A broader view for unions

Unions need to stop doing the work of bosses by pitting workers against each other for marginal parochial gain. They need to reverse the path taken by the hard-hat rioters. In a recent article, Unions Must Attract the Young and Hip—or Become Obsolete, the following discussion was great. I think that unions need to go beyond the cultural and re-examine the basics. Here’s my take:

Unions first provide a direct benefit for their membership. They negotiate and help protect favorable wages and work rules. Secondly they directly provide to the employers that enter into contracts with them a trained work force with a reliable level of productivity. Unions provide an indirect benefit to the communities from which they gather their strength. They provide a standard of living higher than otherwise would exist. They add to a culture of democratic process in the work place that is essential to a functioning democratic society. As a community’s perception of a union moves away from providing these benefits then the ultimate source of union strength evaporates.

The rationale that if a social policy will cost one union member a job then that is a bad policy has caused unions to take stands recently against the good of the communities from which they derive their support. Organized labor support for the recent bad budget ballot initiatives is one example of this. Another is the electrical workers opposition to Marin County’s attempt to wrest local control of electrical power generation from PG&E. This selfish logic is misguided. The real problem lies in the work rules that the rest of the folk in California and most of America work under. Laws that protected workers and guaranteed the right to work were stripped out and replaced by the so-called “at-will”, right to be fired, rules.

Unions are now struggling with a lack of favorable perception amongst younger workers. The community that the “not one union member’s job lost” doctrine opposes largely consists of those same18 to 40 year old workers the unions are trying to attract. Until unions work towards the Roosevelt doctrine that a meaningful job is a human right for all workers, and not just for their members, they will not succeed with their youth agenda. There is so much social discontent now towards our corporate plutocracy and its control over our representative government that unions could help swing the balance towards a renewed democracy and in the process develop the loyalty of those young workers that was lost in the 60’s and 70’s.

I know of cynicism.

This healthcare bill is just another example of betrayed principles.

In 2006 I became an active Democratic because there seemed to be more folks like me in the Democratic Party than elsewhere. The motivation came when Robert Kennedy Jr. explained the inexplicable 2004 election results. The Republicans were planning to wrest the reigns of government and wage a 100 years of war. We share something with our electeds that the Republicans don’t have. We are compassionate and forgive our electeds for their transgressions. Even when the Republicans are in the minority, if one of theirs votes for a new tax or supports civil rights for gays, etc. he or she will likely not be re-elected. Democrats on the other hand, even when given large majorities, will allow their electeds to betray our interests, our principles, and on the very issues on which we gave them power.

The Democrats and Republicans share one thing. Whether they are elected by a grassroots movement or strictly corporate sponsorship once elected they turn from their base. They immediately become the privileged elected elite. Their decisions are based on information of which we plebeians are not party. A politician like Jared Huffman can garner support by speaking eloquently regarding water policy and its link to unsustainable development. He can then craft and vote for legislation that provides for just that type of development. The 80-member Congressional Progressive Caucus can in July draw a line ‘not to be crossed’ regarding healthcare and then in unison leap that line in November and declare victory. The California Democratic State Caucus can vote for $2,500,000,000 in tax breaks for corporations and cut healthcare to Medical patients of similar amounts. The California Democrats will cut education spending by $9,000,000,000 and say that we plebs need to give up our daily lives and elect a few more like them before they will do anything we need.

It is true that Jared tried to get some environmental policy in that water bill. Policy is short lived. I am not sure that it even survived to be voted on. The peripheral canal will be here for a 100 years. And the Congressional healthcare bill will provide some needed changes to our healthcare cost, delivery, and insurance system. But it is not universal and it allows for death by a thousand cuts over time. It is not the fundamental change the Progressives were promised. And our State’s Democrats believe that providing services to some is better than not passing any budget.

After 40 years of such decision making our state has become a failed state. One in 8 Americans lives in California. America is approaching that condition. If it stood alone it would be the 38th most populous nation. Forty years ago California had the worlds best education system and a college education was nearly free. California had laws that protected workers rights to a job. Now we are an ‘at will’ state. We can be fired at will if we are lucky enough to even have a job. A great many jobs now are independent contracts with no rights whatsoever. Nearly 1 in 5 Californians do not even have legal civil status. We are transients, mostly changing our place with our stage of life. Our collective sense of community and place has been eroded to the benefit of the profit motive and to the detriment of our environment.

If you talk to an elected California Democrat they don’t get that this 40-year nightmare is not a positive vision for our future. Others of our party will jump to the elected’s defense as if you are personally attacking him. I haven’t changed much from the young man who gave up his college deferment on the principle that my privileged condition was unfair. I want electeds that will stand on principle. I want Democrats that will insist on it. I might have to wait a few years until the really big economic crash occurs. But do we really need to wait for the conditions of 1933 to change how we are governed? We need our electeds to use the outside strategy promoted by the Progressive Democrats of America, that the Republicans are using so well.

Did unions force Newsom out of the governors race

Gavin Newsom has dropped out of the Governor’s race. In part his decision must have been influenced by union support for Jerry Brown and by opposition from the SEIU union.

(You can read about it here: Bay Gaurdian Article.)

Personally I am very disappointed by this development. On critical issues of our time Newsom was not just on the right side but he was a motivation force pushing the rest of us in the right direction. Where previous mayors could only study the healthcare availability for city residents, Newsom implemented a universal healthcare system. When the State passed an initiative that limited the definition of marriage as between men and women only, Newsom married thousands of same sex relations pushing the issue to the national forefront. Our polar ice caps are melting at a rate not thought possible just a few years ago, and Newsom has turned San Francisco into the greenest large city in the country.

We are living in a time where the Democrats elected to office remind me of those Depression era graphics of a man with his pockets turned inside out. Democrats are getting elected promoting issues that effect all aspects of our lives then turn around like the empty pocket guy and say we have nothing for you because… Needless to say there are lots of excuses, but the real reason is the singular lack of backbone of folks who want to keep their jobs.

It’s a tough time to balance a budget. Proposition 13 has hamstrung means of increasing revenue in many ways. I can’t say that I am familiar enough with the SF budget process to know whether or not the SEIU workers could have been given a better deal. Let me say something about myself and how I was raised before you get the wrong idea. I think we need to promote unionization of all American workers. I grew up knowing that my grandfather participated in the 1934 San Francisco General Strike that had a great impact on national legislation allowing workers to organize. My parents raised us to never cross a picket line. In our family of five kids only my little sister who was allergic to all other forms of fruit got to eat grapes because of the farm workers boycott. Whenever I was presented with the opportunity to join a union at work I did. Union wages help to distribute the wealth created by our economy more equally. I haven’t forgotten that Jerry Brown had been in office for nearly four years when Proposition 13 passed. And it passed because the Democratic Party that controlled the state at the time was completely ineffective in providing for the needs of Californians.

My first encounter with SEIU was on the streets of San Francisco. They had organized many hotel and restaurant workers. Many of these folk came from Central America and I was organizing against US support of the dictatorships oppressing the people of these countries. I had been a carpenter and in the union but I dropped out when the union not only supported building on environmentally sensitive ground but were asking all building trade members to help bulldoze San Bruno Mountain. I was surprised and pleased that SEIU could take a socially important stance.

Much had happened in the union movement from the 30’s and 40’s to the 60’s and 70’s. US unions were involved in subverting union movements in third world countries. Some had openly campaigned for Nixon and Reagan. Unions had become big business, the providers of labor. They functioned much like material providers for big business. They focused narrowly on their own trade or area of work and not on the creation of a broad unified working. They were successful in dividing the working class by focusing their membership’s attention narrowly solely on their own economic interests. Solidarity of the working class was treated as a subversive and traitorous idea. In the 70’s and 80’s the SEIU seemed to be going against that trend by organizing some of the least privileged of the working class. It represented to me a re-democratization of the working class. This was a much different culture than existed in the building trades where keeping folks out to protect the jobs of those who were already in seemed to be the rule.

The SEIU has changed much since the 1980’s. Recently after they negotiated a contract with Sonoma County the supervisors had to protest the bullying of the union members by their own union. SEIU negotiated wage cuts and other give-backs and prevented the union members from knowing the terms of the contract prior to voting for it. The SEIU henchmen prevented union members who were known NO votes from participating. It is no wonder that the SEIU is preventing the workers at Santa Rosa’s Memorial Hospital from voting for a union after a four year battle to get the hospital to agree to a vote. The Memorial workers would surely vote to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers. Candy Andy, Andrew Stern president of the SEIU, is just another big business man, another dictator that needs to be taken down. Except his business is selling out the democratic process of uniting workers. I am not surprised that SEIU helped stop the Newsom campaign.

I believe that union wages uplift all wages. Thom Hartman is a proponent of the idea. And he tells it much more elegantly than I can. However I believe that he has confused the cause with the effect when it comes to understanding how a community with strong unions is a strong community. Unionization of the workforce is a tool that energized communities can use to distribute wealth and power democratically. All the previous thoughts and explanations were necessary for me to understand this point. And it needs to be developed. The community of the working class needs to use unionization to retake our democracy. When the union movement focuses its efforts on the narrow economic interests of its limited membership it divides the working class. It does the work of the anti-democratic owner class.