i need a word for that sharp pain i have in my back...

In case you've been living underneath a large pile of dirt for the past few months, you know that screen and television writers are on strike throughout the United States. Pickets and demonstrations have been ongoing in New York and Los Angeles, with solidarity rallies held around the world. At stake is more than a decent contract with good wages and benefits: this strike is over whether writers will be paid at all for the use of their work on the internet, an issue that everyone who makes a living through the creation of art should take very seriously.
Amazingly, the U.S. media has been largely sympathetic toward the writers, in part because their demands are so freakin' reasonable but also because the union (Writers Guild of America) has been quite adept at explaining their case in public. It helps that some of the most talented communicators in the world are in the union's rank and file. Celebrities have flocked to the picket-lines to show support, adding a sexiness to the strike that surrounds few other industrial actions.
A recent attempt to return to the bargaining table failed, as management (the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) walked away, refusing to make concessions on core issues. Meanwhile, the AMPTP has hired Clinton-linked consultants to help them in their defense of core American values like profiting off of other people's work without paying them.
But now the writers have a new challenge: anti-strike mobilization by other entertainment workers. Yesterday, hundreds of "below the line" television workers (stage hands, line producers) and vendors took to the streets to demand that the two sides "strike a deal". The message was that their shows have been shut down by the strike and they want the two sides to come to an agreement.
Underneath the rhetoric of "not taking sides", however, was a clear attack on the WGA, with chants and picket signs intimating that the writers, whose upper-level salaries are quite a bit higher than many "below the line" employees, are simply spoiled and should go back to work. The president of the stage hands union was even quoted in the always-happy-to-bash-the-labor-movement Los Angeles Times attacking the writers for not wanting to "bargain in good faith", which is a violation of labor law. Ouch. So much for solidarity.
Personally, I can't imagine what it would feel like to be on strike and have co-workers take to the streets to demand that I fold, particularly in a situation like this one where the basic structure of the industry is at stake. It is quite understandable for people to feel resentful when a higher-paid group of workers strikes and it puts them out of work, a situation made more complex by the fact that the the WGA has been less-than-pristine in it's support of other unions' strikes in the past.
Nonetheless, it's a stupid, stupid move that plays right into the hands of the AMPTP. There is nothing more potent in turning public opinion against a strike than to paint strikers as "spoiled", "overpaid", or willing to sacrifice other workers for their own benefit. The timing of it takes the pressure off of management, the folks who are responsible for the breakdown in talks, and reframes a very straight forward conflict into a moral wash. It's not. The AMPTP is wrong. Just like they are wrong when they go after benefits for stage hands. Duh.
The same talking points were used against UAW workers in the agricultural implement industry in the 1980's. They were often the highest paid workers in their communities, and when they struck, their bosses successfully played the "spoiled" card to turn their neighbors against them. They lost those strikes, and wages in the region have never recovered. It's a basic lesson of the labor movement: what they can do to the highest paid or best organized, they can, and will, do to everyone else. As an aside, that's also why it was so jaw-droppingly ridiculous to read quotes in the papers from student activists who took part in the uprising in France against proposed youth labor market "reforms" attacking the recent transit strikes. Some of those same young activists who enjoyed labor union support in their confrontation with the previous Gaullist administration hit the Paris streets to demand that workers cave in to the current one.
Incidentally, when striking writers asked if they could participate in the "strike a deal!" rally, they were told that they weren't welcome. Read the comments.

The Democratic Party | Help the Democratic Majority Pass the Employee Free Choice Act

The Democratic Party | Help the Democratic Majority Pass the Employee Free Choice Act

And, it's on. Write in now to show your support for a democratic workplace!

...F a MAC

Apple boss slams US teachers' unions - Education - Macworld UK: "Associated Press reports that Jobs was sharing the stage with Dell CEO Michael Dell. Both men were discussing their vision of how digital technologies can boost educational achievement."

This just in from my esteemed colleague Erik Love over at The Most Important Blog...Ever. I hate to sound like a broken record, constantly harping on the anti-union attitudes of the tech class and their intellectual heroes. However, it's just so bad up there in Silicon Valley and Seattle that I just can't help it.

Here we have Steve Jobs being his usual heroic, giant-slaying self, taking a break from fighting for market share against Microsoft by attacking the greedy and shiftless teachers unions. They impede technological development and protect "bad teachers", according to educational and industrial relations expert Jobs. Michael Dell demurred, saying that the only reason there are unions is because of bad employers. These two statements encapsulate the thinking about unions and the labor movement dominant in the technoclass: at worse they are anachronistic and get in the way of progress, at best they are an understandable but unfortunate reaction to bad employer behavior. Of course, in the utopian world of the new economy, employers are nice and generous. They even let you wear sneakers to work.

There is a lot of interesting work being done around organizing high-tech and freelance labor, a move that will require some creativity and flexiblity on the part of existing unions. Barbara Ehrenreich has been an outspoken advocate of opening the labor movement up to skilled, contingent and high tech workers even when traditional collective bargaining agreements are not on the short term agenda. The Freelancer's Union, the UAW's National Writers Union, and even the AFL-CIO's Working America are all related to this effort. The Communication Workers have been organizing computer programmers around health care and job security. Unions are necessary wherever there are employees. Period. This is especially true in the insecure and volatile world of the old "new economy".

However, the assumption that employers and employees in the tech industry have some kind of special relationship that differs from the traditional manufacturing or service sector is dangerous and wide-spread. I'm skeptical of this notion: the tech sector is undergirded by brutal working conditions and environmental insanity in the "hardware" industry, the cult of flexibility has burned up thousands of worker's benefits, capital speculation caused a crash that took the whole economy with it, and programmers are increasingly "proletarianized" through outsourcing and insane work speedups. Bosses in jeans are bosses. They may be nicer in some ways than the Wal-Mart CEO, but they operate in the same market under the same logic.

The Center for American Progress recently underwrote a study by consultants Celinda Lake and Jim Grossfeld on attitudes toward work and unions among high tech workers. They found that the insecurity of the industry has created a wide opening for labor organizing, but that Silcon Valley employees want unions which, among other tings, are geared toward cooperation with management. An article based on their findings appeared online at TAP. It's quite interesting. There is an old debate within both academia and the labor movement about "white collar" workers and their attitudes toward and "identification" with management. Many have argued there are huge differences between such workers and agricultural, service or industrial employees. This may or may not be empericaly true, and it's an open question as to whether this is a convenient mythology or describes some actual difference of conditions.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that the engineers at Boeing don't see themselves as having a special relationship with the company that tried to gut their health care and wages a few years back. At one point in time, Henry Ford was seen as the scion of a new, generous paternalistic capitalism that didn't need unions. Thank god that his employees had the bravery to strongly disagree. We all benefited from the prosperity they helped wrest from the coffers of American business. Even Steve Jobs.

EFCA Introduced

Well,

This week the Employee Free Choice Act was passed through committee and on to the full House for deliberation and hearings. Here's a fairly comprehensive article about it.

Opposition from business groups and their buddies in Congress will be fierce, no doubt. Already last year the Center for Union Facts began a "grassroots" campaign against the reform, including taking out full page ads in major newspapers comparing union leaders to Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin. Nice.

The hearings should be exciting, and a great opportunity to highlight the authoritarian nature of the modern American workplace.

news press workers victorious!

Some good news for a change! By an overwhelming majority, Santa Barbara News Press newsroom workers voted for representation by the Teamsters' Graphic Communication Conference.

This is a great victory for workers who have been threatened and harrassed by their independently owned newspaper, and is the latest event in a saga which has been covered by everyone from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to the British Guardian. A few articles are linked below:


San Francisco Gate

Santa Barbara Independent

A Journalism Blog

Los Angeles Times

The added importance locally is that the News Press is a consistantly anti-union voice in the community, railing against the living wage and singling out political contributions by public employee unions while ignoring corporate donations to candidates they like. The newspaper, of course, has editorialized against their own employees' drive for recognition, spreading what can only be described as propaganda against unions in general and the Teamsters specifically.

The union has done a good job of reaching out to the community, enlisting the help of environmental, social justice and labor organizations in encouraging supporters to cancel subscriptions. We've all been rooting for the reporters, and everyone who cares about quality journalism and workplace rights have reason to celebrate.

labor day essay: buy american!

It’s labor day, the traditional start of the fall election cycle. While most of Santa Barbara’s progressive political community looks at today’s holiday as the two-months-to-go mark for the November midterm election, I’m thinking about the state of the nation’s unions. Despite many positive developments and an increasing commitment to new organizing, it would be foolhardy to argue that workers are in anything but a tough situation in 21st century America. The bulk of new and innovative organizing will doubtless be centered in the growing service sector. However, there are still millions of industrial and manufacturing jobs out there to be organized.
Those jobs are under constant threat from the forces we generally refer to as globalization. Millions of jobs have been scrapped throughout the country, not only in the so-called Rust Belt of the Midwest, but also here in California, throughout the South and Northeast, the cradle of American industry. This is a crisis not only for workers and their families who are thrown to the market wolves, but also for the nation as a whole. On this labor day, we should reflect on how important it is to make things in America.
There are many people and organizations in a community like Santa Barbara who are part of the growing movement toward organic, sustainable and locally-grown food. That’s a good thing. From the perspective of public health as well as ecological sanity, buying locally, when possible, is an important principle. Getting people to make a connection between their favorite produce and our dependence on fossil fuels is an important lesson. We shouldn’t stop at food, however. We are driving cars made from metal forged in China, minerals mined in Africa and assembled in pieces from Korea, Mexico and Japan. The same is true of our ipods, cell phones, computers and other hallmarks of the “new” “clean” economy. In fact, they are very, very dirty products.
Basing our economy on debt-fueled consumption, real estate, and a low-wage service sector invites a massive crash. It won’t be felt equally throughout American society, but where it is felt, it will be disastrous. In many respects, the consistent and horrific decline of our urban centers is a harbinger of a deiundustrialized America. Communities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago and Newark have been destroyed by the loss of manufacturing jobs. When this happens in the context of racialized patterns of opportunity, the results are easy to see.
The art of balancing trade policies which aid the development of poor countries while supporting a domestic industrial base is a difficult one- but it will never be achieved so long as our policy makers, and consumers, fail to see the importance of a domestic manufacturing base. Consumer preferences alone aren’t going to solve the problem, but they can go a long way. Consider again the case of organic produce.
Wal-Mart, a company that got its start stocking made-in-the-USA products and now leads the retail industry in plunder and devastation, has announced plans to step up its marketing of organic food. While this is a mixed blessing for organic food advocates, it demonstrates that rising demand has effected the behavior of a major U.S. corporation. It would be great if, in addition to shopping for local squash, progressive shoppers would also buy cars, electronics and washing-machines made in the United States.
Of course, organic buying also shows the limitations of consumer-based social action. Organic farms are not generally better than their pesticide-using counterparts when it comes to labor standards. In fact, many workers trade exposure to pesticides for increasingly intensive labor. There are attempts underway to find ways of labeling food as worker-friendly. Of course, as with anything from toasters to tomatoes, there is no better label than the union label.

Happy labor day!