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A List of Demands? Why “making it plain” is key for movement success.

In the course of my duties as a PhD student here at the University of Alabama, I have had to teach Public Administration. It is not a fun class; the books on the subject are often reactionary in ideology, the material itself is dry, and the specificities of government infrastructure is a bit much for my 200-level students to handle. As most undergrad political science majors do, they want to talk about elections. They want to talk about social movements. They want to talk about the exciting stuff that they see all the powerful people do on MSNBC or FOX or House of Cards.

In that sense, they are no different from their older counterparts. After all, no one is talking about the state legislative races that will determine most of the policies that affect American lives daily; rather we get 24-7 coverage of a presidential race that does not have its first primary contest for another nine months. Yet both groups of people should realize that activism and frontline politics is but one side of the coin; policy and administration is the other.

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The Occupy movement took off right as I was entering my PhD program. It was a sight to behold, and the way in which it transformed American political dialogue is something that we will be grappling with for a long time. It used to be that poverty and inequality were framed as personal failings, things that only a hard work ethic can fix. Now you have elected officials like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) releasing plans for combatting poverty (horrible as they might be) and the same Barack Obama who chastised parents on the campaign trail in 2008 for “getting that cold Popeyes out for breakfast” to feed their children would introduce a program six years later (flawed as that was also) that would dedicate resources to young Black men in urban areas for education.

Yet amidst all the plans and the discussion, we have seen very little in the way of concrete measures aimed at redistributing wealth and closing inequalities. And if you peruse the website of the NYC General Assembly, the organization that kicked off the Occupy movement, it is hard to find anything in the realm of concrete demands. The closest that you will come is their Principles of Solidarity, which is less a list of demands than it is a loose statement of ideologies that underpin the movement. And good luck wading through the fifty documents under the Demands tag, which appear to be little more than minutes from a committee meeting.

As easy as it may be to pin this solely on Occupy, it is not limited to just them. The most concrete proposals to come out of the police slayings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner last summer are to fit every police officer with a body camera. That seems like a good idea until you remember that Eric Garner’s murder was captured on film, in addition to the fact that he was killed in broad daylight on a busy street corner in Staten Island. The rest of the demands from assorted groups are no less ephemeral than Occupy: truth and reconciliation commissions (typically done after any hope for justice is lost, since no one who has been involved in police brutality would ever forgo their right against self-incrimination), Congressional hearings into police abuse (to what end, no one is particularly sure), and more effective community oversight (with a civilian review board? a streamlined complaint system?). One list of demands even calls for President Obama’s administration to “develop, legislate, and enact” a “National Plan For Racial Justice”. Aside from the fact that the President cannot legislate anything, the details of such a plan are largely left to the imagination.

Given all this, it is little wonder why we have not seen any movement on these issues legislatively or administratively.

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The opposite side of that coin, of course, is the Fight For 15 movement. What are the demands of this movement? Well, it is right there in the title: fast-food workers are fighting for a minimum wage of $15 per hour, which would bring some of America’s most vulnerable members of the working class to a living wage in most areas of the country. While fast-food workers demanding such a wage would have been thought laughable just a few years ago, the movement has scored successes in Seattle and San Francisco, and Portland, OR has raised its minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour. Even by those standards, the movement would have been considered one of the more successful ones initiated by the working class and their allied organizations (labor unions such as SEIU have greatly assisted in the Fight For 15 effort) in the last generation.

But it did not stop there. The 2014 elections saw minimum wage increases on the ballots in several states, and some of the ones that voted Yes may surprise you: Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota are on no one’s list of most labor-friendly political environments, and yet those states all voted to increase the minimum wage by substantial margins. In fact, the victories in these states were probably the only highlight in an election that saw Republicans win eleven more state legislative chambers and take back the U.S. Senate. The issue also featured prominently in the last dash to the polls in Chicago’s just-concluded mayoral election, where challenger and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia has come out in favor of a $15 minimum wage for employees of the city’s public school system, which has been decimated by budget cuts and closings under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

And as the movement’s day of national action on April 15^th draws closer, it has become clear that this is a fight that will endure for quite some time.

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There are many factors that go into organizing on different issues, and I am not trying to make the case that there are tight parallels between organizing around law enforcement issues and doing the same with regards to the economy. But Occupy and the protests of police violence have failed to “make it plain” and give people something that they can take into their communities and begin mobilizing for social change. That has to change if we are to see the working class build enough power to dismantle the structures that holds progress back.

American federalism and the case for reevaluating labor’s priorities.

On March 8^th, Wisconsin became the 25^th state to legalize the open shop. The provision commonly referred to as “right-to-work” by the corporations and right-wing politicians who back it has very little to do with economic freedom and liberty for workers, and everything to do with the destruction of a movement that has given the American economy a tiny measure of democracy. Ever since the 2010 elections that swept Republicans to power across the country, the push to make America an open shop nation has been stronger than at any time since the policy’s genesis in the Jim Crow South. Nineteen state legislatures have seen right-to-work proposals during the 2015 session, a clip similar to the period between 2011-2014, and there is no reason to believe that the pace will be slowing down anytime soon.

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In Local Elections and the Politics of Small-Scale Democracy, J. Eric Oliver notes that the people who are most likely to vote in local elections are those who own homes. This makes sense in a way; the homeowner is more directly affected by changes in their land values than those who rent, and are thus more likely to be in tune with the ways in which local government engages in land management. Oliver notes that as land management is the most important function that most local governments provide (since many communities contract their emergency services and utilities to county or regional authorities), it will be the concerns of the homeowner that dominate election issues at the local level.

But another thing that drives the disparity between homeowner turnout and renter turnout in local elections is the gap in outreach to the two groups of people. According to data the author pulled from the National Elections Studies in 2008, homeowners were reported to be 60 percent more likely to have been contacted by a political campaign than renters. Combine that with educational disparities (renters are twice as likely to not have a high school degree), and homeowners are engaged with at a rate at least double that of renters. While Oliver makes the case that low turnout in local elections should not be automatically seen as a delegitimizing force in our democracy, the fact that there are some who are being engaged in the political process and others who are not is something that is deeply troubling. This goes double when you consider that renters are three-and-a-half times more likely to earn under $15,000 a year (the rough estimate of the federal poverty line for a family of two) than homeowners. These stats underline a long-standing contention by political scientists and leftist organizers alike that American democracy is regressing in its responsiveness to working-class concerns.

But the question becomes: how do we change this for the better?

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A disengagement from federal politics….

The labor movement has given generously to federal politicians, particularly the Democratic Party. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, well over 90 percent of all donations go to Democratic candidates. In addition to the money spent directly on campaigning, labor unions have spent nearly $428.6 million on lobbying members of Congress on their top issues. What does labor have to show for it? Not the Employee Free Choice Act, despite having the largest Congressional majority in over four decades. Not a public option for Obamacare. Not any kind of deal that will prevent the so-called “Cadillac plan tax” under Obamacare from hitting the health benefits that labor has won through negotiation and struggle. And all the money spent on ensuring that a Democrat remained in the White House did not keep the President from appointing judges and cabinet members who have worked against the working class throughout their careers.

If we could not get decent labor policy during a Democratic bonanza at the federal level, what are we honestly to expect when the party of Scott Walker controls Congress? Maybe we get another Democratic president, but Hillary Clinton ain’t exactly Norma Rae. It is clear that both parties have failed unions and the working class at the national level and that a reassessment of priorities for movement resources is required.

….and a rededication of resources to the local level.

Recent years have brought with them some very encouraging news for the working class in local politics and policymaking. In 2010, local labor unions in New Haven, Connecticut backed city council candidates and defeated candidates backed by the long-serving Mayor (and failed 2006 Democratic gubernatorial candidate) John DeStefano. The year 2013 would be even better: in addition to the election of socialist Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council, a slate of independent labor candidates stormed the city council elections in Lorain County, Ohio; in that election, nearly two dozen candidates defeated people backed by the long-dominant Democratic machine in the union-dense county.

But winning the election was not enough; these candidates had to produce once they were in office. And produce they have:

While the Fight For 15 was a movement that predated Sawant’s ascension to the city council, her dogged determination on the issue pushed the council and mayor to an agreement that will bring in a $15 minimum wage for Seattle workers in the next few years
The New Haven councillors crafted an agreement that allowed a charter school into the city, but mandated them to allow the unionization of its employees and the acceptance of disadvantaged children who were not already in one of their schools elsewhere

And in Lorain County, the councillors have simply given an ear to the working class that had not been there before, when the former mayor took it upon himself to break a picket line and do sanitation work for a day. That work can be just as valuable as a concrete policy outcome. Increasing the political efficacy of the working class is what spurs the development of social movements and efforts at an independent political voice in a landscape where common concerns can fall on deaf ears. The capital class knows this all too well, and has seemingly cleared the floor for the advancement of anti-worker policies.

I thought I read that the New Haven effort began as some sort of worker center?

You read correctly.

That is the last plank of this community engagement plan. It has nothing to do with labor unions, of course, as worker centers are barred from engaging in activities that could be seen as preparing workers to join a union. Doing so would bring them under the administrative clutches of the Landrum-Griffin Act, which has odious reporting requirements that often hamstring union organizing budgets. But they should be more than just a means of entry into traditional labor unions, anyway: they should independently act as a means of mobilizing the working class around issues of democracy and economic justice, as well as educating communities about the ways in which capitalism continues to fail them on a regular basis.

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Local and state governments are often referred to as the “Laboratory of American Democracy”, and it is not hard to see why: the pilot projects that begin in a neighborhood, city, or county can become national policy under the right circumstances. The dismantling of our national welfare system did not begin with President Clinton in 1996; it began over a decade earlier with Gov. Tommy Thompson’s (R-WI) efforts to change the federal matching system for funding to a block grant system that would severely curb the flexibility of state governments in managing their welfare systems. After a reduction in welfare rolls (but, notably, not a reduction in relative poverty), the program was greenlighted for other governors who wanted to do the same. Eventually, it became federal statute with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which is the welfare reform bill that President Clinton signed into law. So it was with this thing that its proponents called “right-to-work” in Florida during the early 1940s. After its passage in a statewide referendum, the policy spread like wildfire across the South and the Great Plains, eventually finding federal backing in the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, better known to opponents and allies as Taft-Hartley.

With an increased focus on communities and local politics, the labor movement can begin to turn the tide against the right-wing onslaught of the last couple of years. Otherwise we are just waiting for the next catastrophe to take hold.

Whither the Works Council? A critique.

Labor is, God willing, at a turning point in this country. New campaigns have started to infuse fresh energy into a moribund and declining movement, and new models of collective action are being proposed in the course of these ongoing efforts. While the existing NLRB/NMB certification election-contractual bargaining system still functions on paper, in practice it has broken down. Employers do not hesitate when flouting the law while trying to head off a union vote going against them. Even when they lose, bosses are willing to sandbag their workers by refusing to even bother to negotiate, and striking has been gelded as a tactic through injunction and wrongly decided precedent about permanently replacing strikers. While corporate campaigns, which focus on pressuring shareholders and embarrassing companies into acting humanely, have met with some success they have not delivered the kind of widespread worker empowerment that the postwar period did. There’s absolutely no doubt that if workers are going to ultimately make their own destiny that a new model or approach is needed for unions. One that has been proposed, separately by the UAW and by Benjamin Sachs, is the implementation of works councils in the United States.

The works council model is one that is used across Europe, with the most prominent examples being in Germany, although works councils also exist in the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium. There, employees are elected to four-year terms on the works council, where they negotiate the terms of employment and workplace conditions with the employer. In Germany this is enabled through the Works Constitution Act, which was first passed through the Bundestag in 1952 and allows the formation of works councils in any private workplace of at least five people. While the employees who serve on the works council are not required to be in a union, over 77 percent of them are. As such, the works council functions as a strong facilitator of union power in German labor relations, especially in the large auto plants there.

(It should be noted that the works council system is different from a worker cooperative. The chief distinction is that workers in a cooperative have full control over the means of production, while a works council is, essentially, what we would consider to be a labor union bargaining unit in the United States.)

It is imagined in the United States as an unprecedented form of economic democracy. Our conception of a Board of Directors has very little to do with a company’s employees or their demands; rather it is an oligarchy of investors and corporate officers who run our nation’s business apparatus. So the thought of workers getting a say in the dealings of two of our nation’s largest industries, automotive and fast food, is one that is understandably exhilarating for those supportive of the labor movement.

There’s a couple of problems with implementing such a model in the US, though. Firstly, the National Labor Relations Act explicitly bans company unions in Section 8(a)(2). Sachs makes that clear in his piece, saying that implementing a works council model at McDonalds would require significant legal wrangling to avoid being proscribed by Section 8(a)(2), though far more optimistically than we would.

Another big concern is that the works council model could mollify working-class radicalism at a time where it is on the upswing. Few could have predicted that fast-food workers would be engaging in waves of walk-outs with the demand of a $15 an hour minimum wage. Combined with the recent demonstrations against state violence in major cities across the country and the connections between these two movements, working-class organizing might be in a stronger position now than in any other time since mass deindustrialization began in the 1970s.

Furthermore, story after story is raising awareness of how other countries have paid their fast-food workers a living wage and still managed to turn a profit. To turn all of this potential for a paradigm-shifting movement and steer it towards a highly formal and bureaucratic process before any real gains have been secured would seem to be an error. In fact, it could be argued that the bureaucratization of the labor movement is a key part of why it is in such dire straits in modern times. Why voluntarily repeat the errors that got us where we are today for a system that we are not even sure will work in the United States?

Finally, is winning a process that, from its beginning, privileges the interests of management at the same level as the interests of the workers really worth it? Given all of the effort, energy, and time that would get put into organizing works councils, is it a big enough win? Make no mistake, the purpose of works councils is for smooth functioning of commerce at a given employer by addressing the collective concerns of its workers. Whether the emphasis falls on the front half of that statement or the back half in an American implementation of works councils remains up in the air. At a time when labor is frequently discussing things in terms of labor-management partnerships and jointness, will workers’ interests be better served by a system where the union is not even an independent body but rather an organ inside the corporate structure?

Works councils have significant power in Europe and are able to redress major issues for the workers who participate in them. However, they gained this power in the shadow of the Cold War, at a time when capitalism had to show it gave a damn about Western workers lest they fall “victim” to Communism. That threat does not exist now. There is no indication that the works councils that are being proposed would be able to address the larger problems that the working class faces on a day-to-day basis. While alternatives to a dysfunctional NLRA-focused process should be considered, the notion of labor-management partnership can only function when labor has sufficient power to make everything stop.

We will only rebuild power through advancing the interests of the working class as a whole. Investing more in organizing, training, mobilization, and educating union workers about their rights is a part of this equation, but only by fundamentally aligning the labor movement with the communities it represents will we start to recover.

Try the Mystery Meat…

Organizing Theory

Try the mystery meat. Want to engage young people in a campaign? Try asking them to upload photos of their school lunch…

Networked Labour is an effort that emerged from a conference in May 2013, to improve the online networking of the international labor community. In this blog post, they talk about the online tools they use to create community & exchange ideas.

Are you running a campaign where you need to find email addresses for many corporate executives? You might wanna talk to this guy.

Here’s a new book that offers how-tos for organizers in the building trades.

Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability

Ecuador is asking their citizens to help write a new law—about free & open software. Is open-sourcing the opposite of lobbyist-sourcing?

I’m pretty sure that talk of a Grand Unified Global Income Tax will bring the black helicopter-fearing crowd out of the woodwork. Still, from a policy perspective, this new paper is worth reading.

Do you want to make sure that your shopping habits line up with your activist beliefs? Try this app, the next time you’re at the grocery store. Or anywhere, really.

The Singularity Approaches

Do you know how to identify one paper shredder over another? Probably not. The systems at Google do, of course. The weird part is, no one really programmed them to do it. So how did it happen?

If you were hiding under a rock on Sunday night (or still in a tryptophan coma), you may have missed the announcement that Amazon wants to launch (pun intended) drones to deliver packages, as early as 2015. But is delivery dominance their real mission?

Reputation, reputation, reputation

If my life’s going to have a ‘personal dashboard,’ shouldn’t I be able to monetize myself in some way? And no, I’m not talking about Klout Perks. If you’re a programmer, you can have keep your data private—I’m not sure how an amateur user would.

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I think Snapchat is the devil. Need more evidence? Turns out those naked selfies don’t really get erased from your phone…

From Partners

ICYMI, TechPresident had a great write-up on coworker.org last week.

LabourStart is holding their annual conference in Berlin, next May. I’ll be kickstarter-ing a ticket any day now…

Geeking Out

Worried that you’re going to regret that drunken tattoo? Try programmable e-ink under your skin, instead.

What’s Going on in the Workforce?

If there’s one thing I wish that people in the economic justice movement would learn from tech folks, it’s how to work asynchronously & in different places, using technology.

Organizing security guards? Say hello to the $6.25/hour robot night watchman.

Is globalization causing a decline in labor standards? These academic researchers say yes. (Non-paywalled, earlier version here.)

Is Silicon Valley really that different from the rest of corporate America? Claims of meritocracy notwithstanding, it looks amazingly similar to the Fortune 500…

Help build a community for justice.

Do you want to help launch the start-up phase of this effort to build an online community for economic justice in the 21st century?

I’m going to spend the next few months talking to people who are thinking about the future of work, and worker organizing. If you’re in one of the following categories, I’d love to talk to you—if you know someone who is, I’d love an introduction. And if you’re doing work that doesn’t exactly get described here, but still seems relevant—let me know what you’re doing!

*Non-traditional worker organizing (ie—does not seek to go to a union election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board or similar body)

*Inside the labor movement, but doing non-traditional work (Fast Food Forward, Wal-Mart campaign, etc.)

*Folks who are organizing the unemployed around economic demands

People who are organizing worker co-ops, and thinking about how to keep (or bring back) capital in our communities.

*Academic or other thought leader that is studying the 21st century economy

*Funders who are interested in economic justice work

*Tech industry types who are interested in work and change organizing

*Journalists who cover labor- or worker-organizing

For the most part, I’ll be doing interviews via google hangouts or Skype, though I do have a limited travel budget—so I’m also curious to hear about conferences happening over the summer or fall where there might be groups of these folks.