Dispatches on the labor movement — or the need for a new one — is finally up.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
First response: Obama makes his case and hits a long double into the gap
President Barack Obama laid down the ganlet tonight (drew his line in the sand, pick your cliche) on healthcare tonight, with an hour-long speech that finally made it clear that he is committed to “a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange” that “would only be an option for those who don’t have insurance.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that he’s leaving it to Congress to craft the mechanism that gets us there, meaning we could be left with a weak “trigger” compromise on a weak reform compromise — a public option, which falls far short of the single-payer system we need, that only kicks in if other reforms fail to extend coverage or reduce costs.
And just as worrying was his rhetorical nod to deficit reduction — a problematic way of framing a debate that should be about a societal commitment, a moral commitment to those in need.
Ultimately, however, the speech’s importance may lie in its role as personal marker. President Obama finally came out and explained why healthcare reform was necessary. (I was out and didn’t get home until after the speech, so I’m relying on the text published by NYTimes.com.)
Our collective failure to meet this challenge – year after year, decade after decade – has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can’t get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can’t afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.
We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people. There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage. In just a two year period, one in every three Americans goes without health care coverage at some point. And every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage. In other words, it can happen to anyone.
But the problem that plagues the health care system is not just a problem of the uninsured. Those who do have insurance have never had less security and stability than they do today. More and more Americans worry that if you move, lose your job, or change your job, you’ll lose your health insurance too. More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won’t pay the full cost of care. It happens every day.
He hit the crazies — the people engaging in “demagoguery and distortion” — hard:
But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve it. I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now.
So yes, a good speech, an effective speech, but it remains to be seen whether he’s already given up too much.
Runner’s diary, Tuesday
I stayed inside this morning, because it looked like it might rain and to save time so I could get in some lifting. I managed three miles then kicked my own butt with the weights. Tell me again whey we do this?
Where have all the union members gone?
Union members used to make up between 35 and 40 percent of the private-sector workforce; now, according to most estimates, fewer than one in 13 private-sector workers is in a union.
That sharp decline offers as good an explanation as any for what has happened to middle-class wages over the last four decades.
So, rebuilding the labor movement would seem to be key to rebuilding our economy, leveling wages and improving the lots of those who do the work.
How to do that? Unfortunately, there are a lot of people with a lot of ideas but not a lot of unity among unions and even less of a favorable atmosphere among business or government.
Unions were hopeful that the Obama administration would bring with it a new union-friendly approach. But it has done relatively little to improve the ability of workers to organize. Card check — the chief reform sought by the major unions — appears dead, at least for now. And rather than using the government’s new stake in the auto industry to bring unions to the table, to empower workers, the administration attacked them, forcing a renegotiation of contracts and making the United Auto Workers the poster child for what the Detroit carmakers had been doing wrong.
The failure to reignite the union movement has surprised some, given the explosion of union growth during the 1030s. Fear, according to one North Jersey labor attorney, is partly to blame:
Nancy Erika Smith, a prominent labor union attorney, says she is “disheartened” by the “go it alone” attitude of many workers.
“Everyone seems so afraid to join together and help each other,” says Smith, whose office is in Montclair. “It’s a time when people should want to stick together.”
Contrast that with the Great Depression, for example, when hard times spawned labor aggressiveness — the founding of the United Auto Workers (1935), American Newspaper Guild (1933), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (1937), the predecessor of the Communications Workers of America (1938).
“Hard times drove people together to offer mutual protection,” she says.
Another North Jersey union leader, David McCann of the Service Employees International Union, points to a different kind of fear: Fear of change, especially as it revolves around race and the loss of privilege.
McCann sees the divisions over health care and other issues as surrogates for a much larger, if silent, fear. The fear of change represented by the election of a black man — “a black man with a funny name,” says McCann — to the presidency.
“A lot of this is code — this is racial. The election was easy, but now those with an interest in defeating this president are resorting to unsaid fears about change,” he says.
This may be true, but any analysis of that earlier period of union growth has to reflect the aggressive organizing that took place over the first three to four decades of the 20th century, the apathy that came with success and the impact that the red-baiting of the 1950s had on the radical critique that had been a staple of the earlier labor movement.
Union growth in the 1930s was not just a product of the economic times, but a culmination of the efforts of hundreds and thousands of workers demanding their rights and working to alter the one-sided social contract under which they lived.
Their success altered the definition of what it meant to be working class, with factory workers suddenly finding themselves earning middle-class wages and moving into quiet suburbs. One result was a shift in the labor movement from improving the lives of the laboring classes to a business unionism in which individual unions focused only on the lives and wages of their members, ignoring the organizing side and creating a disconnect.
When middle-class labor jobs started to disappear in the 1960s — at a time when minorities began to claim their own piece of the American dream — the movement crashed and burned. It was a two-decade process, but one that has left labor wandering in the desert.
So, don’t expect the bad times — or even card check — to reverse the losses. The labor movement has to begin to think of itself as a movement representing all workers again. It is going to be a painstaking process that will take the movement outside of its traditional industries to white-collar jobs and immigrant and minority communities.
Unfortunately, that means we’re still several years away from a real rebirth of labor in America.
Do unto immigrants as you’d want them to do unto you
The subject of immigration tends to bring out the worst in the people who respond to our stories on line. The level of xenophobic vitriol is truly breathtaking — and scary, revealing a dark undercurrent that seems ready to boil to the surface.
So when we ran an editorial this week supporting an immigration reform bill that would allow judges during deportation hearings to consider the impact on citizen children, I was ready for the worst.
After all, a story on a vigil scheduled for next week at St. Anthony of Padua R.C. Church generated quite a lot of hateful responses.
The editorial elicited its share of ugly comments, as well — but this comment from someone identifying him/herself as Koleary sums up the more humane sentiments and gives me hope:
I think Catholics all need to ask ourselves. Who would we have been in the story of the nativity? Would we have been the innkeeper who turned Mary away?
I think this pretty succinctly sums up the question we all should be asking — even those of us, like myself, who are not Catholic or even Christian. This is a question of humane treatment of our fellow human beings. Shouldn’t we treat them as we’d wish ourselves to be treated?
