After the sweeping losses in Wisconsin yesterday, AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka tells Greg Sargent that when it comes to politics, organized labor won't switch its emphasis to raising money for ads, but will focus on developing strength in as a rank-and-file outfit. "Our emphasis will be on educating and mobilizing workers on the union and non-union levels," Trumka says.
Part of that work is in rebuilding union membership, which has fallen dramatically over the last half century. One union, the United Auto Workers, has said it wants to start new locals at foreign-owned plants in the South. You can see one attempt at that unfolding at a Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi, where workers have asked the UAW about organizing.
The workers say bosses at the Nissan plant don't like the idea of their joining the UAW. From the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:
Nissan workers said they have sat through roundtable discussions in which they were told they didn't need a union. They said they are told that the union just wants workers' money.
"I went to one last week," said Betty Jones, who has worked with Nissan for nine years. She said the meeting was simply to tell workers that "We don't need a union, we're anti-union at this company."
They've pressed on, with vocal support from the NAACP and Congressman Bennie Thompson. AP's report makes a point of noting that Thompson, the state's only Democrat in Congress, is supported by labor unions. This should surprise no one. Unions generally support Democratic candidates -- that's why Republicans have been so set on breaking the unions.
The UAW faces significant hurdles to organizing in a place like Mississippi. Unions elsewhere have bargained away wage increases to non-union levels. And like the other Southern states, Mississippi has a right-to-work law, known in labor circles as "right to work for less." If workers at the Nissan plant in Canton voted to form a union, the law would allow individual employees to enjoy life in a union shop -- reduced as the union benefits might be -- without paying union dues.
Much the same recipe decimated Wisconsin's public-sector unions a year after Governor Walker signed the anti-union law. Reduce the benefits of membership, then make people choose again and again whether to pay for membership. Whittle away the unions and you whittle away support for union supporters, like Democratic Congressman Thompson.
(Photo: @sisterbeer/Flickr)
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Unions were key to ending some wicked labor practices. The trouble is that people seem to have forgotten about sixteen hour days in unsafe conditions with low pay and zero benefits. Those times are returning as corporate greed causes employers to either outsource jobs or cut pay and benefits so the wealthier investors can squeeze every dime they can out of the business.
Slash the military so business will understand that we are not going to send Americans into foriegn lands just to make it safe for them to bleed those countries dry and enslave their people. Quit sitting on the sidelines and insist on public healthcare so you are not forced to work just to have insurance while not getting paid enough to live on.
Ahh, why bother, you are doing so well. Why worry since you will always have a decent job. Let some other chump fight to keep child labor out or to prevent companies from tossing older or injured employees out the door while the next chump in line eagerly enters to take their place.
We are screwed! All those recall petitions and yet Walker still sits in his bought and paid for office. Well if you live in Wisconsin you might want to start hoarding food. Better yet just take the advice of the right wingers and leave. Of course if you sat out the election then don't move to my screwed up state!
I agree with you totally, I am so disgusted with my state and ashamed to say that I live here. The only hope I have left is that Walker will be indited that is our last hope.
If all the 2 million people who signed the petitions to recall Walker had voted, he'd have been recalled. But the labor unions didn't like Barrett because he wasn't totally under their control, so they lost their "enthusiasm" - what sort of deals they thought would be better with a winning Walker is beyond me.
Amnerican Labor: a 70 year record of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to screw themselves. From working with the employers to prevent "fair employment" in the war industries in 1942, to not organizing the unorganized in the 1950s and 1960s, and of course their "allies" in keeping the blacks and women out of the factories were the ones who stabbed them in the back for being "communists" in 1948 with Taft-Hartley. I remember an argument with my cousin in 1967 - he was an official in the International Association of Machinists, and told me I was wrong to be against the war since it "generated jobs" for his members. He didn't like when I asked if the members were OK with sacrificing their sons in Vietnam to pay for the "job generation."
The union movement in this country has gotten exactly what it deserves for not doing what it could have done when it would have been possible to keep unions alive. Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity...
Pretty sad commentary. So if the union had tried harder they could have defeated Walker and his austerity program. So the people of Wisconsin need the union to get them to vote?How sad.
Value add: Unions need to do some serious thinking about beefing up their value proposition in ways that benefit members whether they're in a closed or open shop.
One example is insurance: the UAW (to pick one) is a large enough group that they can negotiate good group insurance rates. Not necessarily health care (although that would be a good one to propose to employers as part of a package) but also auto, home, life ...
We already do that. Our teachers union had to sue the school to be allowed to participate in insurance negotiations. We won and as soon as we got involved the insurance company offered us a fantastic rate with a long term contract.
The unions have let their relevance pass them by. My father was a staunch union supporter, having lived through the depression and abuses of the rail roads. However, I remember two incidents in the 50's which turned me against unions. First, my father would say everyone made the same money for the job grade,regardless of quality of work. My question was: "Where's the incentive to do better". Second, after a four month strike, he came home and boasted about a 3 cent increase. After doing some quick math, I explained he would need to work many years to make up for the lost wages.
People are now coming to rethink the value of unions today. Witness Wisconsin and the dramatic drop in membership. Auto companies flock to the South partly because of right to work laws. Local governments are beginning to realize that negotiated benefits are unsustainable. People must realize the US is in a global economy and must compete in that arena.
Who can afford to work and live on $2.00 an hour? Are we going to turn into a China where we live in dorms and work 24 hours or more a day? Workers need to organize greed is killing this country.
fromnytosc: obviously you moved from New York to South Carolina so the fact you are a drooling moron would be less obvious. You idiot.
Thank you for your very thoughtful response. Do you have any other inciteful remarks?
fromnytosc
That statement might be valid IF ONLY we HADN'T been in a global economy from at least World War II. The fact is that we were in a global economy in the 50's and 60's when the workers in this country were actually doing very well. The difference was that businesses WEREN'T paying their CEO's 500 times what the workers were paid at that time, Wall Street served businesses instead of itself, and we had a belief in this country that we were "we the people" and we ALL needed to share in the bounty!
But the counrty has changed and the worker had better face the fact that if Wall Street and the Republicans have their way, $2.00/hr will be BIG wages!!
Good pun, BTW.
Unions provide the baseline for all employees. If a union has bargained decent pay and benefits for one part of the workforce, then other parts can look at that for ideas and support. Companies are held to some level of fair compensation for their employees because unionized employees are getting fair wages and benefits. The auto makers in the South still had to offer a certain of compensation because union shops set the bar. I think that people have forgotten the importance of unions because we are so far away from the excesses and unfairness of non-union times. My hope is that we don't have to repeat the early 1900's for people to understand that unions are a good thing.
As a staunch union supporter it pains me to say this. Wisconsin demonstrates what has become ever more clear since Reagan pounded air traffic controllers and their union into submission in the 80s. As a viable part of the business of influencing public policy, unions no longer have ANY real clout. While that eroded over 30 years, Citizen's United drove the proverbial nail in the coffin. The playing field has been tilted in favor of "job creators" and away from actual workers to such an extent that now unions can be outspent 7 to 1 in a state election with 70% of the anti-union funds coming from out of state, and the process is fully legal. This means that in not too many years, all states will be "right to work (for less)" states by law. Democrats need to accept this reality, and energize the base with local combat to Citizen's United and "right to work" or the oligarchs will have won. Unions have been outflanked, and out PRed. The help they need will have to come from outside their sphere of influence. Non-union workers need to know how their wages and rights are depressed by the tactics on the right. Allegations of union thuggery need to be answered with proof of "job creator" thuggery. Workers need to be re-educated about strength in common interest, rather than simple union organization. The answer does not any longer lie in unionization, but in a broader coalition of workers combating these legally coordinated strikes on their ability to influence public discourse as a counterweight to the massive weight of business rhetoric. I don't know, but maybe as a start we need something like Facebook for workers.
That makes sense (that unions won't try to compete on ads, and instead will focus on rank & file, grassroots contacts).
I mean, what kind of strategists would they be, to take a bucketful of water and try to compete with an opposing side that has a firehose?
Can't tell you how many times, in my Wisconsin small town, I watched the local volunteer fire department have a "reverse" tug of war with firehoses, usually where they have to force a pony keg or some such item across the opposing team's line.
Great fun to watch! Of course, before the end, they'd end up turning the hoses on the opposing team, just for good measure.
Last night was really hard for me. My parents (in Alaska) had more of a clue than I did. My mom is retired NEA-member, and my dad retired IBEW. They talk to the older relatives back in west-central Wisconsin more than I do, and they knew which way the wind was blowing (downwind of the ND oil sands WI sand-mining operations, apparently. Mom says so many areas we grew up in are unrecognizable).
So what's my Day 2 Post-Wisconsin take? I'm struggling. I want to believe that people-power can overcome money-power. It's a basic tenet of democracy. Of radical democracy, one of the core theories I referenced in my dissertation, in studying the potential political empowerment and disempowerment of online communities.
So was that idea tested and found wanting? Proven false? I mean, my home state, the birthplace of progressive politics, the prescription of how to stand up to the corruption of boss politics at the turn of the century, one of the original union states. If my home state could fall like this, how could I continue to look down my nose at the Right-to-Work South, where I've also lived (only with substandard electrical, plumbing, and other tradescrafts)?
My folks have both washed their hands of it. They knew 40-year union members (IBEW cousins, no less! Electrician is a family occupation on the Boese side) who voted for Walker. Farmers who voted for walker. Avid deer-hunters who voted for Walker.
Talking to them was like talking to a brick wall. Dad is convinced Wisconsin will be a Right-to-Work state before Walker is up for re-election. And all those rellies will take a MAJOR hit in their annual incomes (except for the retired ones, I guess).
WHY couldn't ideas penetrate the Fox News haze? This could send me back to academia, another burning question I just HAVE to find the answer to. It may give us a more charitable view of early 1930s Germany (and we are German in Wisconsin, after all, those of us who aren't Norwegian).
Is it something in the nature of authoritarianism?
Or is in something we have not yet been able to identify in the nature of mass media propaganda? To be sure, many of the relatives deep in the Fox News haze do not spend enough time online to be engaging in deeper argumentation and debate, other than forwarding rants and puppy videos sent from someone else. But my most liberal activism farmer-cousin also refuses to join any social media.
I have to believe in distributed power. Not lynch mobs, but distributed systems of power-sharing and responsibility, not just in governmental forms, but in civil society, technology access, wealth access, and interpersonally, in non-hierarchical churches and faiths, business structures, publishing platforms, public libraries, public Commons and gathering spaces, everything.
This is my article of faith, I guess, even more so than Enlightenment Rationality or Transcendentalism/Romanticism (I've been exposed to too many pomos).
WHAT penetrates? What stirs the masses, one-to-one and many-to-many, not one to many, like a demagogue? What reaches people? Stirs them to action? That DOESN'T come from the fake marketing culture that permeates the US, in lieu of real, grassroots-grown cultures?
I really don't want to go back into dying, hollowed-out academia (like dying, hollowed-out newspapers) to try to figure it out.
Help me Obi-Wan Maddow! (and Obi-Wan Conaway, Obi-Wan ProducerGuy1, etc) You're my only hope!
I went for a Ph D in political science. But not in the American side, foreign affairs. Seems to me from the recent research is the GOP has gone off into la-la land. Its sort of What's The Matter With Kansas? They keep saying how great the benefits and wages are in unions and that's YOUR tax money. They are leeches who feed off of YOU the taxpayer. While they ignore the Koch Brothers and other corporate types that are making money like gangbusters in this environment. Sell the dump the union swill and profits keep going up for them. Dump environmental regs, more money for them. Why they're supported, well they're pro gun, anti gay and Bible thumpers. Just watch them, but don't look at what they really do - Walker wants to get deer as a rent your hunting plot from a corporation biz, next will be 'right to work'. One of these days they'll wake up, too late. Hitler did this. So did a lot in Latin America.
What penetrates the most is when reality hits too close to home. Unfortunately, this is the only way most people who have been bobbing their heads in agreement with the talking heads on the Right are going to wake up and realize that they have been voting against their own self-interests. I've seen conservatives who work in the public sector recite talking points against the no-good bums who were promised a pension for their years of service. Then, all of a sudden it is their own pensions that are at risk. Finally, it hits home--it penetrates--that oh, when they talk about the drains on society, they mean ME.
If you're asking when it hits home, you can look it up in the literature. A gent named Niemöller.
The other side of the coin - today, my boss received a letter from a Republican Senator from another state urging him to join the fight to make PA a "right to work state." As we are already a union shop, my boss just ignores it, but that's not to say he doesn't agree.
The point is that the other side is also "organizing" and pushing and garnering support and even more $$$$$ from business owners.
This is "do or die" time folks and as evidenced by WI last night, all the grassroots boots on the ground won't win it. The 99% needs to dig deep and contribute $$$$$ which the DNC needs to spend wisely. Also as evidenced in WI, all the talking and speechifying that goes on now is preaching to the choir. They need to reach the folks that don't attend "services" and are not now hearing the preacher during the week before the election because that's when the majority of those folks will not tune out - ya know? Hit them with info just before they go to the polls so they will still recall when they look at a ballot - name recognition and all that. Walker told everyone last week that he balanced the budget; they bought it. Just saying . . . .
Trumka needs to go. He is a study in mismanagement. Unions are their own worst enemies with cops and firefighters leading the way to the ultimate demise of organized labor in America. Unions have become their own special interest groups and don't seem to give a darn about other folks, including their fellow union personnel. Unions are the gang that can't shoot straight and they are unfortunately and apparently headed to the scrap heap of history.
It's not the unions per se ... they're doing just fine in Canada (as far as I know not having lived there for 6 years). We've had strong unions for decades and while people sometimes grumble about them, it's usually because they wanted a union gig and couldn't get one. But, everyone benefits from unions even when you're not in one. And, neither the Canadian government (out loud anyway) nor the non-union-member citizens begrudge the unions their right to exist.
So, what is the problem in THIS country?
The problem, imo, is that Unions forgot the struggles that produced their movement, and have fallen prey to their own ignorance and greed. A lot of Union folks simply only care about what will line their pockets, and the heck with anyone else. The problem with American Unions is the problem with America, greed and hyper dedicated self interest. American Unions are a House divided against itself. They appear to be doomed. Their own foolishness is undoing their honor. They really don't care about advancing the interests of the working stiff anynore,, they just care about their own self interests. It's the American way. They've become what they fought against. Now they are their own enemies.
The decline of unions began under Nixon when they began supporting Republicans. Once union workers started endorsing and voting for Republicans, the voting trend could only go up. The unions sat on their hands when Reagan dismantled PATCO. That should have set off alarms with unions, but they remained complacent. Now their viability is being challenged in the states and the federal level. It will get worse if this country elects another Republican Congress and president.
The unions need to identify seats in Congress where the unions can make a difference. Money is only part of the equation, but ground troops are more effective. If the unions were to work the swing districts in the next elections, it could mean a big difference in control of the House. Labor needs to stay involved in House races in every election. Senators are more problematic because there are so many corporatist Dems. This means that unions should assist primary challenges to Dems who are not friendly to labor as well as Republicans. Once unions demonstrate the power to elect people, the Dems will start paying attention to the unions.
Unions need to begin getting involved in state races in every state regardless of how blue or red the state may be. No red state will turn blue overnight. It will take a lot of money and ground work to chip away at the red states. But once the Republican stranglehold is broken in red states, the subsequent victories will get easier. The states that hold the most promise for labor and Dems are Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nevada. All of these states are west of the Mississippi River but can go either way. The unions job will be to make sure these states become blue and stay blue.
The last obstacle for unions is a matter of image. Republicans have successfully portrayed government and private unions as greedy and that is because unions have let it happen. Voters have been conditioned with this image for too long. But most voters have no real idea as to what these workers get paid. The worker "bees" need to be put in the spotlight with their pay and fringe benefits. Let the public see the clerical help or the teachers instead of allowing Republicans to use individual government employees or teachers as the image of a union government employee. People would be shocked if they saw what union hotel workers (SEIU) make a week. Changing the image is going to take time and a lot of voter education, but unless the image is changed, the unions will continue to be the Republican whipping boys.
Under Nixon, when Republicans HAD TO court both unions AND the middle class.
How odd, one of the most memorable thing I learned from my undergrad junior-level State and Local Politics Poly Sci course (besides the fact that politics is the study of "Who Rules?" The purest an expression of it than anything I've ever heard since) was a deep and calculated exposition of the numbers game that Nixon-era Republicans HAD to do to get elected.
My professor basically showed us (and this was so counter-intuitive to me at the time) that strictly by the numbers, due to the size of the middle class at that time, Republicans HAD to appeal to middle class interests, in tax breaks, family needs, housing needs, and union negotiations-- or risk being irrelevant at all levels of politics. It was a simple math equation.
Perhaps this was a Goldwater learning, in the end, about the futility of extremism. By my professor framed it as the power of populism trumping all else.
Early 70s. Can you just imagine? A middle class that powerful, that it could literally shut out any politician. And that was the way things went, SOP, until Reagan went after the air traffic controllers.
It should have been political suicide, to oppose unions, until Reagan did it. And from then until now, it has been growing as a GOP article of faith, to decimate and eliminate unions. (Rachel's segment last night, "The Brass Ring," was just brilliant in the dramatic way it illustrated this. I've sent it to everyone I know)
Thugs? Damn, we could use some thugs. People willing to put their bodies on the line to bring the bosses to the inevitability that they are NOTHING without their workforce. People BLED for unions.
A world of strikes is a far cry from a world of incremental negotiations. Negotiations that corrupt the negotiators (high priests can get seduced or get kickbacks from management, that is, if the union reps aren't hired out of the union and into management outright, when they get too powerful. That's what Ma Bell did to my uncle the union rep, slid him into middle management to take him out of the loop, then conveniently laid him off at 55. Last night he also voted for Walker), negotiations can capitulate and deal away the health needs of women or safe working conditions, just so long as that incremental salary increase is a lock.
I miss the world of real strikes. When the fight was on, and real stakes were on the line. Maybe we'll get that again soon, if we are uppity enough. Smarmy back-scratching negotiations often leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
I love you, Rachel, but I think Labor itself is victim of the Christian Nationalist bull@!$%#. Remember the title "What's the Matter with Kansas?"? Now we can ask "what's the matter with organized labor?" when we see that many the unionists did not maintain solidarity with their fellows, but sided with those who seek their political annihilation. We've certainly got our work cut out for us.
I left mississippi 56 yrs ago ..then & now damnunion & damnyankee are words down there.. but in in montana in some small towns you hear just the first one ..I guess you can find this situation in many small towns & .. small minds
Those that think unions have outlived their usefulness have enjoyed the benefits without having to fight and/or bargain for them. That includes those that were never unionized. Two big examples are the five day week and the 40 hour week. Don't take them for granted. As union membership has declined, so has income along with the amount of hours one works to keep their heads above water. How many one income households do you know?
Can someone try to find statistics of how unions affect litigations? I have a theory that more unionised places have less litigations. but want to know if this is true or just my imagination
Without the Union support, Barrett would not have done as well as he did in his losing battle here in Wisconsin. But it's had to beat an 8-1 discrepancy in dollars. I am more concerned about the quality of Democratic candidates. I think Barrett has pretty much reached his political plateau. Russ Feingold appears to be the only real "star" we have left here, and I mean "left" as in "remaining." If we can't find more charismatic Democratic leaders, the big money guys are going to keep loading our offices with their bought and paid for puppets like Scott Walker.