Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: When any commodity is carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the necessity of the purchaser that raises the price….If the goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The impossibility of the subsistence of a man, who carries his labour to a market, is totally beside the question in this way of viewing it. The only question is, what is it worth to the buyer? (pp. 68-69) Carl Menger, Principles of Economics: Neither the means of subsistence nor the minimum of subsistence of a laborer, therefore, can be the direct cause or determining principle of the price of […]

Last month, I debated Mark Blitz, a Straussian neocon and former Reagan Administration official, and now professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, about the politics of freedom. Throughout the debate, Blitz expressed some skepticism about my account of coercion in the workplace. At one slightly tense moment, I confronted Blitz directly about the situation of the workers at his college (1:08:35 in the video). Robin: Let me ask you another question. You teach at Claremont McKenna College. Are the staff there—and by that I mean the custodial workers, the clerical workers—are they unionized? Blitz: I would say that most people who are familiar with colleges everywhere recognize that they’re good places to work. They’re very good places to […]

Last Tuesday, February 26, I debated Mark Blitz, a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College and the Associate Director of the United States Information Agency under Ronald Reagan. Our topic: the politics of freedom. Our venue: lovely Linfield College in Oregon, where they have wonderful food and excellent conversation. Our host: Nick Buccola, who’s got a relatively new book out about the political theory of Frederick Douglass. Buy it! Anyway, the debate got into some of the thornier questions of freedom in the workplace. Heated at some points, it was interesting throughout. With great questions from our audience.    

On February 21, Lucille Dickess died at the age of 79. Lucille worked as the registrar of the geology department at Yale University and served as the president of the clerical and technical workers union, Local 34. (This photo of Lucille was taken by Virginia Blaisdell.) I can still remember the first time I saw and heard Lucille speak. It was at a rally on Beinecke Plaza, I think in the spring of 1991. She had white hair, looked like a suburban grandmother, and breathed fire. I had always thought of union workers as burly white guys. I never thought that again. She was, to me, what the labor movement at its best is about: transcending easy and lazy stereotypes […]

I got an interesting email regarding my last post on the possible origins of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s image of a man falsely shouting fire in a theater. Steve Lehto is an attorney and a historian who has written three books on the Italian Hall tragedy that was discussed in that post. He’s got a fourth coming out this summer on the same topic.  He’s taught history at the University of Detroit. According to Steve, the scholarship on the Italian Hall tragedy has moved considerably beyond the sources my co-author Ellen Schrecker and I consulted in writing about the tragedy and its role in Holmes’s jurisprudence. There is stronger evidence than we realized to suggest that the false shout of fire […]

Did you ever wonder where the metaphor of falsely shouting fire in a theater comes from? Several years ago, I was co-writing a book about American political repression with Ellen Schrecker, the brilliant historian of McCarthyism. We came across a fantastic article by University of Texas legal scholar Lucas Powe that made a strong case for where Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came up with the metaphor, might have gotten the idea for it. Ellen followed up Powe’s hypothesis with some extensive sleuthing in the Michigan archives, and what follows is the result of her research and our writing. Sadly, Ellen and I never finished that book. We did, however, write drafts of a few chapters, some prologues and preludes, and […]

I and my fellow bloggers at Crooked Timber have written this statement below in support of Erik Loomis, who is being targeted by a vicious right-wing campaign of intimidation. Please go to the Crooked Timber site and voice your support for the statement. Also, and perhaps more important, please send an email of support for Loomis to the following top three administrators where he teaches: Dean Winnie Brownell: winnie@mail.uri.edu Provost Donald DeHays: ddehayes@uri.edu President David Dooley: davedooley@mail.uri.edu Thanks! ● ● ● ● ● Erik Loomis is no stranger to this blog. A gifted young scholar of US labor and environmental history, Loomis is also a blogger at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Many of us have tussled and tangled with him, […]

Freddie DeBoer writes me: On my local Indiana news just now: apparently there’s a law around here that if a local government employee can’t produce a urine sample in “an appropriate amount of time,” the city gets fined—$15 for a half hour, $30 for an hour, and $45 for 2 hours. A local municipality just passed an ordinance that passes these fines on to the workers themselves, under the mayor’s theory that they need to watch every dollar and “it’s part of their job to produce urine in a timely fashion.” So they’re forcing people to pee in cups while they watch and charging them if they can’t do it fast enough. Luckily, the city backed down; back story is […]

Steven Greenhouse has unearthed the most revealing statement of this entire controversy over employers instructing employees how to vote. David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, sent his 7000 employees a mailer warning them not to vote for Obama. Asked to explain his letter, Siegel said: I really wanted them to know how I felt four more years under President Obama was going to affect them. It would be no different from telling your children: “Eat your spinach. It’s good for you.” Got that? No different. In The Reactionary Mind, I argue that conservatism is a defense of “the private life of power,” those hierarchies in spheres like the family and the workplace that we often call private. And here you […]

As many of you know, I’ve been calling our contemporary political order feudal for quite some time. But this post from the Roosevelt Institute’s Tim Price (h/t Alex Gourevitch) really blew my mind: That could soon be the law of the land in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature has passed a bill that would, as Philadelphia City Paper blogger Daniel Denvir describes it, “allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers’ withheld income tax.” These workers will essentially be paying their employers for the privilege of having a job. Some have called this“corporate socialism,” but it also calls to mind an even older economic model that was once popular in […]

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 […]

From the you can’t make this shit up department: A federal agency charged with enforcing labor law has issued a complaint against the Hyatt Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, alleging the hotel illegally implemented a new electronic tracking device that monitors productivity of housekeepers. The system, known as “Rex” because it is animated by a wagging-tailed dog by the same name, consists of tracking software managed on iPods that tells housekeepers exactly which room to clean and when. It requires housekeepers clock when they enter and exit each guest room. It can send a housekeeper and her heavy cart from one end of the hotel to the other, sometimes hundreds of yards away, potentially increasing travel time from room to […]

Employer intimidation of voters is really breaking into the mainstream media. Yesterday, Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace profiled the story. Here are some of the questions he posed to University of Florida emeritus professor Joseph Little: Is this legal? Can companies actually fire you if you don’t vote the right way? I mean I’ll be honest with you. This kind of floored me when I first read about this. … What’s the recourse? I mean I suppose you could always just try to find another job. But unemployment is almost 8 percent. … I imagine this is rare, right? I mean we’re talking the rare instance here. We’ve been talking about this topic forever around here, of course. Mr. Ryssdal, if […]

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the wide world of sports. But I am a fan of labor unions, and in that capacity, I have noticed that there have been quite a few lockouts over the past couple of years—four in 14 months, to be exact. I assumed that was because of the general shittiness of the sports bosses. It is, but there’s another factor, as Dave Zirin reports here: the shittiness of the sports bosses’ lawyers. A law firm called Proskauer Rose is now representing management in all four major men’s sports leagues, the first time in history one firm has been hired to play such a unified role. In practice, this has meant that […]

In the past few weeks, there’s been a flurry of articles about employers coercing or intimidating workers to vote for their preferred candidates (usually Republican). This is not a new topic on this blog, but the brazenness of these efforts is beginning to get a fair amount of traction elsewhere (in part because of the election). Anyway, here’s a quick roundup: 1.  Alec McGillis kicked off the most recent round of stories with this report in The New Republic on Murray Energy’s forcing its workers to support Romney. (Though I had already commented on this story back in August, McGillis has a lot of new details.) 2. Mike Elk then broke the story, in In These Times, of the Koch brothers trying […]

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 […]

One of the things Hayek disliked about Social Security was that it gave the government—in this case, the agencies responsible for collecting and dispensing Social Security—a ready-made vehicle for the dissemination of propaganda. Particularly propaganda on behalf of Social Security. It confers on the organization a power over minds that is in the same class with the powers of a totalitarian state which has the monopoly of the means of supplying information. As good libertarians, the Koch brothers have naturally read their Hayek. Which is why they do stuff like this. In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood […]

Two Democrats—from California and New York City, no less—are leading the charge against legislation that would give domestic workers lunch breaks and paid sick days, among other things. Salon‘s Irin Carmon has the story. In fact, two policy prescriptions that are catching on across the country – modest by the standards of other industrialized nations, but radical enough to inspire feverish opposition from Chamber of Commerce types — have recently been opposed by Democrats apparently seeking to appear “pro-business.”  One is the domestic worker’s bill of rights, which passed in New York state in 2010 but was vetoed by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday. It would have provided overtime pay and meal breaks to the 200,000 childcare workers and housecleaners […]

Alex Gourevitch is no stranger to this blog. He was one of my co-authors, along with Chris Bertram, on the Crooked Timber post about workplace coercion. He also has a terrific blog of his own, The Current Moment, which I recommend you check out. Here, in this guest post, he does a double-take on Matt Yglesias’ double-take. • • • • • Prompted by Gary Shteyngart’s op-ed today chronicling a disastrous American Airlines flight, Matthew Yglesias produced a little nugget explaining that AA’s delays are the product of pilot slowdowns. American—well, its executives—are trying to save their hides by using bankruptcy courts to screw the unions. Pilots are fighting back by zealously following all kinds of obscure rules—what Yglesias dubs […]

Commenting on the recent labor unrest in China, Matt Yglesias makes a comparison with the past and present of the United States. Conditions in contemporary China have much more in common, structurally speaking, with conditions during the heyday of western labor activism than does anything about the Chicago teachers strike or the apparent American Airlines sickout. The rapid pace of Chinese industrialization means the average wage in a Chinese factories has managed to lag behind the average productivity of a Chinese factory worker (roughly speaking because it’s dragged down by the absymal wages and productivity of Chinese agriculture) which creates a dynamic ripe for windfall profits but also for labor activism. The repressive nature of the Chinese state is an […]