Category: Labor/Workplace

When Politics Becomes Professional: From the Obamanauts to the New Deal

The historian Josh Freeman has an excellent review of Michael Walzer’s Political Action, which came out in 1971 but has been reissued by NYRB Books. Freeman compares Walzer’s short pamphlet to the Manual of Practical Political Action, another how-to political guide, prepared in 1946 by the labor movement’s National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC), one of the first modern PACs. Both texts were written at moments of political deceleration, when the velocities of change were about to alter dramatically or already had. But here’s what Josh says about that earlier moment that’s relevant for today: For NCPAC…organizing requires strategies that are not inherently progressive. Somewhat apologetically, the Manual suggests borrowing techniques from commercial advertising, presenting detailed guidance, much of it derived from standard business practices, […]

David Brion Davis, 1927-2019: Countersubversive at Yale

David Brion Davis, the pathbreaking Yale historian of slavery and emancipation, whose books revolutionized how we approach the American experience, has died. The obituaries have rightly discussed his many and manifold contributions, a legacy we will be parsing in the days and months ahead. Yet for those of us who were graduate students at Yale during the 1990s and who participated in the union drive there, the story of David Brion Davis is more complicated. Davis helped break the grade strike of 1995, in a manner so personal and peculiar, yet simultaneously emblematic, as not to be forgotten. Not long after the strike, I wrote at length about Davis’s actions in an essay called “Blacklisted and Blue: On Theory and […]

What is the connection between Ezra Pound, the Constitution, and the Steel Industry?

The steel industry is making profits, hand over fist. But it’s not passing the profits on to the workers. So the 30,000 members of the United Steelworkers Union are talking strike. If the workers wind up benefiting from the current boom, it’ll be in spite of the industry, not because of it. Which reminds me… Literary scholars know the publishing house New Directions as the publisher of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, and Wallace Stevens, among others. It was founded by James Laughlin, scion and heir of the Pittsburgh Laughlin family, of Jones & Laughlin Steel fame, after Pound told him that he didn’t have a future as a poet. Constitutional scholars know that […]

As political scientists head to their annual convention, the workers at the convention hotels prepare to protest: Here’s what you can do

The American Political Science Association is holding its annual convention this coming week in Boston. As luck would have it, the three hotels (all owned by the Marriott chain) at which the convention is being held are in the midst of a labor dispute with the hotels’ workers, who are members of Local 26 of UNITEHERE. The issues are many, but the main one is that, as the union contract has expired and the workers renegotiate a new one, they’d like to make sure that a hotel worker should only have to work at one job—not two, not three—in order to support herself and her family. That’s the workers’ demand: “One job should be enough.” And that’s the name of […]

Freedom and Socialism

The New York Times asked me to write something on socialism and its current appeal. I did, and it’s running as this weekend’s cover story in The Sunday Review. Here are some brief excerpts: The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival. … The stories of […]

On Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and Sexual Harassment in the Academy

I wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Avital Ronell/Nimrod Reitman sexual harassment story. Here are some excerpts: The question of sex, of Ronell’s work and stature in academe, of literary theory or critical theory or the academic left, of the supposed hypocrisy of the scholars who rallied to her side, of the fact that the alleged harasser is a woman and gay while the alleged victim is a man and gay — all of this, if one reads Reitman’s complaint, seems a little beside the point. And has, I think, clouded the fundamental issue. Or issues. What’s clear from the complaint is just how much energy and attention — both related and unrelated to academic matters — […]

The Creative Class Gets Organized

The staff of The New Yorker—the people behind the scenes: editors, fact checkers, social media strategists, designers—are unionizing. They’ve even got a logo: Eustace Tilly with his fist raised. If you’re a loyal reader of the magazine, as I am, you should support the union in any way you can. Every week, they bring us our happiness; we should give them some back. They’re asking for letters of solidarity; email them at newyorkerunion@gmail.com. If you look at their demands, they read like a tableaux of grievances from today’s economy: no job security, vast wage disparities, no overtime pay, a lot of subcontracting, and so on. The creative class used to see itself and its concerns as outside the economy. Not […]

Why is the media—including the liberal media—supporting these teachers’ strikes?

I’ve been amazed—in a good way—at how positive is the media coverage of all these teacher wildcat strikes and actions in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Particularly from liberal media outlets. I say this because it was just six years ago that the teachers in Chicago struck. Even though their cause was just as righteous as that of the teachers in these southern states, featuring many of the same grievances you see in the current moment—the Chicago teachers’ final contract included a guarantee of textbooks for all students on the first day of class; a doubling of funds for class supplies; $1.5 million for new special education teachers; and so on—the hostility from media outlets, including liberal media outlets, […]

When Libertarian Judges Rule

Prominent libertarian jurist Alex Kozinski has been accused of sexual harassment by six women, all of them former clerks or employees. One of the women is Heidi Bond. In a statement, Bond gives a fuller description of Judge Kozinski’s rule, sexual and non-sexual, in the workplace. One day, my judge found out I had been reading romance novels over my dinner break. He called me (he was in San Francisco for hearings; I had stayed in the office in Pasadena) when one of my co-clerks idly mentioned it to him as an amusing aside. Romance novels, he said, were a terrible addiction, like drugs, and something like porn for women, and he didn’t want me to read them any more. […]

Because of her, it went well with him: Weinstein, Wieseltier, and the Enablers of Sexual Harassment

Part of this week’s Torah portion, from Genesis 12, tells the story of a famine in Canaan that drives Abram and Sarai (the names of Abraham and Sarah before they became Abraham and Sarah) to Egypt. As they near Egypt, Abram fears that Sarai will be sexually desired there and that he’ll be killed so that she can be taken. Abram devises a plan. Sarai should pretend to be his sister. That way, she’ll be taken but he won’t be killed in the process. “Please say that you are my sister,” he says, “that it may go well with me because of you.” And that’s what happens. Sarai is taken by Pharaoh (none of this is described as rape; it’s all part […]

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand At Work: The Harvey Weinstein Story

Of all the sentences I’ve read on the Harvey Weinstein story, this one, from the New York Times, was the most poignant: More established actresses were fearful of speaking out because they had work; less established ones were scared because they did not. In virtually every oppressive workplace regime—and other types of oppressive regimes—you see the same phenomenon. Outsiders, from the comfort and ease of their position, wonder why no one inside the regime speak ups and walks out; insiders know it’s not so easy. Everyone inside the regime—even its victims, especially its victims—has a very good reason to keep silent. Everyone has a very good reason to think that it’s the job of someone else to speak out. Those […]

What do the NFL and Trump’s Birth Control Mandate Have in Common? Fear, American Style

The Wall Street Journal reports that the NFL may adopt a policy to force football players to stand for the national anthem as a condition of employment. It’s worth recalling that as a matter of constitutional right, a six-year-old student in this country cannot be required to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem. But a grown man or woman can be forced by their employer to do so. That should tell you something about the state of rights in the workplace. A state-run institution like the public school cannot stop you from sitting down during the pledge, but a private employer can. The one factor that may stop the NFL from forcing the players to stand up during […]

Fighting Fascism in France, 1936 v. 2017

Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 1936: Léon Blum’s Popular Front government establishes extensive labor law protections, including the right to collective bargaining, two weeks’ paid holidays, and 40-hour work week. Fighting Fascism in France, Summer 2017: Macron’s government uses summer holidays to ram through extensive labor law retrenchments, including provisions that ensure collective bargaining agreements protect workers who aren’t in unions and that prevent workers from having to answer work-related email and phone calls after hours. Also, this: … he’ll [Macron] ask Parliament for legislation that would let the government enact labor reforms by decree, avoiding momentum-sapping debate… That’s how we fight fascism today: by an enabling act that allows the government to bypass political debate and rule by decree.

Welfare Reform from Locke to the Clintons

In a draft of his “Essay on the Poor Law,” Locke writes: Now no part of any poor body’s labour should be lost. Things should be so ordered that everyone should work as much as they can. That passage, which Locke ultimately deleted, came right after his complaint that women were staying home with their kids and not working. As a result, he wrote, “their labour is wholly lost.” Locke follows this observation up with a complaint about the existing poor laws in England: the problem with them is that “they are turned only to the maintenance of people in idleness, without at all examining into the lives, abilities, or industry, of those who seek for relief.” That is what […]

Defend George Ciccariello-Maher

On Christmas Eve, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University whose excellent work on Venezuela and political theory you may know, tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The next day, he followed up with this: “To clarify: when the whites were massacre during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” After denouncing the tweets, the university said, “The University is taking this situation very seriously. We contacted Ciccariello-Maher today to arrange a meeting to discuss this matter in detail.” Folks, we’ve been here before. Over the years, it has become a pillar of our organizing around here that no one should be punished by his or her employer for political speech off the job. This […]

Viva Las Vegas!

As we head into the final days of the election, some thoughts, observations, and provocations—by turns, cantankerous, narrow, and crabby, and, I hope, generous, capacious, and open to the future. 1. As the polls tighten, there’s a lot of left-blaming and left-fretting among Clinton supporters. That fits with a long-standing psycho-political syndrome among liberals of attacking the left—a syndrome in which the left often plays its own not so healthy part. But there’s little basis for that syndrome in reality, at least in this election. Not that this particular reality has much impact on the self-styled reality-based community. But it’s important to register that reality nonetheless: “The problems Hillary Clinton is having do not have to do with the left,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist […]

The Limits of Liberalism at Harvard

One of the claims you hear a lot these days is that the new progressive coalition of the liberal left will consist of women, people of color, and urban professionals of the sorts you find at universities or in the media or Google or places like that. This coalition was first mooted by the McGovern campaign, and a lot of breathless commentary now sees the Democratic Party, particularly in its Clintonite wing, as the fruition of that vision. On any given night on Twitter, you’re sure to find some liberal journalist or academic braying about his happy association with this constellation of forces. But the recent, successful strike of Harvard’s dining hall workers, many of whom are women and people of color, is a useful demonstration of […]

A Good Time for Revolution: On Strikes and the Harvard Man

Once upon a time, a Harvard Man knew how to handle a strike. In 1919, two hundred students answered Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell’s call to break the policemen’s strike. They patrolled the streets of Boston, barricaded Harvard Yard against thieves and thugs, and heaped antisemitic abuse on a young pro-strike instructor by the name of Harold Laski. The students, including all of the football team, made up 15% of the city’s strike breakers. “To hell with football,” said the coach, “if the men are needed.” What a difference a century makes. Unfamiliar with the bloody battles of yesteryear, less adept in matters of primitive accumulation, today’s ruling class is no longer repelled by strikes. It’s confused by them. So when Harvard’s dining hall workers go out on […]

Harvard, In Theory and Practice

Harvard in Theory: “Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are…to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged….an excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship.” (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, § 46) Harvard in Practice: When dining hall workers ask a university with a $36 billion endowment to pay them $35,000 a year plus health benefits, they’re forced out on strike.

When a Worker Freezes to Death in a Walk-In Freezer at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Downtown Atlanta

Last March, Carolyn Mangham, a worker at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown Atlanta, froze to death after being trapped 13 hours in the hotel’s walk-in freezer with a temperature of below minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The autopsy report read: “Found in freezer; malfunctioning exit release button.” Just a couple of notes on this ghastly story, straight out of The Shining. Hotel workers and their union would like hotels to install emergency devices in large freezers that, much like an alarm that could be pulled, would notify security if they are trapped inside. They’d also like to carry panic-button devices in case they should need help, wherever they are. Hotels routinely install unwanted surveillance devices throughout the workplace and on workers—like the notorious “Rex” robotic dog that would follow […]