will there ever be a time where we're allowed to treat a large, immensely influential school of politics as a legitimate target of interest and criticism?
America was 90 percent white at that time. It’s true that unions were racist to be black people, but there were very few Hispanics around, and it’s hard to say that race was the major issue when 90 percent of people belonged to the same race to begin with. On top of this unions were actually pretty successful. A factory worker in 1960 was way better off than one in 1920.
Re: "On top of this unions were actually pretty successful. A factory worker in 1960 was way better off than one in 1920"
Not entirely due to unions.
The massive increase in demand - first by the federal stimulus spending up to the late 1930's, then the massive spending in preparation to WWII, then the war spending, the post-war GI Bill, pent up demand of savings accrued by soldiers and workers during the war (end of rationing), plus the further infrastructure spending (interstate highway system, etc), Korean war and arms race of the 1950's, made for very tight labor market for most of this period.
My father was a non-union white collar worker in the 1950's, and told me stories of how the labor market was so favorable at many points, that workers could quit jobs at any time, knowing for certain that they could be rehired immediately for more pay down the street.
Not to mention the huge improvements in efficiency (supply side) during this time. Yes, it was also important to distribute these efficiency gains broadly - but a tight labor market does this very effectively, and unions *cannot* achieve real wage gains in an environment of supply shortages (inflation) or labor excesses (wage gains not sustainable).
Unions have some advantages, but also huge disadvantages for the macro economy of a nation.
At the moment, supply is tight, energy is expensive. Raising wages now (e.g. from unions), will just go into inflation, and could also sink companies, drive jobs overseas.
What can we do? Lots of our money currently goes to medical insurance companies, drug companies, and high energy costs. This is money that is not in the pockets of workers. Reducing these costs helps workers, whether thru higher wages, lower prices on drugs, energy, and insurance, or lower taxes.
If right populists and leftists can get past their distrust of each other's motives, they might be able to hash out compromise on those issues of common ground, such as desire for broad prosperity, need to deal with government corruption and corporate influence, monopoly power, etc.
For example, instead of Obamacare, which gives 15% to the insurance companies (written by an insurance company lobbyist), why not lower the Medicare age one year every year, until it is universal? Social Security? So-called Trump voters don't want to cut SS any more than Bernie voters.
Just because right populists disagree with leftists on specific policies, and maybe on culture issues (but less than MSNBC would have you believe - lots of gay & lesbian talking heads on Fox, and in the Trump admin) - doesn't mean there isn't potential common ground between a lot of Trump voters and Bernie voters (for example).
As what is commonly called a "right populist" (although originally a typical liberal - by 1960's standards), I like a lot of what I am hearing from RFK Jr., but also some of the populist Republican candidates.
Policy is better when critical input from all sides is considered - but any good policy changes will be fought ferociously by those who are currently skimming huge profit from present policy. That is why those in power (and their donors and associates) don't want substantive policy discussion and debate on economic issues to take place - they don't want a consensus for change.
The labor movement was successful in the late 19th & early 20th century, largely because it then began to accept Irish and Germanic workers. It was after 1970 that they lost relevance and their gains began to be rolled back. I wish I knew why.
[Added: A Pragmatist, above, suggests some plausible reasons.]
Institutions publicly & financially support Woke policy (racial justice, gay marriage, unisex johns, *pronouns*) that costs them nothing, but buys allies against economic policies(healthcare, education, paid leave, unionization, etc.) which might make it harder for them to make money.
Yeah but I think there is something deeply moralistic about it. When everything is exploitative rot, people need something to feel good and virtuous about.
Some people. I think you'll find that the people running many organizations, corporate, government, etc., exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of sociopaths.
I'd rather we in the comments section stay away from a cluster of topics Freddie has insistently asked like ten times for commenters to stay away from, and not receive yet another talking-to about this.
Ok I'll delete my comment but you can't not talk about the elephant in the room. I guess you can but what is the point? When a comment section becomes like Twitter it's time to go.
I am usually amused by his attempts to scold us about expressing our opinions while desperately attempting to avoid looking hypocritical at the same time.
The comments here rarely, if ever veered into outright transphobia. Given this, your censorship of the topic violates your professed civil libertarian values.
The distinction between the hard left and identity politics goes back a little further than the authors you cite. From 1848: "The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."
A lot of social justice as we know it is just the over-prioritization of the high-school-level personal grievances of the culture class (with ranked tiers of priority within that class itself).
One of my most eye-opening experiences was seeing how, even at the height of the Floyd-era BLM online wave, there were legitimized discussions about whether certain black male victims should be marched for if they said things like how they didn't find dark-skinned women attractive. Undoubtedly a shitty thing to say (and to be critiqued on another day), but the fact that anger over such a remark ought to potentially trump something like protesting police violence was astonishing to see.
Have you noticed how people now -- adults! -- still see the world as nerds and jocks, to a degree I absolutely do not recall being part of the 20th century? Something about the 80s high school/college movie trend ossified particular clique boundaries and made them a lifelong identity. Social justice is a superclique made up of the nerds and drama kids, out for revenge against the "chuds" who were jocks and popular kids. This is the fundamental reason that they feel they are permanent underdogs. The 21st century is the true revenge of the nerds, from the Elon techbro libertarian nerds to the "science rocks, love is love!" social justice STEM crowd.
What especially frustrates me is that this shift has destroyed a lot of what I used to like about nerd / hacker culture: irreverence towards authority, curiosity and openness to new ideas, an autistic focus on truth and fairness even when it's not popular, social tolerance of difference (if only because we had no alternative). The OG nerds were anti-ostracism to a fault (that's Geek Social Fallacy #1) but the new culture sees ostracism as the go-to solution for social conflict, with the rationale that it makes communities more "inclusive" and "welcoming", a nice bit of doublespeak.
The same thing has happened in every subculture that got important or popular. People who had no organic interest in the thing show up to chase money and clout. The woke stuff is just one way for them to do that.
Adults have always had that eternally adolescent mindset, but the difference now is that people are using socially progressive language to make it seem loftier than it really is.
I remember in The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris talked about how someone's conception of self is crystalized in their teenage years. And there's good evidence to show this.
For example, height in men is correlated with adult earnings. However, more exactly, your height at around 16 is correlated with adult earnings. Men who have a late growth spurt don't end up making as much as men who had an early growth spurt, even if they end up with the same adult height. Which suggests it's not because of how others perceive us based upon height, it's about our own internalized sense of self-worth, which is crystalized by the mid-teen years. So even if you end up 6'0", if you were 5'6" when you were 16, you always have the internal mental image of that short, awkward teenager holding you back.
You've just described my own observations that the granola/lefty underdogs I went to college with in the early 90s have become the adults and parents of kids who are finally having their revenge by standing at the top of the social order.
Their voices dominate poltical and social discussions because they took to heart their class readings that everything is about power, about oppressed and oppressors. Even if they aren't running the Fortune 500 companies, they've influenced their HR structure, their marketing, their PR.
They're the ones who fill their Facebook feeds with Science FTW! posts, Ukraine flag profile pics, any lefty meme that garners instant likes (like the recent one I saw about how great it is for Orcas to eat yachts since we can't eat the rich).
They've become the hosts of influential news shows, journalists at legacy newspapers, artists whose reach is far more expansive that it could have ever been when they were younger.
They're the ones running the day-to-day decision-making of social media companies, shaping the narratives they deem acceptable (take a look at the newsfeed on Linkedin as one example).
What you've described reveals the malign mixture of fear, status-seeking, and either/or thinking that drives woke politics.
Within a structure that determines whether people are entirely bad or entirely good, the woke set responds to social and political matters with the idea that they, too, could be canceled if they don't respond according to the perfect dictates of the woke borg. At the same time, they are aware that responding correctly elevates their social standing (and in our new DEI world, their economic standing, too).
I don't doubt this all can be traced to a moral impulse, but it's an impulse that has been warped to prioritize one's status. That's where fear rules the day, and makes any attempt at discourse impossible. As Freddie noted, there's no world where the woke set is open to critique.
Funny thing about woke people, especially those who work in media, is that they hate center-left people MORE than conservative people. That much is obvious by now. They hate people who agree with them 70% of the time more than those people all the way in the other camp.
And I want nothing to do with a movement that is so mean, scoldy, and contemptuous of normies.
I've said this before, but I think the best analogue for modern-day woke politics is Victorian-era morality. Yes, the details differ; often they are directly inverted, but broadly speaking, there are many commonalities.
1. It's performative; for public consumption among your peers, rather than a self-regulation of private behavior.
2. It's held to most strongly among the managerial class.
3. It attempts to enforce upon others within the "proper" social class through a culture of shaming and shunning.
4. There's a high emphasis on "personal improvement" as a means towards social change.
Note that I don't consider Victorian era-morality to be entirely negative. While we tend to view the Victorians these days as being mainly homophobic, racist, repressed prudes, they did make major advances on moral grounds, including abolitionism, animal welfare, and a near-elimination of child labor. In the end, almost all moral movements end up something of a mixed bag, particularly ones that broadly cast themselves as being "progressive" in orientation.
When I was young I liked nothing more than Victorian novels, and thought I would be lucky to live in a society where the morals had been established. Boy, was I naive.
I'm only passingly familiar with Victorian mores, but from what I've seen they seem to have been a lot more systematic, logically coherent and spelled out, so less crazy-making in that sense. (The negatives were the negatives of course)
Those on the center-left (or other so-called woke people with slightly different agendas) are more of a professional and social rival class in their personal lives than conservatives.
I can see a lot of reasons for that. To start out with, folks who agree with you 70% are more likely to gain influence in your movement and steer it away from the goals you disagree on - both because they have a toehold in the movement already and because they have some credibility with other fellow travelers. Second, those are the people most likely to care what you think of them, and to be bullied into accepting the last 30% of your agenda. Finally, I think almost all of us hate a traitor more than we hate an enemy.
But all of this is about maintaining the purity of a movement, not about building a majority coalition.
This is how things often go. The Pakistanis and the Indians often hate each other. Like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the Russians and the Ukranians, symbolic AI researchers and machine learning researchers, and the Dodgers fans and the Yankees fans.
The identity politics left doesn’t seem to be able to conceive that they are doing the capitalist devil’s bidding. As Yglesias points out helping poor people is pretty popular. And if you help poor people that disproportionately helps Black people as they are poor at much higher rates than the general population. But if you couch it in racialized language support plummets.
If I was a rich guy who didn’t want my taxes raised to help poor people what I’d do is try to convince the left to use racialized language.
Are those on the racialized left open to the possibility that they are being played?
I've tried to make the argument that companies would much rather hire a director of DEI and adopt social justice language because it doesn't really cost them anything, but a lot of young people really think language actually makes a huge difference. I blame the fact that everyone learned what critical theory is and then had to apply it to absolutely everything and thought they were waking everyone up from the Matrix when they told them their favorite movie, book, etc. was actually really racist.
I'm quick to admit that ESG has been very, very profitable for wall street guys like myself. The DEI stuff has been more of a mixed bag. It adds a lot of overhead and wastes time and resources among the general staff of most companies.
1) You can charge 2 or 3X the fees for anything that has a ESG label on it. But it only takes 1.1X the work to do. The Sell side loves this.
2) You make an investment in a junior lithium miner, or similar. You put together an analysis of how it meets ESG directives. You pay a ratings agency about 125k to publish it for you. You make more than that back on your investment. The Buy side loves this.
I'm not actually trying to imply that this is a hustle. Both can be legitimate. There are scummy parts of wall street, but most of it is providing services that people want.
Progressives want to feel good about their investing and will pay a premium for that. Maybe it directs a little more money to companies that are doing good. We're starting to see more legitimate ESG funds now.
#2 was a real life example I was involved in. It was a very promising company that was not getting the coverage we thought it warranted. ESG was a tool to get things rolling. In the past we would have used other methods.
It's shocking to me how many people on both the "left" and the "right" now believe leftism and postmodernism are somehow united (to the point where idiots like Jordan Peterson can't tell the difference between the two). Postmodernism is at its base apolitical, because it's incompatible with positivism, which is a necessary undergirding of not only Marxism, but basically all socialist movements, which define certain social structures as being morally just, and others as being morally unjust. I mean, there's a reason Chomsky has always been so critical of it. If there's no truth, how can you argue that the status quo is wrong, and that there's a path forward towards a better world? How can you do anything but snigger at the sidelines?
Lindsay's assessment is accurate. Proper application of postmodern ideas would find that progressive social justice ideology / narrative is just as non-meaningful and / or oppressive as any other ideology / narrative. This is part of the reason it irritates me when people blame postmodernism for social justice ideology.
The social justice movement uses postmodernism selectively, as Miles wrote. For instance, if you try to bring statistics into the BLM controversy, to show that police are no more likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects, they'll counter with pomo arguments against the use of measurements and statistics, or Foucaultian arguments against the institutions which compile the statistics.
But being applied selectively was baked into post-modernism from the beginning. No postmodernist ever deconstructed post-modernism AFAIK. Almost no critical theorist applied critical theory to critical theory until quite recently (~2017; google "post-critique", tho Paul Ricoeur reportedly wrote similar stuff in 1970). It was a gaping and unacknowledged inconsistency so obvious that it could only be intentional. Freud's hypocritical "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" set the tone for that whole crowd.
I do blame postmodernism for social justice ideology. Perhaps Marxism and the Frankfurt School are more to blame. Ultimately, everything is Hegel's fault; or, if you prefer, Augustine's; or, if you prefer, Plotinus'; or, if you prefer (and I do), Plato's.
But the Social Justice movement relies on post-modernism to try to refute science, and privilege phenomenologist epistemologies over it, which is its worst aspect. It's social justice warriors, not post-modernists, who are the first to attack any attempts to measure the phenomena they complain about, and who talk about "systemic racism", which isn't actually a thing, but the denial of the efficacy of reductionism--a typical post-modernist piece of ignorant bullshit.
Post-modernism and "social justice" both rely on social constructivism, which is why Judith Butler is a post-modernist and a key figure in social justice theory. They both also descend from critical theory, as does critical race theory (although this isn't obvious in the foundational critical race theory writings, which were written by lawyers and cited mostly case law). There would be no Social Justice movement today without the paranoid ravings of Foucault. They both draw on Heidegger and other Nazi philosophical concepts. It's wrong to call "social justice" an offshoot of post-modernism (it would be more correct to call it an offshoot of Plato's Republic); but they're closely enough related that they share many faults.
With a class based system, you will actually end up helping about two white poor people for every black person that you help because of absolute numbers. And I imagine the poor populations are still segregated, so you will need to choose which areas you are spending money in.
It is the same problem with socioeconomic class based affirmative action.
"Among single parent (male or female) families: 26.6% lived in poverty. This number varied by race and ethnicity as follows:
22.5% of all white persons (which includes white Hispanics),
44.0% of all black persons (which includes black Hispanics),"
Suppose you have a policy that can lift 100 people out of poverty. If, as you say, you help 2 white people for every black person then the policy will lift 66 white people and 34 black people out of poverty. You have lifted (proportionally) more black people(who make up only ~13% of the population) than white people out of poverty.
The only way this seems to be a problem is if if your goal is to help just poor black people and poor white people don't get help.
If you were a guy running a company, you'd realize that taxes would have to be raised quite a lot to be worse than being pressured by "diversity" metrics to hire less-qualified workers at the same wages.
A decade ago, I had a little blog that talked about some topics in social justice, with left-based critiques, and received exactly this kind of response you are talking about: "The people saying these things are just Tumblr teenagers and dumb Redditors, why care?"
At the time, I said what I felt: that it seemed these teenagers (and the cultural zeitgeist from which they drew their opinions) were the vanguard of a new movement that would be much more than fringe online people, especially if people didn't take seriously any criticism of its obvious flaws and excesses.
Now, family bonds and long friendships are impacted by these "terminally online" debates. It's become the stuff of real life. Theory has collided with praxis and still, plenty of people assert that "touching grass" is the one correct solution to the excesses of the social justice movement.
Going outside and socializing IRL is a key part of the solution, yes. People love to pretend their online friendships are just as meaningful as real ones though, so...
Add to your reading list 2 left critiques of identity politics: "The Trouble With Diversity" by Walter Benn Micheals, and "No Politics but Class Politics" by Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Micheals.
I really can't stand Beauchamp, but I'm not sure he meant "center-left" derisively. I'm actually surprised he didn't follow the usual playbook and pretend that every who objects to wokery is "right-wing."
Here's a shimmer of hope: Teens are starting to think woke is lame, and are beginning to treat it with the irony and dark humour they do with all topics that Visa, the Military and HR departments are fond of. My teacher wife told me the other day that kids are starting to call each other the f-word again (not fuck). They are "bi" but only ironically. This is at a school where the elite's kids go.
I guess this should be the most obvious and predictable thing to happen. It always does. Has anyone else noticed this among their kids?
Graeme Wood did a profile on Richard Spencer for The Atlantic a few years ago where he pointed out that Spencer was very aware that racism was cool now in the same counter culture sense that scoffing at religion was in the 1990's.
That seems inevitable to me. Wokeness becoming a thing that primarily middle-aged people do spells doom for the movement. Kids love to rebel against their cringey parents. We've all done it.
I’m seeing this. I think what’s actually happening is that woke and LGBTQ are becoming what goth and punk and emo and band kids etc used to be back in early 2000s, just another clique. And kids usually look down on other groups. But I did hear some middle schoolers doing some major griping about the fact that their town was putting on a Pride rally. So who knows, maybe it really is going into full backlash among the under 20s.
I've said what I'm about to say before, more or less, in the comments of this same blog, but it bears repeating. There's something in the current liberal-and-left ("""left""") character that deplores action. The social justice movement is an enormously successful one if measured by widespread acceptance; this year is the first in many that corporate pride has seen widespread pushback making national headlines, the POTUS says things like "systemic racism" and "LGBTQ." In terms of material gains, we all know it's piles of fluffy nothing, but it terms of Facebook letting you customize your pronouns, it's an unmitigated victory. This feels like progress, and it feels like righteousness, if you're intellectually sort of lazy and looking for the bubbly comforts of yas-queen liberalism and have never given Libya any more thought than someone making stickers of Ruth Bader Ginsberg told you to. I think in many ways this intense antipathy to action, and this intense embrace of institutions being "on our side," explains (if not justifies) the bizarre cognitive dissonance you're discussing here. I guess given the choice, people will choose to argue what is comforting and asks little of them, even intellectually, even when it is obviously not true. I don't know that I'm coherent here, and I don't think I have a clear point. The frustration is endless, the grievances more so, and material gains are nothing. Idk man.
In addition to hating action, I feel the left-of-center is incapable of admitting their own achievements. I keep hearing things from friends and colleagues like "diversity in [field]/ the LGBTQ movement still have a long way to go." And, well, do they? My field is majority white, but less so than the country as a whole. Gay couples can get married and adopt children. It's okay to say things have gotten better.
The fear is that by admitting that progress has been made, and that the current era represents the best it's ever been in terms of a lot of social justice aims, that the social justice project will somehow cease to exist. But by ignoring that progress, it makes the project seem untethered from reality, and makes every small act seem futile in a world where it's still as bad as it was in 1619. And it's the small acts that build big, successful movements.
Social Justice Politics, as I think you are using it, is focused on prioritizing the importance of racial and gender identity in our culture and our politics.
I think trying to make these identities a consideration rather than a dispositive guiding light is crucial to battling the DeSantis-like reaction, which I believe is more harmful than anything positive accomplished by the Social Justice movement in the last few years.
How do you sell a vision of the future where the marginalized are daily celebrated for their racial, gender and sexual identities while everyone else must apologize and atone for theirs? I don't buy that "woke" is solely responsible for the right wing's insanity right now, but I do know that the Left's inability to craft a unifying, positive vision of the future, rooted in universal solidarity, is a major drag when a lot of programs like universal healthcare and pre-K are wildly popular.
Seeing the two sides spur each other on to greater harms is one of the wretched parts of this moment. It would be nice if someone said, "My gosh people are mad about this, let's think about their critiques and moderate." But no, it's always about doubling down from the previous position.
Something I wrote before: now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and yellow and white working class people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email.
Yes, Jeff Bezos donated a couple million to BLM org, so he must care about black and brown people, right? And I'm sure he welcomes efforts to unionize the workers at his warehouses, too.
I have to strongly disagree that workers benefit from the union. Union bosses benefit. Democrats benefit. Regular Joe whose money is being stolen just so he can work and put food on the table? Not so much.
Yes the working class needs to be organized for its own interests. A thousand times yes. But that doesn’t mean unions aren’t bureaucracies exploiting that need rather than serving that need. Winning concessions from the employer class is really really really hard and today’s unions are not built for it.
If unions actually offered great pay and benefits in exchange for negligible dues payments everyone would be union. Employers are nasty but the organizing drives would not be failing for decades as they have. It that were true. Workers would not be decertifying unions as they have if that were true.
Unions provide around a 20% advantage on wages alone, and the average union dues are in the range of two hours pay per month, meaning workers get way, way more out of unions than they put in.
And yet somehow the % of workers in private sector unions continues to steadily decrease. Less and less people are finding the union argument compelling. But if somebody wants to belong to a union, by all means go for it. But making it a condition of employment? Preventing people from leaving the union and no longer pay dues? If somebody demands to be paid for your right to work, that is a definition of a racket.
Please note that this only applies to private sector unions. Public sector unions are parasites that always kill their host.
The percentage of private-sector workers that are union members continues to decline largely because employers fight them tooth-and-nail. The huge labor upsurge in the 1930s happened during an era where employers provided next-to-no opposition, where most workforces were recognized after a voluntary show of interest by the members, or a union election that happened within less than a week of a showing of interest. Indeed, until the passage of the odious Taft-Hartley, employers had no role whatsoever in union elections, which is the way it should be: a union election is a decision by the workers collectively on representation, not some sort of election between the boss and an outside force.
Unfortunately, unlike other places (such as Europe) a bedrock of U.S. labor law is what's known as the "duty of fair representation." This compels unions to represent everyone within the workplace if they are certified. Although this was originally enforced in order to stop racist unions from not providing access to stewards and the like to black workers, it has become interpreted over time to unions having to provide services free of cost to non-members, including representation in grievances and arbitration. Plus of course having the terms and conditions of the union contract apply to them.
Imagine if you bought a unit in a condominium (or a HOA) and then could withdraw condo fees at any time, no legal action could be taken on you, and you still needed to be provided with full access to benefits. This is effectively what being a free-rider in a union shop means. Just as the condo fees are a quasi-democratic structure which provides for services and helps internally regulate a building, unions do the same in workplaces. Except unions have way, way more legal oversight than condo associations.
I live in South Florida and the demand for skilled tradesman is through the roof. Free market provides better than any union. As for free riders, it is up to the individual to decide whether or not they want to pay their union dues. Anything else is a shakedown by definition. It is even more of a shakedown when this money goes to Democrats, which it inevitably does.If you have to force someone to buy your product, your produce sucks. Maybe unions had their place a century ago. In an increasingly global world, they are an anachronism slated to disappear. Recently West Coast ports were shut down by unions. Ask yourself, will there still be humans carrying cargo from ports 100 years from now? 200 years? If AI is 5% as influential as its wildest proponents claim, the answer is clear. Unions are economically inefficient and that doesn't work long term. And the fact that unions are extremely corrupt and infiltrated by organized crime is another unpleasant fact that always gets ignored.
That's great for South Florida skilled tradespeople, JR. Not everyone needs a union in all circumstances. But there are no grounds for generalizing your sliver of an example.
The definition of "definition" is different from what you think it is. Compulsory union dues for members who benefit from union negotiated contracts are closely analogous to compulsory taxes for citizens: mandatory contributions for essential services delivered. You can claim it's a shakedown, but if that's the definition of "shakedown" then the term will no longer denote unethical activity to most speakers of English.
Globalization has not erased the appropriateness of unions; it has altered the realities within which unions need to work. Whether the port strike was justified and union demands realistic I can't say without knowing details, but the longterm replacement of workers by AI is precisely the sort of transition where workers need collective representation to ensure that their interests are optimally served in the pace and design of the transition, when management is most likely to view individual employees as near-expendable. (A similar transition will affect coal miners' unions.)
There have been unions infiltrated by organized crime, but that does not mean this is common--it's not. As for "corruption," there are degrees of corruption in virtually every large-scale enterprise, just as there is inefficiency. There isn't a sector of society where this charge couldn't be made. It is only a significant action factor if it rises above levels we normally tolerate. If you're seeking examples of brazen corruption you'll find plenty in private sector ownership and management. (Deinstitutionalize that and you get to concentrate it in government.) The best we can do with corruption is to hold it in check through competing institutions that hold one another accountable, which is one of the functions performed within the unionized private workplace.
Blaming or crediting employer behavior for union successes and failures is to say unions have no power or are beyond criticism. Unions are just arms of the HR department now. I dont believe the 20% wage differential. If that were true, unions would be winning. Unions keep losing because they are now bureaucracies that live off nostalgia for when unions did make a difference. They are a grift now like BLM. The sitdown strikes in Detroit were real. The march on Selma was real. Now it is all grift.
The labor movement is a really mixed bag, and things can vary from union to union, even local to local. Some are still corrupt organizations with mafia ties. Some are business unions which spend way more time and energy electing Democrats and lobbying than building worker power. Some are militant and run by the rank-and-file.
What is generally true though is no matter the structure, the deformations of labor law which happened since roughly 1980 have made it incredibly difficult to organize new workers in the private sector. The general rule-of-thumb right now is you never file for election in any campaign unless you have 70%-80% of the workforce who sign union cards, because the anti-union campaigns run by employers (which often include threats to shut down the work place, captive audience meetings, and supervisors intimidating employees one on one) will generally turn 20%-30% of the workforce away from the union drive.
This isn't the sole element though, of course. I also think the increasing atomization of our social life, along with the decline in large workplaces where people interface with one another on a regular basis, plays a role. In order to develop an active, militant trade union, you have to not only hate the boss, you need to see your coworkers as your comrades - not just in a theoretical sense, but as your peer group that you'll make sacrifices for, knowing they'll do the same for you. Disengaged workers are really, really hard to unionize, and even when they do win recognition, they invariably turn into weak locals who can't make major wins at the bargaining table.
America was 90 percent white at that time. It’s true that unions were racist to be black people, but there were very few Hispanics around, and it’s hard to say that race was the major issue when 90 percent of people belonged to the same race to begin with. On top of this unions were actually pretty successful. A factory worker in 1960 was way better off than one in 1920.
Re: "On top of this unions were actually pretty successful. A factory worker in 1960 was way better off than one in 1920"
Not entirely due to unions.
The massive increase in demand - first by the federal stimulus spending up to the late 1930's, then the massive spending in preparation to WWII, then the war spending, the post-war GI Bill, pent up demand of savings accrued by soldiers and workers during the war (end of rationing), plus the further infrastructure spending (interstate highway system, etc), Korean war and arms race of the 1950's, made for very tight labor market for most of this period.
My father was a non-union white collar worker in the 1950's, and told me stories of how the labor market was so favorable at many points, that workers could quit jobs at any time, knowing for certain that they could be rehired immediately for more pay down the street.
Not to mention the huge improvements in efficiency (supply side) during this time. Yes, it was also important to distribute these efficiency gains broadly - but a tight labor market does this very effectively, and unions *cannot* achieve real wage gains in an environment of supply shortages (inflation) or labor excesses (wage gains not sustainable).
Unions have some advantages, but also huge disadvantages for the macro economy of a nation.
At the moment, supply is tight, energy is expensive. Raising wages now (e.g. from unions), will just go into inflation, and could also sink companies, drive jobs overseas.
What can we do? Lots of our money currently goes to medical insurance companies, drug companies, and high energy costs. This is money that is not in the pockets of workers. Reducing these costs helps workers, whether thru higher wages, lower prices on drugs, energy, and insurance, or lower taxes.
If right populists and leftists can get past their distrust of each other's motives, they might be able to hash out compromise on those issues of common ground, such as desire for broad prosperity, need to deal with government corruption and corporate influence, monopoly power, etc.
For example, instead of Obamacare, which gives 15% to the insurance companies (written by an insurance company lobbyist), why not lower the Medicare age one year every year, until it is universal? Social Security? So-called Trump voters don't want to cut SS any more than Bernie voters.
Just because right populists disagree with leftists on specific policies, and maybe on culture issues (but less than MSNBC would have you believe - lots of gay & lesbian talking heads on Fox, and in the Trump admin) - doesn't mean there isn't potential common ground between a lot of Trump voters and Bernie voters (for example).
As what is commonly called a "right populist" (although originally a typical liberal - by 1960's standards), I like a lot of what I am hearing from RFK Jr., but also some of the populist Republican candidates.
Policy is better when critical input from all sides is considered - but any good policy changes will be fought ferociously by those who are currently skimming huge profit from present policy. That is why those in power (and their donors and associates) don't want substantive policy discussion and debate on economic issues to take place - they don't want a consensus for change.
The labor movement was successful in the late 19th & early 20th century, largely because it then began to accept Irish and Germanic workers. It was after 1970 that they lost relevance and their gains began to be rolled back. I wish I knew why.
[Added: A Pragmatist, above, suggests some plausible reasons.]
Businesses do this as a form of Woke Insurance.
Institutions publicly & financially support Woke policy (racial justice, gay marriage, unisex johns, *pronouns*) that costs them nothing, but buys allies against economic policies(healthcare, education, paid leave, unionization, etc.) which might make it harder for them to make money.
Yeah but I think there is something deeply moralistic about it. When everything is exploitative rot, people need something to feel good and virtuous about.
Some people. I think you'll find that the people running many organizations, corporate, government, etc., exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of sociopaths.
I'd rather we in the comments section stay away from a cluster of topics Freddie has insistently asked like ten times for commenters to stay away from, and not receive yet another talking-to about this.
Co-signed
Signed in triplicate!
Ok I'll delete my comment but you can't not talk about the elephant in the room. I guess you can but what is the point? When a comment section becomes like Twitter it's time to go.
Yeah, Freddie’s views on the thing we cannot speak of is among the excesses he opposes.
I am usually amused by his attempts to scold us about expressing our opinions while desperately attempting to avoid looking hypocritical at the same time.
There's no hypocrisy. There's a series of unjustifiable extrapolations from the politics I told to another set of politics, based on bad assumptions.
The comments here rarely, if ever veered into outright transphobia. Given this, your censorship of the topic violates your professed civil libertarian values.
That's the hypocrisy.
The distinction between the hard left and identity politics goes back a little further than the authors you cite. From 1848: "The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."
A lot of social justice as we know it is just the over-prioritization of the high-school-level personal grievances of the culture class (with ranked tiers of priority within that class itself).
One of my most eye-opening experiences was seeing how, even at the height of the Floyd-era BLM online wave, there were legitimized discussions about whether certain black male victims should be marched for if they said things like how they didn't find dark-skinned women attractive. Undoubtedly a shitty thing to say (and to be critiqued on another day), but the fact that anger over such a remark ought to potentially trump something like protesting police violence was astonishing to see.
Have you noticed how people now -- adults! -- still see the world as nerds and jocks, to a degree I absolutely do not recall being part of the 20th century? Something about the 80s high school/college movie trend ossified particular clique boundaries and made them a lifelong identity. Social justice is a superclique made up of the nerds and drama kids, out for revenge against the "chuds" who were jocks and popular kids. This is the fundamental reason that they feel they are permanent underdogs. The 21st century is the true revenge of the nerds, from the Elon techbro libertarian nerds to the "science rocks, love is love!" social justice STEM crowd.
Except that Elon has defected to the other side, which may account for a lot of the venom.
What especially frustrates me is that this shift has destroyed a lot of what I used to like about nerd / hacker culture: irreverence towards authority, curiosity and openness to new ideas, an autistic focus on truth and fairness even when it's not popular, social tolerance of difference (if only because we had no alternative). The OG nerds were anti-ostracism to a fault (that's Geek Social Fallacy #1) but the new culture sees ostracism as the go-to solution for social conflict, with the rationale that it makes communities more "inclusive" and "welcoming", a nice bit of doublespeak.
Yes! It’s like there’s been a gentrification of nerd culture. My husband complains about this all the time.
The same thing has happened in every subculture that got important or popular. People who had no organic interest in the thing show up to chase money and clout. The woke stuff is just one way for them to do that.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Adults have always had that eternally adolescent mindset, but the difference now is that people are using socially progressive language to make it seem loftier than it really is.
I remember in The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris talked about how someone's conception of self is crystalized in their teenage years. And there's good evidence to show this.
For example, height in men is correlated with adult earnings. However, more exactly, your height at around 16 is correlated with adult earnings. Men who have a late growth spurt don't end up making as much as men who had an early growth spurt, even if they end up with the same adult height. Which suggests it's not because of how others perceive us based upon height, it's about our own internalized sense of self-worth, which is crystalized by the mid-teen years. So even if you end up 6'0", if you were 5'6" when you were 16, you always have the internal mental image of that short, awkward teenager holding you back.
You've just described my own observations that the granola/lefty underdogs I went to college with in the early 90s have become the adults and parents of kids who are finally having their revenge by standing at the top of the social order.
Their voices dominate poltical and social discussions because they took to heart their class readings that everything is about power, about oppressed and oppressors. Even if they aren't running the Fortune 500 companies, they've influenced their HR structure, their marketing, their PR.
They're the ones who fill their Facebook feeds with Science FTW! posts, Ukraine flag profile pics, any lefty meme that garners instant likes (like the recent one I saw about how great it is for Orcas to eat yachts since we can't eat the rich).
They've become the hosts of influential news shows, journalists at legacy newspapers, artists whose reach is far more expansive that it could have ever been when they were younger.
They're the ones running the day-to-day decision-making of social media companies, shaping the narratives they deem acceptable (take a look at the newsfeed on Linkedin as one example).
No lie. Note how the Cool Kids can get away with saying and doing things that the uncool kids cannot.
What you've described reveals the malign mixture of fear, status-seeking, and either/or thinking that drives woke politics.
Within a structure that determines whether people are entirely bad or entirely good, the woke set responds to social and political matters with the idea that they, too, could be canceled if they don't respond according to the perfect dictates of the woke borg. At the same time, they are aware that responding correctly elevates their social standing (and in our new DEI world, their economic standing, too).
I don't doubt this all can be traced to a moral impulse, but it's an impulse that has been warped to prioritize one's status. That's where fear rules the day, and makes any attempt at discourse impossible. As Freddie noted, there's no world where the woke set is open to critique.
Funny thing about woke people, especially those who work in media, is that they hate center-left people MORE than conservative people. That much is obvious by now. They hate people who agree with them 70% of the time more than those people all the way in the other camp.
And I want nothing to do with a movement that is so mean, scoldy, and contemptuous of normies.
I've said this before, but I think the best analogue for modern-day woke politics is Victorian-era morality. Yes, the details differ; often they are directly inverted, but broadly speaking, there are many commonalities.
1. It's performative; for public consumption among your peers, rather than a self-regulation of private behavior.
2. It's held to most strongly among the managerial class.
3. It attempts to enforce upon others within the "proper" social class through a culture of shaming and shunning.
4. There's a high emphasis on "personal improvement" as a means towards social change.
Note that I don't consider Victorian era-morality to be entirely negative. While we tend to view the Victorians these days as being mainly homophobic, racist, repressed prudes, they did make major advances on moral grounds, including abolitionism, animal welfare, and a near-elimination of child labor. In the end, almost all moral movements end up something of a mixed bag, particularly ones that broadly cast themselves as being "progressive" in orientation.
When I was young I liked nothing more than Victorian novels, and thought I would be lucky to live in a society where the morals had been established. Boy, was I naive.
I'm only passingly familiar with Victorian mores, but from what I've seen they seem to have been a lot more systematic, logically coherent and spelled out, so less crazy-making in that sense. (The negatives were the negatives of course)
This used to be a thing you could print in Jacobin! https://jacobin.com/2016/10/victorian-values-fitness-organic-wealth-parenthood
Those on the center-left (or other so-called woke people with slightly different agendas) are more of a professional and social rival class in their personal lives than conservatives.
I can see a lot of reasons for that. To start out with, folks who agree with you 70% are more likely to gain influence in your movement and steer it away from the goals you disagree on - both because they have a toehold in the movement already and because they have some credibility with other fellow travelers. Second, those are the people most likely to care what you think of them, and to be bullied into accepting the last 30% of your agenda. Finally, I think almost all of us hate a traitor more than we hate an enemy.
But all of this is about maintaining the purity of a movement, not about building a majority coalition.
And they're more likely to respond. People who don't agree will ignore you, but people who partially agree? Those you can reach.
This is how things often go. The Pakistanis and the Indians often hate each other. Like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the Russians and the Ukranians, symbolic AI researchers and machine learning researchers, and the Dodgers fans and the Yankees fans.
Mets fans and Yankees fans. We don't talk about the Dodgers anymore.
Oh, right.
They do have a lot of vitriol for the center left, but I think they're more likely to fraternize with the center left than right wingers.
The identity politics left doesn’t seem to be able to conceive that they are doing the capitalist devil’s bidding. As Yglesias points out helping poor people is pretty popular. And if you help poor people that disproportionately helps Black people as they are poor at much higher rates than the general population. But if you couch it in racialized language support plummets.
If I was a rich guy who didn’t want my taxes raised to help poor people what I’d do is try to convince the left to use racialized language.
Are those on the racialized left open to the possibility that they are being played?
I've tried to make the argument that companies would much rather hire a director of DEI and adopt social justice language because it doesn't really cost them anything, but a lot of young people really think language actually makes a huge difference. I blame the fact that everyone learned what critical theory is and then had to apply it to absolutely everything and thought they were waking everyone up from the Matrix when they told them their favorite movie, book, etc. was actually really racist.
That is why I've come to like "critical social justice" as a neutral term for wokery, when one is necessary.
That is a great insight regarding the Matrix metaphor. They really do seem to think that way, and I'd never quite put that together before.
I'm quick to admit that ESG has been very, very profitable for wall street guys like myself. The DEI stuff has been more of a mixed bag. It adds a lot of overhead and wastes time and resources among the general staff of most companies.
But is that because it's actually fiscally sound or because everybody else is doing it?
It provides two opportunities:
1) You can charge 2 or 3X the fees for anything that has a ESG label on it. But it only takes 1.1X the work to do. The Sell side loves this.
2) You make an investment in a junior lithium miner, or similar. You put together an analysis of how it meets ESG directives. You pay a ratings agency about 125k to publish it for you. You make more than that back on your investment. The Buy side loves this.
I'm not actually trying to imply that this is a hustle. Both can be legitimate. There are scummy parts of wall street, but most of it is providing services that people want.
Progressives want to feel good about their investing and will pay a premium for that. Maybe it directs a little more money to companies that are doing good. We're starting to see more legitimate ESG funds now.
#2 was a real life example I was involved in. It was a very promising company that was not getting the coverage we thought it warranted. ESG was a tool to get things rolling. In the past we would have used other methods.
This is systemitized bullshit.
It's shocking to me how many people on both the "left" and the "right" now believe leftism and postmodernism are somehow united (to the point where idiots like Jordan Peterson can't tell the difference between the two). Postmodernism is at its base apolitical, because it's incompatible with positivism, which is a necessary undergirding of not only Marxism, but basically all socialist movements, which define certain social structures as being morally just, and others as being morally unjust. I mean, there's a reason Chomsky has always been so critical of it. If there's no truth, how can you argue that the status quo is wrong, and that there's a path forward towards a better world? How can you do anything but snigger at the sidelines?
Lindsay's assessment is accurate. Proper application of postmodern ideas would find that progressive social justice ideology / narrative is just as non-meaningful and / or oppressive as any other ideology / narrative. This is part of the reason it irritates me when people blame postmodernism for social justice ideology.
The social justice movement uses postmodernism selectively, as Miles wrote. For instance, if you try to bring statistics into the BLM controversy, to show that police are no more likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects, they'll counter with pomo arguments against the use of measurements and statistics, or Foucaultian arguments against the institutions which compile the statistics.
But being applied selectively was baked into post-modernism from the beginning. No postmodernist ever deconstructed post-modernism AFAIK. Almost no critical theorist applied critical theory to critical theory until quite recently (~2017; google "post-critique", tho Paul Ricoeur reportedly wrote similar stuff in 1970). It was a gaping and unacknowledged inconsistency so obvious that it could only be intentional. Freud's hypocritical "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" set the tone for that whole crowd.
I do blame postmodernism for social justice ideology. Perhaps Marxism and the Frankfurt School are more to blame. Ultimately, everything is Hegel's fault; or, if you prefer, Augustine's; or, if you prefer, Plotinus'; or, if you prefer (and I do), Plato's.
But the Social Justice movement relies on post-modernism to try to refute science, and privilege phenomenologist epistemologies over it, which is its worst aspect. It's social justice warriors, not post-modernists, who are the first to attack any attempts to measure the phenomena they complain about, and who talk about "systemic racism", which isn't actually a thing, but the denial of the efficacy of reductionism--a typical post-modernist piece of ignorant bullshit.
Post-modernism and "social justice" both rely on social constructivism, which is why Judith Butler is a post-modernist and a key figure in social justice theory. They both also descend from critical theory, as does critical race theory (although this isn't obvious in the foundational critical race theory writings, which were written by lawyers and cited mostly case law). There would be no Social Justice movement today without the paranoid ravings of Foucault. They both draw on Heidegger and other Nazi philosophical concepts. It's wrong to call "social justice" an offshoot of post-modernism (it would be more correct to call it an offshoot of Plato's Republic); but they're closely enough related that they share many faults.
Any links regarding "post-critique"?
If there is no truth, you can argue that your position is as well founded as anybody else's position.
Oh, they know, At worst it's pure tribal loyalty ("Team D good! Team R bad!").
At best, they just demand more diverse oppressors.
😹
With a class based system, you will actually end up helping about two white poor people for every black person that you help because of absolute numbers. And I imagine the poor populations are still segregated, so you will need to choose which areas you are spending money in.
It is the same problem with socioeconomic class based affirmative action.
"Among single parent (male or female) families: 26.6% lived in poverty. This number varied by race and ethnicity as follows:
22.5% of all white persons (which includes white Hispanics),
44.0% of all black persons (which includes black Hispanics),"
Why is that a problem?
Suppose you have a policy that can lift 100 people out of poverty. If, as you say, you help 2 white people for every black person then the policy will lift 66 white people and 34 black people out of poverty. You have lifted (proportionally) more black people(who make up only ~13% of the population) than white people out of poverty.
The only way this seems to be a problem is if if your goal is to help just poor black people and poor white people don't get help.
If you were a guy running a company, you'd realize that taxes would have to be raised quite a lot to be worse than being pressured by "diversity" metrics to hire less-qualified workers at the same wages.
A decade ago, I had a little blog that talked about some topics in social justice, with left-based critiques, and received exactly this kind of response you are talking about: "The people saying these things are just Tumblr teenagers and dumb Redditors, why care?"
At the time, I said what I felt: that it seemed these teenagers (and the cultural zeitgeist from which they drew their opinions) were the vanguard of a new movement that would be much more than fringe online people, especially if people didn't take seriously any criticism of its obvious flaws and excesses.
Now, family bonds and long friendships are impacted by these "terminally online" debates. It's become the stuff of real life. Theory has collided with praxis and still, plenty of people assert that "touching grass" is the one correct solution to the excesses of the social justice movement.
Going outside and socializing IRL is a key part of the solution, yes. People love to pretend their online friendships are just as meaningful as real ones though, so...
Add to your reading list 2 left critiques of identity politics: "The Trouble With Diversity" by Walter Benn Micheals, and "No Politics but Class Politics" by Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Micheals.
Making a performance is usually not serious.
I really can't stand Beauchamp, but I'm not sure he meant "center-left" derisively. I'm actually surprised he didn't follow the usual playbook and pretend that every who objects to wokery is "right-wing."
Here's a shimmer of hope: Teens are starting to think woke is lame, and are beginning to treat it with the irony and dark humour they do with all topics that Visa, the Military and HR departments are fond of. My teacher wife told me the other day that kids are starting to call each other the f-word again (not fuck). They are "bi" but only ironically. This is at a school where the elite's kids go.
I guess this should be the most obvious and predictable thing to happen. It always does. Has anyone else noticed this among their kids?
Graeme Wood did a profile on Richard Spencer for The Atlantic a few years ago where he pointed out that Spencer was very aware that racism was cool now in the same counter culture sense that scoffing at religion was in the 1990's.
That seems inevitable to me. Wokeness becoming a thing that primarily middle-aged people do spells doom for the movement. Kids love to rebel against their cringey parents. We've all done it.
In the middle class schools kids are still transing at remarkable rates, I hope it doesn't work its way down to the poorer schools and it ends.
I’m seeing this. I think what’s actually happening is that woke and LGBTQ are becoming what goth and punk and emo and band kids etc used to be back in early 2000s, just another clique. And kids usually look down on other groups. But I did hear some middle schoolers doing some major griping about the fact that their town was putting on a Pride rally. So who knows, maybe it really is going into full backlash among the under 20s.
I don’t think that socialism necessarily privileges the collective over the individual. Consider forms of libertarian socialism a la Chomsky.
"If you feed Midjourney the prompt “center-left,” it’ll give you a picture of Beauchamp humping the Vox logo."
I really really did not need this visual.
No, but it was simply delicious.
Prevert.
I've said what I'm about to say before, more or less, in the comments of this same blog, but it bears repeating. There's something in the current liberal-and-left ("""left""") character that deplores action. The social justice movement is an enormously successful one if measured by widespread acceptance; this year is the first in many that corporate pride has seen widespread pushback making national headlines, the POTUS says things like "systemic racism" and "LGBTQ." In terms of material gains, we all know it's piles of fluffy nothing, but it terms of Facebook letting you customize your pronouns, it's an unmitigated victory. This feels like progress, and it feels like righteousness, if you're intellectually sort of lazy and looking for the bubbly comforts of yas-queen liberalism and have never given Libya any more thought than someone making stickers of Ruth Bader Ginsberg told you to. I think in many ways this intense antipathy to action, and this intense embrace of institutions being "on our side," explains (if not justifies) the bizarre cognitive dissonance you're discussing here. I guess given the choice, people will choose to argue what is comforting and asks little of them, even intellectually, even when it is obviously not true. I don't know that I'm coherent here, and I don't think I have a clear point. The frustration is endless, the grievances more so, and material gains are nothing. Idk man.
This is what social media does to a populace. It turns everyone who uses it into a powerless loser.
In addition to hating action, I feel the left-of-center is incapable of admitting their own achievements. I keep hearing things from friends and colleagues like "diversity in [field]/ the LGBTQ movement still have a long way to go." And, well, do they? My field is majority white, but less so than the country as a whole. Gay couples can get married and adopt children. It's okay to say things have gotten better.
The fear is that by admitting that progress has been made, and that the current era represents the best it's ever been in terms of a lot of social justice aims, that the social justice project will somehow cease to exist. But by ignoring that progress, it makes the project seem untethered from reality, and makes every small act seem futile in a world where it's still as bad as it was in 1619. And it's the small acts that build big, successful movements.
Social Justice Politics, as I think you are using it, is focused on prioritizing the importance of racial and gender identity in our culture and our politics.
I think trying to make these identities a consideration rather than a dispositive guiding light is crucial to battling the DeSantis-like reaction, which I believe is more harmful than anything positive accomplished by the Social Justice movement in the last few years.
How do you sell a vision of the future where the marginalized are daily celebrated for their racial, gender and sexual identities while everyone else must apologize and atone for theirs? I don't buy that "woke" is solely responsible for the right wing's insanity right now, but I do know that the Left's inability to craft a unifying, positive vision of the future, rooted in universal solidarity, is a major drag when a lot of programs like universal healthcare and pre-K are wildly popular.
Seeing the two sides spur each other on to greater harms is one of the wretched parts of this moment. It would be nice if someone said, "My gosh people are mad about this, let's think about their critiques and moderate." But no, it's always about doubling down from the previous position.
Something I wrote before: now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise questions about how the economic pie is sliced.
Put another way - to paraphrase Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching sensitivity to the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not been discovered yet. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of concrete material benefits, to brown and black and yellow and white working class people greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email.
Which is precisely why they will not do this.
Yes, Jeff Bezos donated a couple million to BLM org, so he must care about black and brown people, right? And I'm sure he welcomes efforts to unionize the workers at his warehouses, too.
And you should see the house Patrisse Cullors purchased with it!
HOUSE(S)
I have to strongly disagree that workers benefit from the union. Union bosses benefit. Democrats benefit. Regular Joe whose money is being stolen just so he can work and put food on the table? Not so much.
Yes the working class needs to be organized for its own interests. A thousand times yes. But that doesn’t mean unions aren’t bureaucracies exploiting that need rather than serving that need. Winning concessions from the employer class is really really really hard and today’s unions are not built for it.
If unions actually offered great pay and benefits in exchange for negligible dues payments everyone would be union. Employers are nasty but the organizing drives would not be failing for decades as they have. It that were true. Workers would not be decertifying unions as they have if that were true.
Unions provide around a 20% advantage on wages alone, and the average union dues are in the range of two hours pay per month, meaning workers get way, way more out of unions than they put in.
And yet somehow the % of workers in private sector unions continues to steadily decrease. Less and less people are finding the union argument compelling. But if somebody wants to belong to a union, by all means go for it. But making it a condition of employment? Preventing people from leaving the union and no longer pay dues? If somebody demands to be paid for your right to work, that is a definition of a racket.
Please note that this only applies to private sector unions. Public sector unions are parasites that always kill their host.
The percentage of private-sector workers that are union members continues to decline largely because employers fight them tooth-and-nail. The huge labor upsurge in the 1930s happened during an era where employers provided next-to-no opposition, where most workforces were recognized after a voluntary show of interest by the members, or a union election that happened within less than a week of a showing of interest. Indeed, until the passage of the odious Taft-Hartley, employers had no role whatsoever in union elections, which is the way it should be: a union election is a decision by the workers collectively on representation, not some sort of election between the boss and an outside force.
Unfortunately, unlike other places (such as Europe) a bedrock of U.S. labor law is what's known as the "duty of fair representation." This compels unions to represent everyone within the workplace if they are certified. Although this was originally enforced in order to stop racist unions from not providing access to stewards and the like to black workers, it has become interpreted over time to unions having to provide services free of cost to non-members, including representation in grievances and arbitration. Plus of course having the terms and conditions of the union contract apply to them.
Imagine if you bought a unit in a condominium (or a HOA) and then could withdraw condo fees at any time, no legal action could be taken on you, and you still needed to be provided with full access to benefits. This is effectively what being a free-rider in a union shop means. Just as the condo fees are a quasi-democratic structure which provides for services and helps internally regulate a building, unions do the same in workplaces. Except unions have way, way more legal oversight than condo associations.
I live in South Florida and the demand for skilled tradesman is through the roof. Free market provides better than any union. As for free riders, it is up to the individual to decide whether or not they want to pay their union dues. Anything else is a shakedown by definition. It is even more of a shakedown when this money goes to Democrats, which it inevitably does.If you have to force someone to buy your product, your produce sucks. Maybe unions had their place a century ago. In an increasingly global world, they are an anachronism slated to disappear. Recently West Coast ports were shut down by unions. Ask yourself, will there still be humans carrying cargo from ports 100 years from now? 200 years? If AI is 5% as influential as its wildest proponents claim, the answer is clear. Unions are economically inefficient and that doesn't work long term. And the fact that unions are extremely corrupt and infiltrated by organized crime is another unpleasant fact that always gets ignored.
That's great for South Florida skilled tradespeople, JR. Not everyone needs a union in all circumstances. But there are no grounds for generalizing your sliver of an example.
The definition of "definition" is different from what you think it is. Compulsory union dues for members who benefit from union negotiated contracts are closely analogous to compulsory taxes for citizens: mandatory contributions for essential services delivered. You can claim it's a shakedown, but if that's the definition of "shakedown" then the term will no longer denote unethical activity to most speakers of English.
Globalization has not erased the appropriateness of unions; it has altered the realities within which unions need to work. Whether the port strike was justified and union demands realistic I can't say without knowing details, but the longterm replacement of workers by AI is precisely the sort of transition where workers need collective representation to ensure that their interests are optimally served in the pace and design of the transition, when management is most likely to view individual employees as near-expendable. (A similar transition will affect coal miners' unions.)
There have been unions infiltrated by organized crime, but that does not mean this is common--it's not. As for "corruption," there are degrees of corruption in virtually every large-scale enterprise, just as there is inefficiency. There isn't a sector of society where this charge couldn't be made. It is only a significant action factor if it rises above levels we normally tolerate. If you're seeking examples of brazen corruption you'll find plenty in private sector ownership and management. (Deinstitutionalize that and you get to concentrate it in government.) The best we can do with corruption is to hold it in check through competing institutions that hold one another accountable, which is one of the functions performed within the unionized private workplace.
Like taxes should be voluntary as well. I didn't decide whether to resurface that country road, I hardly use it.
Blaming or crediting employer behavior for union successes and failures is to say unions have no power or are beyond criticism. Unions are just arms of the HR department now. I dont believe the 20% wage differential. If that were true, unions would be winning. Unions keep losing because they are now bureaucracies that live off nostalgia for when unions did make a difference. They are a grift now like BLM. The sitdown strikes in Detroit were real. The march on Selma was real. Now it is all grift.
The labor movement is a really mixed bag, and things can vary from union to union, even local to local. Some are still corrupt organizations with mafia ties. Some are business unions which spend way more time and energy electing Democrats and lobbying than building worker power. Some are militant and run by the rank-and-file.
What is generally true though is no matter the structure, the deformations of labor law which happened since roughly 1980 have made it incredibly difficult to organize new workers in the private sector. The general rule-of-thumb right now is you never file for election in any campaign unless you have 70%-80% of the workforce who sign union cards, because the anti-union campaigns run by employers (which often include threats to shut down the work place, captive audience meetings, and supervisors intimidating employees one on one) will generally turn 20%-30% of the workforce away from the union drive.
This isn't the sole element though, of course. I also think the increasing atomization of our social life, along with the decline in large workplaces where people interface with one another on a regular basis, plays a role. In order to develop an active, militant trade union, you have to not only hate the boss, you need to see your coworkers as your comrades - not just in a theoretical sense, but as your peer group that you'll make sacrifices for, knowing they'll do the same for you. Disengaged workers are really, really hard to unionize, and even when they do win recognition, they invariably turn into weak locals who can't make major wins at the bargaining table.
The principal-agent and free rider problems - how do they work?