New Orleans   

Part of the story is in the numbers which continue to slip and fall.

Bureau of Labor Statistics announced another slight drop last year of union membership compared to the overall non-farm workforce from 11.9 to 11.8%.   Steven Greenhouse in the Times reports that union membership is now 14,760,000.  The public sector percentage was 37% and about 7,560,000 and the private sector percentage is now only 6.9% with about 7,200,000.  Private sector membership is clearly heading towards 5%, unless something serious and drastic happens.

The numbers could have been worse.  There is speculation that the AFL-CIO is claiming 3,000,000 members from its Working America unit as part of their membership totals, which would be wild, since these are “canvassed” members rather than “real” dues paying members in local unions around the country.  There are still scars on the ears of AFL-CIO staffers from 2008 who did phonebanking to the call list with that group and heard in no uncertain terms from many of these “members” that they had no idea they were part of a union?!?   The BLS numbers come from the Current Population Survey of 60,000 households taken on a monthly basis so those are much more reliable indicators than those reported by unions themselves.

But, I’m grabbing at straws in saying that it could have been worse.  This is plenty bad, and there’s no sign of anything being done in the labor movement to make it much better.  Counting on the economy to make the numbers look a bit better is not a strategy!

 New Orleans              

One of the dangers of organizing work is that sometimes the tactic can swallow the strategy, and this seems to have happened in DC.  The news was all about 60 to 70 arrests for this and that and a lot of attention was paid to the street blocking and traffic delays as folks tried to gum up the works.

The press may have thought that this was all Occupy all the way, which speaks to the power and impact of a legitimate movement and the savvy of SEIU and others to attach themselves to something with traction, but seeing the following quote from one of the arrestees was labor all the way:

“K Street is the place to be if you’re going to stop the moneybags who are corrupting our government,” said Jim Sessions, 75, a Methodist minister from Tennessee who was arrested Wednesday. He and eight others from Texas, Massachusetts and Washington state had linked arms across K and 16th streets and refused to move.

I couldn’t help smiling seeing my old friend and comrade (and Labor Neighbor Training and Research Center board member!), Rev. Jim Sessions, whose history and credentials within the labor movement and many other progressive causes is blue ribbon all the way from his time supporting the Pittston Strike to his directorship of the Highlander Center and then his efforts to build the Union Community Fund for the AFL-CIO until returning to Knoxville, taking one for the team and staying on message.  Nonetheless this was all run as Occupy.

Another article looked extensively at whether or not the street blockings and arrests advanced the 99% cause or not, which is always the argument when message gets consumed in the tactics.  Given that this was really the hard paws of labor sending a message to the Capitol, I hope the message was not lost on the White House, even if it is likely to end up as hours of debate before the Occupy DC general assembly in coming days.

No question we took a shot.  Just unclear if it came within a mile of the real targets.

The panel itself was fascinating. The room was packed and Early was committed to letting everyone have their say, and largely let them do so evenhandedly and without argument. It was how I would have imagined a session on some kind of group organizational therapy. The assembled folks who were long time and dedicated labor educators meeting in New Orleans with the United Association of Labor Educators were universally clear on only one thing: they did not like conflict! They differed sometimes on whether it was a good or bad thing, but there was high consensus that they felt torn between sides, too often forced to choose when they just wanted to serve the labor movement, and frustrated that they could not find either safe space for their own programs or common ground between the combatants. They had chosen the bridge between unions and the academy looking to walk on higher ground and have a good vantage point and all of a sudden they felt way too close to the action.

Many spent a lot of time on a letter they had signed as a message to SEIU and its then President, Andy Stern, asking them not to trustee the big health care local in northern California. When the letter ended up in the New York Times, some of the signers jumped ship and wanted their names retracted. I had trouble following this long debate, though I had remembered the letter. It stretches the imagination for any of the signers or non-signers to not have known they were being “used” as a tactical deterrent “strike” to send a message to Stern. It’s hard for me to believe that they thought it was a private note. And, they were clearly horrified that SEIU took it very painfully and seriously and pushed back, which might not have been the best response by SEIU, but it was a “civil war” so who would have been surprised, and they wanted to be taken seriously, so what did they expect? Probably to be ignored as academics and educators or something? Like I said, I had trouble following the problem here, though I could hear clearly that many of them were still in pain. My slim contribution was that educators were making a mistake not training and teaching more about internal conflict, how to prepare for it and avoid it, and how to handle it both organizationally, personally, and professionally, since I’ve always argued that is the demarcation line that marks whether someone is day tripping in this work or able to make it for the long haul.

A small caucus evolved of organizational behaviorists of sorts who argued that a lot of this was just normal behavior for big organizations, their leaders, and the project at hand, which seemed right, but didn’t solve anything. These are tough times and any problems become more pronounced, so it was good that we had a “sharing.” I’m not sure what many may have learned about what they would do differently the next time, but it’s clear there will be a lot more looking before leaping, and folks will be more prepared to find higher ground or take the chances of injury if they choose to join the combatants on the field.
All of which seems fair enough.

New Orleans     

Furthermore how “secret” is a tape filmed at as part of a public presentation at a panel discussion of some sort at Pace University:  answer – not a secret at all!   I’ve known and worked with Lerner for decades and his long experience with union lawyers and what used to be called “corporate campaigns,” has made him one of the more careful commentators on his work that I know.  The rest of us are verifiable flap jawed loose lips compared to Steve!

BigGovernment.com, the loud and furious factually challenged hate machine run by Andrew Brietbart, who I gather now is a journalist with the Huffington Post where he must have found a home after being blocked from Fox during the mid-term elections, while labeling Lerner an ex-SEIU official who was signaling that unions and community organizations were “dead,” also reported hook-line-and-sinker that in May, according to Lerner, there would be days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase signally the beginning of the anti-banking jihad.  Hmmm.  An ex-official issuing the call to “dead” troops to storm the barricades?  Does something not add up here?

The New American website went for the bait, but at least commented on the irony behind their uproar:

“It’s unclear exactly how much influence Lerner holds or who his fellow conspirators might be. He was reportedly fired recently from SEIU, one of America’s largest and most influential unions with around two million members, for spending vast sums of money on a plot similar to the one he described during the speech. The person who introduced him at Pace University said Lerner was working on building alliances with unions and other organizations in Europe and South America.  But regardless of Lerner’s true degree of influence, the tape has attracted considerable attention and condemnation.”

Well, yes, that seems right.  You need organization and members or someone to storm the barricades, and certainly Stephen is not airlifting boots on the ground from Europe and Latin America to do actions in the US.

In short welcome to the hate-and-scare hooey machine hard at work again.

Without talking to Stephen there are some simple facts that get in the way of this fantasy, no matter how pleasing it is to contemplate:

• Lerner has not been “fired” by SEIU as they report.  He was placed on paid leave last fall to think through his contribution to the union, but was certainly present at the recent international executive board meeting.  He’s in a curious position no doubt, but it’s something like being an “injured reserve” in the NFL and waiting for the team to find a place to bring him back on the roster.
• Lerner has written a number of well circulated papers over the last year expanding on his analysis of the impact of the recession and the need to frame larger campaigns around accountability of banks and the financial system for working Americans.  He is an avowed advocate of developing campaigns to finally bring them to account, but who among us hasn’t written something close to the same, isn’t engaged in such pursuit, and doesn’t believe this is necessary?  I’ve been on TV panels with Tea Party folks, and when we get to the subject of the banks, we all sound like we are part of the hallelujah chorus and have prayed at the same church forever.  That should really share you, Glenn Beck!
• Finally, the Wall Street Journal has already reported from unnamed sources on the SEIU IEB that the union is embarking on a major 15+ city organizing campaign with expansive plans to mobilize labor and community members on economic issues from banks to local corporations.  They are following their own, different drum and clearly have their hands tied up in what may be a $100,000,000 organizing campaign mobilizing the entire union to win “climate change” in favor of unionizations again.

The right wingers need to leave Lerner alone rather than erecting yet another statute in their wax gallery of threats to America.  Knowing Stephen, he’s having a hearty laugh at all of this.   Especially since the more the Becks and Breitbarts embrace the banks, the more they are inadvertently building a huge, peace and unity bridge that will unite all of us against the ways that Wall Street, tax evading corporations (see GE in today’s papers), and the banks have ripped us off royalty from stem to stern and coast to coast.

More depressing to me was reading an Ezra Klein interview with former SEIU President Andy Stern in yesterday’s Washington Post. I wish it were a case of misunderstanding or mistaken identity, but Andy seems happy enough with how his views were presented that he linked to the interview on his twitter account, so I guess this is what he really thinks.  Long and short he seems to say, his well ran dry:

“What I would say is I felt that the next strategy of change would be different. I had tried everything I knew. I was too much of a victim of the model I created. I tried Change to Win and helping Obama, and then I just ran out of Andy Stern ideas.”

I actually don’t believe that is either true or what Andy really thinks.  The rest of the interview in fact belies that quote as does his interest in broadcasting the interview.  Andy has never been short of ideas, what he seems to have realized is two more fundamental things in leaving SEIU.  First, that he could not convince people to follow his ideas, and, secondly,  after having led people to follow him  through past ventures like Change to Win, sometimes they don’t work.  It may have been the right idea, but it was the wrong strategy or set of tactics.  The rest of the ideas in the interview are feints in different directions.  I can remember how he scoffed at the German workers’ councils a dozen years ago, so it’s a little hard to see him touting them now.  I’ll think about all of that and get back to you….

But worse in all of these comments whether high or low, Twitter or Times, is that even when expressing hope they still reflect the old post-Katrina refrigerator slogan:  Hope is Not a Plan.  There still seems to be no coherent strategy or plan that pulls labor together in a more fundamental direction to rebuild and reassert.  In some ways it is too easy to see Wisconsin as a last gasp of the old school.  I heard recently that the Madison AFL-CIO was debating calling a general strike.  If called, who would come?  If we came, what would we really stop?  I want to see this and count the feet on those streets!

In the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago a breathless story about a possible $100,000,000 organizing campaign being launched by SEIU in more than a dozen cities around the country was attributed to an anonymous SEIU board member and other sources.  Whatever the merits and truth of those reports, SEIU and every other union need to pull all of their last dollars together and figure out how to survive and turn the tide and do it now, make it real, and make it very, very different, because the bell has rung on the old school and the old ideas, as Stern acknowledges, and we are running out of time and money with the tide coming in hard against us.

Time for speeches is over.  It’s only sweat that counts now.

New Orleans

And, that was a shock.  Oliver was a friend and supporter.  Mayor Morial’s blessing and Oliver’s work on the inside when I ran the multi-union project, HOTROC, for SEIU, the AFL-CIO, HERE, and the Operating Engineers, ended up being the big success of our inside “leverage” campaign with the Piazza de’ Italia public corporation that built the Lowe’s Hotel, the only major post 9-11 property, and now the only union hotel in the city.  Earlier Oliver had been the key we needed when he cast the deciding vote preventing the privatization of the Sewerage and Water Board.  He has been one of our most vocal champions when we fought to raise the minimum wage.  Believe me, if he had been for sale, developers, hoteliers, and the privateers all would have paid way more than $20,000 chump change to take him out of those fights.  So of all the trees to be toppled and fall, the looming, large Councilman Thomas was the surprise never expected and the disappointment most deeply felt and impossible to replace.

When caught with the cookies, Oliver manned up, pled guilty, didn’t rat, and did his time.  We got some letters from him from the fed penitentiary in Atlanta that were moving and well thought out.  Big believers in redemption, when the bizarre news came out that he and his old friend, Anthony Bean, director of a community theater uptown had written a play about all of this, called “Reflections:  A Man and His Time,” I immediately went on line and bought six tickets so we would be well represented from the top (Local 100 ULU’s President Mildred Edmond) to the bottom (the rest of us organizers).

The play was sold out and my guess is that the theater should have cleared $6000 conservatively the night we attended, and that’s a very good contribution and says something about rehab right there.  What do I know about the theater?  Not much, but the play was sprightly up to the intermission.  Some of it was even funny.  The crowd got a tremendous kick out of the satire around the preachers advising and arguing with Oliver before his public announcement.  The second half focusing on his prison time was preachy and boring with one good song, which might mean it was realistic, but it didn’t offer much to most of us already off parole.

A politician slipping and falling and then doing something as public as a play to try and “explain” himself is a rare thing, so it’s hard to judge.  Having read Oliver’s prison letters, I don’t doubt his sincerity, yet watching all of this on a stage inevitably and by definition takes some of the reality out of both insight and contrition.  The sense of “I did wrong” was never diluted, but the play allowed there to be curious mitigations around the inadequate pay in politics, the puny level of the bribe, the generosity shown to needy constituents, the lack of benefit to his family, and the couple of times that problems with racetrack gambling floated out in snippets of dialogue without explanation or amplification, as if the very mention was a trial balloon for an alternate reality.

Some things can’t be explained and Oliver and Bean were sharp enough to not try to defend something that was just plain stupid.  The play also left the future cloudy and confused for our friend and now banned politician.  The very drag of the second act made it hard to believe that there as a clear path for Oliver working with young people, which was part of the hint drifting there.

New Orleans is not like other cities.  Thank goodness!  Former governor Edwin Edwards just came out of jail after a decade as the play was hitting the boards.  Here he maintains a reputation after four terms in office as delightful rouge regardless of the evidence.  In our city Oliver can still be an advocate what needs to be done.  A son of the lower 9^th ward and a long time representative of uptown housing projects and neighborhoods, Oliver can still find a voice speaking truth to power.   He did wrong, and he paid his debt to society.  Now he needs to find a new stage and talk about what he really knows and what really matters.  Maybe that will be with young people, maybe it will be a broader role in helping cement the coalition that continues to try and build real power for the majority of people in this city.

After a slip and fall, what’s most important is finding a sure path to continue on making progress as you make your way.

New Orleans

Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times wrote a scary piece this week detailing some of the draconian steps that legislatures and new governors are proposing to stick it to public employees and their unions, including in some situations outright withdrawal of recognition for the unions.   There are few folks out there that have not seen this coming particularly given the last year of struggle in heavily unionized California around state and local employees and the drumbeating by New York’s new democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and President Obama on wage freezes.

Part of the problem is the wide misperception that public employees are living high on the hog with better salaries and benefits, so now it’s time for them to share in the pain.  There is little evidence that this is in fact the truth.  The only traditional advantage that public employees have had historically is that their jobs were simply more stable and secure than in the private sector, and workers traded the security of a job certain for the ups and downs of the private sector business cycle.  Unions in the public sector, rather than being greedy, simply enjoyed the same security as their members since they were not facing constant employee turnover and therefore costs were less to service and generated a stable dues base.   The real crises could be the loss of that stability.

There may be some states and isolated cities where certain jobs between private and public sector are equivalent when one measures both pay and benefits, but this has been an exhaustively studied situation, and the notion that there is a significant public sector advantage is largely a politicians’ mirage.  A good example often in the news is the mismatch of pay for public sector nurses compared to those in the private sector where devotion to the job is about all that holds the workers.  Lower wage workers in the service sector have increasingly been contracted out in past economic crises and are tit for tat with the private sector if not below.

The advantages argued in the past for public sector pensions are also disappearing, especially as the reports of public underfunding build up in piles these days.  In fact what is often ignored is that some of these same pensions substitute for social security, so that if they are degraded public workers could find themselves up a terrible creek.

Contrary to what the right wing is arguing, public employees are not pampered and over paid.  The real issue is more likely “defunding” the unions which have been their protectors, especially the aggressive and politically powerful SEIU and AFSCME.  Greenhouse makes this point as well arguing that tactically forcing unions to spent more in defense would defang them in terms of political spending for 2012 federally and at the local and state levels.

This is a bad time for this fight, but there’s no reason to “blame the victim” — public employees — when this is just brass knuckle political war.  We might as well engage the battle on the real ground rather than the make believe world.

New York

There were some brief moments over the last 100 years where it was not politic to victimize the poor and workers.  Reading the propositions of the bi-partisan Deficit Commission and its total assault on citizen wealth, if there was any doubt, it’s crystal clear that at least many of the blue ribbons on this commission think those times are long gone.  The headlines have focused on spending cuts and adjustments, but this is much, much more and much, much less, and I don’t say this because all of the adjustments are wrong.

Sitting with my view of Brooklyn, I could read the morning paper, the New York Times, and its chart on the cuts which mislabeled some of the most severe anti-poor attacks as “tax increases.”   I assume they mean revenue increases, since the point was to eliminate entitlements like the critical ones for working families and low income workers, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the child tax credit, both of which have long enjoyed total bipartisan support whether Clinton or the Bushes or Obama at the top.

They want to save $24 billion by freezing federal and non-combatant salaries for three years moving the concept of an “all voluntary” army bias to public workers without reckoning with the impact there on families, communities, or anything else.   In the same spirit this commission’s leaders argued for cutting social security benefits for retirees, and remember those of us who need social security the most are lower income workers without fancy salaries and benefit programs.  Reducing automatic cost of living increases also would guarantee that we impoverish senior citizens depending on social security for their subsistence living.  I hope Mexico is read for all of the undocumented seniors that will be swarming across the border looking for lower living costs.

Some of the big headline “gasps” doesn’t worry me as much, frankly.  Changing the retirement age for social security to 69 by 2075 wouldn’t affect any workers alive now and is so far off in the political and economic future that it’s something that intellectually doesn’t bother me as much as not supporting real workers and their families now.

I argued in Citizen Wealth that we needed to redirect the lost tax revenues that have become nothing more than giveaways to the rich when they receive mortgage interest rate deductions.  The tax benefits that might make the difference in a working family entering home ownership do not really matter up the income scale and there’s evidence.  The rich continued to buy second homes (and third and fourth) even after the deductions disappeared there, and are still going to buy homes even without a deduction.

The other point I made before repeatedly, and that hopefully is being drummed in by the disaster of the great recession, is that we need to incentive other affordable housing options in multi-family housing, apartment construction, and, yes, public housing.  The ILGWU coop where I was staying was no long price capped, but had gone to market rates.  Estimates on the value of this “worker housing” in Manhattan were now between $450,000 and $1 million.  The coop itself, no longer in the business of safe guarding worker housing now gets 20% of any sale, though in my brief stay I couldn’t find out where that 20% goes.  So though the real estate lobbies and interest will lather up on this one, I actually believe that we need to reappropriate the tax revenues from reforming mortgage interest rate deductions to more effective affordable housing programs.  Unfortunately even agreeing on some of the Commission’s recommendations doesn’t really mean consensus, since they don’t want to reallocate, they want to recover the funds and pretend that workers and the poor don’t exist, never age, don’t need affordable housing options, and the rest.

What mischief!  Read Paul Krugman’s column in today’s Times for even more here.

Fortunately Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky from Chicago is on this Commission, and she’s a freedom fighter.

Andy Stern, former chief of the Service Employees, is also a member.  There’s hope there as well though he was quoted as saying “at least people stayed in the room” in concern for the Republicans walking out.  I hope Andy doesn’t get to comfortable in this chair, because frankly I was surprised on reading the early reports that he was still in the room.

Someone has to stand up for the poor and workers here, because there is no question they are under assault both now, and as we can see, in the future.

Mumbai

Perhaps there should be more protest around the USA though that would require more solidarity. Union seem to have chosen to curb their voice nationally in favor of trying to impact the midterm elections, though no candidate anywhere to my knowledge is talking about a recovery plan for public employment or a bailout plan for city and state governments. Unions are trying to cut the best deal at the bargaining table in terrible times of

draconian budgets. The huge California State Employees Association (CSEA/SEIU) with over 100,000 members cut a deal on concessions with the long 3+ month stall on approving a budget.

The real changes are likely to be more profound and enduring. I worry that these cutbacks if they continue and deepen will also ravage cities and the low and moderate income community nationally lengthening even further any economic recovery. As the service sector has replaced manufacturing as economic drivers in the jobs sector, the best of the service jobs with decent wage standards, real benefits including insurance and pensions, and job stability have been in the public sector. If these jobs are significantly diminished and in some cases eliminated by deep tax revenue losses created by fewer jobs and less property taxes due to the housing meltdown, many cities will be especially racked in crises. At one level because many cities and districts require or incentivize public employees to live within their limits. The other level will be the damage to minority worker employment stability since the level of job discrimination in the public sector is less. In places like New Orleans, which I call home, the public sector has virtually created the black middle class. The slow recovery after Katrina, a preview to the recession, can be seen in the loss of teacher jobs by the thousand coupled with the loss of city jobs as well.

If you want to look for signs of more disaster, follow the attack and slashbacks on the public sector. If you want to look for signs of any recovery, look for whether or not public jobs begin to rebound.

I have a terrible feeling reading these numbers that we have a long way to go, and it’s a global problem.