach allies sent out a desperate mailing that tried to paint Patterson as a drug dealer. (A meth lab had been discovered on a piece of property owned by Patterson, but Patterson had nothing to do with the lab and worked with police to shut it down.)

Roach denied exploiting the meth lab episode but later admitted that she faxed the story to reporters.

2003-02-05T22:25:00.000-08:00

Highly Recommended
Gerald Sorin’s Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent is a fine biography of the late democratic socialist critic and thinker. In particular, Sorin shows how Howe was able to change and adapt to the real-life politics of his times without retreating from the democratic, egalitarian ideals that were at his heart--unlike many other radicals of his generation.

You can read up and coming young left-liberal historian Kevin Mattson’s far more eloquent review here.

Arguments on Organizing
Stephen Early reports back skeptically on the recent AFL-CIO Organizing Convention. One new proposal that was discussed was forming a National “Rights At Work Committee” to help reestablish American workers’ rights to form unions without interference form their employers.

Kim Moody responds to Stephen Lerner’s discussion of the need for more industry-focused organizing among workers. Moody’s response is sometimes at odds with itself. He attacks some of Lerner’s points, weakly, in some cases. To find an example to prove that smaller unions are just a strong as unions that unite a lot of workers in a single industry, Moody has to go back 14 years to the United Mineworkers’ Pittston strike. Then, at the end of the article, Moody says it would be a good idea if the United Auto Workers let the American Federation of Teachers concentrate on uniting graduate students so the UAW could refocus on auto manufacturing. Isn’t that what Lerner was talking about in the first place?

The Union Primary
AFSCME international president Gerry McEntee says John Kerry has the “best chance” of beating Bush.

Down With Wilco On The Way
Unlike a lot of albums that seem to disappear into oblivion during record label sales/mergers/acquisitions, The Minus 5’s collaboration with Wilco will make it to the surface pretty quickly. It’s out on February 25 on Yeproc Records. Miles of Music has preview MP3’s here.

2003-01-28T23:16:00.000-08:00

Huh?
Did you notice Bush's whopping self-contradiction on health care? First he intoned that:

[W]e must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good insurance policy, choose their own doctors, and seniors and low-income Americans receive the help they need. Instead of bureaucrats and trial lawyers and HMOs, we must put doctors and nurses and patients back in charge of American medicine.

But in almost the next sentence, he hyped his prescription drug benefit, which will require seniors to join the HMOs he'd been bashing in the previous breath. At that point I pretty much expected him to officially call on Congress to give him the right to have his cake and eat it too.

2003-01-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

Milton Friedman's Right Hand Flim Flam Man
Steven Cheung, a crony of Milton Friedman and a fellow libertarian economist, has built a comfortable life pontificating on the need for less fettered markets.

Apparently he also supplemented his income by using those markets to rip off people seeking antique Chinese art.

The Seattle Times lays out the facts in an investigative series that catches Thesearus Fine Arts -- a Seattle dealership that's probably owned by Cheung -- in the act of pawning off newish pieces of pottery as pricey antiques.

Luckily for Cheung, the innovation-stifling regulators in the U.S. government haven't taken much interest in his particular brand of fraud.

2003-01-16T21:47:00.000-08:00

Doctor’s Orders
Read this piece to understand how Bill Frist can be a brilliant surgeon, a likable guy, and a kind man but at the same time be mostly clueless about the real problems facing American health care.

Lil' Greens
This interminable LA Weekly piece profiles some great kids who are getting involved in the Green Party. They're to be applauded, but their idealism and youth doesn't undo the problems that already surround the Greens and other third party electoral efforts in a single-member district system.

The piece doesn't mention a significant example where a young Green activist barely out of high school almost decided the balance of power in a state legislature.

In 2001, Washington voters in a hotly-contested suburban district north of Seattle went to the polls in a crucial special election that, because our legislature was tied, decided who controlled the state house. In an attempt to split the center-left vote, a pair of shady Republican campaign consultants contacted Young Han, an 18-year old Green activist, and gave him seed money for a campaign without telling him they were conservative Republicans. (They tried the same tactic in an important King County council election.)

Han qualified for the ballot and stayed in the race, but there was enough publicity about the Republicans' dirty tricks that his campaign didn't get much energy. A solidly pro-union Democrat won. But who knows what would've happened if the origin of Han's candidacy wasn't uncovered?

Also in the LA Weekly, Micah Sifry examines some of the other obstacles Greens will have to overcome if they want to become a meaningful party.

2003-01-15T20:20:00.000-08:00

The Union Vote 2004
Former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal was at Harvard talking about strategy for 2004 and giving more details of the nascent 527 independent advocacy group he is leading:

In preparation for the next election, the AFL-CIO is about to launch a new program to mobilize black, Latino and women voters, who have been vastly underrepresented at the polls in past years:

The $20-40 million program, scheduled to be operational in selected states by the end of February, will identify issues important to these voters to help the AFL-CIO find candidates representing their interests.

Impatience on the Right
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting editorial on the Rove/Bush overtures to certain union leaders, drawing this comment from The New Republic’s blog.

2003-01-13T22:41:00.000-08:00

The Buzz
Naming Steven Weisman's The Great Tax Wars a Joe Kenehan Center "Notable Book for 2002" certainly boosted its buzz.

In yesterday's New York Times Money and Business section "What They Are Reading" column, we learned that New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer is reading Weisman's edifying history of the income tax.

In the Times' Week In Review section, Weisman himself held forth on the history of taxes and class.

And today the Los Angeles Times' ace Washington correspondent, Ron Brownstein, refers to Tax Wars when remarking that Bush is the first president in 140 years to plan to fight a war on credit.

(Note: book publishers -- and, for that matter, music labels -- can contact the Joe Kenehan Center here to find out how to submit freebie review copies for future consideration as a notable.)

2003-01-09T17:36:00.000-08:00

The Future of GOTV

Just about everybody agrees that the Sweeney/Trumka/Chavez-Thompson team that was elected in 1995 to head the AFL-CIO has done a lot to improve the labor movement’s political operation.

Union families are more likely to vote than their non-union neighbors, in large part because of improved efforts to provide union voters with information about candidates, issues, and elections.

Steve Rosenthal, who recently stepped down as the AFL-CIO’s political director, is widely-respected and gets a lot of credit for helping boost working families’ political power and election participation.

According to this story in Roll Call, Rosenthal is now getting ready to lead a new union-backed “527 group” that will support pro-worker candidates, and this AP story says Karen Ackerman has been named to take over as political director at the AFL-CIO.

I can't pretend to know much about what a “527 group” is. (Here’s a Brookings Institution backgrounder on 527s.) But maybe this sort of thing cause for optimism – representing a refocusing of unions’ political energy away from soft money generation and towards independent action.

Bill Frist, R-Corporate Health Care

This LA Weekly piece is a good summary Dr. Bill’s history of tending to the well-being of corporate interests in health care.

2003-01-08T00:20:00.000-08:00

Tax Debate, Chapter 122

Bush’s new “stimulus” plan has once again set off the debate over about who should pay for necessary investments in education, health care, and transportation that even many Republicans grudgingly pretend to believe in these days.

Citizens for Tax Justice tax guru Robert McIntyre -- in this excellent review of Stephen Weisman’s The Great Tax Wars in The Washington Monthly -- reminds us that this debate has been going on now for generations. (Weisman's book, please don’t forget, was also a Joe Kenehan Center Notable Book for 2002.)

Airlines: Let’s Ignore What Works!

Everything I’ve ever read about the airline industry has touted Southwest Airlines as an example of an airline that “works.”

So isn’t in interesting that while most major airlines want Bush to make it easier for them to boost revenue by muzzling their employees' unions, Southwest is outspokenly doubtful that this is the right move for airlines? Here’s what Southwest itself had to say:

"We're totally, incredibly uninvolved" in the lobbying effort [to restrict airline workers' right to strike], said Ed Stuart, a spokesman for Dallas-based Southwest. "Historically our negotiations have gone very well, and we're the most unionized airline in the industry."

Also worth reading . . .

Brazil’s Lula as FDR.
John Sweeney on jobs and growth.
E.J. Dionne on "class warfare."

2003-01-06T23:12:00.000-08:00

America’s Best Songs 2002

TOP 25
(note: this list is not a ranking -- it’s a rough track list of a CD I’ll get around to making once I can get my CD burner to work again.)

Many Rivers To Cross -- The Blind Boys of Alabama

A Little Less Conversation (JXL Radio Edit Remix) -- Elvis Presley

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1 -- The Flaming Lips

Walking In A Straight Line -- The Mayflies USA

This I What I Do -- Rhett Miller

Oceanbound -- 764-HERO

Talk To Me -- Jay Bennett & Edward Burch

Anchor -- Dear John Letters

It’ll Be The Same Without You -- The Mendoza Line

Pot kettle black -- Wilco

Oak Ridges -- The Sadies

(a year ahead) . . . & a light -- Richard Buckner

My Name Is Jorge -- The Gourds

Lonesome and Losin’ -- Lil’ Cap'n Travis

Virginia, No One Can Warn You -- Tift Merritt

Jerusalem -- Steve Earle

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry -- Johnny Cash

Shallow Heart -- Caitlin Cary

The Death of John Henry -- Ralph Stanley

Don’t Break The Heart -- Laura Cantrell

Everything’s Gonna Be Cool -- Chris Mills

When I Hold You In My Arms -- Neil Young

Lone Star -- Norah Jones

the new cobweb summer -- Lambchop

2003-01-04T15:35:00.000-08:00

Coach Chait

Anybody who reads much of New Republic editor Jonathan Chait’s writing on politics and economic policy is well aware of his consistently on-target analysis.

But who knew Chait could out X and O the college football puditocracy? While most of the pre-Fiesta Bowl debate was preoccupied with arguments over just how badly Miami would beat Ohio State, Chait countered with this piece in Slate boldly (and as it turned out, correctly) pointing out that Miami was thoroughly vincible.

Speaking of the New Republic . . .

Their anonymous blogger had this to say about Steven Greenhouse’s New York Times profile of former Teamster official Bill Hogan.

2003-01-01T20:01:00.000-08:00

Debating How to Rebuild

The new Labor Notes includes several responses to Stephen Lerner’s suggestions for rebuilding the union movement in the United States. Cornell professor Kate Bronfenbrenner’s is the most interesting. UPDATE: Teamster reform activist Ken Paff's response is also well worth reading.

O Brother, Ralph Stanley’s On The Grammys

Echo, an “music-centered” online journal published by UCLA, has a new issue that focuses on the folk/bluegrass revival touched off by the surprisingly successful O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.

Now that record store bins are clogged with hastily compiled bluegrass compilations -- all straining to work the words “Brother” or “Mountain” into their titles -- Echo’s essayists take a critical look at what this means for the music.

Rachel Howard, writing from the perspective of a long-time fan, contributes a nice assessment of how it feels to watch music you’ve quietly loved suddenly become the big new thing. (Full-disclosure: Rachel is my long-time significant other.)

Notable Books 2002

Fiction: If you’ve read any of Robert Boswell’s books before, you saw some familiar themes in his most recent novel, Century‘s Son. But because I love Boswell’s clear, elegant prose and his ability to create such compellingly human characters, I can’t begrudge him much for returning to those ideas.

Readers of this blog will take interest in Century’s Son because of Morgan, one of the novel’s main characters. Morgan is a former union organizer who later returned to his rank-and-file job. He was a sanitation worker in a Illinois town who helped organize his local in the ‘70s (probably with AFSCME or SEIU, but Boswell doesn’t specify) and then became a much-respected leader of his local union. But after the tragic death of his son, Morgan returns to his job driving a garbage truck, struggling to move ahead with his life despite constant reminders of the loss of his son.

It’s hard to think of another recent American novel that contains such a rich and unstereotyped portrait of a “union guy.”

Fact: Given that so much of the political debate nationally (and in Washington State, locally) is dominated by tax issues, I highly recommend The Great Tax Wars: From Lincoln to T.R. to Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America by Steven Weisman.

I thought it would be a chore to get through this one, but Weisman actually makes the topic interesting. In many ways the book is really a short economic history of the U.S. after the Civil War, and it helps explain how grassroots support for a fairer tax system gained strength in the early years of the 20th century. Smart progressives should take a look at how that happened in the first place.

(If you have any interest in buying these or any other books, make sure you get them at Portland, Oregon’s Powells.com, which is both the best book store in the country and an ILWU shop.)

2002-12-25T16:07:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays

Christmas greetings from the staff of the Joe Kenehan Center.

We hope you had a chance to catch It's A Wonderful Life on TV this Christmastime, because it's such a compelling articulation of progressive values like solidarity and community. I confess I hadn't watched it all the way through until a few years ago. When I finally did, I was startled to hear such full-throated economically populist arguments in a film that's too often dismissed as an over-sentimental Christmas tearjerker.

George Bailey's speeches -- at the board meeting after his father dies and his plea to his customers to have faith in the savings trust -- are remarkable. I seriously believe should be included alongside Cuomo's 1984 keynote, FDR's 1936 inaugural, Jesse Jackson's 1988 convention address, and any of King's speeches as important arguments for a better America.

Battle of the Bands '02

The staff of the center has been enjoying the holidays, keeping us from blogging. On Saturday I was drafted by my schoolteacher little brother to serve as an alumni judge at our alma mater, where he's teaching 9th grade World History.

To their credit, this year's battle participants were noticeably better than I remember my contemporaries being. Nervestruck won with a polished set of rap-metal. On my card I had The Undesirables coming in second, based on their charming NBA game style introduction and their punkish cover of John Denver's "Leavin' On A Jetplane." (R.I.P. Strummer). Other standouts included Nerd Warfare, who dazzled during their soundcheck but turned in a slightly lackluster set when their turn came. They definitely lost points with a by-the-numbers, uninspired cover of BTO's "Takin' Care of Business", which summed up the unfortunate failure of nerve that undermined the rest of their performance.

2002-12-12T21:59:00.000-08:00

Voting on the Docks

A fairly good overview of the situation in the West Coast ports from the LA Weekly. The ILWU membership is currently debating whether to accept their tentative contract agreement. (The piece is weakened, however, by a few glaring factual clunkers -- founding ILWU president Harry Bridges joined the Industrial Workers of the World as a young man, not the International Workers of the World, and AFL-CIO president John Sweeney came out of SEIU, not AFSMCE.)

The Health Care Enron

This Los Angeles Times article takes a look at a the internal culture at Tenet, a for-profit health care corporation that was touted as a revolutionary innovator in health care much the same way Enron supposedly remade the energy industry. Tenet is facing a growing fraud scandal. The story details a go-go money culture--the company’s CEO cashed in $110 million in stock options last year--that induced Tenet managers to cut corners. But hey, these are just hospitals -- it's only people's lives that are at stake, right?

Acceptable Class Warfare

Don’t miss Nathan Newman on the kind of class warfare conservatives love to wage -- attacks on those American union members who still have good wages, secure health care, and a decent retirement.

2002-12-09T23:28:00.000-08:00

Steve Earle: Union Yes

Steve Earle, during his set opening for Pearl Jam last night, remembered that the survival of the Quecreek Mine Nine was the just about the best news of the past year. Everybody agrees about that.

Refreshingly, Earle went on introduce “Harlan Man” by pointing out that that without previous sacrifices by union miners, none of the safety procedures that saved those men’s lives would have been in place.

More Ideas for a New Union Movement

Tom Geoghegan and Barbara Ehrenreich team up to offer more suggestions for reviving American unions, including a variation on the “open membership” model that a lot of people are talking about but to my knowledge nobody is really putting into action.

Other Union News . . .

John Judis on Bush and the Carpenters

ABC News on unions and the future of the Democrats.

Gram’s Ghost

Here’s a nice New York Times piece on the continuing intense interest in Gram Parsons and his short life. Two major G.P. movies are in the works, including a Keith Richards-produced project based on Ben Fong-Torre’s biography.

2002-12-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

Conservatives and Federalism: the Hypocrisy of It All

One of the least-essential myths in politics today is that conservatives favor a less active federal government.

They don’t, of course. The right is perfectly willing to use federal power to advance the goals of corporate special interests, regardless of whether it means trampling over the rights of the states that conservatives claim to hold sacrosanct.

Striking example du jour: New York State recently passed a law that bars health care institutions from diverting tax dollars to pay for campaigns against employees’ efforts to organize a union. But the Bush Administration is moving to stop New York from making this reform.

Virtually all American health care employers are dependent on state and federal funding in the form of Medicaid and Medicare. Currently, just about everyone in the health care sector agrees that there aren’t enough of those tax dollars to go around. Yet when health care workers try to form a union so they can have a stronger voice about how our tax dollars get used, employers routinely waste some of that money to hire hugely expensive outside consultants who run a campaign against the pro-union staffers.

The New York legislature decided that taxpayers deserved to know that their resources were being devoted to patients and health care, not to campaigns against nurses and caregivers.

Now, the Bush Labor Department is warning New York that this new law could be illegal, supposedly because it’s a deviation from the federal National Labor Relations Act. But really it’s because in this particular case a state’s action threatens powerful special interests—and therefore it’s okay to use federal power to defend those interests.

Here’s an excerpt from a November 26 Albany Times Union story (which I can’t find online):

LABOR NEUTRALITY LAW UNDER SCRUTINY IN ALBANY
Federal officials raise flag on bar to use of state funds to encourage or discourage union activity
by James M. Odanto

Federal labor officials have "serious concerns" with a new state law that muzzles employers during union organizing drives because it could infringe on free speech.

The law was strongly desired by influential unions and signed into law shortly before this year's election by Gov. George Pataki. It bars employers from the right to "freely discuss labor relations issues," according to an Oct. 30 letter from the National Labor Relations Board staff.

In the letter, a federal lawyer tells state Labor Commissioner Linda Angello that the National Labor Relations Act probably pre-empts the state's "labor neutrality" law.

Of course, if a state wants to weaken the protections the National Labor Relations Act extends to working people, then conservatives are all in favor of doing that.

Example: “Right To Work” laws, which allow states to deviate from the federal law and ban workers from negotiating an agreement with their employers that sets up a requirement that everybody covered by the contract has to pay their fair share of maintaining the union.

2002-12-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

The Union Press

Here’s a spate of stories about unrest in the nation’s newsrooms:

The BeLo Corporation threatens to fire any Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise employees who dare to keep a pro-union e-mail in their inboxes. (It's unlikely BeLo could be punished for this. Keep that in mind the next time a conservative bloviates on about how labor law prevents companies from "defending themselves against the unions.")

Dow Jones’ CEO gets flustered when Wall Street Journal employees at a company “town hall” meeting angrily ask why their co-workers get fired because of budget belt-tightening while he gets a $80,000 raise. His answer: feeble, unconvincing platitudes about the nature of capitalism.

The suburban D.C. Journal Newspapers Inc. fires staffers just a few days before a union election.

2002-12-04T21:49:00.000-08:00

Read the Letter

It’s hard to imagine that Ron Suskind’s upcoming Esquire piece can be much better than John DiIulio’s scalding letter discussing the day-to-day operations at the Bush White House. If you haven’t read the letter yet, it’s here.

2002-12-01T23:28:00.000-08:00

Why Johnny Can’t Organize

Within the labor movement, the crisis of figuring out how to organize a stronger, larger union movement has been a topic of discussion, concern, and alarm for so long that it sometimes seems like there’s not much more new to say.

That’s why it’s so important to take a look at this Labor Notes article by Stephen Lerner, the director of the SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign.

Progressive union members and leaders have long blamed our own unions for not doing more to reach out to nonunion employees. Lerner takes this analysis a big step further, arguing that the very structure of today’s labor movement discourages the creation of effective unions.

Joe Kenehan Center Christmas Gift Tips

If you decide to give some historic photos as gifts this year, make sure you don’t pay the New York Times for what you already own.

The Times’ e-commerce division offers pricey selections from the Times archives. Most of the images are their photos, so they can name their price.

What’s irritating is that the Times will also sell you photos that are public property, for a huge markup. Roughly 600 percent for this classic 1936 Dorthea Lange photo of a migrant farmworker and her children in California.

Dorothea Lange took the photo while she was working for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. That means the photograph was and is owned by the American public.

You can see Lange's photo and thousands of other amazing photos from New Deal art projects at this web site, part of the Library of Congress’ American Memory project.

The Times wants $195 for an 11x14 print of the photo. The Library of Congress will let you have it for the cost of reproduction -- about $25.

2002-11-19T18:58:00.000-08:00

Must See Alt-Country

If you live on the West Coast, you should try to make it to one of the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers’ shows as they finish their tour this week. They played a sloppy yet completely endearing show at The Tractor in Seattle last night. For some people Victoria Williams’ voice is an acquired taste, but I think everyone could agree that her interpretation of “Moon River”—which they closed with last night—is beautiful.

In related news, The Jayhawks have resurfaced on Lost Highway records and are supposed to have a new album out in April.

Red-Baiting Redux

Others have already justly ridiculed Balnint Vaznoyni’s hysterical Washington Times column warning that Nancy Pelosi is a stealth totalitarian.

It doesn’t say a lot for the Times’ op-ed page that they give a forum to a guy who insists that the very presence of non-whites on TV news teams is proof enough that an authoritarian quota system has been imposed on American business--because otherwise black people aren't qualified to do the weather, right?

Vaznoyni make this observation on a “Booknotes” interview a few years ago:

BRIAN LAMB: B--back to the anchor thing--and the reason I brought it up is
'cause I remember you referring to the fact that there are usually
four anchors on a television news show on a local basis, and--two of
'em news, t--one of 'em weather, one of 'em sports, and that there is
always a racial mix: Hispanic, a black, a woman and all that. Have
you noticed this as you've traveled around in all the cities that you
go to?

Mr. VAZSONYI: Mostly. Mostly.

LAMB: And what does that mean, if that's the case?

Mr. VAZSONYI: Well, what it means is that we live in a world of
quotas, which I consider as much running counter to American
principles as anything possibly could and that, as part of the
30-years war, forces have surfaced in this country which have somehow
brought about a con--the condition in which radio stations and
television sta--television is special, of course, because it's
visual--feel that they need to show this kind of a mix or they will be
in trouble, and--and people do get in trouble. I mean, there
is--there is no question that there's a quota system in the
universities, at the workplace, with federal contracts. I mean,
it's--it's a hotly debated topic.

It would be easier to dismiss Valziony as an isolated crank on the right if various House Republicans weren’t launching similarly ludicrous attacks at the same time against Brazil’s President Lula in a clumsy attempt to turn him the next Daniel Ortega.

2002-11-18T00:45:00.000-08:00

Klein vs. Reich

What role can American workers and their unions play in renewing the Democratic Party?

If you listen to Joe Klein, it’d be better if working people disbanded their unions and let the DLC handle things from now on.

In an exchange with Robert Reich in Slate, Klein assigns unions a huge share of the blame for any number of problems facing America. This is nothing new in the cyberpages of Slate, where Mickey Kaus is a reliable and consistent basher of all things union.

What’s irritating about Klein’s portrayal of the labor movement is that it’s not serious analysis but a lazy caricature. Klein’s labor movement is two groups of people: xenophobic UAW guys and incompetent public school teachers who couldn’t care less about kids. And nobody else, really.

To Reich’s credit, he fills in some of the gaps. He uses my own union, SEIU, as an example of a union that’s growing in both the private and public sectors. Reich gets some of the details wrong about the kinds of workers who are joining SEIU, but his main point -- that employees in the post-industrial service economy need a stronger voice -- is crucial.

Given that folks like Klein are largely unconcerned with issues of economic fairness, it’s not surprising that he can’t be bothered to talk about unions without flinging around cliches.

2002-11-13T21:49:00.000-08:00

Why Did Boeing Leave Seattle?

When Boeing executives left the Pacific Northwest for Chicago, they muttered excuses about traffic and the “business climate.”

Personally, I think they were all too well aware of the social and human consquences of their plans to drastically cut production in the Puget Sound area. And they didn’t want to have to read stories like this with their morning latte: Laid-Off Boeing Worker Barricades Himself In Home, Is Killed By Police.

Ted Olson, Union Man

In a bizarre twist, the Bush Justice Department took a pro-worker position on a case that could have headed to the Supreme Court, agreeing with the UFCW that organizing more workers helps improve standards for everyone. Therefore, workers who legally refuse to pay their full union dues because of personal ideological dislike of unions can’t use their ideology as an excuse for refusing to support organizing.

Ted Olson argued the point for the Bush Administration, to the bewilderment of the Joe Kenehan Center and to the disgust of certain right-wing groups.

Bush’s efforts to make nice with some unions is causing some grumbling on the right, as indicated by this Washington Times op-ed.

Borders Workers on the Move

Borders Bookstore employees in Minneapolis voted to join the UFCW on October 18, and now employees at a store in Ann Arbor say they want to form a union. The employees are communicating about their campaign with this web site.

New Think Tank Launched

A new player in the battle of ideas: the Commonweal Institute.

2002-11-12T23:02:00.000-08:00

Better Days, Eh?

Over the weekend the staff of the Joe Kenehan Center tried to get our minds off of the election by fleeing to Canada for a few days.

Long enough to enjoy the excellent Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, the even better Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and a functioning transit system that puts Seattle to shame.

Because voters in Vancouver head to the polls on November 16, I found myself getting sucked into following another election campaign. It looked like things were on a better track up north. A coalition of progressives is poised to turn out a conservative administration that’s held power in Vancouver for about a decade. After returning I stumbled across The Vancouver Scrum, an impressive blog that’s tracking the latest developments in British Columbia politics.

CD Buyer Guide

As long as you ignore the cover of “Desperado” (with an atrocious guest vocal by Don Henley himself), Johnny Cash’s new Rick Rubin-produced album is as strong as the previous three. Even if the album were full of bad Eagles covers, Cash’s gorgeous and haunting version of “Danny Boy” alone would probably cancel those out.

2002-11-07T21:16:00.000-08:00

The Day After the Day After

Harold Meyerson was out of the gate early with his analysis of what went wrong for the Democrats. An obvious problem was indicated in an AFL-CIO election night poll that showed union members were baffled about the Dems’ agenda for creating jobs and economic growth.

Here in Washington State, the picture wasn’t much prettier than it was nationally. The big surprise was that anti-tax crusader Tim Eyman’s latest ballot initiative, a car tax cap that will effectively defund several transit projects in the Puget Sound area, passed easily.

What was weird was that there was not much of a public campaign about I-776. The op-ed pages and letters to the editor columns were dominated with debate about R-51 (a gas tax to fund another hodgepodge of transportation projects) and a new tax in Seattle to build a monorail. But nobody was talking about I-776.

Eyman had hardly any campaign money and he was seen as deeply wounded by a personal campaign finance scandal. The unions and the environmental groups pretty much ignored him this time.

Also, the media’s statewide polls showed I-776 losing badly. A KCPQ-TV poll showed it down by 16 points less than a week before the election, and a KOMO/Seattle Post-Intelligencer survey had it going down by about that much the week before that. The media's pre-election polls seem to be getting much less accurate.

The end result meant that Washingtonians were subjected to another night of Tim Eyman’s shit-eating victory grin on TV. You could actually see the guy’s ego double by the half-second.

Eyman’s already announced his next initiative: a permanent ban on public investment in just about anything, accomplished by requiring a 75 percent majority in the legislature for any tax or fee increase.

The Battle for the Future

The New York Time’s Steven Greenhouse on Wal-Mart employees’ campaign to join the UFCW.

2002-11-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

Lula On The Spot

Take a look at this smart performance by Brazil’s President Lula in a hostile interview with the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth.

Weymouth testily badgers Lula with silly, simplistic questions like “[t]here are two ways to generate growth: the free market or the socialist model that relies on the state. Which course will you follow?” Lula reminds her about a little thing called the New Deal:

I don't think that the state has to manage companies. I remember what President [Franklin] Roosevelt did with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The state's role is to plan, stimulate development with incentives and, if necessary, provide funding in partnership with the private sector.

He also calls attention to some important differences between himself and Chavez in Venezuela, is upfront about his attitude towards Castro, and provides a sobering reminder of where he came from. The whole interview is worth reading.

2002-10-31T19:59:00.000-08:00

More Eggs

Check out this account of the living wage campaign in Santa Monica by Edmund Newton in the LA Weekly. It seems like this fight has been going on forever -- Santa Monica’s business interests got a fake living wage proposal onto the ballot a few years ago that voters sniffed out and rejected. Now a real living wage initiative is on the ballot, and the big beachfront hotels are paying for a fake grassroots campaign to oppose it.

Meanwhile, one of the hotel workers campaigning for the initiative explains what’s in it for her family: “More food. Más huevitos. More eggs."

Also in the Weekly: Minnesota expats in L.A. -- including the voice of the “brand that fits” Lee jeans commercials -- gather for a wake to remember Paul Wellstone.

Trick or Treat

Don Slack, the indispensable host of KEXP’s “Swingin’ Doors” alternative country show, treated listeners to a spin of Don Sovine’s classic “Phantom 309” a little earlier tonight. It’s an oddly appropriate Halloween song, in a way -- a sentimental ballad about the kindly ghost of a trucker who died swerving to miss a stalled school bus and now acts as a spectral Good Samaritan. Treat yourself to a listen.

2002-10-30T22:41:00.000-08:00

More On Wellstone

Harold Meyerson writes the definitive appreciation.

The New Republic includes a nice tribute from Jonathan Cohn and posts a 1977 piece from Wellstone himself about North Carolina textile workers fighting to organize a union.

It Ain’t Over On The Docks

The shipping employers are hoping the Justice Department will bring the weight of the federal government down on the ILWU. Read the ILWU’s response here.

David Bacon digs for details I haven't read anywhere else in the LA Weekly. This Labor Notes piece also has good analysis of the shipping companies’ strategy.

2002-10-25T17:21:00.000-07:00

Remembering Paul

It’s been a gray and empty day ever since I first heard about Wellstone.

His loss is awful, even more so because it started to look like he was going to withstand the furious and well-funded campaign against him and win another six years.

My strongest memory of him is a wonderful speech he gave to health care workers in my union a few years ago in Pittsburgh. He talked about how often voters came up to him to ask why it’s so hard to get affordable health care. He was one of the few leaders willing to say how embarrassing it is that this country spends so much money for a health care system that is so inefficient and inadequate.

I’ve had the little “thanks for donating” postcard from Wellstone’s campaign magneted up on our refrigerator for months—it’s just a simple drawing of Paul standing next to the his green campaign bus.

I love that card. In the drawing, Wellstone looks welcoming, like he’s beckoning you aboard a campaign for a better country. The bus reminds me of how Woody Guthrie and Curtis Mayfield and Bruce Springsteen have written songs using trains as symbols of hope for change for the better.

Wellstone became one of my heroes because he was honest about our challenges and serious about finding solutions.

All Too Common

Sam Heldman deals with his grief by angrily recounting a depressingly familiar story about how feeble American labor law is.

2002-10-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

Eyman Hits The Wall?

Tim Eyman, Washington State’s slick young anti-tax crusader, might be losing momentum. After several years of successfully using the ballot initiative to limit taxes or cap public spending in various ways, his latest initiative is apparently not getting much traction.

A new Seattle Post-Intelligencer poll shows I-776 not even getting 50 percent support in fervently anti-tax Spokane.

I think people are just getting tired of Tim. There’s been little coverage of him or his initiative this election season, he’s out of money, and most of his traditional opponents are pretty much ignoring him.

2002-10-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

Most Pathetic Statement of the Day

The Supreme Court -- to its credit -- didn’t act on a chance to put the powerful ahead of the people on Monday. It let stand a California law that guarantees public access to beaches along the Golden State’s coastline.

Various super-rich property owners who want to discourage the citizenry from actually enjoying our public lands have sought the right to privatize the beaches in front of their estates.

The Court’s decision not to hear a challenge to the law -- brought by wealthy beachfront estate owner Wendy McCaw, owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press -- prompted McCaw to actually say that she is “disappointed about the court's nondecision. My hope is the U.S. Supreme Court will come around as it did with civil rights and stop the California Coastal Commission from expropriating private property.”

Apparently McCaw has found an early draft version of Thurgood Marshall's NAACP suit in Brown vs. Board of Education where he argued that the wrongs of racial discrimination in education could certainly never be righted until the rich had their own private beaches.

2002-10-21T21:38:00.000-07:00

Reassessing the Fifties

Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine cover piece on the rise of the super rich and the decline of the middle class says a lot of things that need to be said, obviously.

What Krugman leaves out, unfortunately, in any mention of the role that unions played in these events. He looks back longingly at the middle part of the last century as a “interregnum” between two Gilded Ages, when the average working person didn‘t live in a completely different nation, economically, than the business elite. That period of time, of course, was also the high tide of the American labor movement.

Krugman’s acknowledgement of the better nature of those years reminds me a lot of a book that is one of better works of history I’ve read in the past few years -- Jack Metzgar’s Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered. Metzgar’s book is remarkable not just for the writing, which is dazzling, but also for the fresh look he takes at the years Krugman’s talking about.

Metzgar’s book is a memoir of his family’s climb up the economic ladder, framed around the events of a national strike by the United Steelworkers of America in 1959. That strike was the biggest in American history, but I’d never even heard of it until I’d read Metzgar’s book.

What’s striking about Metzgar’s book is how it clashes with the conventional liberal (and in many ways the mainstream) view of American history, by glorifying the ‘50s. Today, the ‘50s are often remembered by progressives mostly as a time to be mocked -- the stale gray Eisenhower times that were followed at last by the revolutionary Sixties. But Metzgar points out that a lot of people looked back fondly on those years not so much out of a Hilton Krameresque nostalgia for clean-cut, “upstanding” America but because their families gained so much ground economically during that time.

Union membership reached its zenith in 1953. During that decade, the average working family made significant, real improvements in its standard of living. (I wish I could quote from Metzgar’s book, but I loaned my copy to a scofflaw friend who’s still hoarding it. But take my word for it that he gathers a lot of impressive numbers to show how big the gains were.)

Obviously, for the hip and the hip-at-heart there’s a lot to scorn in pre-Elvis American culture, and pro-union folks also have reasons to glance back at the ‘50s with doubt. By 1959, the USWA was far removed from the dramatic organizing drives of the CIO-SWOC. The merger between the CIO and the AFL in 1955 was largely a victory for the more conservative, plodding vision of the AF of L. Calcification had set in and the unions were starting their long decline.

But again, Metzgar challenges that history. He remembers how committed his dad and his uncles were to the union and to winning the strike. To them, the union hadn't stopped being anything except a vibrant and life-changing force for good.

I’m not sure I agree with everything Metzgar writes, but believe me it’s a fantastic book.

Certainly, there were still a lot of people who didn't gain much ground in the ‘50s (See Harrington, Michael: The Other America), but Krugman and Metzgar both make important points about how strange, in a sense, the mid-1900s were for America. For some time at least American working people had a stronger voice in their democracy and their economy.

This Also Needed To Be Said

Props to the Post's Dana Milbank for noting how often and shamelessly Bush simply makes it up (and then sends Ari out to insist that 2+2 is indeed 47.)

2002-10-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

SoCal Report

The Joe Kenehan Center staff was briefly in Los Angeles earlier this week—just long enough to spend a little too much money during a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Amoeba, Rockaway, and Aron’s.

(Sightings . . . Beachwood Sparks drummer Aaron Sperske moonlighting as a record clerk at Amoeba.)

Speaking of Los Angeles, somehow I missed posting this excellent Harold Meyerson piece about the LA Weekly’s successful effort to stop its advertising staff from forming a union. It's a good history of employee-management relations at the paper and it's all the better because Meyerson doesn’t try to excuse away how wrong it was for the Weekly to resort to those tactics.

2002-10-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

Investing for Change

In the days before most of us had heard about Enron’s Raptors, market utopians would wonder at the sight of the “people’s capitalism” that America had built.

These folks would note that American workers -- through their union pension funds -- watched over billions in investments. This, the marker zealots smugly told us, meant that loosely fettered markets had created a “workers’ society” far more giving than anything Michael Harrington or Irving Howe could’ve imagined.

But now that one major pension fund is actually throwing the ball downfield for the benefit of social and human good -- rather than just trying to do its fiduciary duty and avoid quarterly third and longs -- the market enthusiasts aren’t exactly happy about it.

2002-10-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

What If We Put the Whiner In Charge?

Tim Eyman finally takes a shot at responding to the taunts that all he does is bash government but never puts forward his vision for how things should change. (Eyman is a leader of a ballot initiative movement in Washington State. For the past several years he’s led annual campaigns to put anti-tax initiatives on the ballot, and he’s been wildly successful. He’s operating under a bit of cloud this year, however. After years of claiming that he made no money from the campaigns, he was forced to admit that he was secretly paying himself a comfortable salary from the campaign’s donations. He paid a fine to settle campaign finance charges.)

In a Seattle Weekly cover story, Eyman tries to explain how things would be “If I Ran Seattle.”

Once you get past the wooden writing, it’s dismaying to see just how little substance there is to Eyman’s politics. Given this opportunity to make a new statement, he says nothing new. It's just more of his familiar complaints against various government projects, (including some that everyone agrees are indeed off course.)

And that’s about it. No solutions other than Smaller Government.

According to Eyman, politicians are obsessed with “BIG projects.” Fine. But how exactly is knee-jerk opposition to major change going to help Seattle solve some problems that are indeed rather BIG?

Sadly, a lot of cities have moved towards Eyman’s vaunted Smaller Government, with lousy results. My friend Jim McNeill makes that clear in this review in The American Prospect of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, a book by Eric Klinenberg that recounts a terrible heat wave that killed 700 Chicagoans in 1995. The city of Chicago had privatized much of its social service safety net for the elderly, and the leaner and meaner private agencies failed dismally when put to the test.

Eyman is correct on one count. Washington’s tax system is appallingly unfair. Washington has no income tax and as a result the tax burden hits middle class working people extra hard. It’s important that our state fixes this problem, but Eyman is exploiting people’s frustration at a flawed system to make things even worse.

2002-10-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

Longshore Fallout

Regarding the political fallout of Boy George’s move against the ILWU:

This USA Today piece speculates that it’ll provoke a backlash with union voters.

Steven Greenhouse reports that White House is indeed concerned about that result.

This post on The New Republic’s blog (unsigned, but my hunch is that it’s from John Judis) wonders how this will affect Bush’s relations with the Teamsters and Carpenters.

For what it’s worth, the Teamsters endorsed Jeb Bush’s opponent today.

Also: Max Sawicky crunches the numbers on West Coast dockworkers' pay.

Neutral for One Side

The Washington Post reports that Bush huddled up with corporate America to give them a heads up on his game plan against the longshore workers, but didn’t communicate in good faith with the workers.

And Joshua Micah Marshall points out that Bush’s mediator between the parties, Eugene Scalia, has a blatant conflict of interest: the shipping employers were his clients when he was a corporate lawyer.

2002-10-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

Battle on the Docks

As I came home from work tonight Seattle’s Elliott Bay was crowded with container ships waiting to catch up on lost time.

Nathan Newman has already written persuasively about the larger consequences of Bush’s decision to invoke Taft-Hartley, so read him if you haven’t already.

This Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece has good background on the inglorious history of the law Harry S. Truman called the “slave-labor bill.”

A few more thoughts:

It’s not surprising, but still disappointing, that the White House clumsily exploits the international crisis as an excuse for intervening. Bush claimed that the port shutdown jeopardizes “our military” -- never mind that both the ILWU and the employers had offered to move military cargo, the same as they made exceptions for supplies for Alaska. (And now that the ports are open there apparently isn’t any special effort underway to move military cargo first.)

Another puzzler: this NY Times piece co-bylined by Steven Greenhouse has unnamed White House figures arguing that “labor itself was divided over the issue.” Huh? Which unions are applauding this? The Teamsters strongly condemn Bush’s move in the same story, and Hoffa himself called Bush’s decision “open union-busting.”

The “liberal” media continues to botch key points of the story. I frequently hear that the ILWU is “opposed to new technology,” which isn’t true. Most media accounts seem to accept at face value the shipping companies’ accusations that working safely is really slow-motion sabotage -- without reporting on the five on-the-job deaths at West Coast ports this year.

2002-10-08T00:50:00.000-07:00

Being Big Pharma

Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby on what happens when a pharmaceutical lobbyist’s Power Pointed rhetoric about innovation and intellectual property runs into real world accounts of health care in the Global South.

When it’s too uncomfortable for the industry to demand higher profits outright, there's always pretend support.

More on the GOP, Unions, and Strange Bedfellows

The infant New York Sun weighs in here and here.

2002-10-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

Labor History in Action

This Seattle Times article highlights how International Longshore and Warehouse Union members’ reverent, serious treatment of their union’s history helps maintain unity and purpose during the current lockout. New ILWU members are required to learn about the union’s history and the longshore workers have won a paid holiday for Harry Bridges' birthday. It’s enough to make Lynne Cheney proud.

Steven Greenhouse’s overview of the lockout shows how longshore workers in the U.S. and around the world are using their strategic position in the global economy to protect good jobs.

The More They Stay The Same, II

One year after the scandals started to ripple across corporate America, things are pretty much business as usual.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Americans are paying more and getting less for their health care.

Meanwhile, Richard Scrushy, the CEO of for-profit health care provider HealthSouth is in good shape. He can relax at his $3 million weekend mansion and get back to work on HealthSouth’s private airline (7 planes, 1 helicopter) manned by 14 full-time pilots.

2002-10-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

What Would Willie Do?

Check out Adam Gopnik’s enlightening profile of Willie Nelson in the current New Yorker.

Johnny Cash gets all the acclaim with the handsomely packaged re-release of his Columbia catalog and his recent Rick Rubin projects, but Willie has also put out a number of good records lately (as long as you ignore the embarrassingly awful Great Divide, Willie’s album from the beginning of this year).

2002-10-04T18:19:00.000-07:00

The More They Stay the Same

Congressional Republicans are going back to basics: working hard to coddle powerful corporations. Embattled SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt was considering supporting TIAA-CREF executive John Biggs to head a new accounting oversight board, but now that Big Accounting and its Republican lackeys are yelping in protest he’s backing away.

The accounting industry is touting a hand-picked candidate who's described as someone who in the past “has been very loyal to the profession and maybe was a little reluctant to meet the profession head on.”

Go Lula, Go Lula

Will Lula get 50 percent?

2002-10-03T21:46:00.000-07:00

Sweden on the West Coast

Check out Nathan Newman on the big momentum shift in the land of Nixon and Reagan. The Los Angeles Times goes back to find out how the United Farmworkers persuaded Gov. Davis to ignore agribusiness’ fierce objections and sign farm labor reform legislation.

Oh, That Income

Washington State Sen. Joe Zarelli has had a rough week. First, word leaked out that Zarelli, a conservative Republican, didn’t bother to mention his $32,800 legislative salary when he filed for unemployment after getting laid off from his day job. Zarelli insisted that this is no big deal because other legislators do this sort of thing all the time. But it turns out that‘s not true.

None of this is coming at a good time for Zarelli's run for Congress against Rep. Brian Baird.

Labor and the Party of Lincoln

The Forward’s take on unions reaching out to the GOP.

2002-10-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

Workplace News Roundup

California farmworkers like Baudelio Aguayo and Jose Garcia explain why it's important that Gray Davis signed a bill to prod agribusiness to conduct real negotiations with the people who work the fields, David Bacon files an update on the West Coast port lockout in the American Prospect, and Boston Herald columnist Margary Eagan explores the rat factor in Boston’s janitor strike.

Shame on the Weekly

The LA Weekly’s effort to stop its advertising staff from uniting with the paper’s journalists in a union succeeded, unfortunately. It’s all too common a result when an employer decides to interfere with its employees’ right to form a union.

Management says that now it’s time to heal, but Erin Aubry-Kaplan -- one of the Weekly’s best writers and president of the journalists’ union -- says it‘s more complicated than that: "I'm not interested in healing, because it just sounds like a cover-up. I'm interested in the issues, and they are not resolved. This isn't going to die. This campaign was a defining moment for us because it showed people here in their true light as nothing has before. We assumed the paper stood for certain things, and it turns out not all of it does."

2002-10-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

Unrest

West Coast ports are shut down because the ILWU is locked out. Conservatives urge Bush to rattle the Taft-Hartley saber, while the predictably anti-worker Seattle Times editorial page lectures Longshore workers to get with the program and understand that the march of progress means destroying good jobs.

Janitors in downtown Beantown are on strike. You can support them here.

The GOP and the Unions

From the American Prospect . . . David Bacon writes about Bush's efforts to use the war as a political weapon against the labor movement. Harold Meyerson on the markedly different reasons why some unions are reaching out to a few Republican officials.

Gray Did The Right Thing

Give California’s Governor at least a little credit. In the past week Gray Davis signed legislation to strengthen farmworkers' ability to negotiate with their employers, an innovative new family leave bill, and set first-of-their kinds rules to establish minimum staffing levels for nurses in hospitals.

2002-09-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

Blame the System

Another take on corporate corruption. In a New Yorker piece (not available online) economist Michael Jenson responds to the “few bad apples” theory.

“It is important to recognize that this doesn’t come about as a result of crooks. This comes about as a result of honest people being subjected to forces they don’t understand. The forces are very strong, and this evolves over a period of time. You end up with highly moral, honest people doing dishonest things. It wasn’t as if the Mafia had taken over corporate America. We are too quick to say -- and the media feed this -- that if a bad thing happens it’s because a bad person did it, and that person had evil intentions. It is much more likely that there were some bad systems in place.”

Jensen should know. The article explains how starting in the early 1970s Jensen and his colleague Kevin Murphy helped build consensus for expanding stock options for executives, convinced they would provide incentives for responsible leadership. Instead, the stock option craze touched off a frenzy of greed and created a broad invitation to commit fraud.

Wear That Flag

This Fox News piece about companies that refuse to allow workers to wear American flag pins at work somehow ignores why these companies actually create these policies.

Is it because these managers are secretly Chomsky-loving leftists? Of course not. They won’t let workers wear a flag pin because they are terrified that allowing Old Glory buttons on the job would mean that they couldn’t stop employees from wearing a pro-union pin.

Federal labor law bans employers from permitting one kind of button but prohibiting another. Therefore anti-worker consultants routinely advise employers to issue broad “no public display” policies to try to discourage employees from getting the crazy idea that they have the right to form a union.

No Sweat

SweatX, an apparel manufacturer that operates with a respectful relationship with its employees’ union, is thriving.

2002-09-26T00:26:00.000-07:00

Depressing Development of the Day

The LA Weekly -- which for my money is the best weekly paper in the country -- is fighting to stop its advertising staff from forming a union.

Given the LA Weekly’s careful attention to important union news in the City of Angels and its principled editorial support for LA’s growing Latino-led labor movement (especially when Harold Meyerson was at the helm), this is a very sad turn.

LA Weekly reporters have been members of the Machinists for a long time, but when other staff started to organize, the corporate owners of the LA Weekly apparently ordered a full campaign of interference. Same old stuff -- employees have been required to attend mandatory anti-union meetings, employees have been warned that organizing a union will jeopardize their existing pay and benefits, and other standard tactics.

When queried by a reporter, the Weekly’s management reverts to the same public talking points employers always use to spin a campaign to stop employees from organizing : our staff has the right to form a union, but we don’t think it’s in “their interest.” We can’t agree to a card check because we want employees to have a “free and fair choice.” We’re not anti-union, we’re “pro-democracy.”

Proving Dick Wrong

At least the Weekly’s obnoxious public spin is somewhat more thoughtful than this howler on graduate student teachers organizing with the UAW. Cornell grad student Joseph Sabia struggles mightily to make a coherent argument against TA unions, but instead he succeeds mostly in undermining Dick Armey’s grand theory on conservatives’ innate intellectual vigor.

Looking back at chestnuts like this, Sabia is clearly hard at work at this task.

Faces from the Past

The public library in Everett, Washington has launched a new online exhibit on the 1916 Everett Massacre. On November 6, 1916, sheriff deputies and a vigilante mob murdered as many as 17 IWW members who attempted to speak in public in Everett about their union.

Take a look at these eerily vivid mug shots of the Wobblies who were arrested that day.

2002-09-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Beating The Mob

A fascinating piece in the Village Voice on how a greedy real estate owner in New York City unsuccessfully tried to put his union janitors on the street. The plan was to replace the union members with workers from a shady cleaning contractor from New Jersey who had a sweetheart contract with a sham union. The contractor also used to serve in New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman’s administration.

Oh, and the mob was getting a cut for putting the whole deal together.

Help The Bands Get Paid

Most music fans have heard plenty of stories about how musicians get screwed by their record label. In light of what happened to Arthur Anderson, the entertainment industry’s famously dishonest accounting is coming under closer scrutiny.

(Caveat: folks like Don Henley and Glenn Frey get a lot of play in the story. I strongly suspect they’ve already got theirs and the Joe Kenehan Center has long stood with The Dude in sharing a strong dislike of The Eagles, man. )

2002-09-23T23:30:00.000-07:00

Midwest Retail Workers Joining Together

First, underpaid and underappreciated workers at Whole Foods in Madison formed a union, the first successful organizing at the comfortably profitable national chain of yuppie organic grocery stores.

Now their counterparts at a Borders Books & Music in Minneapolis will vote on October 18 to decide whether to join the UFCW.

The Whole Foods employees innovated by using a website to distribute information to their co-workers during their organizing campaign. Apparently retail workers in the Twin Cities are doing the same thing.

Suddenly, Profiles of Non-CEOs

The Sunday New York Times checks in on Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove.

Also in the Times . . .

Citigroup’s close relationship with Worldcom looks bad and has various Wall Street-ers turning on each other.

A Harvard Business School professor concludes that corporate executives are overpaid, don’t really change much at their companies.

Tim Eyman’s Last Dance?

A Seattle Times piece on the possible exhaustion of the anti-tax ballot initiative movements in Washington and Oregon. Union members in Oregon get credit for talking to other voters about the consequences of extreme anti-tax intiatives. It's not unusual for voters in Washington to approve initiatives to both expand public services and cut taxes -- on the same ballot -- so something's got to give.

Finally . . .

Don’t miss Nathan Newman’s weekly labor news roundup.

2002-09-19T22:59:00.000-07:00

Changed, (Not Really) Utterly

Is gravity finally affecting compensation for American CEOs?

While there are signs that it might be -- Jack Welch will have to pay for his drycleaning. The Conference Board bashes the rich. Alan Greenspan’s possible successor gives a preachy speech denouncing CEO pay -- Nick Penniman points out in The American Prospect that the disgust with CEOs hasn’t quite jelled into a broad movement yet.

Reconsidering the 90s

Former Clinton Administration economist Joseph Stiglitz looks back at the 1990s economy. Stiglitz continues to expose weaknesses in the Washington Consensus on free trade and also points out that America pretty much ignored an early example of deregulation gone bad: the S&L crisis that closed the 80s.

Boeing Leaves The Building

Boeing made all kinds of excuses for why it moved its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago a few years ago.

My own theory is that Boeing executives simply realized that it’s much easier to ruin someplace from thousands of miles away -- they just don’t want to have to here when the shock of losing thousands of middle-class union jobs hits the Western Washington community.

Knute Berger's essay in the Seattle Weekly on the future of Boeing in the Seattle area does a good job of explaining what this means for the Pacific Northwest.

Do We Really Want Kenny Boy In The Tower?

For some reason, the GOP hates America’s air traffic controllers.

Everyone remembers Reagan’s disgraceful firing of the members of PATCO.

Now the Bush White House -- which sometimes seems just incapable of putting the public’s interests ahead of corporations' -- insists that we shouldn’t rule out privatizing the air traffic control system.

A sensible editorial from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer explains some reasons why this is a stupid idea. (The P-I forgets to mention that the July air disaster involving a Russian jet crashing in Germany happened because of an error made by a Swiss controller working in a privatized system.)

Help Save The Youth Of America

Remember when you thought that web savvy twentysomethings were supposed to rule the world (that is, if you believed all that crap that the Industry Standard ladled out back in 1999?)

Things are a little different now. Most young workers support forming a union at their workplace.

2002-09-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

JKC on Hold

The Joe Kenehan Center staff is away. Posting will resume around September 18.

What’s Missing From The Debate

David Kusnet on America post 9/11, post-Enron:

“When will public debate reflect the new national spirit that says America is about more than making money? Only when our leaders show courage comparable to the everyday Americans whose heroism they honor but whose interests they ignore.”

Close To You

The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse on Bush and the Carpenters.

2002-09-10T23:28:00.000-07:00

Remember

A list of the union members who died, including all the public employees.

Why again exactly is the Bush White House so determined to keep public employees out of unions?

Will Tivo Save the Republic?

Politicians spend too much time fund-raising, because campaigns are expensive. Campaigns are expensive largely because they’re driven by television advertising. TV advertising can be staggeringly expensive.

So what would happen if voters stopped watching the commercials?

Honesty-Schmonesty

South Dakota Republican Senate candidate Jim Thune seems determined to run the most intellectually dishonest campaign of 2002.

First there were his ridiculous attacks on pro-Social Security Democrat Tim Johnson, where Thune portrayed Johnson as a “privatizer.” (For anyone who cares about things like integrity, a let down. But for those of us who want a workable retirement system, it’s certainly heartening to see conservatives suddenly demand that we juice up the third rail of American politics again -- and quick!)

But then Thune’s supporters started this kind of stuff.

2002-09-09T00:03:00.000-07:00

Just-In-Time for Leverage

What if Wal-Mart didn’t have all that stuff from China to sell?

In an interview in Sunday’s New York Times, David Olson, a professor at the University of Washington‘s Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, explains how sophisticated “just-in-time” inventory schemes leave corporations like Wal-Mart vulnerable to seemingly small disruptions in shipping.

As Olson says, “The container box is the warehouse for modern-day business.”

If the containers stop moving, there isn’t much other inventory around. That means that a strike by the port workers in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union could have an enormous impact on American retailers.

The Auto Workers recently showed how a relatively small group of workers can suddenly become very powerful if everyone else in the company is waiting for the parts they produce to arrive just in time.

The managers who invented just-in-time in recent decades probably saw a declining labor movement and figured that strikes would soon be an anachronism. Let’s hope that an unintended consequence is that port workers, UAW members, and other workers gain a louder voice for creating good jobs.

Music Is My Savior

I Am Trying To Break Your Heart -- a documentary about the making of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album -- finally arrived in Seattle this weekend.

I love Wilco, so it’s hard to imagine how I wouldn’t have liked the film. But while I watched it, I tried to imagine how I would’ve reacted to the film if I wasn’t a fan, or if I wasn’t aware of the details surrounding the struggle to get Yankee Hotel Foxtrot released.

In the current issue of No Depression, critic Geoffrey Himes trashes the movie for failing to tell a story to the non-fans. (His review isn’t online yet.) Himes feels it doesn’t place Wilco in context, not explaining how their music grows from the larger alternative country movement, or Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt's past work in Uncle Tupelo, or other developments outside of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The film is much better than the Himes gives it credit for, but he has a point in that it does focus a little exclusively on YHF, leaving even recent important events out. The firing of longtime drummer Ken Coomer is almost completely overlooked.

Jay Bennett, who was fired from the band while the film was being made, comes off very poorly. A long scene where he insisted on arguing with Jeff Tweedy and everyone else in the band over a mixing detail -- and then pouts that Tweedy is “making a big deal” out of it -- is devastating. And just about everything he says in a his post-Wilco interview is whiny and self-centered.

Bennett’s subsequent solo record is pretty good, although I saw him play in Seattle a few months ago and it may have been the worst show I’ve ever seen. I was so embarrassed for him I left about half way through.

In the film, Wilco manager Tony Margherita predicts that it would be difficult for Jay Bennett to get used to playing tiny shows again after being in Wilco. Unfortunately, that’s what I witnessed. Bennett just didn’t seem to get it that he was starting from scratch, and personally he’s not quite charming enough to pull off the smartass remarks that Tweedy gets away with.

At any rate, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart does succeed in giving us a firsthand look at a music industry that's largely baffled by the commitment that Tweedy and Wilco bring to the music.

2002-09-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

How the Sausage Gets Made

The paperback edition of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation continues to sell briskly, so obviously at least some Americans are concerned about where their Big Macs come from.

This article from last week’s Nation profiles the fight by packinghouse workers in Pasco, Washington and Amarillo, Texas to have a say in slaughtering animals humanely and safely.

Maria Martinez, an IBP worker in Pasco who led a strike at her plant and then was elected president of her Teamster local, explains how a safer workplace for workers allows them to process meat more safely for consumers. That's one good reason why all of us meat eaters should support these workers.

2002-09-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Cato’s Worst Nightmare

California’s disastrous experiment with energy deregulation has gotten the lion’s share of media attention, but other Western states like Montana haven’t fared much better.

Several years ago, Montana’s old-school power company -- which for years had simply provided reliable, reasonably-priced power under prudent public oversight -- decided to bet it all on the deregulation casino. A compliant legislature agreed to let Montana Power sell off its hydro dams to out-of-state companies, who proceeded to jack up prices.

Given that Montana’s economy is already sputtering, higher power costs have hurt working families, ranchers, and small business.

Now Montanans might vote to re-regulate their hydroelectric infrastructure. If the ruggedly conservative voters of Montana are seriously considering a plan to socialize their power system, the Cato Institute has to be getting worried.

Working Class TV

Over at the seeingtheforest blog, the forester notes how rare it is for the mainstream media to focus on working class and union issues.

Matt Witt, a writer and editor who has worked for a number of unions, had this to say about the lack of working class voices in the media in a op-ed piece that originally appeared in the Baltimore Sun in 1999.

2002-09-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

Sizing Up Boeing’s Competition

Supposedly, Europe is doomed to certain economic collapse because of its unions. Even many American liberals believe that because Western Europe’s strong labor movement imposes “rigid” work rules and “exhorbitant” demands on European industries, it’s all but impossible for the Euros to compete.

So how on earth does Airbus even make it out of bed in the morning?

Here in Seattle, the outcome of chaotic contract negotiations between Boeing assembly workers and the company will be a huge factor in the direction of our local economy.

Boeing has thrown down a take or leave it contract, insisting that vicious competition from Airbus requires it to ratchet down labor costs. To compete with Airbus, it says it simply must move more and more production to low-wage markets like China and Indonesia.

But according to the conventional wisdom, Boeing should already be running circles around Airbus. As shown on this map, Airbus produces its airplanes in “entrepreneurially stagnant” areas like Northern Germany -- somehow overcoming the high wages, high social taxes, and strong regulation that characterize European social democracy.

Yes, European countries subsidize Airbus, but it’s not like Uncle Sam hasn’t been willing to help out Boeing.

The reality is that Airbus is indeed challenging Boeing. But it’s hard to believe that Boeing’s labor costs are what’s holding it back.

Bill Virgin, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s business columnist, is not a fan of unions, but even he can see the contradictions of Boeing's arguments.

(By the way, has anyone compared how Boeing’s executives are compensated in comparison to Airbus’ honchos? I remember when Daimler-Benz bought Chrysler that Daimler’s German executives where stunned when they learned how much Chrysler's top management was getting paid.)

Wellstone and the Greens

Another reason to support Paul Wellstone for Senate is that he’s actually trying to build a campaign the right way, by relying on volunteers, grassroots campaigning, and participation -- not just an endless blitz of TV ads. Harold Meyerson reports on the Wellstone campaign from the Land of 10,000 Lakes, including an up close look at the Greens’ infantile campaign against Wellstone.

Micah Sifry, who is an articulate supporter of building a third party, checks in on the Greens and admits that the Minnesota Greens' attack on Wellstone is not a sensible stategy for the party.

By the way, if you haven’t given money to Wellstone yet, you should.

A Health Care Candidate?

Andy Stern, the president of SEIU, appeared on CNN’s Capital Gang over the Labor Day weekend and spoke warmly of Vermont Gov. Harold Dean’s efforts to discuss health care reform in the early presidential campaign: "basically because he's talking about universal health care . . . This is going to be a campaign about issues, and I think Howard Dean's taken a good start on it."

Actually Existing Privatization

The privatization of public services isn’t just a theory anymore. For the past several decades, American governments at every level have experimented with turning a wide range of public services over to for-profit corporations.

It’s time to look at the results. The West Coast’s experience dealing with the Enron-driven manipulation of California’s energy markets shows how dangerous to put our power supply in the hands of guys like Andy Fastow.

What about schools? This Slate piece highlights the disastrous performance of Edison, a private corporation conservatives insisted would be able to quickly and easily solve all the problems facing public schools in troubled urban neighborhoods.

Splitting the House of Labor

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports on the Rove/Bush White House’s efforts to woo Doug McCarron and the Carpenters Union.

Gimme Retirement

An appropriately savage indictment of the Rolling Stones' feckless new tour. Your editor’s first major rock concert was the Who’s “farewell” tour (the 1989 version). Even as a rock concert rookie I remember feeling that something seemed missing. Like actual passion or commitment to the music.

By the way, Daltrey and Townsend have come under far too little criticism for pushing on with a similarly pointless tour just days after Jon Entwistle died.

2002-09-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day

Your editor started the workers’ holiday at the King County Labor Council picnic and then moved on to Bumbershoot -- Seattle’s Labor Day weekend arts festival -- to witness blistering, gorgeous early afternoon sets from The Minus 5 and Wilco.

Later highlights from today: a lovely set in the rain from The Mekons, including an anti-Thatcher anthem they wrote during the 1984-1985 miners’ strike.

The Gourds were fantastic as usual. I was almost dismayed to see them give in to the shouters and play "Gin N' Juice" as the last encore, but their Snoop Dogg cover really is hard to resist. Tonight’s version featured improvised nods to Britney, Lou Reed, and Willie Nelson.

Speaking of outdoor music festivals, Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney provides a thoughtful little essay about how playing these shows feels as a performer.

(Also: I officially call bullshit on lame radio stations hanging their banners at festival stages and sending out their DJs to give cheesy DJ welcomes to bands that they never, ever actually play on their stations.)

Upticks In The Numbers

Various Labor Day polls confirm what should be obvious: in the post-Enron economy, workers are less trusting of executives and more in favor of joining a union. The number of workers who would “join a union tomorrow” is at the highest mark in decades.

Let Them Play, Let Them Get Paid

The MLBPA settled without a strike, and supposedly mobs of vigilante fans were going to brutalize the ballplayers if they hadn’t given in. Clumsy, almost non-sensical anti-player sentiments ran deep on the sports radio I caught last week.

This piece in The New York Times provides a little perspective on “playing for the love of the game.”

My Advice? Join A Union

A restaurant worker whose bosses are pocketing his tips wonders about the ethics of the situation. The New York Times magazine’s ethics columnist admits that there’s little that a single employee can do to fight back without joining together with his or her co-workers in a union.

2002-08-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

A Broadband REA?

Left to its own devices, the deregulated telecommunications industry is doing a lousy job of expanding affordable access to broadband for the average consumer.

An interesting John Judis piece in The New Republic explains how Michael Powell and other libertarian ideologues helming the FCC refuse to nudge telecommunications in the right direction.

Two generations ago, the free market was doing a poor job of providing affordable electricity to big chunks of our country. It took leadership from FDR’s New Deal to get us moving on rural electrification, and the public investment paid off with enormous social and economic benefits that last until this day.

Is it time for a public Broadband Information Intiative -- public action to get more people wired on broadband? Judis mentions that one of those towns that benefited from the REA back in the 1930s -- Bristol, Virginia -- took steps to create a public broadband system, but corporate lobbyists went to Richmond to get a state law passed to stop local governments from developing their information infrastructure.

Gray and the Farmworkers

From the LA Weekly: Pressure continues to build on California Gov. Gray Davis to do right by the Farmworkers.

Quiet! They’re Playing Baseball

Working middle class families can’t afford to go to many NBA, NFL, or MLB games anymore. The consequences for the character of sports crowds is pretty apparent in this story. Seattle’s beloved but faltering Mariners are canceling Anthony Ercolano’s $30,000 season tickers behind home plate because he’s too loud. Ercolano doesn’t seem to be a true jackass like Robin Ficker. His main sin seems to be that he makes it harder for the affluent observers in the “Diamond Club” front rows to talk on their cell phones.

Or maybe the Mariners management is simply gutless. Earlier this season they tried to stop fans from wearing “Yankees Suck” t-shirts when America’s version of Manchester United was in town.

2002-08-26T22:35:00.000-07:00

Let Employees Get Rid of the Bad Apples

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote an interesting book this year that points out that virtually all corporations loudly proclaim that they work hard to honor laws banning discriminating against workers on the basis of race, gender, or religion.

But these same corporations gleefully discriminate against employees who favor forming a union at their workplace.

No sane American company would respond to complaints of discrimination by, say, requiring employees to attend meetings on crackpot theories of racial inferiority or watch a KKK video. But during union organizing campaigns it’s routine for employers to require workers to attend meetings to bombard them with all manners of distorted or dishonest anti-union propaganda.

Recent events on Wall Street have shown how badly our securities regulations need reform. The constant abuse directed at employees who attempt to form unions shows how badly labor law needs updating.

Two MIT professors make the case for reform in this Boston Globe op-ed.

Which Way Gray?

The United Farmworkers are keeping the heat on Gray Davis as he decides whether to sign the bill giving farmhands a voice in the fields. Gray looks like he’s signaling a NO on this one.

2002-08-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

The Father of OSHA Fights On

An inspiring piece in the Sunday New York Times on Tony Mazzocchi, the long-time Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Worker stalwart. Mazzocchi is very ill with pancreatic cancer but is not going quietly.

Do Letters-to-the-Editor From My Downline Count?

Apparently GOP activists can’t be expected to roll up their sleeves and work for their cause without getting a few extra incentives. A new RNC program awards "GOPoints" to activists who write letters to the editor, phone bank, etc. The points can then be cashed in for free GOP merch. Maybe the guys who used to run the Camel Bucks program got jobs doing this. (Remember this story the next time you hear a conservative whining about Democrats “bribing” African-American voters with free rides to the polls on election day.)

Stay Outta Malibu, Lebowski!

Also from the Sunday New York Times: the hypocrisy of the Hollywood liberals. David Geffen and other big DNC donors insist California laws that protect public access to our national seashore certainly weren’t meant to apply to them.

2002-08-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

NAFTA At Work

I’ve put Joseph Stiglitz’ new book on the flaws of market-driven globalization, Globalization and Its Discontents, on hold at the library, but luckily it hasn’t come in yet because I wouldn’t have had time to read it anyway.

In the meantime, labor journalist David Bacon provides a detailed account on the huge hurdles that Mexican workers have to jump to try to organize independent unions. On paper, Mexican workers have a lot of rights written into Mexican law and even into the labor side agreement of NAFTA. But in practice those laws are worthless. Now corporate interests want Mexico to get rid of those rights, even if they're just on paper.

The Long March

The Farmworkers are marching through California’s Central Valley to keep the heat on Gov. Gray Davis to sign the bill to help give migrant farmworkers a stronger voice about their working conditions.

Some highlights: a warm reception from Anglo working people along the march. Also, former California Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa -- who nearly won an upset victory to become mayor of Los Angeles -- shows up in the crowd. I was working in Los Angeles while Villaraigosa was running for mayor. I still have a Villaraigosa sticker on my truck even though I live in Washington State. Antonio is probably the most interesting politician in the progressive movement today -- a charismatic, intelligent figure who is able to articulate a compelling vision for a multi-racial agenda of jobs and progress. Kind of like RFK with an East L.A. accent.

Apples and Trees

I don’t really care much about Ann Coulter. In comparison to her loony harangues, my late grandfather’s racist, anti-Semitic cracks now seem like cogently-argued Edmund Burke polemics.

But I will say that it is very telling that Coulter grew up in the privileged environs of New Canaan, Connecticut, the daughter of a corporate attorney for Phelps Dodge Corporation. (Follow link and scroll about half way down.)

In 1983 Phelps Dodge provoked a vicious strike at its mine in Morenci, New Mexico and eventually destroyed the unions there. (Writer Barbara Kingsolver chronicled the strike in her book Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983.)

2002-08-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

Strike Hiatus

The Joe Kenehan Center is on a short hiatus while the staff helps out on a strike.

2002-08-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

Where’s the West Coast’s Refund?

Bush’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission finally issued a preliminary report that shows what progressives have known all along -- Enron and other energy corporations gouged consumers by manipulating West Coast energy supplies.

Like a lot of progressives, I feared that energy deregulation would leave the markets susceptible to greed-driven market manipulation. But I have to admit that even I was a little surprised that California’s free market experiment was completely dominated by greed right from the start.

California’s energy deregulation plan was the most far-reaching dismantling of oversight of energy since the deregulation fad began, so a lot was riding on it. So much that you would have thought that Kenny Boy and the folks at the Cato Institute could’ve organized a little meeting to arrange a gentlemen’s agreement among the energy players: let’s take it easy on the rice-pay ouging-gay during the first year or so, so deregulation can look good for a little while.

FERC’s report verifies a lot of “told you so’s” on the left, but the real problem is that the energy deregulation disaster is still affecting the economy.

In Seattle, where I live, we’re still paying inflated prices. Our city public utility didn’t privatize but nonetheless got thoroughly snookered by the deregulation hype.

Our taxpayer-owned utility decided to “act like a corporation.” It sold off control of significant chunks of its own power generation because market forces were supposedly going to drive wholesale energy prices so low that there wouldn’t be any need to generate power “in-house.”

Of course, the exact opposite occurred. During the crisis, Seattle City Light sank deep into debt buying exorbitantly expensive power at prices juiced up by Enron and the gang.

That debt hasn’t gone away, and we’ve got the light rates to show it. More than half of my montly bill goes toward the debt. Even worse, FERC says we can all trust the energy companies to do the right thing again.

Organizing the Organizing

Everyone in the labor movement remembers the 1930s as a remarkable time when working Americans spontaneously rose up to challenge the social rot that had hollowed out our economy during the Depression.

It’s important to remember, however, that the union movement of those years figured out a way to channel that rage into organizations that could effectively take on the corporate powers of the day.

When John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, John Brophy, and millions of other men and women built the CIO, they united enough workers in the same industries together to have a meaningful voice in the direction of that industry. The UAW focused on carmakers, the Steelworkers focused on steel, the Mineworkers kept their focus on coal, the UE aimed hard at electronic industry, and so on.

In today’s union movement, we’ve lost that focus. Union members want our unions to grow, but in the haste to organize, too many unions are reaching out to workers from a cluttered sample of different industries. As a result, unions can grow in numbers but lose strength in actual effectiveness.

The AFL-CIO announced that it’s convening an Organizing Summit to look at ways to refocus organizing to build organizations that can really take on the Wal-Marts, the Overnites, the McDonald’s, and the Manpower, Inc.’s.

Within the labor movement, this is an enormously controversial idea. But it’s an idea that needs to be thought through.

2002-08-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

Tim Eyman’s Search For A Paycheck

Tim Eyman has a problem.

Eyman, a telegenic young anti-tax zealot who over the past several years has sought to literally make a living from churning out anti-tax ballot initiatives in Washington State, wants a certain lifestyle. And pesky rules for publc disclosure of campaign contributions are standing in the way.

For readers who don‘t live in Washington: for years, Tim Eyman insisted that he was running his initiative campaigns purely as a citizen volunteer. He sneered at “overpaid” politicians, public employees, and union leaders for making money from politics. He sanctimoniously postured as a true honest citizen who made his living selling watches to fraternity brothers.

It was a pretty inspiring tale, but unfortunately for Eyman it a complete lie. In reality, he was siphoning out a comfortable salary for himself from the initiative campaign fund. When reporters asked about his income, he just lied and lied. Finally, someone within his organization blew the whitle.

Eyman just paid a $50,000 fine for lying on campaign finance disclosure filings.

But now he’s got another initiative on the ballot. He wants to be on TV as often as possible again. Oh, and he wants the lifestyle again.

Because Eyman can’t make enough selling fratty boy bling-bling to support a Lexus life, he’s been forced to come clean about a key motive for his endless ballot initiative war: his own desperate need for cash.

Eyman’s sent out a mailing that actually asks people to write checks directly payable to him. And he doesn’t intend to offer any disclosure at all about who's picking up the tab for his life.

Not surprisingly, it hasn’t taken long for Washington State’s campaign finance oversight officials to notice Eyman’s clumsy attempt to exempt himself from the law.

2002-08-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

John Sweeney Is My President

Sweeney says all the things that should have been said in a real discussion about the economy.

2002-08-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

Repeal Taft-Hartley

A bullish forecast for a resurgent labor movement from (of all places) the Business Pages of the Dallas Morning News. Commenting on the post-bubble economy, investing columnist Scott Burns predicts that “the long decline of labor unions is over.” Burns goes on to predict that “health care will be nationalized” and that George W. Bush is a one-termer.

Burns forecasts that the political center will move leftward “faster than either party can conceive.” If he’s right, progressives should get ready to take one easy step to restore working people’s ability to have a meaningful voice in the economy: repeal Taft-Hartley.

As things stand today, it’s clear that large employers don’t have to seriously negotiate with their employees so long as a friendly White House is ready to quash any uppity impulses among workers.

Also, a long piece in the New York Times explains why something’s got to give in the American health care system.

2002-08-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

Is Populism Popular?

The New Republic editors enter into the donnybrook over the merits of political populism that was touched off by Joe Lieberman’s anti-populist remarks at the DLC’s New York Conversation and Al Gore's New York Times op-ed.

Here’s my two cents on the question of whether populism “cost Gore the election” or not:

In the months after the 2000 election, I remember reading the DLC’s very flawed analysis of what happened. I was amused, but not very surprised, that they almost totally ignored the impact of Ralph Nader.

The Joe Kenehan Center reluctantly endorsed Al Gore in 2000. Not out of deep love for the Clinton-Gore record (ideologically I was foursquare in support of Nader’s platform) but out of sober realization that in our current political infrastructure – with its winner-take-all electoral college scheme – a vote for Ralph was a vote for W.

But I wouldn’t have voted for Gore no matter what. If Gore had campaigned with the message that Lieberman now says was right, I could easily have been pushed into the arms of Ralph Nader.

The Joe Kenehan Center lacks the resources to commission polling on the subject, but I suspect that there were a lot of labor-left voters out there who—seeing the threat of a large Green vote throwing the election to the GOP—were lured back to Gore by his mildly populist message. But not enough of them, obviously.

Much has been said about Nader peeling off votes from Gore. Not enough has been said about Gore's populism peeling votes off from Nader.

More Arthur Anderson Fallout: A Shorter Oscar Show?

Your editor is ashamed to admit that I usually get sucked into watching the Oscars. The prospect of a A-list celebrity saying something obliviously stupid or selfish on live television is just too tempting.

A charming bit of every Oscars broadcast, of course, is the ritual introduction of two pasty, bashfully grinning accountants who attest that a respected accounting firm carefully tabulated the results.

Harold Meyerson points out in the LA Weekly that the time-honored accounting segment at next year’s Oscars is likely to have a much different connotation.

Various corporations have turned to the Academy's accountants — PriceWaterhouseCoopers — to monitor overseas manufacturing operations and provide a “sweatshop-free” seal of approval. Meyerson writes that the rigor of PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ reviews has come into question: apparently their investigators neglect to ask workers some fairly basic questions, like if they are allowed to form a union.

He urges the Academy to take the tabulation gig away from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and give the job to someone the public actually trusts—like some Boy Scouts.

Maybe they could just cut the bit and try to bring the show in at under four hours.

2002-08-09T00:45:00.000-07:00

Remembering "Joe Kenehan"

Joe Kenehan is a fictional union organizer created by writer-director John Sayles. Kenehan was a main character in Sayles' 1987 film Matewan, played by Chris Cooper. Sayles first introduced the character in his very fine 1977 novel Union Dues.

In Sayles' novel and film, Joe Kenehan travels to Mingo County, West Virginia in 1920 to help a group of coal miners organize a union with the United Mine Workers of America. He is later murdered by private security guards hired by a coal company.

Carter Wright is the founder of the Joe Kenehan Center and the editor of its blog. I work on the staff of the Service Employees International Union District 1199NW, a union of more than 10,000 health care workers in Washington State.

The Joe Kenehan Center is not affiliated with SEIU.