Back in January, I wrote a piece titled "This isn't leadership" in a fair amount of anger. The subject was LGBT organizational leaders and donors who, in the face of severe Pentagon pushback on Don't Ask, Don't Tell and White House demurring on the issue, along with inaction or setbacks on a number of other issues, got together and wrung their hands over what to do (which became public, to boot). One of my central points is that you have to get out there in the media and push back, hard, or what happens around you will define the debate and the conventional wisdom on political strategy.
Via VLaszlo in Quick Hits, there's an article in Politico with labor union leaders trashing Democrats over the Becker nomination, Employee Free Choice Act, TSA unionization, trade agreements, merit pay, on and on. The biggest lesson that stands out for me, and should stand out for the LGBT community, is this:
Union leaders warn that the Democrats' lackluster performance in power is sapping the morale of activists going into the midterm elections.
"Right now if we don't get positive changes to the agenda, we're going to have a hard time getting members out to work," said United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard, in an interview.
"There's no use pretending any longer."
The biggest threat, of course, is apathy from a Democratic constituency that has a history of mobilizing for elections.
"You're just not going to be able to go to our membership in the November elections and say, 'Come on, let's do it again. Look at what the Democratic administration has done for us!'" Gage said. "People are going to say, 'Huh? What have the Democrats done for us?'"
This is exactly what I called for in my piece, and exactly what LGBT advocates should be doing. Conventional wisdom has always been that LGBT rights is among the issues that hurt Democrats and progressives in the elections, and should generally be avoided, or prioritized way down the list. After Scott Brown's election, to me, that has only become more true, with "We need to do jobs! Jobs jobs jobs!" becoming the drumbeat from the White House, "Democratic strategists" and any number of members of Congress. Part of that, to many, is that "controversial" issues (read: LGBT issues) should be put off.
Legislative action, much less success, on any number of LGBT issues including Don't Ask, Don't Tell, is far from certain, and our side needs to be lighting a fire under the White House and Congress, and warning of apathy from LGBT voters, or the Newsweek prediction from December will come true.
Labor gets it. LGBT leaders: take a cue from our allies and follow their lead.
On the occasion of Labor Day, I wanted to share some of my own brief thoughts on the labor movement.
I grew up in a union household in suburban Buffalo. My parents are both career-long members of United University Professions, which represents about 34,000 faculty and staff across all of the 29 State University of New York (SUNY) schools. It's a part of the American Federation of Teachers. Growing up, that meant I was a little luckier than other kids. It meant very good health insurance, and procedures like my juvenile kidney surgery were fully covered; my trip to the emergency room was covered when I fell running around a shoe store and cut my ear open; my replacement tooth when I tried to ride a bike over a basketball (bad idea) was also nearly fully paid for. I also got both glasses and contact lenses per year growing up because both my parents were on the vision plan negotiated by UUP.
When I finished undergrad, I planned to attend graduate school, but I didn't have a job at that point in time. I wouldn't have any health insurance. My mom told me that as long as I took a certain minimum number of credit hours in grad school, UUP would cover me up until I turned 25. Kaiser Family Foundation just released a study showing the highest percentage of the uninsured were people in that exact age range- 19 to 24 year olds who are either in college or just graduated and had no job or employer-provided coverage. I still have friends on their own a year or two behind me, out of college, without health insurance. I was lucky UUP was there for me.
I remember one day being worried my my dad would be fired for a misunderstanding with his boss. He had been working at Buffalo State College for years already. He didn't commit any gross incompetent violation or anything- they just didn't get see eye to eye on something. I asked him, a little worried, if he would be fired, and he responded "I'm tenured and union. I have representation for things like this." And so he did. There are a lot of places where longtime employees like him would be fired on the spot for just looking at the boss the wrong way, but he had someone to speak up for him.
I got involved in the labor movement at a very young age, when Gov. Pataki took office in 1995 and UUP's contract was up. He promptly proposed a three-year deal with annual raises of exactly 0%, 0%, and 1%, respectively, over the three years. He also pushed to make New York a right-to-fire state. I remember picketing with signs outside Rockwell Hall, one of the flagship buildings of my parents' college. We eventually beat him and got a much better deal. He later refused to negotiate a contract at all, but because my parents are public employees, they were required to work. So we had "working without a new contract" buttons made up to wear and continued the pressure.
UUP also fought back when my mom's job was at risk. She works at the Educational Opportunity Program, known as EOP, or HEOP in private schools. The program accepts underprivileged students who don't quite meet the academic standards for acceptance, but are accepted with the requirement to accept academic counseling my mom and her colleagues provide. They come from schools with 45 kids in a classroom and no textbooks and gangs in inner-city Buffalo, and would normally not go to college at all, but because of EOP, they go and enter the workforce with a good degree. Pataki and the Senate Republicans had been cutting EOP for years and then finally zeroed it out of the budget for the entire SUNY system altogether. My mom would have literally lost her job. But UUP fought back and, with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's help, got most of the cuts restored.
I recently read that in a new Gallup survey that just 48% of Americans in a new survey approve of labor unions- an all-time low. 51% of those surveyed say unions "mostly hurt the economy", up from 36% in 2006. But still an overwhelming majority (66%) say unions mostly help the workers in them. I'm sure that's for reasons such as those I laid out above. People get that part of it. Our challenge as a movement is to convince people that unions lift people up, in terms of wages, health care, fewer accidents on the job, and that is good for productivity and the economy as a whole. I was lucky enough to be in a union household, and for those who need it, we face a challenge of not just organizing problems (which is one reason the Employee Free Choice Act is so important) but in out-messaging our opponents.
I hear the chants in my head. When I need them, they come to me.
This line is especially true right now for the former members of United Healthcare Workers-West. We are the union. A week and a half ago, many of my sisters and brothers and I slept in our union hall, before the hostile takeover by our International, SEIU. As we held our hall, my sisters and I worked to maintain our union. We fended off anyone SEIU sent to weasel their way in without warrants. We planned how we'd move forward during an imminent occupation: how we'd communicate with each other; how we would reach deep into our membership to take our union back.
It occurred to me that night hunched over the bare desks in the communication department office, the union solidarity posters hanging behind me, that though we had been member leaders up to that point, stewards and activists for union democracy, something had changed. This was a sort of matriculation, graduation day.
{Amy Thigpen and members of UHW are sleeping in their union halls across California tonight due the threat of imminent seizure of those buildings by SEIU International, which instituted a takeover of UHW West today.}
Last night I slept on the kind of carpet you don't really want to examine too closely. It's splotched with decades of coffee stains and salsa and too many conversations still seem to hang in the stale air, but there I was, curled up on my air mattresses in the union hall in downtown Oakland, the home of United Healthcare Workers West, my union. On my right my sister the Medical Assistant slept peacefully, on my left my sister the Call Center Representative, across my sister the Ultrasound Technician, and my sister the Optical Technician. All of them healthcare workers, member leaders and officers in our union. I realized that I loved this stale, stained room, with carpets held together by duct tape, I love the room because it holds the waking dreams of my sister and brothers in UHW-W. The place may be held together by duct tape but we as a union are held together by something stronger.
An old friend of mine who has been involved in Chicago politics since before Harold Washington's day, Don Wiener, unearthed this old video from a labor rally in Chicago in 2003. Obama wasn't on the program or planning to speak, but Congressman Danny Davis had taken him to the rally and asked him to come up and say a few words on the spur of the moment. To my knowledge, this video hasn't ever been shown anywhere, and it's kind of fun, showing Obama at his fired up progressive best. It's short, only about 45 seconds, but I thought you'd enjoy it.
Over at TPM Cafe, Nathan Newman has a piece, "Long-Range Vision of the Labor Movement", that talks about one of the ways in which labor is rebuilding itself, particularly in California. It's by maximizing bargaining power:
For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.
It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making:
For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers.
So 75,000 hospital and nursing home workers covered by nearly 200 separate union contracts have been moved from fighting individual battles into a united force that can demand better working conditions and better care for their patients.
This is a highly significant development, as can clearly be seen by realizing how relatively rare this practice has long been. Newman goes on to talk about another such long-term effort on behalf of the Hotel Workers, and concludes:
Not that all unions have the long-term vision needed, but there's been an almost Darwinian evolution in the union movement. Those unions without long-term vision have shrunk and those with long-term vision have grown and become more and more dominant.
So while the overall numbers of union members have not really grown in the last decade, the proportion of those numbers in unions likely to grow in the future has-- which makes the prospects for the labor movement as a whole far more promising in coming years than they looked a decade ago.
This sort of thinking was noticably absent in one of the most high-profile strikes of recent years in Southern California, the Grocery Workers strike back in 2003. This was an extremely costly strike for the supermarket chains, but it was confined to one part of the country, and so they were willing to take devasting losses in the short term for the prospects of drastically slashing labor costs in the long run, so they would no longer sustain a middle class life-style--a strategy they could not have adopted if the strikes had been nationwide.
These struggles are vitally important for preserving the dream of a universal middle class. But Obama's leading economic advisor appears to have a major blind spot here. More on the flip...
Over the course of a week, two of the most important elements of the progressive coalition meet consecutively in the great city of Chicago. Starting first will be YearlyKos, a convention of bloggers and blog readers, which will be followed immediately by the annual summer meeting of the AFL-CIO. The juxtaposition of these two events is important and fascinating symbolically. These two movements, so different in so many ways, make up two of the most fundamental foundation blocks for building a progressive majority in this country. Lacking one or the other, progressivism will go down in flames. Strengthening both, and having the two movements working together, gives us a fighting chance.
I have always believed that a vital labor movement is an absolutely essential element of building a progressive majority. At its core, labor is about two things: economic security for working people and being treated fairly at work. They are the only entity that has those two things, day in and day out, as the heart of its fundamental mission. Without those two things, how exactly does one have a progressive society?
