Tag: Gordon Lafer

The Democrats: A party that wants to die but can’t pull the plug

Yesterday, I noted my exasperation, in the face of the economic desperation of the younger generation, with the Clintonites in the Democratic Party. Young men and women are drowning in massive debt, high rent, low pay, and precarious jobs, and what do the Democrats have to offer them? In today’s Times, Chuck Schumer, the highest elected official in the Democratic Party, gave an answer: Right now millions of unemployed or underemployed people, particularly those without a college degree, could be brought back into the labor force or retrained to secure full-time, higher-paying work. We propose giving employers, particularly small businesses, a large tax credit to train workers for unfilled jobs. This will have particular resonance in smaller cities and rural areas, […]

The War on Workers’ Rights

I have an oped in the New York Times on the Republican war on workers’ rights at the state level. My conclusion: The overall thrust of this state legislation is to create workers who are docile and employers who are empowered. That may be why Republican legislators in Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota, Utah and Missouri have been so eager to ease restrictions on when and how much children can work. High schoolers should learn workplace virtues, says the conservative commentator Ben Stein, like “not talking back.” Early exposure to employment will teach 12-year-olds, as the spokesman of an Idaho school district put it, that “you have to do what you’re asked, what your supervisor is telling you.” And […]

ALEC supports worker collectivism and redistribution of wealth

From Gordon Lafer’s report for the Economic Policy Institute: In Wyoming, a bill co-sponsored by a group of ALEC-affiliated legislators and backed by the Restaurant Association would have given employers the right to force employees to pool their tips.159 While employees may have previously pooled tips, this was done voluntarily. In many restaurants, bussers, who are legally considered tipped employees, in fact receive little tip income.160 In such cases, employers are required to pay them the regular minimum wage. By forcing more highly tipped wait staff to pool earnings, employers may avoid this obligation—essentially cutting the take-home pay of wait staff by making them pay the bussers’ wages, with employers pocketing the difference as increased profits. In 2011, Maine legislators […]

Dictatorships and Double Standards

I’m hoping in the coming days to do a longer blog on the stories about employers instructing employees how to vote, forcing employees to attend rallies for Romney, etc. In the meantime, Gordon Lafer has one of the best pieces yet on this story. He makes the point, which came as news to me, that the Bush Administration repeatedly condemned elections in other countries where because in part bosses there were doing the exact same thing they’re doing here. The Bush Administration, for instance, rejected Ukrainian elections as illegitimate, in part because international observers found that managers of state-owned enterprises had “instructed their subordinates to vote for [the ruling party].” … One step beyond even the Kochs is GOP mega-donor […]

The Kochs’ Libertarian Hypocrisy: It’s Worse Than You Think

In response to my last post, Gordon Lafer sent me an email: Unsurprisingly, there’s a glaring contrast between the standards that the Kochs and other employers insist on for themselves—i.e., they should be maximally free to tell their employees who’s worth supporting for public office— and what they are trying to impose on workers’ organizations around the country. For instance, Alabama’s Act 2010-761, an “ethics” law adopted in 2011 which banned payroll dues deductions for unions that engage in any type of political activity, also includes this: Any person who is in the employment of…any…governmental agency, shall be on approved leave to engage in political action or the person shall be on personal time before or after work and on […]

Gordon Lafer Weighs in on Wisconsin, again

At the Nation, Gordon Lafer responds to some of the criticisms of his original article. Here are some highlights: My disagreement with Doug Henwood has nothing to do with whether unions should be “sucking up to Democrats” or pursuing “business as usual.” I believe that Doug and I see the same crisis; we disagree about what caused it, and what is to be done. … Public confidence in unions has declined, which Henwood insists is because the public correctly perceives that unions are selfish and fail to promote the common good. Yet the most important facts at the heart of Henwood’s argument—42 percent of the country would like to see unions have less influence, and only 30 percent want more influence […]

Adolph Reed Speaks Truth on Wisconsin

Over at The Nation, Adolph Reed weighs in on the great debate about Wisconsin. (His piece, as of this writing, is second from the top, just after Bill Fletcher’s and Jane McAlevey’s.) Adolph, whose credentials as a thinker and activist I assume no one (at least no one in her right mind) would question, has got some choice words of wisdom that I hope we’ll all heed. Many observers have noted that the Madison occupation depended on intense, aggressive, even extraordinary mobilization by unions, and not only unions in Wisconsin. That point has underscored the labor movement’s centrality to any mass action of that sort because it alone has the capacity – people and organizational and economic resources — to […]

Whither Wisconsin: A Guide to the Perplexed (Left)

Gordon Lafer on how to think—and not think—about the Wisconsin recall: After all, if the real problem was overpaid union bureaucrats, then radical unions like the Wobblies or United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers. Read the rest here.

Wisconsin: WTF? A Facebook Roundtable on Labor, the Democrats, and Why Everything Sucks

The defeat of the recall effort in Wisconsin has, understandably, troubled the waters on the left. Everyone from Ezra Klein to Doug Henwood to Josh Eidelson is trying to figure out what it means. I’ve been doing the same, though I’m still not sure. So I put the question to my Facebook friends.  Lots of folks participated in the discussion: bloggers like Aaron Bady and Seth Ackerman, political scientists like Scott Lemieux and Alan Ryan, journalists like Doug, and labor experts like Gordon Lafer, Stephanie Luce, and Nathan Newman. The discussion was kicked off by my posting Klein’s observations on FB, and everyone took it from there. • • • • • • Corey Robin Here are some sobering thoughts […]

Birth Control McCarthyism

Climbing aboard the anti-birth control bandwagon, the Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-2 on Monday to endorse legislation that would: a) give employers the right to deny health insurance coverage to their employees for religious reasons; b) give employers the right to ask their employees whether their birth control prescriptions are for contraception or other purposes (hormone control, for example, or acne treatment). There are three things to say about this legislation. The Private Life of Power First, as I argue in The Reactionary Mind, conservatism is dedicated to defending hierarchies of power against democratic movements from below, particularly in the so-called private spheres of the family and the workplace. Conservatism is a defense of what I call “the private […]

The Economic Cure That Dare Not Speak Its Name

If you don’t know Gordon Lafer, you should. He’s an associate professor at the University of Oregon,  a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, and in 2009-10 was a Senior Labor Policy Adviser to the House of Representatives. He’s also one of the leading experts in the country on the labor movement and labor politics. I asked him over the weekend to comment on a new report, just out in the American Sociological Review, that’s getting a lot of play in the media.  This is what he had to say. Last week a new report came out showing that economic inequality is largely caused by not enough people having unions.  For a dry statistical study, this one got a […]

Why Aren’t There More Union Members in America? A Reply to Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson is awfully confident that the labor movement doesn’t have a future in America because…Americans don’t want it to have a future in America. Now, if you ask me, the combination of continually increasing global competitiveness and the peculiarly individualistic tenor of American public opinion makes the prospect of revitalising organised labour exceedingly unlikely. Organised labour still has plenty of fight in it, and no doubt it will win some important battles in the coming months and years. But the war is long lost, I’m afraid. No matter how hard the left claps for Tinkerbell Local #272, she’s not getting up. Well, I didn’t ask him, but he did ask me.  In a Twitter exchange, where I said to […]

Other People’s Money

In response to the question “What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?” Matt Yglesias writes, “The best step to create jobs and boost the economy would be for the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee to announce a plan to target inflation at 3 or 4 percent.” In a follow-up post, he’s even more emphatic: “The actual single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation” is “adopt a higher inflation target.” I’m no economist—the worst grade I got in college was in Econ 101; the professor was a newly hired economist by the name of Ben Bernanke—but I would have thought the single best thing the government could do to create jobs (and […]