During the two years I spent as a union organizer on the volunteer and professional levels, I was part of campaigns that successfully unionized over 2,000 previously unorganized workers. Those workers who now have unions are all graduate student employees of universities (TAs, GAs, and RAs), and would generally be considered creative class. I point this out to pile on to what Mike wrote below:
God knows there is nothing wrong with a little old-fashioned working-class populism, as I have advocated many times in my day. But I don't see how it adds any working-class voters to the Clinton cause, and it has great potential to drive your numbers down among what some of us call creative-class voters (those who work in universities, the arts, media, high-tech and in small businesses like architecture, engineering and law firms), many of whom are still wavering as to whom to vote for.
I would add that it isn't working class populism as such that is the problem, but the implication coming from Buffenbarger and even Bill Clinton that the interests and cultures of working class and creative class progressives and fundamentally opposed. As a former union organizer who has mainly held creative class jobs in my life, my experience indicates quite the opposite. In fact, while I have never had a latte, one time while organizing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I remember sharing a type of vanilla tea I like quite a bit with all the other organizers in the office. And they all liked it, too.
My experience of unionizing the creative class is neither exceptional nor limited to teacher's unions like the NEA and AFT. For starters, the most prominent strike in the last ten years just ended, and it was a strike of writers, who most certainly are a creative class group. Further, some unions that were once almost entirely the province of the industrial working class, such as the UAW, have actually managed to reverse their declining enrollment by doing the same thing:
The United Auto Workers union boosted its membership rolls by 30,000 last year, ending a string of annual declines brought on by steady downsizing moves at Detroit automakers and major parts suppliers.
The UAW ended 2004 with 654,657 active members, up 4.8 percent from 624,585 in 2003, according to the union's latest annual financial report filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.
The UAW represents a large and growing number of technical, office and professional workers at manufacturing companies as well as in the public sector, health care, schools and universities, telecommunications and news media. The UAW's technical, office and professional members work in a wide range of occupations, including draftsmen, industrial designers, engineers, computer specialists, health care professionals, social service workers, journalists and writers, curators and librarians, graduate teaching assistants and state and local government employees.
These include Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky state employees; service, clerical, technical and graduate student employees at more than 20 colleges and universities; artisans at Greenfield Village; the staffs of The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and The Stamford Advocate; technical and on-air staff of WDET, Detroit's public radio station; workers at the three Detroit casinos, staff lawyers of the Legal Services Corporation, and more than 5,000 members of the National Writers Union.
The university employee membership of the UAW alone now represents about 20% of its overall membership, and is easily the fastest growing part of an expanding union. In fact, a friend of mine who I grew up with joined the UAW when he became a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. He said that at UMass the UAW referred to itself as the "Union for All Workers." I love that! While it may remind some of the wobblies from the early twentieth century, it is also a sign of where some of the more successful unions are heading. The new willingness of some enterprising unions like the UAW to expand into the creative class is undoubtedly one of the reasons that union density has begun to increase for the first time in 25 years. If unions want to grow, then they need to acquire new members in industries that are expanding. Obviously, that includes creative class industries.
Today, I have written a great deal about an activist class war for control of the Democratic Party (see here and here). However, there are opposing reasons for the grassroots activist uprising in the Democratic Party and the creative class vs. working class divide among progressives being pushed by Buffenbarger and the Clintons. The grassroots activist uprising in the Democratic Party seeks to more widely distribute power within the Democratic coalition, and to pursue a strategic course where no geographic area or demographic group is either dismissed out of hand as unwinnable, or is taken for granted because it supposedly has nowhere else to go. To put it a different way, the activist uprising is ultimately a struggle over expanding and forming new coalitions versus maintaining a narrowly targeted status quo. By contrast, helping to foment and further a divide between working class and creative class progressives causes nothing but stagnation. We should not be preventing the creation of new and surprisingly effectively alliances. The expansion of union density in American simply would not have been possible if blue collar and creative class workers had not seen clear overlaps in their economic interests, and instead dismissed each other as hopelessly incongruous on cultural grounds. By expanding into new areas, unions like the UAW have helped turn the tide for the labor movement. The same thing can be accomplished in the Democratic Party.
It is just as dangerous to concede 249 electoral votes to Republicans at the start of a presidential campaign as it is to believe that blue collar and creative class workers can't be in the same unions. In both cases, the Democratic Party and the labor movement have to reject narrow targeting strategies that practically admit defeat from the outset. We live in a moment when new, more expansive, and more widely distributed coalitions are possible. That is the promise of the Open Left, as Matt wrote in his introductory article for this website:
Political power is more and more situated in far-flung networks that can be activated and deactivated quickly, and the new millennial generation that will be the political backbone for the new progressive America likes it this way.
At OpenLeft.com, we are going to explore these new dynamics. We don't believe the internet changes everything, or that older institutions are irrelevant. Far from it. We think that any institution can succeed in building the new America we see unfolding in sketches on the internet. We see the internet and the Open Left as a sort of operating system for a new political system, where groups can plug in and form coalitions more easily and effective on the left, and we see a strong set of dynamics pulling us into this new coalition-focused direction.
Amen to that. While one of the class wars I have discussed today is seeking to expand, distribute power more widely and build these new coalitions, the other seeks to do the opposite As such, I think we need to continue to press one of these class wars, while seeking to end the other. The path of expansion is the only one to follow.
