After some Twitter pushback from Ned Resnikoff and yours truly, Elias Isquith is still skeptical of the claim that Jack Lew’s nomination should make lefties queasy.
Isquith:
One, we don’t know enough about Lew’s actions while at the NYU to draw any definitive conclusions; he certainly wasn’t working in concert with or on behalf of the organizers. Yet it’s important to appreciate that this wasn’t his job. If he made some kind of decisive push against them, one that wouldn’t have happened in his absence, then that’s significant and something lefties are right to find appalling. But we don’t know — maybe we can find out during Senate hearings, though I doubt it.
Second and more important is whether or not Lew will actually be influencing policy rather than merely implementing it. The 2012 elections resulted in something of a two-sided political retrenchment, with the perpetuation of the status quo near-guaranteeing that no stimulus is in the offing for 2013. The near-term policy goal for liberals? Less austerity than there might be otherwise — at best. (Not quite Braveheart’s “Freedom!” when it comes to rallying cries.)
With the debt ceiling near at hand, however, the option of literally doing nothing is out of the picture. Doing nothing means potential economic armageddon. So there will have to be negotiations — even if the negotiations are over whether or not there should be negotiations. And that’s where Lew’s decades of experience in DC’s back rooms becomes valuable, potentially so valuable as to outweigh his ideological shortcomings. Don’t take my word for it: skip ahead to 3:12 and hear Paul Krugman, no Obama apologist, say the same.
Since I can’t speak to the behind-closed-doors persuasiveness of Lew, I’d like to instead comment on Isquith’s initial inclination: that is, to tweet “If Jack Lew’s job had anything to do with labor unions, this would matter.”
To me, what’s troubling is the clear delineation Isquith posits between cabinet positions which affect labor and positions which are immaterial to labor. In his mind, one can easily classify the duties of the treasury secretary as outside those narrowly defined boundaries; Lew, you see, would be advising the president on economic policy and negotiating over the debt ceiling—not say, enforcing labor law or conferring with Richard Trumka. (Lew’s role would also be quite different than his predecessor, Tim Geithner, even if they’d be occupying the same position.) Thus, whether Lew’s actions as an NYU administrator amounted to union busting—a matter I won’t wade into, though I’m loath to quibble with Josh Eidelson’s reporting—isn’t germane to his possible ascension to treasury secretary.
For those who put workers’ rights and economic justice at the center of their political project, however, Lew’s views and actions vis-a-vis organizing struggles are absolutely relevant. Every cabinet post, but especially those tasked with overseeing or crafting some facet of domestic policy, is relevant to labor, to workers. The degree of impact on the livelihood and freedom of workers varies from position to position, of course. But Isquith—not out of conscious anti-union animus, I’d hasten to add—is thinking about this in an insidious way. His easy compartmentalization of what positions will and won’t affect unions serves to reduce labor to a constituency or interest group.
And a weak one at that. Union density is low, workers are relatively impotent. A regrettable state of affairs, Isquith allows, but the inescapable reality, to Isquith, is that this further shrinks the decisions and posts that labor can claim affects it. Unions are no longer redoubtable movers and shaker. They don’t impact macroeconomic policy. They’re not a powerful constituency. But where does this leave workers?
Government rulings and statutes—most notably, the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 despite President Truman’s veto—have boxed in unions and induced them to act on a narrow set of issues that affect their members. Unfortunately, the proscription of certain solidarity-enhancing tactics—secondary boycotts, for example, which Taft-Hartly outlawed—has also often been exacerbated by union parochialism.
In short, narrowness of vision and narrow definitions of interests impede the construction of a vibrant labor movement—yes, one composed of unions and associated groups, but one engaged in a broader fight for social and economic justice. Stunted conceptions of labor by its would-be allies don’t aid that fight.
You should get into an apprenticeship.
Maybe that would change your outlook.
I would suggest the Carpenters.
You can do the Carpenters for two years.
Think of it as the Peace Corps.
I think the willingness to section these matters off from one another shares a kind of fatalism through conventionalis that runs through the rest of the thinking. Two examples:
“If he made some kind of decisive push against them, one that wouldn’t have happened in his absence, then that’s significant and something lefties are right to find appalling. But we don’t know — maybe we can find out during Senate hearings, though I doubt it.”
I take this as meaning that the only nominees lefties should oppose are those who not only break ranks with them on most issues, but vigorously oppose them on an ideological level. Without actively being hostile to labor, and being merely passive and/or silent on the issue instead, we should not be concerned. Despite the fact that indifference is probably labor’s number one enemy at this time.
“With the debt ceiling near at hand, however, the option of literally doing nothing is out of the picture. Doing nothing means potential economic armageddon. So there will have to be negotiations — even if the negotiations are over whether or not there should be negotiations. And that’s where Lew’s decades of experience in DC’s back rooms becomes valuable, potentially so valuable as to outweigh his ideological shortcomings. Don’t take my word for it: skip ahead to 3:12 and hear Paul Krugman, no Obama apologist, say the same.”
Putting the cart before the horse on this one, and being concerned about someone’s ability to negotiate, without first worrying about what they will push to negotiate in favor of, strikes me as resutling from a similar place. Settle for him because he’s a team player and good at what he does…the kind of guy you would want on your side, etc.
The point then is that as long as the options presented are not in idelogical opposition to us, and are good at what they do (A Fox “Political Player of the Week”) then we should be satisfied, despite the fact that the unwillingness to polarise and demand a more assertive progressive agenda is precisely what has allowed moderation to slowly degrade labor in particular, and liberalism as a whole.
Worth asking if he’s willing to repudiate his actions. “I did them, because I was paid to do them. Wasn’t because it was right, and if I’m hired to run herd on folks, I’ll know ’em just a bit better from having been on the inside.”
Agreed….”Labor Isn’t Just Another Interest Group”. Labor UNIONS, however, are.
Face it; there’s a big, BIG difference between the two. Actual “labor” has the availability and maintenance of jobs as its primary concern. But from the history of the past few decades, one can only assume that the very destruction of those jobs is the goal of so-called “labor” unions.
I’m just coming to this now, but I dispute that it is true that labor is, as a practical matter, currently confined to acting on a narrow set of issues that affect their members. In fact, if only this were so! That the leadership of some (though by no means all!) labor organizations have allowed themselves to become, in effect, wide-ranging tools of liberalism has significantly hastened their decline.
About a decade or so ago, I interned in the goverment affairs shop for a labor organization that did not suffer from this malady. Even in a GOP-dominated Congress at the time, this organization was able to achieve significant legislative successes, maintaining good working relationships with enough Republicans, and importantly, enough relatively powerful Republicans to advance its agenda, though its most significant legislation at the time was ultimately killed by a narrow filibuster after passing the House (I think this legislation was eventually passed a few years later, though).
During this period, I was brought along to attend a meeting of Government Affairs folks from a good number of unions. What was striking to me was that a disturbing percentage of these folks made abundantly clear that their biggest legislative issues were things that were, at best, tangential – and in some cases utterly irrelevant – to their members’ interests: things like working to block relatively low-level pro-life judicial nominees, or making sure lobbying strategies were geared towards helping Democracts take over Congress. These unions were by far the loudest group at the meeting; they also, not coincidentally, tend to be among the louder unions in our national discourse. The unions that were less loud at the meeting more or less universally made clear that their legislative priorities, while mundane to most folks, were on things that were critically important to their members’ interests.
If you map out the unions whose memberships have declined the most over the last 10 years or so, or who have suffered the most devastating attacks from Republicans in that period, they pretty well correlate with the unions who considered themselves to be more than a narrow interest group. If you look at the unions who have suffered the least in that period (and we should recognize that all unions have suffered to some extent or another), you will find that they are the unions who tried to keep to their narrow interests as labor unions at that meeting.
These “loud” unions, unfortunately, wind up having an outsized role. Because they lack focus, they have trouble building coalitions outside of the Democratic Party. They would up viciously attacking even pro-labor Republicans in the hopes of unseating them, with the result being that those pro-labor Republicans were either forced out of office or, at best, no longer interested in what these unions (or their collective vehicle) had to say. I actually saw at least one example of this first hand, just as I saw a powerful example of the benefits of keeping a narrow interest-based focus first hand (anti-union committee chairman successfully pressured to allow vote on pro-union bill by my then-employer).
While looking for a cite to the particular campaign I was thinking of as alienating a pro-union Republican, I found this piece: http://www.ipsn.org/characters/coia/magazines/john_sweeney_and_the_state_of.htm
Yes, it’s the Weekly Standard (but it’s also Matt Labash, who has always been one of their better writers). But it’s also from 1996, shortly after this strategy you’re advocating for here started to be implemented, and several years prior to my experience. The piece very briefly and indirectly mentions one of the events that would culminate with the incident I witnessed first-hand. What’s eerie is that it pretty much perfectly predicts that incident.
The end result of the strategy you’re advocating here was: 1. the alienation of virtually all of the remaining pro-labor Republicans, such that labor no longer has anyone speaking for them on Capitol Hill in the branches where Republicans have power (and, so long as the filibuster rule exists, they will always have at least veto power in at least one branch); 2. the alienation of the last remaining conservative Democrats; and 3. allowing the rest of the Democrats to basically take unions for granted.
I also suspect there’s one other thing that this strategy has caused – as Labash noted at the time, most union members’ views on things outside the purview of their interests as union members were, at best, all over the map, and at worst distinctly conservative. This overarching, broad-based strategy you advocate pits union members’ own interests against each other, which decreases their individual loyalty to the union, and may well give them an incentive to leave the union entirely. I personally know at least one union member for whom this is absolutely the case.