After Sanders swept six of the last seven contests, by a margins averaging about 75 percent, the contest moves into Wisconsin where progressivism and the unionism face a historic ideological challenge. Will Wisconsin vote for the principles of political revolution they were founded on or will they default to neoliberal pragmatism?

Laborers or labor unions

A little discussed fact is that it is the unions and their members have been the major contributors to Bernie Sanders campaign. Most notably are the Machinist Union, Teamsters Union, National Education Association, United Auto Workers, United Food and Commercial Workers, Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, not to mention the US Postal Service and the Laborers Union.

However, there is a schism. Unions like the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME),  which was central in the fight with Governor Walker on the right to organize, endorsed the reformist darling of the Democratic Party establishment Hillary Clinton. Since Sanders seems more popular with the membership than the leadership, it is not clear how this will translate into votes. The AFL-CIO, the largest national union, has declined to endorse either candidate.

Which labor movement will show up? The one who fights for workers rights or the one who believes they already have a seat at the table that it could lose?

Independent voters

Wisconsin has an open primary and at this point it looks like the blue collar workers will largely support Sanders and not be tempted to cross over to Trump like they did in Ohio.  Though Trump has also has taken an anti-NAFTA position, it is Bernie Sanders who has clearly articulated a pro-worker vision from the $15 minimum wage to a pledge to rewrite all of the so-called free-trade agreements. It is Sanders appeal with independents that his campaign bases there claim that he is the stronger candidate in the general election and they may break his way on Tuesday.

Wisconsin’s progressive roots

And then there is the question of ideology. There’s been much discussion in this campaign about progressivism. After Bernie Sanders laid out a clear progressive, social democrat platform, Hillary Clinton claimed that she was “a progressive who can get things done.”  This was particularly startling since Hillary, a household name, has been practicing triangulation and transactional politics which was started by her husband Bill Clinton through her career. Clintonism, which has dominated the Democrats ideology for decades, claimed that by moving the discussion to the middle, the Democrats could get the Republicans to compromise. What happened, which is what many on the left predicted, is that this tactic pulled the whole party to the right.

Wisconsin should know what the term means. The Progressive Movement was founded there by Bob La Follette, who is known as “Fighting Bob.” At the age of 64, the former governor and staunch supporter of Socialist Eugene V Debs, ran for president largely on an anti-corruption platform, demanded investigations into the war profiteering and corrupt monopolies, and that the big banks be broken up. His platform called for taking over the railroads and private utilities, calling for child labor laws, the right to organize and increasing civil liberties ending racism.

He campaigned for the presidency on a pledge to “break the combined power of the private monopoly system over the political and economic life of the American people” and denouncing, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence, “any discrimination between races, classes, and creeds.”

This laid the groundwork for the Progressive Party of Wisconsin which influenced Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and was carried on by his son establishing the progressive platform as core values in progressive politics for decades.

Bernie for Wisconsin

What is on the line Tuesday is whether Wisconsin stays true to its progressive roots, or if after years of being clobbered by the Koch brothers, it takes on the mantle of neoliberal centrism. Its progressive roots still live on, at least, at the an annual event called the Fighting Bob Fest where, in October 2014, Bernie Sanders spoke on his familiar topic- Democracy or Oligarchy. You can read the full speech here – or watch the video.

After eviscerating the Koch brothers and the racist right wing fringe, pillars of power in the Republican Party, Sanders lays out the Progressive Platform that he is currently campaigning on – demanding campaign finance reform, breaking up the banks, single-payer health care and strengthening the safety net with a passionate plea for social, environmental and economic justice.

He said we are in the midst of the greatest crisis since the Civil War.

And this is not an easy fight. They have huge resources. They have think tanks. They have media. You name it, they’ve got it.

But there is one thing they don’t have. While they have unlimited sums of money, what we have is the people.

And if we can overcome some of our differences, we can focus on the broad issues facing America: jobs, health care, education, the environment, the needs of children. And on these issues, believe it or not, we are a united nation.

So let us reach out to our brothers and our sisters, fellow workers, fellow family members, and let us create a movement that tells Washington: We are not asking you, we are telling you.

Change will take place in America not through some backroom negotiations.

Change takes place in America when millions of people demand it.

Wisconsin decides Tuesday if it wants systemic change or the status quo primacy of the 1 percent and Wall Street. The same question faces Rhode Islanders on April 26th.

While NEARI, the state’s suburban teachers’ union, is vociferously backing Pell, a diverse group of public and private sector unions launched today calling itself “Working Families for Angel.”

In a press release the group said: “Angel Taveras is the only Democratic candidate in this race who knows the stresses working families are under.  Angel was raised by a single mother; his first job was a unionized bagger and cashier at a grocery store; worked his way through law school; and as Mayor has collaboratively solved problems with his employees to move Providence forward. We will convey this message to our members and their families, utilizing every communication avenue possible and look forward to the Democratic Primary Election on September 9th.  We are confident that come Election Day our members’ voices will be heard.”

The group plans on making contact with 16,000 union households, it said in the press release. “A coalition this size could represent more than 30% of this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary voters, and provide a massive boost to Angel Taveras’ campaign,” it said.

The group includes, according to the press statement:

…the Rhode Island State Association of Firefighters, International Association of Firefighters, AFL-CIO; RI Council 94, American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO;  United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 328; United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 791; International Brotherhood of Police Officers, National Association of Government Employees, SEIU, AFL-CIO;  Service Employees International Union, Local 580, AFL-CIO; Brotherhood of Utility Workers Council, Local 310, United Utility Workers of America, AFL-CIO; and International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 400, AFL-CIO.

A letter from the governor to Raimondo dated November 13 thanks her for joining him for lunch on Friday and asked her to discuss with him further the idea of negotiating a settlement with the unions whose current and past members were hurt by cuts to their retirement plans.

Here is Linc’s letter to Gina:

Dear Treasurer Raimondo (Chafee crossed this out and wrote in “Gina”)

Thank you for lunch Friday. My pastramì hit the spot. And our conversation on current events was lively.  One issue l would like to explore further than our brief discussion at lunch is pursuing the possibility of a  negotiated settlement to the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act litigation pending before the Rhode island Superior Court.

It is common practice for settlement discussions to be held while litigation is proceeding. l would not make this suggestion if I did not believe the result could be favorable to the Rhode isiand taxpayers. And l also  believe I can answer in greater detail some of the concerns you raised on Friday. All litigation has chances of  success and failure and it would be beneficial to our economic standing to have the major court cases associated with pension reform resolved amicably.

I look forward to exploring this further with you and labor leaders when appropriate.

Best Wishes,

Lincoln D. Chafee

Raimondo replied 15 days later. Here is her response:

Dear Governor Chafee,

Thank you for your letter of November l3, 2012. On advice from our counsel, it is not  appropriate to pursue the matters you raised. The legislation passed by the General Assembly represented the culmination of ll months of thoughtful, fact-based analysis and input input  retirees, employees and taxpayers.

As we agree, it would be devastating to the state and the fiscal health of mnany municipalities if  the Rhode îsland Retirement Security Act of 2011 was overturned. And perhaps most importantly, the retirement security of our public employees would again be in jeopardy.

I look forward to conitinuing to work diligently together to defend this important piece of legislation to protect Rhode IslaI1d’s future.

Best Wishes for a happy holiday season.

Sincerely,

Gina M. Raimondo
General Treasurer

Providence Journal reporter Mike Stanton referenced the letters in his piece on Chafee and Raimondo’s disagreement in today’s paper. You can read both letters here.

And here’s the rest of our coverage on this:

• Gina Raimondo Should Be at the Pension Talk Table
• Almonte: State Should Negotiate with Labor
• Linc, Gina At Odds Again

For some good Labor Day journalism, please read the Providence Journal editorial this morning, in which they make some surprising statements for the normally very conservative ed. board:

“Consider that U.S. government data indicate that per-capita productivity has more than doubled since 1968,” they write. “And yet 60 percent of the income gains went to the top 1 percent in 1979-2007. And that was before the Panic of 2008. Lower- and middle-income people ought to get slices of the economic pie more commensurate with their contributions.”

Some will be continuing the fight for better workplace rights this Labor Day, like the janitors and food service workers at Brown University who will march today to draw attention to their impending contract negotiations.

The ProJo also profiles Scott Molloy this morning. He’s a professor of labor history at URI and the founder and president of the Rhode Island Labor History Society. Pat Crowley just wrote this piece about Molloy a few weeks back. And Ted Nesi dug up a piece written by Molloy on the history of Labor Day in Rhode Island.

Traditionally, the Ocean State honors Labor Day with a memorial at the site in Central Falls where four factory workers were killed during the Saylesville labor strike in 1934. Here’s a preview of the event, which is today at 10:30 a.m., and here’s the story I wrote on it last year for WPRO (needless to say I’m guessing this audience will appreciate this story more than did my audience at WPRO!):

President Grover Cleveland pushed through the legislation to make Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, just days after the violent break up of the Pullman Rail Strike – a walk-out led by Eugene Debs that started with 3,000 workers in Pullman, Illinois and grew to almost 250,000 by the time the president deployed some 12,000 army troops to dismantle the protests.

The holiday declaration was meant as an appeasement to organized labor; 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded during the insurrection.

Some 40 Labor Days later, Rhode Island would leave its mark with regard to famous organized labor insurrections in what has become known as the Saylesville Massacre – although it really wasn’t so much of a massacre as it was a 48-hour stand-off, spanning two cities, between union workers and the Rhode Island National Guard.

Textile workers from all over the Eastern Seaboard had gone on strike for better wages and mill owners responded by hiring non-union laborers to keep their businesses in operation. On Monday, September 10, at the Sayles Finishing Company in Central Falls, 600 union supporters had gathered in front of the textile mill that was now making due with non-union workers.

John A. Salmond describes the events that then transpired in his 2002 research paper “The General Textile Strike of 1934: From Maine to Alabama”:

“Minor scuffles turned more serious as the shifts changed at 3 and 11 p.m. The state police, augmented by special deputies lost control at the second change, and, as the crowd surged forward to invade the plant, they fired blindly into it. Two strikers were hit with buckshot while a score or more were injured by bricks, rocks and billy-clubs as the police added ‘to the uproar the thump of swinging nightsticks and exploding teargas bombs.’ One, Louis Fercki, was critically hurt, his skull fractured by a club during a fracas at the mill gate. The strikers prevailed, however, trapping seven hundred workers inside the mill until first light.”

The next day, September 11, Governor Theodore Francis Green called in the National Guard, but Salmond wrote that “he was too late to prevent an escalation in violence at Saylesville.”

Local and state police were joined by some 260 national guard troops, who could not keep in control the reported 4,000 people who were continually charging the gates of the Sayles Finishing Company throughout the day and into the next evening. They threw rocks and pieces of headstones from a nearby cemetery at the troops, according to Salmond.

“Indeed, the local cemetery had become a battleground. Troops, firing machine guns from the mill roof, eventually drove the crowd away from the gates. Eight strikers were shot, none fatally, due to the determination of the guard commander to use only buckshot and to fire, for the most part, safely over the heads of those in the crowd. More than 100 were injured by clubs or missles, however, including 18 guardsmen, before the fighting ceased. Governor Green, meantime, had placed the whole Saylesville district under martial law.”

Bullet holes in headstones can still be found at the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, 978 Lonsdale Ave, where today’s crop of local labor leaders will hold a vigil at 11 a.m. to honor the event and the people who took part. You can watch some old news footage of the events by clicking here.

But the real massacre occurred the next day in Woonsocket, at the Rayon Plant. There, guard troops fired on striking workers again. One, 19-year-old Jude Courtemanche, was killed and four others were seriously-wounded.

“This time there was no shooting over the heads. Faced by an angry mob of nearly 10,000, guardsmen shot to wound, if not kill. ‘The screams of the wounded stopped the strikers,’ ran one report. They beat a disorderly retreat to the town’s business district, where for three hours they laid waste, looting stores, setting fires, and hurling stones and other missles before the guard was able to restore order. Governor Green, by now thoroughly shaken, closed all of Woonsocket’s nighclubs, saloons, dance halls and stores until further notice, and an uneasy calm returned to the city.”

The SEIU filed a grievance against the private sector custodial business hoping to ink a deal with the North Kingstown School Committee. The union says the company violated their New England-wide contract when it failed to apprise them of the deal it entered with the school district.

According to the grievance, GSA, the outsource company, had a previous contract with the SEIU that stipulated the company is “required to notify SEIU Local 615 ‘as soon as (your company) receives notice that it has been awarded a new job location.'”

“Failure to do this can result in a misapplication of contract standards which may subject your company to monetary damages and penalties,” read the grievance.

While a deal has yet to be signed between North Kingstown and GSA, the company is already doing business in the local schools.

Rachel Miller, of the SEIU 615, said the contract requires GSA to negotiate a contract with the custodians who will have the option of organizing under the SEIU. The NK school custodians are currently represented by the NEA.

“The starting point for negotiations would be no cuts,” she said. “It is also my understanding that they misled- at least by omission- the North Kingstown school committee, never mentioning that they are parties to the agreement with Local 615.”

A provision in the contract, she said, stipulates  that working conditions and wages cannot be reduced.

In other words, the company might not be able to negotiate any better deal with the custodians than did the School Committee. In fact, the new union might have more negotiating power because it would have greater leeway to strike given that it might not be bound by the same state labor laws the current union is.

Meanwhile, Rhode Island custodians are holding a 24-hour strike at TF Green Airport in solidarity with Houston area janitors who are holding out in hopes of winning a modest pay increase.

“Just like here in Rhode Island, Houston janitors clean the offices of some of the richest corporations in the world yet they struggle to make ends meet,” according to a press release about the strike. “Despite record profits and inflated CEO pay, janitors who clean Houston’s office buildings are paid just $9,000 a year. When janitors refused to accept this offer, they were met with harassment and intimidation by their employers.”

North Kingstown school custodians are standing in solidarity with the strikers at the airport and will a representative will be speaking with the media there at 11 am.

To those who support such public sector outsourcing, it is a very black and white issue. Governments, they say, are in the business of providing services not jobs and if and when money can be saved for the taxpayer, it should be.

But detractors often see a more nuanced situation, or more complex economic ramifications.

First, the savings aren’t worth the costs. In East Greenwich, for example, firing the custodians would have saved the average property taxpayer about $13 a year. Because NK has not yet agreed to terms with the private company, any savings are still unknown. But compare that to the $11,000 a year pay cut Tom Keenan will take if the School Committee outsources his job. While the deal isn’t done in NK, he is already employed by the private company at a $5 an hour pay cut.

It begs the question: how many taxpayer dollars equal one person’s financial security? The answer, at the very least, is that, morally, we should all be willing to cough up the price of a pizza a year to keep our neighbor solvent. But forget about doing what’s right for a moment, even from an economic perspective the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

Secondly, the savings aren’t even real. I don’t know much about GSA, the Tennessee-based company North Kingstown is considering doing business with, but I promise you they are not in business to save taxpayers money. Any school committee that thinks it is going to be easier to negotiate a contract with a faceless big national corporation than with organized janitors is fooling itself. The only difference is the taxpayer dollars will be going to rich people in Tennessee rather than working class people in North Kingstown, where more than half of the school custodians live in town. Any savings that are realized will come directly from the pockets of the 26 custodians.

Those are the economic arguments against outsourcing the daily cleaning and conditioning of our schools. The social arguments against this type of outsourcing are a little harder to quantify. One involves the safety of the students, and there are multiple media accounts of GSA employing sex offenders. (See here, here and here.) This alone should be of great concern to North Kingstown residents.

Then, there are the intangibles. Custodians happy with their jobs will be more likely to look through a dumpster for your kids expensive retainer, and will probably do a better job of cleaning the toilet your kid sits on.

Custodians can also be the most important role model one can have in school. Or at least one was for me.

When I was in elementary school I had a little more energy than some of the other students and every once in a while it landed me in a bit of trouble. One time I brought an Eddie Murphy cassette tape to school and when I brazenly played it at recess (quite possibly my first test of the First Amendment). The school’s legendary principal Jim Foster introduced me to school custodian Bobby Taylor. Well, actually he remanded me to help him clean the school.

It turned into a summer job and Taylor paid me $5 an hour to help him spruce up the school. We became fast friends, and he was one of the first adults I knew personally who worked with his hands for a living – something that can be really inspirational for a hyperactive kid. Taylor, us students assumed, was developmentally disabled; we based this on his severe stutter and the fact that he rode a bike instead of driving a car to work. He may well be somewhat slow in clinical terms, but the Bobby Taylor I knew was every bit as smart as any other adult I happened to know as an 11-year-old in East Greenwich.

I still see Bobby Taylor riding his bike around town, and every time I do I recall that one of the first truly great teachers I ever had wasn’t a teacher at all. He was a school custodian.

The custodians and their union representatives say they have met the terms the School Committee had insisted upon for a new contract, but – for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – the committee still voted to do business with GCA, the private custodial company that works primarily in the south and has been controversial in almost every community it has entered.

Because the School Committee still has not signed a contract with GCA, the custodians are still fighting to preserve their jobs.

I suspect if that if named a United States Senator tomorrow (might as well give the right-wing immediate heartburn at that prospect) my committee assignment of choice would be the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the so-called, and when run correctly, aptly named HELP Committee. Putting four important issues so remarkably interlinked together was wise indeed, but those linkages are not always obvious to some who deem themselves progressives.

My progressive friends breathed a sigh of relief last week when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, appreciate the importance of a strong public education system, and usually understand the basics of workers having a voice at the table through collective bargaining rights. But last year, so many progressive legislators, despite making commitments to the contrary, often in writing to the groups that endorsed them, voted to implement some of the most draconian changes in the country to Rhode Island’s state-run public pension plans. And many of their progressive supporters seem to be equally confused by the issue or just wish it would go away. It will not, and should not.

The elected officials who broke their commitments know who they are. While, to the dismay of many, I remain personally fond of Rhode Island General Treasurer Gina Raimondo (who made no commitments on the issue), she essentially told the General Assembly that our unfunded pension liability was a “weapon of mass destruction,” and with remarkable haste in a virtually unprecedented special session, the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011 was enacted. And it was enacted with a lot of nominally progressive votes. I have more sympathy for elected officials willing to make amends, those who felt caught up in the same type of political tide that led federal elected officials to support the ill-advised war in Iraq (a vote which was at least a contributing factor to Hillary Clinton losing the Democratic Presidential nomination) and now acknowledge their errors in judgment, than for those who are angry they have been asked to account for their votes. I do give kudos to Providence Mayor Angel Taveras for negotiating a solution with active and retired employees as the state should have done and progressive legislators should have insisted they do.

All of that said, this article is not primarily directed at elected officials who need to reconsider their priorities, but at the progressive community in general. It is ironic that many of my more conservative acquaintances, while still maintaining their distaste for both unions and defined benefit pensions, confide in me their belief that the State of Rhode Island acted illegally in breaking the covenant it had with those workers and retirees. It pains me that some of the progressives with whom I have fought side by side in so many battles do not understand either the legal or moral obligation the State has to those workers, or that society should have to provide real retirement security to all workers. Worse are those that buy into, and repeat, the false choices argument – that if the state honors commitments to its public sector workers, it won’t be able to tighten the safety net for those most in need. Have the recent tax cuts for the wealthiest among us have been forgotten so quickly? False choices indeed!

Progressives believe that the entire arc of an individual’s life should be imbued with justice. That includes not only a world free from discrimination, a clean environment, the right to choose, the right to marry the partner of your choice and help for those who need it the most, but access to quality, affordable health care, an excellent public education, a good job with good wages where workers have a voice, and a secure retirement.

Apparently, one can still be a Democrat and ignore some of these issues – but you can’t claim to be a progressive.

My surprise stemmed from two sources:  the extent to which liberals of my generation (I’m 45) underestimate the vital importance of unions for the enactment and preservation of liberal measures and attitudes, and the extent to which these same liberals had completely misread the situation in their own state.

On the latter, read Scott McKay’s brilliant take-down of the ‘union rules RI’ meme on NPR.  As he notes, would the tax equity bill have gone down to defeat if unions truly ruled the roost?

Just under 18% of Rhode Islanders are represented by labor unions; it was 26% in 1964, and 22.5% in 1984.  In other words, the trend is the same here as everywhere:  downward.

The national trend, since the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947:

The breakdown by state, since 1964:

There are many reasons for this decline.  Economic change, the shift of American industry and population to the South and Southwest, the restrictive nature of our labor laws, McCarthyism and red-baiting, poor and sometimes corrupt union leadership.  Unions were also victims of their own success; by helping to create the post-war middle class, many of their white constituents (and their children) decamped for the suburbs, and resisted seeing the struggles of the black (and eventually, Latino) working class they left behind as similar to their own, rather than a threat.  In other words, the American original sin of race infected — had long infected — even its most transformational social movements and institutions.  Perhaps our individualistic and materialistic culture has also become indifferent — even hostile — to the sensibility of solidarity, upon which the labor movement depends.

All of these things have mattered, but the most important cause of labor’s decline, ultimately, has been the political success of corporate resistance, particularly since the early 1970s (on this, read Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Jefferson Cowie, as well as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson).  Many of my peers (and my students) seem to assume that unions are a thing of the past, and that the victories they won — like the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of women — are now written in stone, and we can move on.  In other words, progress gave rise to unions, and then tossed them on the scrap heap of history (with the American Anti-Slavery Society, The Women’s Party, the NAACP, and affirmative action) when they had fulfilled their role.  Events in Wisconsin (and, of course, the Occupy movement) may have finally awoken at least some of these folks to the possibility that if the ship of history has moved in this direction, it may be because someone is steering it there.

As a labor historian and former organizer, I also had a hard time getting my head around the idea that unions could actually be too powerful — both because I can’t imagine that being the case anywhere in 21st America, and because I can’t imagine that being a negative thing, on balance.  I would love to have to grapple with that problem, here and nationally.

Walter Reuther, vampire-killer…or life raft?

So why does the decline of labor matter, in Rhode Island and nationally?

Well for one, it is hard not to be struck by the apparent correlation between the decline of union power, and the emergence of increasing inequality, economic insecurity, and wage stagnation for large portions of our population since the early 1970s.  From 1940 until the early 70s, the economic benefits of the productivity of the American economy were widely shared, leading to what economists have called ‘the Great Convergence’:  a shrinking of income inequality, combined with a strong and steady increase in the standard of living for the vast majority of the population.

But since then?

So where did all that money go?  Did it go to those wealth-sucking and budget-busting public employees that Scott Walker keeps going on about?  Did those tax-and-spend liberals devour all of it, so they could rain manna on their special interest constituencies?

Um, no.

Is it any wonder why vampire stories seem to have captured the cultural zeitgeist?

Here is a longer view, depicting both the Great Convergence (during which union density rose from below 10% to over 40%) and the Great Divergence.  Note that the line on the right has moved further upward since 2007, to the highest point it has ever reached:

The inability of American workers to capture their fair share of the productivity of the economy since the early 1970s has very little to do with human capital.  Why had they been able to capture it previously?  Why have they struggled to do so since?

We are all grown-ups here; let us not be so naive as to think that the price of labor is actually and solely determined by supply and demand, and that if a worker ‘accepts’ a job at a particular wage, its because that’s the one she wanted/needed, or because its the only one the employer could afford to pay.  I don’t live inside an economic model.  And if I did, it surely wouldn’t be this one.

The Great Convergence was about power.  And the Great Divergence is, too.  American capitalists didn’t suddenly lose their moral bearings, and their interest in the rest of us (and, perhaps, their own souls — eye of the needle, and all that).  Corporations seek profits.  That’s what they are supposed to do.  Unless you are a Marxist, that’s what you want them to do.  They are good at it, and in the ugly process of pursuing their prey, they often do things that benefit others.  But that isn’t the goal.  Remember Aaron Feuerstein, the owner of Malden Mills in Lawrence MA?  When his factory burned down in the early 90s, Feuerstein kept his entire workforce on the payroll until the mill had been rebuilt and reopened.  An act of tzedakah, surely; but if Malden Mills had been publicly owned, his shareholders could have sued him — and won.  People on the left just exhaust themselves trying to shame corporations into doing the right thing, and think that they are somehow offering a radical critique of our political economy by vilifying (and anthropomorphizing) corporations.  But they aren’t.  The only way to make our economic system compatible with the public good (and public goods) is to establish and maintain what John Kenneth Galbraith once called countervailing powers — institutions, in other words.  Government, and unions, in other words.  Without a strong regulatory state, a redistributive tax system that maintains social mobility, and real representation for workers, there is nothing standing between the sheep and the shears.

If we stick with the vampire analogy above, unions are like garlic.  They don’t kill the vampires; they can still do their thing, and live for ever.  But the garlic does keep them in their place, scares them a little, and prevents them from tearing our throats out.  Nowadays, Republicans and many Democrats seem to assume that the vampires can do the cost-benefit analysis, and will take only what they need.  And garlic is too expensive anyhow.

How is that working out?

Of course, this analogy has its flaws.  Why not just kill all the vampires?  Or perhaps those who are just too big to feed?  Or maybe we can tax the vampires, to pay for the garlic?

Let’s try the rising tide analogy instead.

The top 1% making out like bandits might not matter to most of us, as long as the rising tide is lifting our boats too.  I actually think it does matter, because inequality even within prosperous societies (indeed, especially within them) tends to have all sorts of negative effects on individual and social well-being.  There is even some evidence that inequality hinders economic growth.  But most Americans have never begrudged the rich their wealth.  Plenty of folks got rich during the Great Convergence, and passed it on to their children.  We don’t reshuffle the deck with each generation, after all.  But the game never seemed rigged, at least to white Americans.  They had unions, and their power at the bargaining table, and within the Democratic Party, ensuring wage growth tied to profits and productivity, job security, access to health care, and a humane retirement.  Nationally, progressive taxation paid for both a safety net and a massive expansion in the infrastructure of public education (K-12, and higher education), providing opportunity for the next generation.  There was, or at least appeared to be, social mobility.

The problem since the 1970s, of course, is that the rising tide has increasingly just left most of us wet.  You can assume that the little green line on the right, below, dips down after 2008.  Indeed, average hourly earnings were lower at the end of the first decade of the 21st century than they were at the beginning — and were lower than in 1972:

And when we put it all together, we get this:

Is the decline of organized labor responsible for all of this inequality?  Of course not.  Most scholars attribute between 20% and 30% of it to declining unionization — but those estimates are only based on the direct role of unions in labor markets, and thus underestimate the impact.

There is little doubt that weakened power for workers has affected wages, benefits and working conditions across large sectors of the economy, and for families and communities with no affiliation with (or affinity for) labor unions.  Unions in a given industry have always raised the compensation levels for even non-union workers in the same industry.  If that’s true, the reverse is also true.  If employers no longer have to fear union campaigns (or the enforcement of already-weak labor laws), they can structure their workplaces with impunity.  They have done so.  Today, the middle class increasingly experiences the same sort of economic and job insecurity that the working class did a generation ago.

Another equally critical consequence of organized labor’s deterioration has been the decline in its political power, and its agenda- and narrative-shaping capabilities.  The diminishing presence of labor’s perspective as well as its power no doubt contributed to the “policy drift” of which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written.  The problem, they argue, isn’t simply that government at all levels took steps that exacerbated inequalities and shifted risks onto working people, their families and their communities.  That did happen, and the effects have been catastrophic.  But these sins of commission were compounded by sins of omission too:  Congressional and regulatory actions that might have been taken to shore up and even boost living standards and opportunities were not taken.  Power can make things happen.  Power can also prevent things from happening.  Mainstream American political discourse was almost completely lacking in any kind of meaningful and widely heard critique of the neo-liberal agenda, until very recently.  The DLC-dominated Democratic Party has been a vehicle for that agenda, not a critic of it.

Its the solidarity, stupid

People across the political spectrum are frustrated by the lack of any kind of countervailing power to that of capital (particularly financial capital).  We don’t have a socialist or social democratic party in the US, unlike much of the rest of the developed world.  And contrary to Tea Party fantasy, we don’t have a socialist president, either; after all, he swung and missed at the biggest eephus pitch since FDR’s first term, when he unwisely declined to use the federal government’s post-crisis leverage and break up the biggest banks.

As a result of this narrow political spectrum, there is very little pressure from inside our political system to create and maintain a broad distribution of the material conditions necessary for effective freedom in the modern world.  When our uniquely American version of this countervailing power did exist — from roughly 1936 to 1972 — inequality shrank, social mobility increased, public goods were funded and widely distributed, the economy grew, productivity increased, and the nation finally grappled (however inadequately) with the legacy of slavery.  And that countervailing power existed because the Democratic Party (outside the South) acknowledged the importance of seeding and nurturing the institutional roots of that power:  unions.  Indeed, some in the GOP even acknowledged this, though those folks are long gone now.

Conservatives today, ironically, offer only more insecurity.  That is what Scott Walker is offering in Wisconsin, and what Paul Ryan (and Mitt Romney) are offering nationally.  I say that this ‘offering’ is ironic, because there is very little that is conservative about it.  Following Edmund Burke, conservatives have generally seen society as an inheritance that we receive, are responsible for, and have obligations to, and that if human beings seek to sharply change or redirect that society, they invite unintended and destructive consequences.  In other words, what is and has gone before is by and large better than anything human beings might create in its place.  Liberals, like John Stuart Mill, tend to see the societies and institutions into which we are born as human constructs, which can be unmade or remade in the light of reason.  In this sense, American conservatism isn’t conservative at all, unless one wants to argue that all it is, in the end, is an ideological defense of privilege.  Certainly its historical origins are in the defense of privilege, and the argument that inequalities are in some sense ‘natural’ or divinely ordained.  After all, if today’s social inequalities were handed down by 1) God; 2) human nature; 3) the market), who are we to challenge or change them?

In another sense, as Mark Lilla has argued, we are all liberals in America today:  “We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn’t constitute us and that together we legitimately govern ourselves.”  Conservatives, in other words, have largely accepted the liberal argument for democracy that emerged out of the French Revolution — that the preservation of individual freedom requires political inclusion on an equal basis.  For many American conservatives, particularly in the South, this is a very recent conversion; and as the state-level movement for voter ID laws makes clear, there is still a great deal of backsliding on the issue.  The incarceration state that both liberals and conservatives have constructed in the last few decades has also disenfranchised millions of people, in most cases permanently.  And because many conservatives are so prone to accept the legitimacy of ascriptive forms of solidarity, immigration tests their fealty to full popular sovereignty.  To put it bluntly, the conservative commitment to full political equality is weak at best, and weaker still when the issue is race or national identity (or when vote suppression has partisan benefits).

But, for all that liberals and conservatives do have in common (with conservatives as reluctant junior partners in the larger project), they do still differ in their understanding of power, and of freedom.  I was once a conservative; after all, I worked on behalf of William Buckley’s Young Americans for Freedom at the 1984 GOP convention.  I was a conservative, because I thought freedom was the greatest American virtue, and that Communism and big government were the greatest threats to it.  I still think freedom is the greatest American virtue, but now I have a more nuanced (and, i think, more accurate) understanding of its material and institutional preconditions in the modern world.  Both liberals and conservatives are willing to tolerate various forms of inequality, and both generally adhere (at least in theory) to the belief that basic facial equality in law and politics cannot be compromised.  But liberals also worry that social inequalities (income, gender, race, and increasingly sexual orientation), if left to fester and expand, will undermine political equality (and economic growth).  Conservatives tend to see these social inequalities as the consequence of nature, culture, morality and effort — and even when they don’t, they worry that any attempt by government to ameliorate them will do more harm than good.  My worries are now liberal worries, though what I seek to protect hasn’t changed since my YAF days.

I’m not sure I want to go so far as to say that liberals are now the true conservatives, though it seems that way at the moment.  American liberalism is still a bit too attached to an ontological individualism for that to be true.  It still holds too much to the idea that society “doesn’t constitute us,” which is surely incorrect, and leads Americans to a certain kind of blindness about morally unjustifiable inequalities (particularly with regard to race).

As I noted above, we do not restart the game with each generation.  I think white Americans of modest privilege are particularly blind to this.  When I ask white students in my classes on the history of race relations to tell me about how their whiteness has affected their lives, they stare vacantly into the middle distance for a brief moment, and then try to claim some sort of victimhood (‘the black students won’t let me sit with them!’), instead of trying to unpack their own privilege.  Many white Americans today (left and right) cling so desperately to the idea that they have created all that they are and have, that when the persistence of racial inequality is pointed out to them, they condemn the messenger for racial divisiveness.  Read this recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, for example, which condemns Attorney General Eric Holder for pointing out that voter ID laws will have a racially disproportionate impact, and that in some places, that impact may have been intentional (Really?).  Of course, Americans with even more privilege often react the same way when economic inequality is pointed out to them.  The wages of whiteness do still pay, but not nearly as well as stock options, bank bonuses and trust funds do.  Ignorance of the former breeds ignorance of the latter, even among liberals, until the idea that society ‘doesn’t constitute us’ is re-examined.  As Thomas Geoghegan has argued, post-60s liberals and Reagan conservatives — and even the left, such as it is — seem to share the same Emersonian individualistic conceits.  They have the sensibility of scabs.

But as we move toward a more Green Liberalism (is that what we should call it?), I think the traditional liberal/conservative lines will blur.  The potential common ground will ultimately rest upon a solidaristic recognition of contingency, and human interdependence.  This recognition is, I think, a fundamentally conservative one.    And I’m OK with that.  What is sustainability, after all, if not a fundamentally conservative concept?  There is, of course, an available and very powerful conservative critique of the excesses of capitalism (and capitalists), but it has no purchase anywhere on the American right anymore, theologically or otherwise.  Solidarity for the American right seems to be entirely ascriptive nowadays, as the insecure white middle and working classes run to the barricades to defend the very economic ideologies which are stressing their families, weakening their communities, bankrupting their country, and poisoning their trust in political and social institutions.  The virtue of solidarity for the left was always learned in and articulated by the labor movement (and, to an extent, the church and synagogue).  Where is it supposed to come from now?

A revived labor movement, that’s where.  My lefty friends, the path to sustainability starts with solidarity.  And solidarity starts by once again empowering Americans to collectively represent themselves at their work places.  Geoghegan wrote about this two decades ago, and Richard Kahlenberg has taken up the cudgel more recently:  the right to join a union is a basic civil right, and should be treated as such.

Geoghegan:

“I can think of nothing, no law, no civil rights act, that would radicalize this country more, democratize it more, and also revive the Democratic Party, than to make this one tiny change in the law:  to let people join unions if they like, freely and without coercion, without threat of being fired, just as people are permitted to do in Europe and Canada.”

Yes.

Now, of course, we must play defense (Wisconsin).  The evisceration of collective bargaining rights is not only a violation of a basic and internationally recognized human right (see Article 23 of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights).  It also threatens to destroy — perhaps permanently — the delicate balance between capitalism and democracy that Americans have struggled to establish since the Civil War.  Contrary to the arguments of Scott Walker and others, the winner will not be the economy, or government budgets.  The winner won’t even be capitalism, which will ultimately be undermined and delegitimized by the present trend, much as it was during the Great Depression.  The lesson of the economic and political history of the developed world since World War II, quite simply, is that without some sort of institutionalized mechanism of countervailing power to that of capital, the liberal democratic mixed economy that has lifted so much of the human race out of perpetual misery will be in mortal danger.

‘Interdependence’ has become a truism these days, trumpeted equally loudly by those who believe that economic globalization will save the world, and those who believe it will make it uninhabitable.   But there is little doubt that both experience and empiricism tell us that for each to rise, we must in some ways converge.  As the epidemiological studies of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have shown, the more unequal a society is, the less healthy and happy it is for everyone in it.  Inequality affects our health, our communities, our susceptibility to violence, our sense of social belonging and political efficacy, and the well being of our children.  Studies of early childhood and cognitive development have provided empirical proof for many of philosopher John Rawls’ arguments about the extent to which even seemingly ‘innate’ inequalities of talent and effort are constructed by and derived from circumstances outside of us.

We are, in other words, constitutive of one another to a degree that most Americans might find unnerving to acknowledge.  More broadly, there is so much about us that is situational, contextual, and contingent — the ethos of possessive individualism which has so dominated the American mind for much of our history is, quite simply, an unsustainable conceit that we can no longer afford.  It is not rooted in ‘human nature.’  For most of our (pre)history, cooperation has been far more functional socially and individually than competition has been.  That remains the case.

Individualism, as the old union saying goes, is for scabs.

The essential virtue of the 21st century, I believe, is empathy — which I take to mean, the implicit recognition of interdependence.  The civic manifestation of empathy is solidarity.  And solidarity can take many forms.  It can be a kind of ‘ascriptive solidarity,’ defensively assembled along the socially constructed lines of race, language, and faith.  There is a long history of this in our country — what Gary Gerstle once called ‘racial nationalism’ — and it persists strongly in the present.  But solidarity can also be rooted in an inclusive acknowledgement of human interdependence.  Virtually everything that liberals want to see in the world — indeed, what many conservatives want to see too — ultimately returns to the need for solidarity.  If that solidarity is to be of the inclusive rather than the ascriptive kind, to be blunt, we need unions.  As Geoghegan argued in his classic book “Which Side Are You On,” it was this idea of solidarity that always made unions so oppositional in the US, even when the 60s New Left naively dismissed them as part of the Establishment.  When we lose the labor movement, we endanger that sense of social solidarity, upon which so much of what works in our way of life depends.  The virtue of empathy, perhaps, requires good people —  individuals making the choice to be empathetic.  Solidarity, however, requires institutions within and through which people can practice that virtue.  As Aristotle argued, in order to be a virtuous (empathetic) person, one must do empathetic acts.  But as I’ve argued above (and as Rawls argued in Theory of Justice), we need the institutional framework of our society to be just, if this is to happen.  The most important institution for this is liberal democratic government itself.  But as long as we choose to pair that institution with an economic system organized around markets and commodities, which inherently twists, dissolves and melts empathy and solidarity into atomized air, and which treats every American worker as ‘at will’ (you can be fired for virtually any reason at all, or no reason), unions will be necessary.

In the summer of 1934, after a wave of union organizing and localized general strikes had swept the country, President Franklin Roosevelt took a trip to Madison, Wisconsin.  While there, he called for a politics of solidarity that “recognizes that man is indeed his brother’s keeper, insists that the laborer is worthy of his hire, [and] demands that justice shall rule the mighty as well as the weak.”

77 years later, a protestor held up a sign in that same city:  “SCREW US, WE MULTIPLY.”

So there, Scott Walker.

But there is a gem in the legislature’s disdain for labor and adulation for the rich and powerful … public sector unions have had to adapt, and they have done so by creating a bigger tent – aligning with social progressives on issues like marriage equality and women’s issues and all working people to boost our extremely low minimum wage. Such is the seeds for a real populist movement in Rhode Island – one that would restore power to the people, curb crony capitalism and make our state great once again.

We look forward to Sen. John Tassoni coming back to the State House as a lobbyist … Rhode Island’s least fortunate lose a tireless and effective advocate with him no longer walking the marble halls on Smith Hill.

Here’s how you know we are a society in decline: The Romney campaign is actually rooting against the American economy in hopes of beating the president this November. In fact, this has become the major policy goal of Republicans … shrink government and stifle growth so that the rich and powerful can flourish at the expense of everyone else.

But don’t take my word for it … here’s how Paul Krugman put it.

Bob Kerr takes issue with the all-nighters so common at the end of the legislative session … while they are sure fun to cover (except that I’m still exhausted) there has got to be a better, more open and honest way to make laws.

Hmm, go figure … the Central Falls Charter Commission prefers more democracy to less of it.