The Thanks Unions Get
Every election cycle, Democratic politicians come feasting at the union trough, using unions to raise money and coordinate get out the vote campaigns. Nobody on the Democratic side does these things better.
So what do unions get in return? Lip service. Or worse. Such as yesterday, when Senate Democrats agreed to a “compromise” over the FAA reauthorization package that was essentially another Democratic cave on the major issue between them and Republicans–the ability of government transportation workers to form unions. Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller are the leading sellouts here. Essentially the compromise measure raises the bar for the percentage of workers who show active interest in forming a union to the unreasonable level of fifty percent before a union election can be held. The current level is a more reasonable level of 35%. This is not to vote the union in. This number is simply to begin the process of setting up an election. The Communication Workers of America, who represents many of these workers, and the AFL-CIO worked to kill the bill, but it passed with a huge majority.
Why do unions support the Democratic Party again? Unions were the difference in Harry Reid’s reelection campaign. His payback–pushing through a measure that will severely restrict unionization among government transportation workers. Thanks Harry!
…To be clear, I obviously understand the reasons why unions support Democrats such as the NLRB, etc. However, that unions are taken for granted by the Democratic Party year and year and election after election, even after labor provides much of material necessary to win elections–including having just provided the margin of victory for Harry Reid–is more than a little frustrating. I guess relying on your friends means dying a slow death whereas your enemies will kill you immediately. Great choice.
…..CWA President Larry Cohen is more than a little angry at the Democratic Party.
Um, maybe because they will get NLRB members who might actually vote to uphold labor laws?
Indeed. The fact that Democrats aren’t all they could be on labor issues doesn’t mean that they aren’t worlds better than the Republicans. If the Republicans had been able to write this bill themselves, they would just forbid FAA employees from unionizing at all, no matter how many of them signed a card. And if the Democrats had been able to write this bill themselves, they obviously would not have included these anti-labor measures.
As unfortunate as it is, this is basically an instance of our legislature working as it’s supposed to do – in 2010 the country voted to split control of Congress, and as a result, we’re getting a bill that represents a compromise between the Republican and Democratic views on organized labor. So it goes.
Lesser evils are, indeed, less evil than greater evils.
That’s why unions–and many of the rest of us–continue to vote for Democrats.
Nonetheless, it’s worth reminding ourselves that union loyalty to the Democratic Party more closely resembles, e.g., African American loyalty to the GOP c. 1910 than, e.g., African American loyalty to the Democratic Party c. 1965.
Once upon a time the Democratic Party did affirmatively good things for working people. Now they are merely predictably less bad than the GOP and willing, on occasion but by no means always, to stop things getting even worse.
As a general rule, Democrats don’t take active measures to make things worse, while Republicans virtually always do (to an increasing extent, it would seem).
But I certainly wasn’t arguing that the Democrats are perfect on labor issues. They’re just consistently much, much better than Republicans. This is more a reflection of how awful Republicans are than it is anything about Democrats being good. But it’s still real, and it’s a damn good reason for unions to continue to support the Democratic Party. I’m glad actual unions are more realistic about the political scene than Erik seems to wish they would be.
Over two-thirds of Senate Democrats just did.
They compromised with Republicans to pass a bill that had to be passed. That’s not the same thing as deciding, on their own, to limit labor rights. Democrats generally do not do the latter, which is what I was trying to say.
I care about what politicians do, not about their motivations.
My point isn’t about motivations. When Democrats control Congress, anti-union legislation doesn’t get passed. When Republicans do, it does. That’s a significant difference in practice, whether or not Democratic legislators vote for compromise anti-labor measures when they have to to get enough Republican votes to pass something.
Democrats control the Senate.
Anti-union legislation just passed that body.
Let’s try redescribing our political situation more accurately.
Accurately, our legislature has two houses, and having an FAA (and paying its employees) next year requires passing a bill through both the Senate and House.
Accurately, the Senate has a filibuster rule, and the Democrats do not “control” it sufficiently to pass the bills they’d like.
OK: Democrats control the formal organization of the Senate. Any group of 40 obstinate senators, a number smaller than the current number of Republican-held seats, can control whether legislation goes forward.
Come on. You’re just purposefully missing my point now.
@mark: There are many more than 40 Democratic Senators. If Democrats as a rule opposed legislation that makes things worse for unions, forty of them could have done so here. In this case we’re talking about _stopping_ a piece of legislation, not getting it through the Senate. The supermajority argument ought to work in the Democrats’ interest here…if, in fact, the Democratic Party could be counted on not to make things worse for unions.
@John: No, I don’t think I’m missing your point. I’m insisting that you describe your point accurately. First let me reiterate what I said at the top of this thread: there is a clear and significant difference between the Democrats and the Republicans on labor issues. The Republicans are actively committed to rolling back labor rights. The Democrats, all else being equal, support the status quo in labor relations and are willing to consider minor improvements that benefit workers. But of course, all else is rarely equal, so the fact that this commitment to labor is both shallow and extremely malleable (though, still, it makes them much less bad than the GOP).
You write above:
As I said, I don’t disagree that Democrats are very different from Republicans in practice. Where I think the Democrats fail is in their understanding of “when they have to . . . pass something.” Republicans would simply refuse to vote for any measure that, e.g., gives federal funding for abortion. So Democrats know that if they insisted that such funding were included in any bill, it’s simply a non-starter. If Democrats tried to restore funding for abortions for the military in a defense appropriation bill, Republicans would still say “no,” however necessary they believe military appropriations to be. So Republicans win those staring competitions.
In contrast, Republicans can count on Democrats caving on marginal labor issues like this.
The fact that the Democrats don’t constantly dynamite the political process is one of the reasons they’re better than the Republicans. It does mean that they’ll often cave and give the Republicans what they want on marginal issues, but it also means they don’t pull nonsensical stunts like the GOP has been doing for the last year.
In this particular case, the Democrats seem to have succeeded in removing the worst part of the bill, and the remaining anti-labor provision seems like it may not even be that big of a deal, given the realities of organizing. So I’d say that this is a pretty bad example of the Democrats making labor relations worse.
We’re talking about passing the FAA reauthorization and keeping the airports open.
@John: I’d settle for occasionally dynamiting pieces of legislation. Bad legislation often deserves to be dynamited. And while I agree that it’s a good thing that the Democrats’ don’t simply automatically dynamite every piece of legislation that the Republicans want simply because the Republicans want it, there’s a huge space between doing that and strategically picking legislation to dynamite.
@mark f: The fact that we’re talking about keeping the airports open is, in this regard, a feature not a bug when it comes to dynamiting this particular bad bill. Not passing FAS reauthorization is not an option. But while the GOP is willing to leverage this fact to forward their anti-labor agenda, the Democrats are unwilling to do so to protect workers’ right to organize.
FAA*
I’d guess that the majority party was likely to take most of the blame when the snowbirds couldn’t get to Florida (where some of them might even vote). I’d also bet that Harry Reid isn’t thrilled about pissing off a large portion of his coalition; that’s not to say he won’t do it from time to time, but I doubt it makes his life any more pleasant and that this particular issue isn’t one on which he had substantive disagreement with the CWA. I’ll note as well that it took months for this to pass. Therefore, the conclusion I reach is that one side did see not passing FAA reauthorization as not only an option but probably to its benefit. It’s not like I’m pleased with the outcome. I just don’t think it was the betrayal others do.
“@mark f: The fact that we’re talking about keeping the airports open is, in this regard, a feature not a bug when it comes to dynamiting this particular bad bill. Not passing FAS reauthorization is not an option. But while the GOP is willing to leverage this fact to forward their anti-labor agenda, the Democrats are unwilling to do so to protect workers’ right to organize.”
But that’s because there’s no plausible mechanism to do that in reverse, since a large number of Republicans aren’t going to care about shutting down the FAA. We all know Republicans are crazy and childish, so I don’t understand why so many people resist the notion of the clear practical implications of that fact.
I haven’t read all the way to the bottom of the thread ,so if someone’s always pointed this out, forgive me for the duplication, but when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate at the beginning of Obama’s term, EFCA (card check) went nowhere.
Indeed. And to be clear, they actually took card check out of EFCA in the summer of 2009. And it still went nowhere.
This is a fair complaint, and I’ve made it, but IIRC it passed the House and stalled in the Senate thanks to a couple of unpopular pain-in-the-ass Democrats joining a filibuster. And it’s not the end-all of labor concerns.
I’m not sure if the fault lies with labor or with its ostensible supporters in the blogosphere and elsewhere, but it seems that there’s never much of a furor when Democrats and admin are gearing up to screw over unions. You’d think that what the environmental movement did with Keystone should be a model. Yet with the Columbia Free Trade Deal and this and several other bills, Dems keep screwing labor without much of an outcry. Pleading their case behind the scenes doesn’t work, because Dems know labor will support them in the end regardless. Short of leaving the party, inflicting a broad PR blow through protest is the only lever they have. But labor is out there often in the streets, so as I said, maybe the problem is that Dems as a whole, especially the relatively privileged ones who in the blogopshere don’t care enough about labor issues.
That’s rich.
Exactly. Would that it were so, but unions don’t control the Democratic Party and the Democrats don’t control the whole of the legislative process.
“Why do unions support the Democratic Party again?”
You know why, of course, because like, Richard Gere in Officer in a Gentlemen, they’ve got nowhere else to go. Or so they feel.
At least the OWS-labor alliance gives labor an opportunity to play an inside-outside game.
Here are the Dems who voted no:
That’s less than a third of the Democratic caucus. Pretty much what one ought to expect, I’m afraid.
Well, perhaps this is one more reason to look positively at a possible run by Gillibrand in 2016.
Or Franken.
/God help me but I love that man.
The Senate (and that includes the 37 Dems voting for this bill) are the 1%. The 1% do not like union organizing. And they know voters have nowhere to go. You could call Dem behavior a form of capitulation except that the surrenderers seem far too pleased with their submission. It’s strange how the filibuster fails to rear its ugly head on such legislation. Must be a structural problem.
Well a filibuster wouldn’t be of much help to the workers or the unions right? The worst result is not getting some contract in place which would revert the situation to where it was months ago with worker’s being paid in IOUs. This is a pretty poor result but one that the GOP could live with and Democrats are not willing to live with. So as I see it, a standoff is substantially worse for FAA workers than this compromise, which of course sucks but here we are. When people vote right wing assholes into office, these are the results.
They cut off the hand of the hostage they just released.
They have nothing to worry about, there are plenty of more hostages to take before the November election.
Unions don’t even support unions, else why was the Super Bowl even played?
Sympathy strikes are illegal in the United States, or were you referring to something else?
Sympathy strikes are not illegal in the US. They may (or may not) violate a no-strike clause in a CBA and be unprotected, but they are in no way illegal.
Perhaps you were thinking of secondary rather than sympathy strikes?
i don’t think the change in the showing-of-interest threshold from 35% to 50% will make much of a practical difference. i don’t do any RLA work, but union clients generally won’t file a rep petition with the NLRB until they have a showing of interest of around 75% (even though by law they only need 30% to get an election). that’s because the union inevitably loses votes during the course of the campaign (when the employer can use its enormous influence over employees to convince/scare them into voting “no”, even if they initially signed an authorization card before the petition was filed).
a more serious issue is whether this amendment changes the threshold for winning an election under the RLA. before, the union only needed a majority of votes cast to win. in the prior version of the amendment, the GOP wanted to change that to require the union to get enough votes to be a majority of the employees in the representation unit. that is a huge difference, because it means that the people who don’t bother to vote effectively get counted as a “no” vote rather than an abstention. like most election, a lot of people who are eligible to vote don’t turn out in a union election.
This is correct. Unions typically won’t file for a petition until they are well north of 50% because a) they want to win and b) they don’t want to show their hand until they are forced to. The most successful organizing occurs where an employer is spectacularly unaware they are being organized because of poor communication and mistrust between management and employees.
Talking about Democrats generally is fallacious. The Democrats aren’t the Republicans; there usually isn’t a unifying Democratic position.
Richard Trumka recognizes this, and will be concentrating his electoral efforts more specifically than just a broad Democratic ticket.
Maybe this is a crazy thought, but pro-unions people remind me of the ‘pro-lifers.’
The ‘pro-lifer’s’ vote for Republicans.
And pro-union people vote for Democrats.
And yet, the matches made in heaven are never truly consummated – even though they both get repeatedly f*cked by the party they supported.
Actually, slowly but surely the “pro-lifers” have been getting just what they want. And slowly but surely the unions have been getting screwed.
True.
Sadly, very true…
Unions don’t remind me of prolifers much at all.
Pro lifers will happily replace a prochoice Republican who can win an election with an aboriton banning nutbag who can’t. Unions haven’t often shown that kind of one-issue willingness to self-immolate, which is why the Dems don’t fear them the way Republicans fear the forced birth caucus.
Well, unions aren’t an interest group built around an abstract issue that primarily serves as an outlet for people’s resentment and misogyny either. Rather, they represent real concrete economic concens of actual working class people, and self-immolating would cause real catastrophe in real lives.
I submit that there are certain people on the left to whom unions are NOT representative of their real concrete economic concens, and whose attachment to union politics is much more like that of pro-lifers to anti-abortion politics.
Well of course there are, but not the unions themselves.
Actually, up until the Republicans had the power to declare that union organizing was a crime, many pro-union people happily voted for Republicans.
Union regulations are wierd for me. Like the RTW stuff, all of the arguments revolve around aggregate measures of certified union strength and representation and shifting that one way or the other.
I oppose Right-to-Work laws as a basic matter of principle, but when you start talking about shifting required levels of “active interest” from 35% to 50%, I kinda lose track of the argument.
I guess the argument is that labor is so powerless against capital that it can’t be left to the self-interests of workers to determine the appropriate level of union representation. Therefore, it must be up to the discretion of legislators and economists to propose and pass laws that push aggregate union representation to an appropriate level.
But that argument seems so ridiculously deflating, self-defeating, and aesthetically repulsive that I can’t help but reject it. If ending such a status quo would mean the end of capitalism as we know it, I would be on board.
What?
The 35% (I think it’s actually 30%) vs. 50% argument isn’t about the number of employees who should be unionized. It’s about what percentage of employees should be required to request an election (on the question of “should we unionize?”) in order to trigger that election. Then the results of the election will determine whether the percentage of employees (of that particular class in that particular workplace) unionized will be 0% or 100%.
I started to comment before I saw yours, and it started with “what?” too.
Who says libertarians don’t bring people together?
I understand that.
My point is that arguments over union regulations revolve around what effects a law might have on the difficulty of unionizing.
My turn:
What?
What does that mean? How is that the same thing as what you wrote above?
Then you’ve got it backwards with this part:
Laws do exist that govern how unions can organize and require companies to recognize legally formed unions, but such laws take no position on how many workers should unionize. They simply protect workers’ abilities to do it, or not, if they so choose.
Regulations making it more onerous for workers to form a union, however, have the very much intended effect of determining the preferred level of unionization, i.e. approaching zero.
Whether or not these laws and agencies explicitly state a preference, they certainly have a large effect on the degree of unionization.
Yes, by protecting workers’ rights to express their choice without fear of retribution up to and including death, they do have the effect of increasing the number of workers willing to form & join unions. In the absence of these laws the choice was usually “shut up or get blacklisted and/or shot.”
Wow. You really do lose track of the argument! The 35 vs 50% dispute is over the triggering level for an election – that is, whether labor will get the chance to decide, for itself, the appropriate level of union representation.
I understand that.
The debate is about setting the appropriate difficulty of the unionization process in order to legislate a preferred level of union representation.
Let’s unpack this a bit: if there was no card-signing standard for holding an election – if there was no difficulty in holding an election to determine if the workers at a firm wanted union representation – then the unionization rate would be exactly what American workers decided they wanted it to be.
Introducing any such difficulty reduces the level of unionization below what the workers themselves would set it at.
So, your statement about creating difficulties in order to achieve a desired rate is only true to the extent that it refers to those who wish to make joining a union more difficult because they want to drive down unionization rates below what labor itself would decide.
Which makes your statement:
completely false. The people seeking to push representation to an “appropriate” level by supporting such barriers are not motivated by the fear that labor cannot decide for itself what the unionization rate should be, but rather, by the fear that they can, and would, do so if left to their own devices.
Agreed.
The NLRB itself and the costs of regulatory compliance are impedements to unionization. I get lost because the certification and regulatory schemes surrounding are so complex that there really is no way to trace it back to some natural level of unionization.
It has forced the debate into a realm where one side just sides against unionization and one side supports it. Neither side seems, at this point, to be really concerned with attempting to anchor unionization levels to worker preferences, rather they project their preferences on to labor and build a regulatory scheme to match.
Correction: those things do impose gross costs to unionization, but they also generate benefits – significantly greater benefits – so they are not, in sum, impediments to unionization.
But that’s nonsense. The side that wants lower barriers is attempting to anchor unionization levels to worker preferences. We are supporting a system of eliminating barriers to the expression of that preference.
Even if unionization through the NLRB is beneficial on net, transaction costs can still be prohibitive and marginal boundaries can be set.
They want to emulate that bottom level, but my point is that they cannot.
This line of thinking largely started with the Right-to-Work debate. There are two competing libertarian positions I have seen: 1)that Right-to-Work laws are an unjustified government intrusion into labor contracts, and 2)that current labor law skews labor towards unionization, resulting in de facto “forced” unionization in so aspects.
I agree with number 1 on principle and because that is generally the sort of argument I’m going to side with. But while I doubt #2 is true, I am at least sympathetic to the argument because it could be true.
I think it might be true because I don’t think I could ever definitely answer this question:
Do current union certification laws encourage or discourage unionization relative to natural worker preferences.
Yes! They do!
Heh.
We could be here for weeks. For one thing, I’m not even sure we can talk about “natural worker preferences.”
When I see someone talking about “natural,” that’s when I reach for my revolver.
I agree, and that’s the problem I have with the argument.
I wish I could come up with another way to phrase it because I don’t want connotation to blur my point, but this legal system is imitation collective bargaining.
I don’t mean that as a complaint in and of itself, its just how I see it. There is a legal system set up to replace a market force (if you want to call collective bargaining that) that would be immensely complex and somewhat volatile with a rational and stable bureaucracy.
And because of that, it is really hard for me to set a benchmark for me to judge new legislation against.
When I say “natural” its an open-ended conditional. I don’t mean to say “This is natural, lets aim for it”, I say “If these conditions are met (with the conditions being of the libertarian variety generally), then the result would be natural.”
Basically, I don’t use natural as an argument for something, I treat it as its own good.
Does that make sense? Does it keep your revolver holstered?
Have you read Erik Loomis’s award-winning series “This Day in Labor History”? I wish this blog would link to it more. Anyways, there was actually a pre-NLRB era in American history. Whatever the inefficiencies and iniquities in the modern system, the old way wasn’t better. It didn’t so much feature concern for worker preferences as it did guns, usually pointed at workers.
Can you provide an example? Because it seems to me that one position is “workers who wish to join a union should be able to do so as easily and fairly as is possible,” while the other side says that “it should be difficult-to-impossible to form a new union, and very easy to decertify an existing one.” One of these sides accounts for the workers’ preferences either way, the other side does not.
This.
I certainly agree with this.
There is a reason the lower bound for triggering a certification vote is 30% and not 0%.
Agreed, but what does that reason have to do with one side forcing people to join unions? Or with technocrats trying to engineer a predetermined ideal level of union membership?
Since unionization is a complex bureaucratic process that conveys some pretty unique legal protections, it is not a process that is left open to just any group of employees who decides to unionize. I’m salaried for a company that has unionized hourly workers on the shop floors. I can’t just get together with my fellow quality engineers, walk off the job and expect the state to prevent my employer from applying certain repercussions.
IOW, if you want to make it a rational system, you have to regulate those who enter into the system. This necessarily involves monetary and time investments and a lot of bureaucratic hoops to jump through.
So at this point, just by having this legal unionization system in place, you are necessarily put in a position where you are setting up hurdles to unionization that attempts to maintain a level of ease in unionization but prevents exploitation of the legal privileges the system sets up.
I fully agree that history has not been kind to organized labor, and I am reasonably sure that organized labor is still marginalized.
However, I do not like a system where the question of whether to unionize (which in itself is getting away from the core issue) is not based on “How much will collective bargaining benefit me and my coworkers,” but “How much will it cost to obtain the legal privileges afforded by government?”
The whole point of the Wagner Act was to facilitate unionization and channel historically violent and costly disputes into less destructive methods of resolution. It traded protections to workers and unions for restrictions on the ability to strike in the hopes that this would prevent violemce and result in economic conflicts being resolved at the bargaining table rather than on the streets.
Exactly. It was an attempt to rationalize and stabilize labor markets, especially radical unionized ones.
The goals certainly weren’t ignoble, but as is my libertarian wont, I consider turning to government to arbitrate between management/capital and labor to be a decidedly losing proposition. History has kinda shown that to be true.
Maybe its the idealist in me, but I don’t think that a disolution of that system would result in Pinkerton’s gunning down miners in their tents, albeit a transition would be difficult.
Except it didn’t require Big Bad Gubmint to arbitrate the differences, it required the parties themselves to resolve differences thru economic promises, threats and concessions, while removing legal barriers the government had imposed to unions largely at the behest of industry. The Wagner Act expressly repudiated the forcing of any bargaining concession on either party, recognized by the Board and the Supreme Court.
I mean that the relative power of organized labor versus big business is arbitrated by the government by adjusting the regulations governing the certification process and the legal activities available to unions.
The government exerts a high degree of control over the overall strength of unions by shifting how difficult it is to unionize and then limiting the avenues of protest available to certified unions.
And when the two sides argue over the regulations, the argument seems to revolve around whether or not unions are too strong, and not whether workers are truly allowed the tools to adequately defend the fruits of their labor.
Are you uninformed and naive enough to think that the regime which pre-existed the Wagner Act did NOT affect the level of bargaining power between labor and management?
The Wagner Act gave employees the right to seek an election to certify a Union and barred employers from discharging pro-union employees, getting injunctions against peaceful organizing activities, and refusing to acknowledge or bargain with Unions who were chosen by employees to represent them.
The totality of your comments leads me to the inescapable conclusion that you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
It, and other ostensibly pro-labor laws, also explicitly made illegal many of labor’s most effective tools and methods, all the while streamlining labor resistence into an extremely corporate-friendly model that is easily manipulated by the government.
Unionization trends over the last generation lead me to believe that it may not be for the best.
I totally think they should prove 50 percent interest, and therefore get a union. It’s called card check and the Democrats pretended to support it in 2008.
It passed the House and got blocked in the Senate by an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats from right to work states. Like all labor legislation for the last 70 years or so. I’m not sure why this means that the support the bill received from the large majority of the Democratic caucus in both houses is meaningless. They didn’t have the votes.
They could’ve taken a couple Republican issues hostage and got it passed.
Oh you want that stimulus money going to your district? Plenty of ways to play the Republican game.
I think your analysis of the playing field is deeply flawed. There is no symmetry.
I’d say the filibuster hurts unions more than it hurts most Democratic constituencies. Barbara Mikulski is very pro-union, but opposes significant filibuster reform. I wouldn’t be surprised if others share the same stance.
Republicans hate unions more than they hate other Democratic constituencies. They hate them, not just because they oppose everything they stand for, but, as you say, unions work to elect Democrats. Any labor legislation which need Republican support will be bad legislation.
There are Democratic politicians who are anti-labor and anti-union. But these politicians don’t necessarily see labor as a political enemy who will unseat them. They can be compromised with in a reasonable manner. Gutting the filibuster would allow party-line passage of labor laws with compromises which are qualitatively different than the ones necessary for bipartisan legislation.
Reading this post, you’d think that 37 Democrats voted for the union-elections measure.
In fact, 37 Democrats voted for the overall bill, once the inclusion of the union-elections measure had been included.
Talking about a vote on a major spending/authorization bill as if it demonstrates an officeholder’s position on every element of that bill is the equivalent of Karl Rove’s anti-John Kerry ad showing the weapons systems disappearing around the soldiers on the battle field.
The action that matters here is putting the union regulations in the bill – and that falls right on Reid and Rockefellar – but to extend the blame for that to everyone who voted to have an FAA in the next fiscal year displays either a poor understanding of Congress or a pre-existing desire to paint with a broad brush.
Yes. For example, both Paul’s voted against this bill as well.
I might addd, the Democrats tried for more than a year to get a better bill through Congress–and failed. They did not have the votes to keep the FAA and its 280,000 jobs alive if they didn’t make some concessions to the rabid right.
It would be niced to get the kidnapping victims home safely once in a while without paying the demanded ransom. It’s not always doable, though.
They did manage to get the “non-voters count as a no-vote” rule removed.
Which is a great deal more significant than the level at which elections are triggered. What good is an election if the rules are so stacked against you that you cannot win?
Yeah, that strikes me as much more important, as well. Unions don’t request elections unless they have over 50% support, anyway.
Indeed, that was what the stories and diaries on DKos about the FAA authorization bill’s labor dispute focused on. That was the big issue, right up until it wasn’t.
I wish the Patriots could’ve borrowed the disillusioned liberals’ goalposts the other night.
Shocking.
Sure it is.
You shut the airports down and fight the Republicans every single hour of every single day.
You destroy them until you get them to pass a clean bill.
Is the “them” in your last sentence “everyone who works at an airport?”
You seem quite eager to go through a lot of “them” to achieve your goals.
Slowly decaying conditions will get you there as surely as a couple weeks of extreme pain.
Only after you slowly decay, no one gives a shit anymore because it’s now ‘normal’. Just like it’s normal to piss in a cup, have no medical insurance, and be unable to raise a family on two incomes.
I don’t consider either outcome acceptable. I think we have to look for a third way, not accept the unacceptable.
Your “a couple of weeks of pain” strategy won’t arrest slowly decaying conditions, either. If the FAA bill was blown up, do you think that would be it? Do you think that would arrest the Republicans’ efforts?
It wouldn’t. We’d get a couple weeks of extreme pain, which would fail to make a noticeable difference over the long term. At best, we’d be doing this over and over, and now we’re not talking about just a couple of weeks of extreme pain, but those couple of weeks, over and over.
Well sure, that works really well until people blame unions for shutting down airports and the unions come out worse off than they were before.
That’s always a danger.
Continuing the trend of less and less union representation and the emiseration of the American worker is a greater danger.
Except there’s no real proof that this will lead to lower union representation. SO why take a huge risk with (other) peoples’ lives?
The trend of less and less unionization ended in 2007.
It’s hit bottom, and it’s going back up.
Why do unions support the Democratic Party again?
For the same reason the rest of us do: We have seen the alternative.
Yes they and we are going to get hosed on some things. Sometimes on big things. And, yes we should be angry.
But when the barbarians are at the gate you don’t organize a protest against the King – you kill the barbarians.
Destroy the Republicans while we can, and in doing so, who knows; we might organize a left large enough to displace the DLC types within the Democratic Party.
Obama O Muerte
Actually you need to do both.
Things would be even worse right now–for progressives, for the country, and even for Obama’s political future–if it weren’t for OWS.
(You should also avoid thinking as if your elected leaders ruled by Divine Right.)
Yeah, 7,000 arrested, but at least it relegated the crazy agenda to the Republican primaries.
A new year up ahead. Plenty of police riots in front of us at political conventions.
This is like fighting a rearguard action in a losing war. You might want to come up with a new strategy or else you will never win.
It’s always necessary to remember that the “King” in question has a history of trying to make deals with the “barbarians” and that he needs to be coaxed by his people to join them at the ramparts rather than simply opening the gates to the invaders.
This reminds me of how French Revolutionary armies ended up marching across all of Europe. Sometimes the King is the thing in the way of mounting an effective defense.
I hate reading your posts about labor-related issues because you seem to dislike actually justifying your opinions on the subject. Given your profession, I know you’re capable of it.
It might also be that you’re so embedded in the subject and the discourse around it that you don’t feel the need to justify your big-picture views and answer common objections. But there are those of us who don’t have similar commitments. Speaking for myself, I find this off-putting.
What on earth are you talking about?
Oh, you know, Erik. You know.
You post a lot of polemics about unions and very few of them take time to really make your case.
Example? How does this not make my case? Here’s my case: a) unions help Democrats get elected, b) Democrats throw unions under the bus, c) I wonder if it’s even worth supporting these people.
This seems fairly clear to me. Am I missing something?
You’ve gone a long way towards losing any argument once you start using the phrase “throwing [something/someone] under the bus.”
It’s one of those phrases whose only purpose is to conflate different things under the same term.
Please use the phrase ‘throwing the bus onto [someone/something]‘. It will make the Democrats look like they have superhero strength.
Yeah, “throwing under the bus” has clearly jumped the shark.
Can we get a list of forbidden clichés, please, the use of which allows immediate dismissal of the user?
Scott has provided said list on the blog before: “throwing under the bus” and “on steroids” were two of them. I think there were others that I don’t remember, though.
“game changer” as well, surely.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but isn’t this just another case of the Democrats getting screwed over by their need to be the adults in the room? I mean, I’m certainly supportive of the unions position, but if Republicans are really willing to kill re-authorization of the FAA over the provision, your hands are tied just a little bit if you actually care about good government, no?
Above was me.
What Erik says below. “Being the grownup in the room” is a significantly overrated political virtue…especially because the demon child across the aisle has grown expert at manipulating its adversary’s “adulthood.”
Yeah, because not being a grown up won’t ever have real consequences for real peoples’ lives.
Nobody thinks there won’t be consequences (it would be hardly worth advocating a change in behavior if there weren’t). What’s at issue is whether the consequences of the Democrats’ just saying “no” in situations like this would be good or bad.
In part because I think that the CWA has a better sense of what these actual consequences would be than you or I, I would prefer the party to listen to the unions rather than conforming to the WaPo vision of “adulthood.”
Is constantly capitulating to demon-children something grown-ups habitually do? Should they?
But they aren’t actually children, and the Democrats aren’t their parents, so this analogy doesn’t work at all.
Well, you’re the one who made it in the first place. And nobody said anything about “parents.”
There is truth to this, but the question one has to ask is whether it is worth the erosion the last century of social gains to be the grownup in the room. Me, I’d like to see the FAA authorization killed and let’s have it out. Republicans being responsible for tying up air transportation is a fight I’d be willing to have, especially given the rising protest culture and attention to income inequality over the past year.
But, then, you don’t work there.
Me, I’d be happy to see the pay checks stop at every university in Rhode Island let’s have it out over a bunch of issues that matter to me.
Oh, wait, no I don’t. That would actually be a pretty monstrous position to take.
Fine, let’s allow the FAA workers to vote on what they want to do here. Oh wait, they can’t do that because their unions are getting busted.
I know you defend the mainline Democratic Party on every issue, but try not to fall into pure hackishness.
Can you present some evidence of a practical effect here? As others have pointed out, unions don’t normally request elections until they get well over 50% card support. And the Democrats killed the part about abstaining counting as voting no.
This seem a lot like an excuse to attack the Democratic Party when it basically did the best it could in a tough situation.
Still no answer to this question, John.
I think it’s becoming clear that Loomis’ objection has nothing to do with practical consequences. He wrote one comment alleging that the FAA employees’ unions were being busted, but he seems to have backed off from that.
I don’t think we’re talking about practical consequences here. I think we’re talking about rah rah go team.
If Reid got the actual, significant rule about a non-vote counting as a no-vote removed in exchange for something that won’t actually change anything, then all of this angst is just identity politics and symbolism.
I hit such a nerve that you can’t even accurately describe the issue anymore, nevermind my argument. Pray tell, what union is being busted? You do understand that there is nothing in this bill that will decertify a union, right?
Of course you do. You’ve just become a tad emotional, and have decided to drag out your favorite jargon, like “busted” and “hackish.”
That’s pretty pathetic, “Professor.” I hope you do better in class that this.
I trust if you had any sort of rebuttal to my argument, you’d have shared it with us.
Instead, you’ve decided to pretend that wanting to see several hundred thousand workers get paid for their jobs is “pure hackishness.” Because of your awesome concern for workers, no doubt.
Erik has a pretty broad definition of “busting” a union, basically encompassing any position which does not embrace and facilitate unionization of any potential bargaining unit, whether a union even has a showing of support or not. The term is typically used to describe efforts to disestablish a union.
I like the pretense that it is an open question whether the FAA employees would or would not like there to be an FAA authorization bill.
We just don’t know!
I’m not saying I disagree with most of that, and I admit to not having followed the overall issue very closely…but won’t not authorizing the FAA have some pretty bad consequences? It certainly doesn’t sound like a good idea on the face of it to me.
In the short term, yes. But if the Republicans are going to play politics with it, don’t we have to fight them? Or is the lesson to permanently give ground in order to be the adult? What is the long-term strategy on these issues?
I don’t know, really. I’m not sure there’s really anything you can do about it, considering how far down the rabbit hole of anti-government thinking they are. I mean, I assume most conservatives don’t think the FAA should exist in the first place, and that there’s a hefty representation of that view amongst House Republicans, so what can you really do when they have the majority in one chamber of Congress?
I guess the problem isn’t even so much that Democrats have to be the adults so much as it is that they have to be the non-crazy people in the room.
Fighting them means winning elections, so they don’t have the pull to impose policies like this.
The notion that the only way to fight for unionization rights is to let the Republicans shut down governments and take away (other) people’s pay checks is as politically tone-deaf as it is morally appalling.
Yes, I am clearly arguing that this is the only way to fight for union rights.
Do you even try to make serious arguments?
If you’ve thought better of your argument, just say so.
Don’t do this little shtick of pretending you’ve been wronged. You’re not fooling anybody.
You’ve been quite forthright in arguing that “fighting” in this case means blocking the FAA bill, and that passing an FAA bill that includes anything you don’t like on the labor front is not “fighting,” but rather, “caving.”
Don’t strike this pose just because I’ve pointed out a hole in your argument.
You have a serious lack of self-awareness if you can read what I’ve written, and your responses, and think that you are in a position to ding me for not arguing seriously.
Maybe you should take a little break now and get your wits about you.
It’s all well and good to say that Dems should just let Republicans shut down the government to expose them for the infantile morons they are, but a government or agency shutdown hurts a lot of people, including agency employees, who are not eligible for unemployment but are not getting paychecks. I think different people can genuinely disagree on the amount of compromise that’s justified to avoid those harms, without being characterized as “throwing unions under the bus.” To me, the bill looks like a compromise that has little practical effect on the ability of workers to unionize but which managed to avoid the abstention = no rule, which would have huge practical effects on the ability of workers to unionize. Given that Congress is divided, what better outcome are we hoping for here?
Republicans to magically bow down to the will of liberals and somehow be forced by the omnipotent power of public opinion and vote for progressive ends, as per usual.
Or so it would appear, anyway.
Emotionally-satisfying symbolism?
Shorter Joe: “Keeping the unionization of the FAA under the same rules they had during the Bush years is emotionally-satisfying symbolism.”
What better outcome are we hoping for? For things to stay how they were during the Bush years?
“What better outcome are we hoping for? For things to stay how they were during the Bush years?”
Well you aren’t going to make things much better with Republicans in control of the House, are you?
Since you can’t answer John’s question, despite it being brought up by a couple of different commenters, I’m starting to think that yes, on this particular issue – having a 35% level instead of a 50% level – Keeping the unionization of the FAA under the same rules they had during the Bush years is emotionally-satisfying symbolism.
So far, all you’ve been able to come up with suggesting the opposite is the word “Bush” and some personal insults.
Yep, emotional. Yep, symbolic.
No, that was wengler who did that when they wrote this:
“You shut the airports down and fight the Republicans every single hour of every single day. You destroy them until you get them to pass a clean bill.”
Also, the earlier TPM report notes that the Democrats did succeed in getting the much more odious provision that any abstentions in a union vote would be counted as a “no” vote stripped from the bill, which is probably worth noting too.
I agree that there could be some positive impacts from forcing the Republicans to own the consequences of their infantile lunacy. On the other hand, I have no confidence that the Dems would, or even could, do that. They seem incredibly incompetent at branding the Republicans with the consequences of their actions.
Oh for sure–I certainly don’t think the Democrats understand the political game well enough to actually make this work.
I’m not entirely convinced you aren’t overestimating public support for unions in assuming you could make Republicans “own” the consequences.
I agree. In a full government shut-down over a large number of budget issues, there is a broad range of people who potentially benefit over the issues in question. Most people at least know someone who knows someone who benefits from some program Republicans would like to kill. This isssue is too narrow.
The Democrats would be seen as bringing the airline industry to a halt to benefit a narrow range of workers. Not only would there be resentment from people harmed by the shutdown who do not benefit, there would be resentment from people for whom the Democrats did not bring about a catastrophic confrontation.
This presumes that this is an isolated incident instead of Hostage-Taking #193.
We are really going to put our foot down on #194. Just you watch.
I look forward to the strongly-worded letter!
Yes, the Dems are in on this from the get-go. Arguing that it’s a failure of understanding misses their complicity. Being the adult means always caving to your children’s tantrums. It’s simply Good Parenting 101.
Well, if you can’t get the hand grenade away from them, then yeah, I think you kind of do have to keep giving them as many cheeseburgers as they ask for, while you keep working on that hand grenade problem. Saying “pull the pin if you want to, but you are absolutely not getting another cheeseburger!” does not strike me as the height of responsible parenting. The resulting closed-casket funeral is going to be an awfully poor platform for priding yourself on your tough love.
Shorter me: this isn’t a game, consequences matter. To the extent that this does resemble a game, the game is chicken — in which it’s important to remember that “losing” is the *second* worst outcome.
I see that you don’t have children.
I find that the last people you want to listen to in a hostage situation are the ones who are 110% sure that there preferred strategy is the best one and that there’s absolutely no way anything could go wrong.
There is truth to this, but the question one has to ask is whether it is worth the erosion the last century of social gains to be the grownup in the room.
Have you tried living in a country where the room has no grownup in it? People who do live in those countries are desperate to immigrate to the US, deteriorating workers’ rights and all.
Shooting the hostage is not good for the hostage. No matter how pure your intentions.
And threatening to shoot the hostage simply doesn’t work when the other side doesn’t care about their life at all.
One of the things I hated about the Republicans during the Bush years was their attitude that the ability of the government to actually do its job just didn’t matter – that government was only an arena for political fights. They’d blow the whole thing up, or shut it down, and the consequences of doing so were beneath notice, if it could advance some ideological goal or advance the interest of some well-connected party.
I don’t think liberals should aspire to be the mirror image of that.
But if you don’t aspire to at least promote an agenda that could work, and instead are captured by interests or political parties that will just keep taking one hostage or another, you will ultimately be passing someone else’s agenda.
This is classic game theory. The problem is that Republicans are not reaping any sort of consequences for their endless defections.
I’m not arguing that there should be no ideological/political aspect to government, that the government doing its day job is the only thing Democrats and liberals should support.
I’m arguing that, unlike the Republicans during the Bush years, our side should aspire to do both.
Believing that it’s actually important to have an FAA or a competent FEMA chief means that letting the hostage get shot counts as losing the game for us.
I think Loomis’ point is that there are different ways of maneuvering politically so that a key policy to an important constituency doesn’t have to be sacrificed.
If the choice is “this FAA authorization bill or nothing”, obviously the choice is clear. I don’t think Loomis would argue that.
But letting the situation devolve to that choice is a clear failure. Why the balls haven’t the Dems been screaming about a straight up-or-down FAA authorization vote? Why haven’t they spent a pittance to flood airports with ads saying the Republicans are willing to screw everything up? Why wasn’t it in the SOTU?
Why haven’t they engaged airlines and the bureaucrats that airports help (administrators, mayors, real estate types, etc.) to lobby Republicans? Why haven’t they threatened government contracts with transportation groups if they don’t lobby Republicans?
Why isn’t a warning about the FAA being shut down printed on every ticket? Why isn’t it being announced over the intercom in every cabin? Why aren’t overseas companies that would have their businesses suffer being prodded to lobby Republicans?
Spare everybody the civics 101 about “you have to win elections to make policy” and “you have to compromise in order to make policy”. If the Democrats had done everything they fucking could have and still been left in this situation, then fine.
But they haven’t, and they left labor holding the bag. And when Loomis says “Hey, labor is already carrying 15 duffle bags, that ain’t right”, he isn’t being “emotional”. Cut that crap out.
All of your strategy suggestions are interesting but are predicated upon the Dems giving a shit. They don’t. You’re going to vote for them anyway. They know that. And the reason 2010 was lost was because many were disappointed in the lackluster effort to truly engage in progressive reform during a two-year opportunity (but which will only occur when the Senate Dems do away with the filibuster – which they won’t because it is the instrument which most discourages populist hope).
the reason 2010 was lost was because many were disappointed in the lackluster effort to truly engage in progressive reform during a two-year opportunity
jeer9:voting behavior literature::Glenn Beck:science of global warming
Regardless of whether you think this sort of thing happens because the Dems are just using unions or because the Dems lack power, the present strategy doesn’t make much sense. Unions need to build power. This means changing how they approach elections, lobbying, and organizing. I don’t mean to suggest that, in general, labor is doing everything wrong, or that there aren’t ones doing it better. But real change has to happen.
I appreciate what a number of people pointed out – better to have an NLRB that will enforce the law over one that won’t. But that only helps are the margins. Enforcing the law as it exists, while using the standard strategies, slows the decline of unions. That’s it. It’s not nothing, but it’s not enough.
The law is stacked against labor, but as Jack Gettman has argued, that doesn’t mean labor can’t produce change. But it can’t under this model.
Regardless, I’m glad to see Cohen make a stink. Even if you think Exit, in any form, is unacceptable, Voice is probably a good thing.
That’s a compelling case for an American Labor Party. They can fight the Democrats where they can and join them where they must.
I am guessing that the number of elected Congressional Democrats that have ever been in a union at any point in their lives is very low. Union issues become less and less salient for the very rich.
We already have one.
The American electoral system makes an “American Labor Party” basically impossible, just like every other third party.
Rep. Steve Lynch of Mass. was president of an Ironworkers local and put himself through college and law school by taking night classes. Guess what? He’s kind of an asshole on just about everything but labor concerns. He wanted to primary John the-F-stands-for-Forbes-as-in-the-really-fucking-old-money-Forbes-family Kerry from the right. It’s no guarantee that you’ll get progressive legislation. I don’t know why so many progressives would prefer to have these arguments before winning elections rather than after winning them.
Bob Brady from Philly is a member of the Carpenters’ Union. He votes a liberal line pretty reliably, but is not otherwise an inspiring figure.
I don’t think it is. The question of what to do otherwise is separate from the question of whether what you are doing now is working.
Part of the problem I think is too much focus on elections. Even if you think elections are all that matter, you can’t be strong during elections time unless you are building your capacity to win them between elections.
FWIW, I think some unions in some locales have found ways to use electoral politics along with other organizing very effectively. Recent events in New Haven provide a useful model. LA is another one.
Erik, did you address the point that this will actually have no effect on organizing and the Dem senators removed the provision that would (i.e., having to win 50% of all possible voters, not just votes). (The latter crops up a LOT. Over here in the UK, low turnout is commonly bandied about by management during actions.)
Well, if it won’t actually restrict, and they removed something that would have actually restricted, and, well, the jobs are funded…what’s wrong with that?
Also, at the state level there’s been lots of pretty determined action by state senators (e.g., denying a quorum even at the risk of contempt actions or fines).
I think Democrats should do a lot more to build unions up, for sure, but this doesn’t seem so outrageous.
This isn’t about building unions up though. It’s about keeping the right to unionize the same as it is now. There’s a reason Republicans see this as a victory and fought so hard for it.
But didn’t they lose the provision they really wanted to pass?
But if it is effectively the same, then the only problem can be in the optics (or perhaps the seeds of future problems).
If unions generally don’t trigger elections at 30% (in spite of them being able to) but at 50% (as people have claimed), then it’s a great move to give up 30% in exchange for a bill (all things being equal, i.e., insane Republicans).
(More precisely, if there were several key circumstances where 30% was the make or break and was typically make, I can see a case. What’s usual?)
I think what you should be asking yourself is what is going to stop the Republicans from raising this to 60 percent or 70 percent on the next FAA re-authorization bill.
These are compromises that make us compromised.
Well, what would stop them from doing that in the future if Democrats effectively killed this proposal?
Yeah, this reminds me of people who criticized the Obama administration’s refusal to defend DOMA, because what would stop President Palin from refusing to defend the constitutionality of Social Security?!?!?!?!?!? Anybody who would think that Republicans would refuse to do something because a Democrat didn’t (but Saint Reagan did!) must have been asleep for the last 40 years.
I think what you should be asking yourself is what is going to stop the Republicans from raising this to 60 percent or 70 percent on the next FAA re-authorization bill.
The 2012 election?
At some point, if the American people don’t stop electing so many Republicans and difference-splitters, they’re going to get even more of what they want. That’s how elected government works.
If the whole Congress was made up of Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, they wouldn’t pass this bill. But it’s not.
Oh hush you, every real progressive knows that the actual composition of Congress is of no importance to the nature of legislation that gets passed and that everyone this side of Steve King is a liberal if you want it! What are you, some kind of DLC apologist?!
I see some sense in being worried about seeds of future losses and lots of sense in establishing bright lights in many contexts (my go to example is University fees in the UK: Labour opened the door and the current govt blew through them).
But two considerations remain:
1) Can you reasonably hold the line? I.e., is the disruption of not funding the FAA for some period of time worth the gain. This requires hostage situation reasoning.
2) Is this actually the start of a slippery slope (or a slipperly slope that you can avoid)? What prevents Republicans moving the standard to 60% or 70%? If they have power, nothing. But then nothing prevents them from adding pernicious vote counting rules either, but surely the fact that the Dems prevented that now is a good thing?
In any case, it seems to be all tactical and strategic disputes, not fundamental betrayal (as suggested).
This was a very dispiriting thread to read.
Clearly, to get more progressive polices, the Dems “need to win elections”. However, institutionally it strikes me that joining in to help slowly strangle one of your key constituencies is not a winning recipe for doing so, and will only undermine your previously espoused “core” principles.
Organized labor is dying in this country. It is dying due to political choices we have made since WWII. This is a choice our Democratic Party has participated in. Willingly.
But it is, many claim above, so self-evidently much better to still be able to fight the GOP over the carcass, the remains of our democracy….this, we are told repeatedly, is called “realism”.
I call it utter capitulation and an extreme lack of political will, much less imagination.
Mark Thompson over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen has an interesting and relevant post (at least to me):
http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/02/08/can-free-markets-and-unions-thrive-together/
That link is very problematic.
While it is true that the state can suppress unionization, it’s equally true that the state made unionization possible through the National Labor Relations Act. The upshot is that the federal government plays a gigantic role in whether unions can succeed or not. It sometimes helps, It sometimes hurts.
I really, really doubt this is true.
[...] == "undefined"){ addthis_share = [];}There was a lot of interesting discussion around my angry post about the FAA reauthorization bill screwing over unions, especially the Communication Workers of America. If you didn’t watch CWA President Larry [...]