Under the Radar
By Ben Becker
“We will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000.”
—Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund, on the U.N.’s prediction that the global population will reach nine billion by 2050
*Youth unemployment rates worldwide:
Spain: 40 percent
Tunisia: 30 percent
Egypt: 25 percent
Eurozone: 20 percent
Britain: 20 percent
United States: 19 percent
(The U.S. figure was, oddly, the most difficult to find in the U.S. press. It can be found at: www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/youth.pdf)
When Using Your Cell Phone Camera Becomes a Felony
When Jeremy Marks, 18, saw an altercation between a police officer and another student near his Los Angeles high school, he did what most teenagers would do: pulled out his cell phone and began recording . . . .
Anti-War Veterans Lead Civil Disobedience at White House
Military veterans carried out a civil disobedience action at the White House over the winter against the Afghanistan war and the ongoing occupation of Iraq . . . .
Massey CEO’s Golden Parachute Surpasses Settlement for Dead Miners
The cameras have long since left the tiny town of Montcoal, West Virginia, where twenty-nine miners with Massey Energy died in an explosion in April 2010 . . . .
Coalition of Rite Aid Workers Holds Nationwide Actions
Protests and pickets took place in forty Rite Aid locations across the country to call attention to the corporation's pattern of increasing executive pay at the expense of workers' benefits . . . .
Placard Slogans from Madison’s Days of Rage
"Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."
"Worst baby names of 2011? 1) Scott."
"Don't let Wisconsin become Karl Rove's laboratory for a plutocracy."
"Dear Scott, this relationship just isn't working for me."
"Union workers won the Super Bowl."
"Santa told me you're on the naughty list." [held up by a small child]
"I support my State Senator (wherever he is)."
"I protect your family from the criminally insane. Remember that!"
"Remember this when you hit a pothole."
"I'm a teacher. I pay more taxes than corporations."
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000002
It’s an Academic Question: Why Progressive Intellectuals Should Not Stay Out of Internal Union Battles
By Dan Clawson
As an academic beginning to engage with the labor movement, if there was one point on which everyone was clear, it was this: you absolutely, positively cannot get involved in the internal politics of the labor movement.
I disagree. If we are to study and work with labor at all, we almost inevitably are involved in its internal politics. Even if it were possible to avoid doing so, I don’t think it would be desirable.
Reasons to Stay Out of Unions’ Internal Politics
Before presenting my position, let’s consider some of the (quite sensible) arguments against intellectuals getting anywhere near the internal politics of unions—reasons that are usually taken as obvious:
1. We all have experience with the academic who has not himself (or, more rarely, herself) done any actual organizing, but who does not hesitate to tell everyone else, most especially people in labor, all the things they’ve done wrong.
2. For those in labor education programs, or those being paid to do research for unions, staying out of internal union politics is a simple matter of survival. To take sides is to lose access to, and funding from, the side you are opposing.
3. There’s the issue of knowledge: do we know enough to be involved? For disputes within labor, there may well be good people and good arguments on both sides; not being in the thick of things, we may have a hard time judging what is really happening, how the workers feel, and the unstated consequences of particular positions. With the best of intentions, even if we think we are fully informed, we can operate in ignorance and make serious mistakes. In such a situation, it is better to stay out of the conflict.
4. There is a good chance that we will be manipulated for factional purposes—union leaders schooled in rough-and-tumble politics will take advantage of naïve academics who don’t understand what they are getting into.
5. Battles within labor will become the focus of outside attention, and our involvement increases that likelihood. A thousand good things that labor does will be ignored, and all the focus will be on the one problem we address.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000003
One, Two, Many Madisons: The War on Public Sector Workers
By Stanley Aronowitz
In the mad race to the bottom that has gripped American politics, no sector has been more targeted and maligned than the government and its employees. Buffeted by the shellacking the Democrats sustained in 2010—largely because of their failure to make a serious dent in the appalling jobs picture—in January 2011, President Obama announced a two-year federal-employee salary freeze. The policy was barely contested by the weak federal unions, so state and local governments—strapped for funds in the wake of the economic crisis—are massively following suit by instituting layoffs, salary cuts and freezes, and threatened pension and health insurance cuts. Some union leaders have registered words of protest and some public employees’ organizations are furiously lobbying legislators. But contained by many state and federal laws that outlaw strikes by public employees—and also by their own timidity or resignation to the inevitable—public sector union leaders have taken it lying down. That is, until Madison.
When GOP Governor Scott Walker and his legislative allies moved in on Wisconsin public employees’ unions, they could not have anticipated the outburst of protest and militancy that greeted the legislation. Mass demonstrations at the state capitol building in Madison have been continuous, emulating the model exhibited by the recent Egyptian democratic movement against the Mubarak regime, an ever-escalating movement that brought down the dictator in ten days and helped inspire parallel struggles throughout the Arab world. In Wisconsin—as anger and large demonstrations mounted, including school shutdowns across the state and occupations of the legislative chambers—the imminent passage of the GOP bill spurred Democratic senators to leave the state rather than provide the majority with the quorum needed to enact the legislation. In addition to reducing bargaining to wages, the bill outlaws strikes by public employees, a measure that is in effect in a number of other heavily unionized states (such as New York). But the Republicans found a legislative maneuver that permitted them to pass the bill without the presence of the fourteen Democrats, and the assembly quickly approved it. As of this writing, the governor is expected to sign the bill and make it law.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000004
Is There Life After the Shellacking?: A Post-Election Program for the Democratic Party
By J. Phillip Thompson
The Right—meaning the Tea Party, most Republican elected officials in Congress, Fox News, and several very large corporations—is attacking the Obama administration not for failure, but for success. Obama not only bailed out General Motors (GM), he put in an overseer to ensure the company made sound investment decisions. It worked. He put money into banks, but also increased the regulation of financial institutions. It worked—in staving off financial collapse—and the stock market has rebounded. He pushed through health care reform, establishing the principle that health care is an entitlement. He has reduced some of the military’s worst excesses (torture) and fired the military commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan when the general challenged Obama’s authority. He put through a stimulus bill that prevented local governments from large-scale layoffs, avoiding hugely diminished public services. He diminished political in-fighting within the Democratic Party after a very bitter primary battle for the presidency. In short, he showed signs that government could work effectively in tackling big problems. This is why he is under attack from the Right.
The Right has been lavishly funded to make the opposite case. Its funders have pocketed trillions from reduced taxes and reduced government regulation of its financial transactions. The justification for such minimalist government is the argument that government doesn’t work. This is what makes Obama a threat. If he is willing to interfere with GM and financial markets, what will be next?
The reason why the Left—meaning an uncongealed assortment of labor unions, black and Latino leaders, a minority of Democrats in Congress, a broad array of civic advocacy groups, and some liberals at MSNBC—is sulking about Obama is that they don’t feel his administration has done enough. Banks failed and got bailed out, managers got undeserved multi-million-dollar bonuses (paid for by taxpayers)—yet needed jobs didn’t come out of any of this. Key provisions for improving health care were stripped out of the health care bill, or never introduced. Many billions targeted for infrastructure are tied up in federal and state bureaucracies, never reaching the ground, where they would create jobs. The administration is expanding the war in Afghanistan, at an incredible cost, with no clear prospect of resolution. Perhaps most aggravating, Obama’s political operatives appear to have lost interest in the tens of thousands of grassroots activists that helped him win office. Key members of the Obama political team appear to not understand movement building, while the Tea Party is grooming grassroots leaders across the country. To some, this feels like a betrayal. Many on the Left were excited about Obama, but not about his policy program. They supported him because his speeches suggested he understood the need for bottom-up movement building to push government reforms. Most knew even modest reform would be fiercely contested every step of the way.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000005
Indians on Strike: Caste and Class in the Indian Trade Union Movement
By Subhashini Ali
The working-class movement in India can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when the country was still a British colony. At that time, there were extremely draconian laws in place, and the onerous task of organizing was so fraught with risk that it was only undertaken by committed political activists.
The first national trade union—the All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC)—was established in the 1920s, during the colonial period, amid tremendous working-class upheaval. Until 1947 (the first year of national independence), the AITUC served as an umbrella organization for trade unions all over the country—workers and political activists of all leftist persuasions (communists, socialists, left-wingers), some of whom belonged to the Congress Party. Still, its writ did not go unchallenged. In the late 1920s, in Mahatma Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat, the textile mill workers saw the birth and development of a peculiarly Gandhian trade union, committed to his philosophy of “trusteeship,” whereby capitalists held wealth in “trust” for their workers.
The union was led, interestingly enough, by the sister of one of the biggest mill owners. She was, however, fairly uncompromising in her opposition to the mill owners, remaining committed to the workers’ cause within the Gandhian framework. The Communists were also a formidable rival in this state. In fact, in most of the big textile cities of Calcutta, Bombay, Indore, Kanpur, and Ahmedabad—and wherever else there were industries like jute production and engineering—it was the Communists who provided the backbone to the AITUC. The colonial government did everything in its power to break their influence.
Thus, the trade union movement in India has been linked to political and ideological organizations since its inception. This characteristic has remained unchanged even after independence, and it has helped make Indian trade unionism prone to splits and divisions. Today’s trade unions—even those that proclaim their independence (from both political parties and ideological constraints)—owe their existence to and are still led by political activists with strong ideological and political associations.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000006
The Working-Class Eye of Milton Rogovin: A Retrospective Photo Essay
By Janet Zandy
Milton Rogovin photographed the people of the neighborhoods and workplaces most of us never enter. He didn’t use the language of war to describe his photographic practices—no casual “shooting,” no “capturing” his subjects, no “arsenal” of cameras and films. Instead, in thousands of photographs over fifty years, he built a human landscape by seeing those who are the least visible and least powerful.
Rogovin—who died in January 2011 at the age of 101 in his Buffalo, New York home—was born on December 30, 1909 in Manhattan to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, and was persuaded by his family to follow the career path of an older brother and become an optometrist. As a Columbia University graduate, he did not fit the stereotype of the working-class laborer. Yet, as the son of a bankrupt small store owner who died suddenly, as a young man experiencing the no-safety-net suffering of the Great Depression, and through his lifelong self-education in literature, political philosophy, economics, music, and the visual arts, Rogovin taught himself how to see the worlds of workers. “The radical movement shaped me into a new person,” Rogovin once recalled.
The artistic expression of that “new person”—and his evolution from a politically-left optometrist to a masterful photographer—was fueled by the energy, chutzpah, and humanity of his wife Anne, a teacher, whom he married in 1942, after moving to Buffalo in 1938. Rogovin served three years in the army during World War II, joined the Optical Workers Union, practiced optometry in a working-class Buffalo neighborhood, and—with Anne—continued such political work as voter registration drives and hosting political reading groups associated with the Communist Party. The Rogovins were not “salon socialists” (as Agnes Smedley once described theorists without actions). In the increasingly oppressive political climate of the 1950s, however, their lives changed. In 1957, Milton was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and refused to answer any questions other than his name and occupation. In this climate of fear, his optometric practice diminished, and his whole family was affected—economically and socially—as the three Rogovin children faced the isolation imposed on them when their father was labeled “Buffalo’s Top Red” in the Buffalo Evening News.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000007
Chinese Investments in Africa: Twenty-First Century Colonialism?
By Herbert Jauch
China’s increasing presence in Africa has been the topic of many studies and publications in recent years. How Chinese businesses and investments on the continent impact African labor movements has, however, received little attention. Drawing on the findings of a ten-country study carried out by the African Labour Research Network (ALRN) in 2008-2009, this article provides a general overview of the labor conditions at Chinese firms in Africa, focusing on some common trends that exist despite country-specific differences. Those trends indicate that—despite some notable differences between the nature of Chinese economic involvement and that of Western foreign direct investment (FDI) on the continent—Chinese business mostly adheres to a familiar, neocolonial pattern of resource extraction, labor exploitation, and infrastructure projects that fail to emphasize the development of local capacity.
A Brief History of Sino-African Relations
During the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese relations with African countries were driven largely by ideological considerations, with China presenting itself as an alternative to both the West and the Soviet Union. During that time, China’s support consisted mainly of moral and material support for liberation struggles. During the 1980s, the relationship became one of economic cooperation based on common aims. After the end of the Cold War, China portrayed itself as an attractive economic partner and political friend. For African governments, this presented an alternative to the “Washington Consensus” and was termed the “Beijing Consensus”—support without interference in internal affairs.
China’s engagement with Africa today is less motivated by ideological considerations than by a commercial agenda that aims to sustain rapid industrialization and economic growth rates in China. China’s presence is usually warmly welcomed by African governments due to the offers of trade, aid, and investments without “strings attached.” China is also seen as a solution to the creation of local infrastructure where local capacity is lacking. In general, African leaders consider their engagement with China to be a viable alternative to the “Washington Consensus,” particularly the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) that ravaged most countries on the continent since the 1980s.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000008
Building a Labor Movement in a Failed State: The Case of Zimbabwe
By Bernard Pollack
In 2000, the Zimbabwean government enacted land reform policies which allowed for the seizure and redistribution of white-owned commercial farms. These fast-track land reforms made all acquired land state land, with settlers having the right only to occupy and use it. The land reform policies have left about 1.5 million farm workers without a source of income as farms are divided up—with many tracts given to Robert Mugabe’s supporters.
While Zimbabwe’s land reform movement was initially intended to reduce the number of white-owned farms in the country and provide land to the landless, it’s done little to help the poor in rural areas. “Land was taken from the rich and given to the rich,” says Gertrude Hambira, general secretary of the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ). The rich farmers have not, however, efficiently utilized the land because they are already well off and choose to hold onto the land to maintain political power. This has led to lower agricultural productivity, higher prices for food, and widespread hunger. These conditions are compounded by the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country. The incidence of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe is one of the highest in the world, with about one-third of the adult population affected. Many families in Zimbabwe support orphans and many households have become female-headed or child-headed as a result of HIV/AIDS deaths, now running at over three thousand people per week.
These combined crises, in large part, hastened an end to the single-handed, three-decades-long rule of Robert Mugabe. In 2008, Morgan Richard Tsvangirai—with support from the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)—was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, ending three decades of Mugabe’s exclusive reign. Prior to this post, Tsvangirai had been the general secretary of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The ZCTU had been growing strong, fighting for more rights and better wages for workers since the early 1990s, and firmly opposing the Mugabe government. Mugabe’s government participated in voter intimidation and suppression, and routinely arrested and jailed opposition activists. Mugabe implemented many policies that weakened Zimbabwe’s economy and dramatically worsened workers’ quality of life. Among those policies, land “reform” enacted in 2000 gave complete control of the land to the government, and left informal workers—who had largely depended upon farming—without a stable income.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000009
Promises, Promises: Assessing the Obama Administration's Record on Labor Reform
By Anne Marie Lofaso
The 2008 election cemented a Democratic congressional majority. Having helped elect Obama, labor had high expectations for the administration and hoped the new president (and Congress) would protect working-class Americans’ interests. It seemed a perfect opportunity to advance a progressive agenda, including strengthening participatory workplace democracy and raising the floor of social and economic rights for workers. This essay provides an overview of what was accomplished, what was not, and where the hope still lies.
Obama’s Key Appointments: Too Little, Too Late?
Obama initially made good on his promises to appoint experts committed to enforcing workers’ rights to key positions. California Representative Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor and former Department of Labor (DOL) policy advisor Seth Harris as Deputy Secretary were popular with labor. Obama also appointed several DOL under-secretaries, including Congressional Senior Labor Policy Advisor for health and safety, Jordan Barab, as Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and former Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Kennedy, Jane Oates, as Assistant Secretary for the Employment & Training Administration. Labor praised the appointment of former United Mine Workers safety official, Joe Main, as Assistant Secretary for the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA).
Labor also praised Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—former SEIU Associate General Counsel Craig Becker and union-friendly labor lawyer Mark G. Pearce. Obama designated former Bricklayers Labor Counsel, Wilma Liebman, as NLRB Chairman. This was the first time in nearly a decade that the Board was made up of those committed to enforcing the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). These appointments remained in congressional limbo for fourteen months after Obama took office. The Board had operated without a quorum for twenty-seven months. When the Supreme Court, in New Process Steel, held that the NLRB was without authority to issue decisions on cases during those twenty-seven months, hundreds of decisions (and many more workers) were adversely affected. According to the NLRB’s website, as of February 2011, the Board had closed or otherwise resolved 346 of the over 550 affected cases.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000010
Battle in the Mojave: Lessons from the Rio Tinto Lockout
By Peter Olney
It has been a difficult two years for the labor movement in the United States. The Obama election held out the promise of labor law reform and massive new organizing initiatives. Instead, there was no Employee Free Choice Act and the biggest organizing campaign in 2010 involved an internal dispute between the Service Employees International Union and the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers. In the absence of reform, and with our unions totally on the defensive, labor strategists and organizers are searching for a plan to move forward. The story of the ILWU’s battle against a lockout in the Mojave Desert a year ago is a contribution toward understanding the moment and the features of a labor counterattack.
The massive right-wing drumbeat—scapegoating public sector employees and demanding deep concessions—is a tune all too familiar to private sector workers. Some recent struggles are illustrative. A UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers Union) strike at a Shaw’s supermarket warehouse in Methuen, Massachusetts lasted for four months in 2010 after the employer attempted to impose a concessionary contract. The Mott’s strike in upstate New York a year ago lasted for almost four months after this highly profitable subsidiary of Dr Pepper/Snapple demanded harsh concessions, asserting that there was no need to pay higher wages in a depressed labor market. The Honeywell lockout of the Steelworkers in Metropolis, Illinois began on June 28, 2010 and continues to this day. The list goes on and on, day after day, and all these conflicts share one common feature: corporations that are on the attack against workers’ hard-won wages and benefits in longtime unionized workplaces. Our capacity to resist these concessionary demands, and to effectively conduct strikes and lockouts, is crucial to weathering this period of attacks and going on the offensive.
The ILWU Under Attack
Last year the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) confronted such an attack in Boron, California at the Rio Tinto Corporation’s borax mining facility—the largest borate mine in the world. The mine is located 130 miles from downtown Los Angeles, in the Mojave Desert. Boron’s Kern County community is a desolate, hardscrabble area where temperatures routinely exceed 125 degrees in the summer. Four hundred and fifty ILWU Local 30 members work at the mine. Last January, they were locked out of their jobs for 105 days. The mine is in the congressional district of Kevin McCarthy, an archconservative and now the Republican majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives. The majority of these ILWU members are Caucasian males with strong religious affiliations. Several of the worker-leaders are lay preachers, and many are Mormons.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000011
Economic Prospects
Field Notes on Wall Street Reform: The Battle Continues
By Robert Pollin
President Barack Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010. Dodd-Frank is the most ambitious measure aimed at regulating U.S. financial markets since the Glass-Steagall Act was implemented in the midst of the 1930s Depression. However, it remains an open question as to whether Dodd-Frank is capable of controlling the hyper-speculative practices that produced the near-total global financial collapse of 2008-2009, which in turn brought the global economy to its knees with the Great Recession.
Dodd-Frank is a massive piece of legislation, 875 pages in length, covering a wide range of issues. These include coordinating the efforts of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and other financial regulatory agencies to control excessive speculation; creating a consumer financial protection bureau; establishing regulatory controls on the previously unregulated hedge funds and derivative markets; and placing restrictions on big banks, like Goldman Sachs, trading on their own corporate accounts—a practice known as “proprietary trading”—when they are supposed to be focused on their clients’ interests only.
The prevailing view on the left is that Dodd-Frank was a major victory for Wall Street. There are valid reasons for progressives to reach that conclusion. The most important is that, despite its length, Dodd-Frank mostly lays out a broad regulatory framework, allowing the various regulatory agencies to settle on the details of implementation over the next few years. Both Wall Street lobbyists as well as advocates for strong regulation anticipate that the lobbyists will be able to dominate this process of detailed rulemaking. But the reality is more complex. In fact, Dodd-Frank remains a contested terrain because there are lots of areas where strong regulations can emerge through this detailed rulemaking process.
Terms of Engagement
The very fact that Dodd-Frank exists demonstrates that the glory days of financial deregulators are mercifully over for the foreseeable future. Yet Wall Street is clearly moving into the phase of regulatory rulemaking with a strong hand. The major Wall Street firms have huge budgets at their disposal to intervene at will during the process of detailed rule-setting. In addition, the regulators themselves understand that they can burnish their future private sector career prospects if they are solicitous to the concerns of Wall Street while still working for Uncle Sam.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000012
In the Rearview Mirror
The Weight of Dead Generations
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman
Marx was wrong. He famously declared that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” But it turns out that, for some, the remembered past can act like a tonic, an inspirational elixir, even a promissory note. Over the course of American history, popular movements of resistance and rebellion have sometimes resolutely turned their backs on the future in concerted efforts to return to some mythic golden age. Others have enlisted their collective recollections of the past to fashion an emancipated new way of life.
As the sesquicentennial of the Civil War begins, we are reminded of this plasticity of historical memory and the way it gets deployed to resolve contemporary dilemmas. Commemorations of the Civil War functioned for generations in the South to reinforce commitment to the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause.” “Confederate Balls,” reenactments of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration, and the like had a political purpose in solidifying core beliefs about white supremacy, states’ rights, and loyalty to the region’s all-white Democratic Party. Around the turn of the twentieth century, when the hot-blooded emotions of the war had finally cooled enough, the “Lost Cause” got nationalized and found a home in the North as well. There it served to turn a conflict over freedom and slavery into a shared national tragedy that hid the country’s ugly racial pathology.
In the South, that distinctive recall of the past at the same time worked to replenish the soil of social subservience, leaving the Southern oligarchy of landlords, merchants, and their political facilitators in charge. Still, for legions of true believers, the “Lost Cause” was empowering, firing resistance to both Reconstruction and subsequent attempts to end American apartheid. For a long century, most white Southerners reveled in their peculiar version of the past, used it to define their moral imagination, and mobilized politically on its behalf; but they were imprisoned by it, unable to envision a future that would liberate them from hierarchies of the South’s caste-based political economy. Already, the sesquicentennial has shown us there’s life still left in that old dog: Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, recalls that life in 1960s Yazoo City wasn’t all that bad as the White Citizens’ Council kept the Klan at bay, and Virginia’s governor “forgot” to mention slavery in his sesquicentennial proclamation. Dream and nightmare!
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000013
Caught in the Web
The Teacher Union Counterattack
By Liza Featherstone
A disturbingly successful ideological assault on teachers’ unions has united both parties. Those unions—well funded and full of smart, skilled people—should be leading a rousing cyber-counterattack. Alas, it would be an exaggeration to suggest they were doing this. But the National Education Association’s site does offer excellent talking points—and data—for the pro-union arguments that we all should be bringing into everyday conversation (because, sadly, everyone has neighbors, relatives, and PTA friends who hate teachers’ unions).
The best place to start is the NEA’s “Myths and Facts about Educator Pay” page (www.nea.org/home/12661.htm), which debunks the notion that teachers are well paid, compared to other professionals. In fact, the average national starting salary for teachers is just a little over $30,000/year, less than that of computer programmers or public accountants. Even sexism—though that’s undoubtedly part of the picture—can’t explain it: registered nurses, another mostly-female field, also make significantly higher starting salaries than teachers. The site also shows that the longer a person teaches, the wider the gap between her salary and the salaries of other professionals. The NEA’s site addresses the popular notion that teachers don’t deserve decent salaries because they have “all that time off.” Studies of teacher workdays show that they spend at least fifty hours a week on instructional duties, including preparation, grading, parent conferences, and so forth. As for their much-vaunted summer vacations, many teachers aren’t headed for the beach when the weather gets warm: they’re working second jobs to offset their low salaries, or taking classes to improve their teaching and advance their careers (often undertaking such professional development at their own expense). The NEA site also shows the starting salaries of other public-school workers (janitors, lunch supervisors, bus drivers); its data certainly refutes the idea that any money is being “wasted” on labor, or that anyone is making more than she deserves.
Another site with superb data to support a teacher counterattack is that of the Educator Compensation Institute (www.edcomp.org/default.aspx). The ECI—which is not funded by teachers’ unions—has posted a study showing that merit pay does not raise student test scores—a beloved plank of the union-busting education reform agenda. The ECI’s site also has a Teacher Turnover Cost Calculator (www.nctaf.org/resources/teacher_cost_calculator/teacher_turnover.html), which shows how to calculate the cost of your school’s or district’s teacher turnover rate—a number not often mentioned in these debates, despite the fact that recruiting, hiring, and training new teachers is expensive. The ECI provides a map of the nation, with links outlining compensation systems—existing and proposed—other than merit pay.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000014
The Closing Window
The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit
By Michael Zadoorian
American Salvage
By Bonnie Jo Campbell
Reviewed by Christopher Barzak
Fiction that examines the lives of ordinary working people was particularly fruitful in the 1980s and 1990s, when writers of short stories—such as Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Toni Cade Bambara—were published alongside novelists—such as Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, and Richard Russo—who wrote about working-class settings, characters, and problems. In the first ten years of the twenty-first century, though, it seems that fewer and fewer writers (or perhaps publishers) are exploring working-class people and issues in fiction. Occasionally, a novelist will appear on the scene with a naturalistic view of working-class life, as Philipp Meyer recently did with his debut novel, American Rust. But fiction that gazes intently upon the lower and working classes has had a difficult time surfacing in the new century.
In an essay called “Never Give an Inch,” published in the Fall 2010 issue of the literary journal Tin House, Gerald Howard states that this infrequency of attention in fiction may have something to do with the social class of those who generally work in publishing houses:
As relatively modest as their salaries may be, people in publishing are still by birth and education and cultural assumptions members of the emerging American overclass, self-replicating and increasingly isolated from the conditions of American life outside the big cities and campus enclaves . . . All of which means that voices from and on behalf of the working class have that much harder a time getting read, understood, and published.
Absent some unforeseen cultural shift, these voices are likely to remain unfashionable. Other factors may contribute to Howard’s analysis, but the claim that working-class fiction is unfashionable or misunderstood by editorial gatekeepers may apply primarily to large, corporate publishing houses, because working-class fiction is alive and well at small presses and university presses.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000015
The Continental Plan
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life
By Thomas Geoghegan
Reviewed by Thomas Greven
This should be a good time for a book that essentially asks Americans to learn from Europe, and especially from Germany. Few Western countries have managed the global financial and economic crisis as well as Germany, it seems, and its successful crisis management has a lot to do with those features of the German model that Thomas Geoghegan highlights as “blueprintable.” During the crisis, the institutional strength of the unions led to measures designed to maintain the high-skills backbone of the German economic model of high-quality exports. For Geoghegan, German industrial relations (and similar systems in other European countries) explain why not only the bottom two thirds of Americans would be better off in Europe; for him, that is a given, especially regarding the unemployed and people on welfare. No, he argues, “Europe is set up for the bourgeois,” too (p. 11), for the upper middle class, who get the same benefits, like six weeks of vacation, maternity leave, good pensions, and so on. His thesis is “that even people who are at the top or are in the top 20 percent by income are better off in a European social democracy than in a country like the U.S.” (p. 260).
While U.S. per capita GDP is higher than in most European countries, the quality of life is not. Just “go outside and walk around,” Geoghegan wants to tell the “Cato types” (p. 12). Thanks to the strength of the European unions, there is an “invisible GDP” (p. 14) of lower inequality, better public services and goods, and perhaps most importantly from the perspective of an American professional, lower working hours—the average German worked almost four hundred fewer hours than the average American in 2006. Geoghegan marvels at the fact that, with these far fewer hours, Europeans manage to get to nearly the per capita GDP of Americans, and he ponders the question of what could be done with all these saved hours—reading, traveling, learning foreign languages? As someone who once unsuccessfully tried for months to find a co-worker in the congressional office of Bernie Sanders—an American socialist after all—to go have an actual lunch break in a restaurant instead of eating microwave-heated noodle soup at the desk, I am definitely with him.
Power to the People
Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group
By John Atlas
Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing
By James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge
Reviewed by Erik Peterson
A community organizer elected to the U.S. presidency. A vice-presidential wannabe who dismisses his work. Nightly screeds and conspiracy charts by Glenn Beck. Lead stories on CNN. There is no doubt that, in the last three years, community organizing has become “hot,” or at least as hot as grassroots organizing for social change can become.
Into this mix come two new books—John Atlas’s Seeds of Change and James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge’s Contesting Community. Both provide a reflective analysis of the role of community organizing in progressive politics and social change. And both are grounded in the pragmatic, populist politics practiced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone—a politics that develops and grows leaders within communities to challenge existing power relationships by combining grassroots organizing with electoral politics, all around a clear public policy agenda. Wellstone used to say: “Electoral politics without community organizing is a politics without a base; community organizing without electoral politics is a marginalized politics. And community organizing and electoral politics without a clear, progressive public policy agenda is a politics without a head, without a direction.” (Wellstone Action now trains out of this model and calls it the “Wellstone Triangle,” www.wellstone.org.)
Seeds of Change examines the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as an example of the type of progressive organizing Wellstone promoted, and Contesting Community provides an intellectual framework and a provocative critique of community organizing in a neoliberal age. Both show why a Wellstonian politics is at once so rare and more important than ever.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000015
Power to the People
Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group
By John Atlas
Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing
By James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge
Reviewed by Erik Peterson
A community organizer elected to the U.S. presidency. A vice-presidential wannabe who dismisses his work. Nightly screeds and conspiracy charts by Glenn Beck. Lead stories on CNN. There is no doubt that, in the last three years, community organizing has become “hot,” or at least as hot as grassroots organizing for social change can become.
Into this mix come two new books—John Atlas’s Seeds of Change and James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge’s Contesting Community. Both provide a reflective analysis of the role of community organizing in progressive politics and social change. And both are grounded in the pragmatic, populist politics practiced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone—a politics that develops and grows leaders within communities to challenge existing power relationships by combining grassroots organizing with electoral politics, all around a clear public policy agenda. Wellstone used to say: “Electoral politics without community organizing is a politics without a base; community organizing without electoral politics is a marginalized politics. And community organizing and electoral politics without a clear, progressive public policy agenda is a politics without a head, without a direction.” (Wellstone Action now trains out of this model and calls it the “Wellstone Triangle,” www.wellstone.org.)
Seeds of Change examines the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as an example of the type of progressive organizing Wellstone promoted, and Contesting Community provides an intellectual framework and a provocative critique of community organizing in a neoliberal age. Both show why a Wellstonian politics is at once so rare and more important than ever.
DOI: 10.4179/NLF.202.0000015