Review of Embedded With Organized Labor

Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home, by Steve Early
Monthly Review Press, 288 pages, $16.95

Ed Sadlowski; Jay, Maine; Pittstown Coal, Tony Mazzochi, the Charlestown Five; Ron Carey – as the names float by on the pages of “Embedded With Organized Labor: Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home,” it sometimes seems that Steve Early’s new collection of articles must encompass every person, place, or corporation of significance to the labor movement over the past four decades.  Not quite, but actually the volume’s thirty nine essays – most of them book reviews – cover even more ground than that.  For instance, there’s stories of labor journalists from the deep past of whom you’ve likely never heard.  But the topic most of interest to Early, recently retired from the Communications Workers of America but preferring to think of himself as “redeployed,” is the future of the American labor movement.

There was a time when leftists of a certain age asked themselves how they could love a labor movement that didn’t seem to want to love them back. Certainly the welcome mat wasn’t out on that day Early recalls “In May of 1970, [when] hundreds of flag-waving New York City construction workers … attacked a crowd of antiwar demonstrators on Wall Street.”  The breach between labor and the left would actually broaden two years later when the AFL-CIO refused to back George McGovern against Richard Nixon.  The South Dakota Senator would come closer to espousing the politics of the leftists of the day than any other Democratic nominee in their life time, but for AFL-CIO President George Meany he was too antiwar, too radical. Some see payback in McGovern’s current opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.  But ironically, the individual he cites for past opposition to the concept of binding arbitration that constitutes one of the bill’s components is none other than Meany.

Still some, like Early, persisted.  A few unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), which to this day maintains the egalitarian tradition of paying no official a salary higher than the highest you can earn under a UE union contract, actually worked with and encouraged student radicals – such as this writer.  (Early drops the sobering fact that this honorable organization – which had half a million members before leaving the CIO in 1949 rather than submit to the government-driven purge of Communist Party members going on in other unions – has now shrunken to 17,000 members.)

Acceptance came much harder in most other unions, though, but ultimately those who didn’t see the labor movement as a collection of “real-life Archie Bunkers who railed against a whole generation of spoiled ‘meathead’ college kids,” would even prevail, to a degree, and by “the fall of 1999,” Early notes, “steelworkers and radical students were seen marching side by side (or at least on the same side) in street protests against the World Trade Organization.”

The signal change of those intervening years was John Sweeney’s 1995 election as AFL-CIO president.  Although a book that Early reviews on that subject bears the tile, “Not Your Father’s Union Movement,” his election did represent a return to the past in the sense that afterward the labor movement would again more or less openly welcome the left as it generally had before the Cold War.  Of course, with Joseph Stalin now more than forty years dead and the Soviet Union itself gone for a decade, this thaw came none too quickly.

Sweeney comes in for his share of criticism in Early’s book, yet it seems fair to say that he did pretty much try to do what he said he would  –  reverse the long term decline of labor that Early notes in the book’s first paragraph: “When I first got involved the labor movement in the early 1970s, unions still represented almost a quarter of the country’s workforce.  Now, unionization is down to 12.4 percent overall and only 7.6 percent in private industry.”  Sweeney had assumed the Federation’s leadership largely on the strength of the fact that his own Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had been an exception to the general downward trend, largely due to the fact that much of its constituency was public employees, more than a third of whom are now unionized.

But Sweeney has not been particularly successful in reversing the overall trend, although SEIU has continued growing to the point where it is has become the nation’s largest union.  And in 2005, Andy Stern, Sweeney’s successor at SEIU, led unions comprising about a third of the AFL-CIO’s membership into a rival Change to Win federation dedicated to doing what Sweeney could not.  About the best thing that can be said about the split to this point is that it has not damaged the labor movement nearly as badly as some had feared.  The overall national percentage of union membership has even risen for the past two years, although it remains lower than before the split.

Not one to see easy fixes for labor’s decline, Early is skeptical that even the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) currently pending in Congress will represent the cure-all some hope for.  He cites a Canadian labor relations scholar’s findings that “union density and bargaining coverage are falling even in provinces such as Saskatchewan and Quebec that have card check and first-arbitration clauses” – precisely the EFCA items that its advocates hope will save union representation drives from the often debilitating process of National Labor Relations Board elections and management refusal to bargain.  The measures he thinks are really needed – repeal of “Taft-Hartley Act restrictions on real union solidarity and the Supreme Court’s seventy-year old sanctioning of the use of striker replacement” are not part of political discourse today – “except in the speeches of Ralph Nader.”

And as SEIU has dominated the labor movement of recent years, so it dominates Early’s book, with Stern coming in for fairly severe criticism.  “Since 1996,” he writes, “when Stern replaced Sweeney, 40 SEIU locals – or 14 percent of its 275 affiliates – have been put under trusteeship to implant new officers.”  While he grants that “[S]ome of those ousted ran old-guard fiefdoms,” others just didn’t want to go along with what he views as questionable programs coming from the top, and perhaps the “air of arrogance and exclusivity” emanating from some SEIU staffers or an “attitudinal style … closer … to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs than to veteran staffers of the trade union movement” that one reviewed author describes.

(The largest of these trusteeship battles is currently playing out with the leadership of the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers claiming to have filed decertification petitions aimed at taking back close to 2/3 of the 150,000 members it formerly led in SEIU’s now trusteed California-based United Healthcare Workers West.)

The fact that book reviews constitute the core of Early’s book naturally constrains him largely to topics that other writers have chosen and many of the more interesting matters are raised only peripherally.  There is the fairly central question of just what a labor radical is to do.  At the one end are the “colonizers” like Wellesley graduate Elly Leary, interviewed in Staughton and Alice Lynd’s “The New Rank and File,” who spent twelve years building cars at the Framingham, Massachusetts General Motors plant.  Jobs like this were hard enough, Early notes, “without the additional task of proselytizing.” The group of radicals that Leary eventually became part of was just about learning its ass from its elbow on how to proceed sensibly when the plant closed in 1989 and they were deindustrialized out of the working class.

At the other end there is “SEIU’s ‘best and brightest’” who come in for Early’s criticism because “most have never been a janitor, security guard, nursing home worker, home health care aide or public employee.”  Of course, Early himself came in for that very criticism back in the mid-1970s as he recounts in the book’s first piece: when he was interviewing coal miners for the United Mine Workers Journal, one obviously wary miner politely shook hands with him, then “looked me in the eye and said knowingly, ‘Ah, pencil hands.’”

And then there’s the question of why the labor radicals do what they do.  I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in saying that most of the people we encounter in these pages saw themselves as socialists, if not by that name precisely then by some synonym they thought more appropriate to the time and place.  They weren’t motivated just by the hope of a better labor movement, but of a better country, a better world – and they saw the labor movement as the best means to that end.  For that sort of thing we will have to wait for Early’s next book, though – he is currently writing his history of the sixties radicals and the labor movement.  But the current book will give you plenty to chew on for the moment.  And, oh yes, it comes with an excellent index, unusual in an essay collection, but extremely useful because this book is dense – and I mean that as a complement.

11/17 Roundup: Fireside IM’s

• President-elect Obama continues a tradition started by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, albeit in with a 21st century twist, in his new weekly You Tube chats. Everyone is encouraged to take their laptops and curl up by their fake fireplace to rekindle the ghosts of socialists past:

• Speaking of the mandate for socialism, Senator Max Baucus of Montana has proposed a new universal health care plan that includes mandates and other important cost controls. I argued this past week that mandates will be necessary for any successful plan, so this is music to my ears. Baucus is chairman of the all-powerful Senate finance committee, so his opinion matters a great deal. Read more about Senator Baucus’s forward-thinking plan here.

• Although only NBC has called the state of Missouri, the final electoral vote tally looks all but official–Obama 365–McCain 173. To everyone’s surprise, Senator Obama won 1 electoral vote from the state of Nebraska. Nebraska and Maine both divvy up their electoral votes by congressional district (with the winner of the state as a whole getting the other two electoral votes). Although this is novel in theory, this is the first time that either state has ever in practice not given all their electoral votes to one candidate. Although McCain won the state as whole  (2 electoral votes) and the other two congressional districts (1 electoral vote each) very comfortably, Obama won the popular vote in the 2nd congressional district.

11/2 Swing State Power Rankings

With only two days left until Election Day, Demockracy is pleased to give its updated ranking of the top five swing states. Today’s rankings will be based on where the candidates were yesterday and where they will be today:

5. Missouri

Obama held what was most likely his last Missouri rally in Springfield, Missouri last night. While probably not a tipping point state, Missouri currently looks up for grabs.

4. Pennsylvania

McCain and Palin both visited the Keystone state again yesterday, and McCain will be there again today. While Obama still seems to have a significant advantage here, an upset here is probably McCain’s only realistic shot at 270 electoral votes.

3. Virginia

Sarah Palin and John McCain did a swing through Virginia yesterday, and Hillary Clinton will be there today. If Obama wins Virginia and Pennsylvania, McCain’s path to 270 will be virtually impossible.

2. Florida

John McCain will hold a Miami rally tonight, and Joe and Jill Biden will make three campaign appearances in Florida today. Florida appears to be the real stake-in-the-heart state that the Obama campaign wishes to drive into the McCain campaign’s electoral heart.

1. Ohio

Joe Biden spent most of yesterday in the Buckeye state, and Barack and Michelle Obama will spend the full day there today, with stops in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. In addition, Sarah Palin will also make three Ohio stops today. Ohio looks to be ground zero again.

10/31 Swing State Power Rankings

In honor of All Hallows Eve, today’s Swing State Power Rankings will focus on the five states Demockracy believes will be most likely to keep us up past the bewitching hour on Election Night with dirty tricks, hanging chads, and provisional spooks…

5. Pennsylvania

Unlike most swing states, Pennsylvania does not have early voting. Therefore, polls could be flooded. Long lines and dirty tricks may ensue.

4. Missouri

Missouri is known for Election Night chaos. In 2000, polls were held open for several hours to accommodate those who still hadn’t been able to vote. These problems resurfaced this February on Super Tuesday.

3. Colorado

As one of the top-tier tipping point states and one of the last competitive states to close its polls, Colorado has the potential to keep us up with fright! If the election is not decided by the time Colorado begins to tabulate their votes, expect all eyes to turn to the Rockies.

2. Ohio

After 2004, how could Ohio not be near the top of the list? A maldistribution of voting machines caused seven or eight hour lines in some areas. For instance, many students at Kenyon College didn’t get to vote until 2 am, AFTER Ohio had been called for George W. Bush. Why? There was one working voting machine for thousands of voters. Ohio has a new Secretary of State this year, but election irregularities would not be a surprise. Obama has called thousands of lawyers to the Buckeye State.

1. Florida.

2000. Hanging Chads. Supreme Court. December. Enough said…

Missouri: Show Me The Crowds

The Show Me State showed up strong for Senator Obama on Saturday. First came St. Louis where Obama drew 100,000 supporters. This was the largest Obama crowd seen anywhere in the United States during the entire campaign. Next came Kansas City where 75,000 supporters showed up to a rally on Saturday evening. As recently as one month ago, Missouri was seen as near lock for McCain. In fact, Obama had not even visited the state since late July. However, there has been significant movement toward Obama in recent weeks. A Rasmussen Reports poll released this past week showed Obama with a 52%-46% lead in the Show Me State. This lead is almost identical to Obama’s current national lead. Missouri could be a tipping point state after all.

Here are pictures from Saturday’s events:

The Future of Choice

Several years ago, I spent some time as a campus organizer for the Missouri affiliate of a reproductive health advocacy group. Much of our time was spent “in the field,” attempting to find ways to engage students on a relatively conservative campus, in the crucial swing state of Missouri.

A few weeks ago, I was wandering around the website of my hometown newspaper, and stumbled across a small piece about my former employers. My state affiliate and their board of directors made a decision to disaffiliate from their national organization. This reflects a larger trend, at least in my home state, in which much of the choice community has given up on the ability to protect reproductive freedom at a federal level, and has instead turned their attentions to preserving and protecting choice on a state level.

Has the choice movement simply given up on the idea that every woman is entitled to comprehensive reproductive health care? It often seems so, when a national agenda is largely abandoned and attention is turned to preventing further destruction of the right to choose in the few states in which the right still exists, often in some highly adulterated form. The national movement focused on preserving Roe, while conservatives pushed for restrictions that served to weaken its protections at the state level. For years, this shift in strategy went seemingly unmet by reproductive health advocates, as they deigned to let the courts tackle problems and allowed Roe to become their watchword. Even in liberal states, legal protection drifted toward the center, with the passage of dangerous parental consent laws and waiting period requirements. The choice movement is only now catching up, realizing that there may be no way to protect a constitutionally-guaranteed right to choose – especially with the anti-choice extremist McCain/Palin ticket. Is the best strategy to focus on protecting the right where it is still likely to exist, even if Roe is overturned? To make sure that there are still places in this country where one can still go to terminate a pregnancy, even at great distance and at her own expense?

While painful to admit, there are advantages to this approach, one with which anti-choice advocates have had enormous success when they decided to focus their attention on state, rather than federal, law. Focusing on a state-by-state approach allows a more tightly-focused battle, a stronger message that can be tailored to appeal to the demographics of the state. Even here, though, problems exist – the horrendous South Dakota referendum that sought to ban abortion entirely was defeated only because the text of the law did not contain a provision for the life and health of the mother. Planned Parenthood and other organizations campaigning against the initiative jumped on this as a reason vote against the referendum. A wise choice in the short term, it is also an easy provision to add the next time around – and what then can they use to campaign against it? One can’t fault them for a winning strategy, but it was hardly a long-lasting one.

I receive far more material in my mailbox and inbox from my state affiliates of NARAL and Planned Parenthood, than from the national office. Whereas legislation on reproductive rights at the federal level receives attention rather infrequently, the availability of comprehensive reproductive health faces a consistent level of assault on the state level. Their efforts have been effective; several times now, they have mobilized to beat back legislation that would have made Missouri the state with the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation – even more draconian than the South Dakota law defeated in 2006.

The idea of giving up on the federal government’s ability to protect our sovereignty over our own bodies is, frankly, terrifying. However, the legislation passed over the last eight years is such that we can no longer trust it to do just that. The neoconservative political dominance of the 1990s and early 2000s brought about legislation and court decisions that allowed states to pass laws determining when physicians could perform abortions, banned specific types of abortion, and granted fetuses protection under the law. The direction of the Supreme Court, thanks to President Bush, has been set for years to come – and stare decisis doesn’t look like a doctrine the current court is determined to follow.

I’m thankful that I live somewhere now that offers strong protections toward a woman’s right to choose, but I know that, across state lines in Missouri, it’s only getting worse. At the end of the year, all but one clinic in the state will be forced to close. Referendums and state laws chipping away at comprehensive reproductive health succeed at a disconcerting rate. I know that my former colleagues, and my friends at NARAL and Planned Parenthood will do what they can to keep fighting back against the anti-choice crusaders, and I’ll continue to help them in whatever ways that I can. They’re running out of options, though, and when that day comes, there may not be a federal backup plan that can save them.

Governor Forecast–9/17/08

Only 11 governors’ mansions are up for grabs in 2008, and only four of these races are truly competitive. Therefore, as expected, governors’ races are not receiving much national attention this election cycle. However, if you live in Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, or Washington, your state has a very competitive race on its hands that could have very important national implications. The governors of these states will have immense power in the Congressional redistricting that occurs after the 2010 census. These four states have relatively even representation from both parties in Congress and the potential for two or three seats to switch per state as a result of this year’s gubernatorial election.  Add to that the immense financial difficulties facing states as a result of the recent economic downturn, and these elections become all the more important.  With this in mind, here is a look at these four races:

Current Governor Party Breakdown:

28 Democrats, 22 Republicans

Democratic Pickup Opportunities

Lean D:

Missouri:

Embattled Republican Governor Matt Blunt’s surprise announcement not to seek a second term surprisingly made this an open seat for the second consecutive election. ( Democratic Governor Bob Holden lost to Claire McCaskill in the Democratic primary in 2004.)  The Republican nominee to replace Blunt is six-term conservative Congressman Kenny Hulshof. Hulshof won a very close primary against moderate Republican and current state treasurer, Sarah Steelman. The Democratic nominee will be four-term state attorney general, Jay Nixon. Because of Blunt’s unpopularity, the Republican chances at this seat actually improved with his decision to not seek reelection. If the more moderate Steelman would have won the GOP primary, this race would probably be a true tossup. However, with the unpopularity of Governor Blunt, this race currently is listed as Lean Democratic. However, it is still very competitive and could easily become a tossup before November. Read more about the Missouri Governor’s race in this recent Demockracy.com piece.

Lean R:

Indiana:

Republican Governor Mitch Daniels faces reelection this year against former Congresswoman Jill Long Thompson.  Ms. Long Thompson narrowly defeated fellow Democrat Jim Schellinger by one percent point in the May primary. Governor Daniel’s popularity in the Hoosier state received several blows very early in his first term from his efforts to uniform Indiana’s time zones and lease the Indiana turnpike. While unpopular, both of these decisions probably make economic sense.  It should be noted that Indiana elected three new Democrats to Congress in 2006 and, prior to Daniels, the Democrats controlled the Governor’s mansion for 16 consecutive years,  Nevertheless, Daniel’s incumbency status and the fact that this is a presidential year lead us to give the slight advantage to Governor Daniels. One caveat here is that recent reports have shown that Senator Obama has organization all over the state, while Senator McCain has essentially ignored the state. While this may not be enough to win the traditionally Republican state for Senator Obama, it may be enough to help Ms. Long Thompson be more competitive than she otherwise would be.

Republican Pickup Opportunities

Lean D:

Washington:

Washington’s governor’s race features a rematch of the epic 2004 race between current Governor Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi. This race featured not one, but two recounts. After the first vote, Mr. Rossi led by 261 votes. Then came a mandated recount, which narrowed Rossi’s lead to a mere 42 votes. Finally, a second manual recount led to Gregoire winning by only 133 votes out of over 2.8 million votes cast. Rossi is seeking a rematch in 2008 and the race appears to be close again. However, we believe that the power of incumbency and the coattails of Senator Obama (he has had big leads in recent polls here) are enough to put this race as Lean Democrat for the moment. However, we would not be surprised if they were recounting again come November.

Toss Up:

North Carolina:

The retirement of popular Democratic Governor Mike Easley creates an open race between Democrat Lieutenant Governor, Bev Perdue, and seven-term Republican mayor of Charlotte, Pat McCrory. Ms. Perdue won a hard fought primary against State Treasurer Richard Moore and Mr. McCrory fended off right-wing conservative Fred Smith.  Helped by his populous base, early polls have shown Mr. McCrory with a slight lead. Adding to that the fact that  Democrats have occupied the governor’s mansion for 16 consecutive years, and one would be prone to make Mr. McCrory the slight favorite. However, while Senator McCain is the slight favorite in North Carolina, we believe that Senator Obama’s ground game in North Carolina could bring out enough African American (in excess of 20% of the vote) and young voters to the polls to push Ms. Perdue over the top (even if it is not enough for Obama himself). Therefore, for now, we will rank this one as a tossup.

Overall Projection:

Overall, we forecast Democrats to have a net gain of one gubernatorial seat, which would give them a 29-21 national advantage.

Missouri Governor’s Race

With the latest polls showing McCain up four points in Missouri, there is a growing interplay between local and national elections here. After a bruising primary in which the establishment candidate, Kenny Hulshoff, won the GOP nod over Treasurer Sarah Steelman there is a close race between Hulshoff and Attorney General Jay Nixon. Outgoing Republican Governor Matt Blunt chose not to run for re-election after facing a number of (ahem) challenges during his term. One particular point of contention are the “reformed” state campaign finance laws which allow virtually unlimited “pooled” donations from various interest groups, although voters seem to be much more concerned about economic issues. With the change in regulations, Hulshoff brought in over a half-million dollars in the first week from national groups and business interests, while Nixon raised slightly less, primarily from law firms. A growing infusion of money seems reflect the national campaigns’ realization that local races could help tip the election here…