The U.S. labor movement is in disarray, with declining union density and fewer members each year. There have been positive signs of movement revival, such as the revolt of public sector workers in Wisconsin in 2011 and the Chicago school teachers’ strike in 2012. But overall, the future of the labor movement does not appear very bright. In what follows, we examine, through the lens of the recent history of two unions as seen by a rank-and-file worker and an itinerant union organizer, the state of organized labor. We ask what kind of people might lead the U.S. working class.

The UAW

Gregg Shotwell, now retired, was for more than thirty years a rank-and-file machine operator for General Motors and Delphi, one of the world’s largest auto parts manufacturers. Angry with the UAW’s increasingly cozy relationship with the companies, he started an in-plant broadside, Live Bait &Ammo, which he hoped would be bait for the bosses and ammo for the workers. His provocative and lively prose, combined with good fact-based analysis, struck a chord with his fellow unionists, and the newsletter gained a wide circulation in union auto plants. His book is an organized collection of Live Bait & Ammo essays, covering developments in the UAW and the automobile industry from the late 1990s until the Federal government’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009. The wonderfully rendered essays are cries from the heart of workers degraded daily by their employers and betrayed by their union.

Some background on the UAW will put Shotwell’s dissidence in historical perspective. The UAW was forged in the courageously fought and radically led sit-down strikes of the Great Depression. Its members, their families, and their communities built upon these bitter struggles to make the UAW a militant industrial unionism. Not only did those who labored on the assembly lines and in the shops transform themselves from factory serfs to class-conscious workers, but they also took control of the shop floor from a management notorious for oppressive treatment of its “hands.”

Shotwell tells a story on the first page of his book that illustrates the power of the union:

I hired into GM and joined the UAW in 1979. I didn’t know much about how unions worked. I soon learned. At six thirty one morning, we were sitting around sipping coffee and trying to wake up to a new day of the same old shit. A foreman who was new to the area told us to get up and get to work. “Right now,” he said. “I’m the boss.” We said, “Yes sir, boss.” We went right to work. Thirty minutes later, every machine in the department was down. The skilled trades came out, tore the machines apart, and went off to look for the missing parts. They didn’t come back. There was no production that day. Every department behind us went down like a domino. The next morning, the same foreman said, “Good morning, gentlemen.” Then he left us alone to do our jobs.

The shop floor was our turf. We controlled the means of production because we were the masters of the means. We didn’t plan this direct action. It was automatic. It was natural. We called it “showing the boss who’s boss.” That’s what old timers taught me about unionism.

As his book makes clear, this does not happen today. The UAW has hit hard times. Membership has plummeted from a peak of 1.53 million in 1979 to 380,719 in 2011. Most commentators point to the decline of domestic manufacturing in the United States and the corresponding increase in the foreign operations of U.S. car companies, along with a ruthless anti-union strategy begun by employers when profit margins fell sharply in the mid–1970s, as the reasons for this. However, Shotwell provides many examples of how the failure of the UAW to organize the foreign “transplant” automobile manufacturers in the United States and the auto parts segment of the industry has also played a major role.

Much of Shotwell’s book shows why the UAW has not organized the nonunion sections of the industry, and worse, how it has become complicit with capital in making certain that these will not be organized. The union has, in effect, become the junior partner of the companies. As he says about former UAW president Ron Gettelfinger:

Gettelfinger is a corporatist: that is, he believes our fortunes as union members are tied to the company’s apron strings. At the Ford sub-council, where union members convened to devise a bargaining strategy, he invited Lord Ford and his stooges to explain how sacrifices would be necessary. Ford’s problems are not the fault of union members or union wages. Does Ford invite UAW members to Board of Directors meetings to advise them how they should make sacrifices for the good of the community?

The beginning of the UAW’s demise can be found in the employer backlash against the radicalization of much of the labor movement during the Great Depression and the tremendous strike wave after the Second World War. The latter, along with the onset of the Cold War, provided good public relations cover for the corporate counteroffensive, as a war-weary public wanted to buy the commodities they were not able to purchase during the war (and still could not because of the strikes) and also began to succumb to relentless Cold War propaganda against the communists. The first big postwar victory of capital was the Taft Hartley legislation, which, among other things, compelled union officers to sign an oath stating that they were not communists.

Most union officials signed the oaths, and many leaders used refusals to sign as an excuse to purge radicals from their ranks. The UAW was home to a large number of reds, and they were among the best, most class conscious members and leaders. Unfortunately, Walter Reuther, one of the leaders of the agitations that helped form the union in the 1930s, used Taft Hartley to red-bait his left-wing opponents and win power.

Reuther and his successors parlayed the postwar prosperity of the industry into pacesetting wages and benefits for autoworkers. At the same time, they built a UAW political machine, the Administrative Caucus—Shotwell refers to it as the “Rollover Caucus”—which has been called accurately a “one-party state.” They worked out an “accord” with employers: the union promised to let the bosses manage free from the threat of wildcat strikes and work slowdowns. In return, the corporations agreed to regular wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, and generous health-care and pension benefits. UAW leaders used the power of incumbency to contain any challenges to their control of the organization.

As democracy in the UAW waned and members chafed at the union’s concession of workplace control to management, rank-and-file movements arose. The union suppressed these efforts, but it was impossible to eliminate dissent altogether. One of Gregg Shotwell’s UAW mentors, the late Jerry Tucker (who wrote the Foreword to the book), engineered several “work-to-rule” campaigns at UAW plants in the Midwest. Patient education convinced workers to slow down production by sticking strictly to the letter of their collective bargaining agreement and their supervisors’ instructions. Workers refused to show the initiative that makes every workplace run smoothly and efficiently. Inevitably, production fell dramatically. As Shotwell notes, each of these “in-plant” work stoppages succeeded; all concessions that management wanted were denied, workers won better contracts, and none lost their jobs.

Tucker became so popular that he was elected a Regional Director. But when he brought his rank-and-file empowerment strategy to the national union leadership, they mounted a vicious campaign to unseat him (union staffers were forced to give part of their salaries to his opponent’s campaign). He lost his directorship, but then helped form the New Directions movement to wrest control of the union from a leadership now far removed from the shop floor. These efforts failed, but the New Directions spirit lived on. Gregg Shotwell and other union dissidents began Soldiers of Solidarity, to return the UAW to its members. Work-to-rule, national strikes, solidarity, an end to concessions, and union transparency are the weapons Soldiers of Solidarity argues are needed if automobile workers, and by extension all laborers, are to reverse the downward spiral in which the working class finds itself.

There are startling revelations of UAW autocracy and disdain for the rank-and-file in Autoworkers Under the Gun, which the author describes in vivid language but can be simply summarized here:

* Members cannot democratically influence what the union does. The union’s conventions are run dictatorially, and most of the delegates are appointed staff persons. The chair silences the microphone when dissidents make critical comments or ask embarrassing questions. “You’re done brother, shut off the mic,” UAW president Yokich said to Shotwell at a union convention when he had had enough of Shotwell’s trenchant analysis of the union’s self-imposed weakness.]

Dissidents are spied upon, and the top officers routinely lie about what they have done in collective bargaining. Shotwell gives especially detailed examples for his employer, Delphi. Union leaders guaranteed Delphi workers that they would always have the same contract provisions as GM employees, that GM would still be the majority owner of Delphi after it was spun off by GM. Not only were Delphi workers soon earning a fraction of what those at GM earned, but they lost all their GM pension credits. Things only got worse when Delphi declared bankruptcy.

Autocracy in the UAW is so blatant that the Administrative Caucus voted to transfer tens of millions of dollars from the union’s seldom used strike fund to pay the salaries of the national staff. Interest on the strike fund is similarly diverted.

* The UAW sells its locals short. It does not inform them about national negotiations; complex issues are presented to members at the last minute, with dire warnings that failure to agree will lead to disaster. The union settles national agreements before local agreements have been completed, leaving the locals with little leverage over their employer.

A particularly egregious example Shotwell gives of the union’s betrayal of its local concerns Local 2036 in Henderson, Kentucky. The UAW sanctioned a strike against wheel supplier Accuride in 1998. When the workers rejected a company proposal but agreed to return to work, the corporation locked them out. A dance then began in which the union paid strike benefits, then stopped payments, threatened the local with trusteeship, and, in 2002, when at least 100 employees were still holding solid against Accuride, disavowed any interest in representing the workers. The disavowal letter was sent to the company but not to the long-suffering strikers. The union never organized solidarity actions by union members who were installing the scab wheels in Ford and GM assembly plants. The best it did was urge GM, Ford, and Chrysler to convince Accuride to settle. Shotwell contrasts the UAW’s (in)action with that of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), which seceded from the UAW in 1984:

When Navistar attempted to bust a Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) local, CAW president Buzz Hargrove said, ‘We are prepared to shut down all of our operations. We are not going to allow them to scab our plants and steal our members’ jobs.’ The CAW kept scabs out and won a fair contract.

* As capital’s anti-union campaign accelerated in the 1980s, the UAW rejected a militant counterattack, as New Directions was demanding. Instead, they embraced class collaboration— more benignly called partnership, or “jointness.” The union and the corporations would work together to ensure the profitability of their joint enterprise. If workers labored hard to make their plants more profitable, employers would share some of the money with them. The union agreed that foreign competition, mainly from Japanese manufacturers, was the source of industry distress. To beat the foreigners, UAW members would have to work harder, smarter, and in cooperation with their employers. The tacit deal was that if the workers did not go along with this, the union would discipline them itself.

To sweeten the pot, the corporations agreed to pay several cents per hour of employee labor into jointness funds, set up as independent corporate entities and administered by union and management. These funds, which soon contained millions of dollars, are not subject to the financial disclosure obligations that unions have under the Landrum-Griffin Act, and the UAW has refused to show the members how the funds’ monies are used. Shotwell tells us that they, in part, pay the salaries of hundreds of union staff persons who work in the plants as the union counterparts in labor-management teams that deal with all manner of workplace issues

With jointness and the jointness funds, the UAW committed itself fully to a class collaboration strategy. Corporations have as their aim the accumulation of capital, made possible by the exploitation of wage labor. The latter is realized by management’s attainment of as much control as possible over the labor process, that is, of how work is performed. Labor-management cooperation means that the union is an ally of its class enemy, committed to helping it achieve its goals.

The first targets of the union-employer partnership were Japanese automakers, who were accused of unfair competition. The degree to which the company-union partners vilified the Japanese can be seen in an early program paid for by the funds, a week-long educational, with mandatory attendance by every union member. I witnessed this firsthand when I taught economics in a one-day session in such a program to groups of Pittsburgh autoworkers; the session held just prior to mine was an eight-hour orgy of Japanese bashing, with the most blatant stereotyping of Japanese culture and behavior.

Once the competitive ethos began to be instilled in union members, the focus shifted from foreign competition to that between domestic automobile companies. Workers at GM were now in competition with those at Ford and Chrysler, even though they were in the same union. From there, it was a short step to pitting employees at one plant against those at another of the same company. So as the corporations began to close plants to remain competitive, workers were forced into a competitive mode, doing whatever they could to keep their particular plant open. Solidarity went out the window, replaced by a war of all against all.

Shotwell predicted what would happen:

Competition between workers will decimate, not solidify, our ranks. A Competitive Operating Agreement is a Trojan horse loaded with three lethal concessions:
(1) the expanded utilization of temps, which is in effect two-tier;
(2) the implementation of nonunion labor into the plants;
(3) the manipulation of union members as “team leaders” in supervisory roles.

He was right. The end result was a sequence of corporate demands and union concessions: lump-sum wage increases instead of percentage raises built into the base wage; two-tier wage agreements in which new hires earn much less than senior workers (now less than half as much); fewer benefits, with workers paying more and more for them; defined contribution pensions instead of defined benefit plans; pensioners sacrificed to ease the pension cost burdens of the businesses; and on and on, with no end in sight.

Union givebacks ultimately led to the decimation of the UAW during the Great Recession. GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy, and the federal government demanded—and received—draconian concessions from the union in return for a bailout, in which the owners suffered nothing. And in a final blow to workers and the union, partnership and the resultant worker demoralization helped make possible the recent enactment of a right-to-work law in Michigan, the very cradle of industrial unionism.

Throughout all of this, the automobile manufacturers continued to unilaterally pursue their interests. While the union bashed the Japanese, the corporations partnered with Japanese companies. They took the profits they made from union concessions and invested them in foreign operations, which, the author informs readers, are now the major source of their profits, and where corporate assets are not subject to U.S. bankruptcy laws. They began to spin off their parts components, converting them into quasi-independent corporations that now supplied modular components to them (such as steering wheel assemblies and seats). These new entities either operated union-free or, with UAW cooperation, remained union but with much lower wages and benefits, and weaker work rules.

A union that collaborates with employers, must, by definition, be hostile to the rank-and-file. In any workplace, laborers face a relentless enemy. Management continually stresses the workers, routinely violating the collective bargaining agreement. A cooperative union must then either negotiate ever-weaker contracts or ignore the grievances that workers file. As Shotwell documents in the latter case, when workers grieve they must confront the union-management teams in the plant, both parts paid for by the employer, who have a stake in shunting the grievance aside or settling it jointly in a corporation-friendly manner, regardless of the needs of the aggrieved employees. When this fails and grievances accumulate, the national union simply concedes them in the national bargaining. When workers protest, the one-party state votes them down.

What then should workers do? How do you wage a struggle against both your employer and your union? Shotwell is a proponent of “work to rule,” which he correctly sees as a potent form of sabotage that both pressures employers to settle disputes with workers and helps workers stop and reverse the erosion of their control over the labor process. But to put this into practice will require much patient organizing both inside and outside the workplace. It will be a difficult process, but really there is no other choice, except complete capitulation. As he poetically puts it:

Strike back.
Strike back because your brothers and sisters are laid off.
Strike back because you hate the bastards.
Strike back to redeem your dignity.
Strike back for full employment.
Strike back to abolish inequality.
Strike back because your job is a bore and your boss is an ass.
Strike back for freedom.
Strike back to restore the balance of power.
Strike back because you are human and care about life.
Strike back to break the corporate chokehold.
Strike back to get the leeches off our backs.
Strike back for more democracy.
Strike back because they never listen to you.
Strike back to control the means of production.
Strike back because Medicare doesn’t cover prescriptions for your mother.
Strike back because politicians retire in splendor.
Strike back because injunctions are only against unions and never against management.
Strike back because judges are the lackeys of industry.
Strike back because no one believes in the system.
Strike back to show we can strike back.
Strike back.

SEIU

Unlike Gregg Shotwell, Jane McAlevey was never a rank-and-file worker. She was appointed to various union staff positions after working in a number of social-change organizations. Most of her book describes her tenure as executive director of a large local of public and private sector workers in Las Vegas. She tells readers that Raising Expectations is about organizing; it is, but it is also a memoir centering on herself and her wars with the SEIU’s top leadership. Nonethess, she has much of interest to say about both how to successfully help workers organize unions and negotiate good collective bargaining agreements and why most unions do neither.

Just as with Shotwell’s book, McAlevey’s account of her time with SEIU should be put into historical perspective. Founded in 1921, the Building Service Employees International Union (BSEIU) initially organized janitors, elevator operators, window washers, and doormen. It eventually began to organize other types of workers and to merge with other unions. In 1968, it became the SEIU, and since then it has continued to grow and to merge, most notably with a majority of the locals of the left-led hospital workers’ union, 1199. Today the SEIU is one of the largest labor organizations in the country, with about 1.8 million members. It is a major union in health care—where McAlevey did most of her SEIU work—with nurses, hospital staff persons, nursing home employees, and home health-care workers among its members.

The two persons most associated with SEIU’s rapid growth are John Sweeney and Andrew Stern. Sweeney led the large New York City local of SEIU, the often-corrupt Local 32BJ, and moved from there to the presidency of the national union, where he helped engineer the famous Justice for Janitors organizing drives. Not long after Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO in 1995, Stern was elected SEIU’s president.

Stern believed that only by raising union density, through organizing in a particular market, could a union gain enough power to improve the lives of its members and achieve enough political leverage to gain further improvements, for its members and the entire working class. However, other ideas of Stern undermined this model’s logic. Like most top union leaders, he was a proponent of labor-management partnership and an enemy of the strike. He said that strikes and class struggle were remnants of a bygone era; the modern union had to offer employers “added value,” that is, a bigger bottom line. As we saw with the UAW, such a philosophy ultimately weakens the union and stifles democracy.

As in the UAW, the SEIU’s partnership strategy faced internal resistance. And like the UAW, the SEIU is a one-party state, intolerant of internal rebellion. Stern demoted or fired those who opposed him and trusteed (took over) dissident locals. When one of the largest, most militant, and successful locals, California’s United Healthcare Workers (UHW), led by Sal Rosselli, was trusteed in January of 2009, SEIU’s UAW-like class-collaboration trajectory reached its logical conclusion. Rosselli was an Executive Board member, a great organizer, had work experience as a SEIU member, had helped workers win pacesetting wages, benefits, and working conditions, and was a strong advocate for patients in the hospitals his local had organized. However, in 2007–2008, he began to question SEIU’s partnership approach and to argue in favor of greater membership control over the national union through direct rank-and-file election of its top officers and board members, rather than the convention selection method used by SEIU that was more easily controlled by Stern. This won him Stern’s enmity. Rosselli then defied Stern further by bringing a platform of reforms and constitutional changes to the union’s convention in Puerto Rico in 2008. He ran as an independent for election to the Executive Board, but was defeated by the Stern slate. A few months later, Stern trusteed his local. Rosselli and his allies left the SEIU and formed a rival health-care workers’ union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). This organization has achieved considerable success, but it has faced unrelenting hostility from SEIU, which has spent millions of dollars filing lawsuits against NUHW and individual members of it, and has actively colluded with employers to defeat NUHW in certification elections.

Jane McAlevey’s account of her labor union work begins during the exciting early days of John Sweeney’s New Voice team, which took charge of the AFL-CIO in 1995. The new officers were committed to organizing, and the author tells us that she was tapped to help lead an innovative project in Stamford, Connecticut, one that would build union power by concentrating on what she calls in her book, “whole worker organizing.” Unions would aim to organize the “whole worker,” that is, not just in the workplace but in all of the institutions and structures that constitute working class life.

The major tool McAlevey used in Stamford, and in all of her organizing efforts, was the Power Structure Analysis (PSA). She describes the PSA as follows:

You identify the real power players in a given community or area, determine what the basis of their power is, and find out who their natural allies and opponents are. Based on that knowledge, you formulate a plan for enhancing the power of your allies and neutralizing that of your opponents.”\

The “quantitative phase” involved an “exhaustive study of demographics, voting trends, political donations and the like.” To this, she added “the qualitative phase,” an “equally exhausting pooling of the collective knowledge of our members….” The quantitative part of the PSA was conducted by professionals, hired by McAlevey, while the second was done by the members themselves.

Not only was the PSA important as a descriptive device, pinpointing who had power, but it also served as an educational tool. With it, McAlevey taught workers about power and showed them how to increase and use their own strength. In Stamford, the PSA-inspired mobilization of the members of the unions participating in the project succeeded in increasing union membership in the area, stopping the planned demolition of a large tract of public housing (where many union members lived), and winning millions of public dollars to improve that housing. And in nearly all of the places McAlevey worked in her ten years as an organizer, the PSA technique proved exceptionally useful: in identifying public housing as a key concern of workers in Stamford, in mobilizing support in Kansas City to stop the sale of a public hospital, in figuring out in several places which local politicians could be compelled to support her organizing efforts and which could be defeated in elections, and in how to pressure employers to meet bargaining demands.

Most of McAlevey’s organizing was done for the SEIU. She agreed to work for the SEIU because it had the money to make organizing possible, but she tells readers that the union was riven with “turf wars” waged by various powerful union chieftains, and that these hampered her efforts wherever she went.

McAlevey was an unusually talented organizer. So, even though she frequently ran afoul of union turf wars, she always managed to have powerful allies who sought out her skills. In 2004, she was appointed Executive Director of SEIU Local 1107 in Las Vegas. Her four years there were tumultuous. The Local had 9,000 members—some were county public employees and others worked at private and public hospitals—but many of the workers under contract were not in the union. The Local’s officers were not much concerned with organizing; finances were in disarray; contracts were expiring; some negotiations had stalled; prosperous private hospitals remained unorganized; and member morale was low.

McAlevey set about bringing 1107 to life and making it grow. She had considerable success. Her account of what she did, and why, makes for riveting reading and valuable “how to” lessons for organizers. It is what anthropologists call “thick description,” so detailed that the description itself becomes an analysis. How does an organizer identify the persons in each department of a workplace who are its natural leaders? How do you get them to lead the union, or in some cases, become union members? How do you meld the leaders into a coherent team? How do the leaders organize the workers? How do you prepare workers for inexorable employer antagonism? How do workers show the employer that they are not afraid? How does the union win allies politically and in the community who will help it defeat adversaries? How does an organizer negotiate the tensions that might exist between local and national union strategies? These and many other questions are effectively answered by the author as she tells readers what she and her allies did in “Sin City.” McAlevey’s ability to think and act creatively is graphically and humorously portrayed in her description of her first bargaining session with a large private hospital. Breaking with typical bargaining protocol, which limits the union negotiating team to a few members, she had scores of nurses at the bargaining table, with individual nurses making the initial union proposal to the flabbergasted management team. Not only was the employer thrown off guard, but the workers felt a sense of empowerment that carried over to future sessions.

The Las Vegas chapters of the book are exceptional in terms of the nuts and bolts of organizing and bargaining. In them, she conveys a message of utmost importance to those who want to rebuild the labor movement. Workers can be organized. They are willing to join unions in large numbers, even when they face hostile labor laws, brutal employer opposition, and considerable personal risks.

McAlevey’s work in Las Vegas was short-circuited, according to her, by the endless turf wars in SEIU. She says,

I operated on the assumption that, if you just kept winning in a principled way, the work you were doing would create the conditions for its own continued existence. The people at the top might not like you…but if you consistently succeeded at the assignments they gave you, ultimately they would give you more assignments and the work would go forward. I was wrong…. Past a certain point, winning actually becomes a liability, because the people at the top will feel threatened by the power you’re accumulating unless they can control it; they cannot imagine that your ambition would not be to use that power in the same way they use theirs. It took ten years of banging my head on a wall to finally knock that into it.

The militant local she had built was, in her view, just too much for Andy Stern, who was more interested in partnering with the employers against whom McAlevey was waging war. The pretext for her departure took place in 2007 when she faced charges by members of her local of illegally interfering with elections to the local’s Executive Board. She writes that she was unaware that she had violated any laws. She says that she was so burned out from the constant turf wars and several years of nonstop work that she was simply “off her game” and caught off guard. To keep the peace, she agreed to resign her post in June, 2008, as did the local’s president, who had been her long-time adversary.

While Raising Expectations contains much of interest, it contains critical flaws, problems as reflective of what is wrong with organized labor in the United States as are the intra-union power struggles and top-down governance criticized by the author.

For example, the author has a limited sense of history, of the truth that we all build on the efforts of those who came before us. Nothing that McAlevey did was new, but she often writes as if it was. She makes it appear that she invented Power Structure Analysis, at least its adaptation to labor organizing, when in fact such techniques have often been used by labor unions. Jerry Tucker did a sophisticated PSA in his 1978 defeat of a right-to-work initiative in Missouri, and in many other campaigns on which he worked. Similarly with “whole worker organizing,” she ignores a long history of union efforts to integrate workplace and community organizing. Packinghouse workers in the 1930s spread their organizing from the meatpacking plants into the workers’ communities, leading the drive to racially integrate local businesses. Unions have built hospitals and housing for their members. The UAW strongholds in Michigan and Ohio created entire “union towns,” in which victories in the factories translated into the creation of local working class democracies. This history escapes McAlevey, who gives the impression that every situation in which she finds herself is a tabula rasa, to be filled by her innovative strategy and tactics, always in the face of ignorant and recalcitrant labor leaders.

McAlevey also often fails to see that building a labor movement is a collective effort. She makes much of her isolation in the right-to-work state of Nevada. However, Las Vegas is not an isolated town in the nonunion South. It is home to a strong labor movement, with a vital and large union of culinary workers, and considerable political muscle. Furthermore, California, with strong unions facing the same employers she did, was just across the border. Private sector hospitals in California had been organized, with workers winning superior wages, benefits, working conditions, and patient protections. She would not have been able to win good contracts with the private hospital corporations in Las Vegas without the prior success of her California counterparts. Yet, she gives them no credit and seems to go out of her way to say that they did not help her at all, which, I have learned since reading her book, is not true.

Finally, a reasonable reader might question the depth of her commitment to rank-and-file workers. She frequently denigrated the Local’s officers, but instead of doing a PSA of the Local to find out how they could be won over to her vision, she illegally tried to overthrow them. She argues that a modern union needs a paid professional staff, presumably comprised of people like her, recruited from outside of the local union. But it seems not to have occurred to her that the rank-and-file members could be trained to be professionals, to do anything she could do, and with the advantage of having performed the work of the members they represented.

I was surprised to find out, again after reading the book, that despite all of her sharp and accurate criticisms of Stern and the SEIU leadership, she agreed to serve on the national union’s Executive Board in 2007; in fact, she was appointed by Stern. Then in 2008, she ran (and won), on Stern’s team, in Executive Board elections, after the SEIU had long since gone down the path of UAW-like partnership. How is it possible that you can be a champion of member empowerment and serve on the very executive body of a union that opposes it?

Conclusion

The trajectories of the UAW and the SEIU tell us something profoundly depressing about organized labor in the United States. Despite their radically different histories and recent growth rates, both unions embraced labor-management partnership with gusto, with the attendant autocratic leadership, member disempowerment, and limited gains from collective bargaining. How can this be? Consider something I once wrote:

The organizations workers form to combat their oppression will find it difficult to avoid being influenced by the hegemony capitalism seeks to impose over society. It has been the rule rather than the exception that labor unions become bureaucratic and conservative, even if they were radical in the beginning. The labor movement in the United States, for example, was an active participant in the anti-worker Cold War, purging and persecuting its left-led unions and radical union leaders. Unions in the rich capitalist countries have actively supported the imperialism of their nation’s businesses and governments. Unions around the world have been sexist, racist, and homophobic, dividing workers just as surely as have the employers they fight against.

Capitalism brings forth behaviors and modes of thought in its own image and likeness. We are forced to act in certain ways if we want to survive and prosper. But these cannot liberate us; they only help to recreate an oppressive system. Unions might raise wages, improve working conditions, and force governments to enact worker-friendly laws. These are good things, but they do not challenge the rule of capital. And if unions come to mirror their class enemy, they would not even be able to achieve these victories. If the UAW and the SEIU hold themselves up to a mirror today, the faces they see will be those of GM and Health Corporation of America.

And still, capital’s power is never absolute, and this is what gives us hope. The brutality of its rule always calls forth rebellion. Gregg Shotwell and Jane McAlevey show us two kinds of rebellion. Shotwell’s is rooted in the daily misery of his fellow workers. He expresses what they feel and helps make them conscious of the sources of their subjugation. His essays reflect their desire for escape from the bosses’ control and to democratically use what is rightfully theirs—the union they and their forebears sweated to create. When automobile laborers look at Greg Shotwell, they see themselves. When they read his words, they feel what he expresses. He is an organic intellectual, risen up from the ranks to give voice to his class.

Shotwell grasps that it is only through the power workers have in their workplaces that they can challenge capital. Work-to-rule is his preferred method of class struggle, but he is not averse to anything that might defeat the employers. Upon the intelligence and efforts of the Gregg Shotwells of the world, and with their leadership, a working class movement worthy of the name might yet be made, one that both the employers and their union junior partners will fear.

McAlevey’s rebellion, on the other hand, centers too much on herself. Her actions were not rooted in the daily work experiences of those she helped organize and whom she represented at the bargaining table. This was not just because she did not have such work experiences. She simply does not have a working class consciousness, a sense of herself as an interchangeable part of a collectivity. Her sensibility is essentially bourgeois—individualistic and narcissistic. Collective give-and-take, much less self-criticism, are not in her vocabulary. When workers see her, they do not see themselves, just her. In the end, capital and the union chieftains are not afraid of such people.

While these two books chronicle the specific experiences of two people in two unions, they contain the seeds of several general lessons for building a labor movement. First, unions as presently constituted are hostile to the attainment of class power. They are often nearly as much the enemy of workers as are employers. Second, people from outside of the working class can ally themselves with workers, but they cannot comprise the bulk of its leadership. Such persons cannot understand what it means to be a worker, to feel the stress and alienation of the assembly line, the hospital ward, the office cubicle. Unless they at least spend time laboring in such places, they are bound to be separated from those they lead. Third, the most important thing experts can do is teach workers to become experts. Workers must lead themselves, and there is no reason why they cannot learn whatever is necessary for them to do so. Fourth, a labor movement has to concern itself with every aspect of working class life: jobs, unemployment, community, politics, family, the environment. Fifth, while workers can be organized and unions can make their lives better, unless these efforts are part of an explicitly anti-capitalist project, victories will always be partial and temporary. Human liberation will never be at hand unless we strive for the abolition of the working class, for an end to wage labor, for a society in which the empowerment and improved circumstances of each is but a moment in the struggle for the collective betterment of all.

*This essay first appeared in the May 2013 issue of Monthly Review magazine.

The post Who Will Lead the U.S. Working Class appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

When we arrived at Cades Cove, we found ourselves on a one-way, eleven-mile loop road. We came upon some gorgeous open fields surrounded by mountains, and we stopped to photograph a small herd of deer. We wondered why these fields were here, fenced in and some burned, seemingly prepared for plowing. The scene looked too pristine, almost staged. Later we learned that, although no one still lives in the Cove, a few families pay a fee to the park for the privilege of doing some farming.

Something struck us as peculiar about this landscape. The usual policy of the National Park Service in the Smokies has been to let formerly farmed areas revert to nature, and we saw many examples in other parts of the park. Why wasn’t this the case in Cades Cove? We returned to our car and continued on the road, noticing signs along the way, directing motorists toward one or another old but restored structure: a cabin, a church, a cemetery, a grain mill. Apparently, nothing had been left in its original state.

We began to feel disappointed and angry. Cleared fields, “farmers” paying to till the soil, restored buildings? This was looking like a movie set. Traffic was picking up, and we envisioned a long, slow drive, our irritation rising as we passed more and more tourist venues. Fortunately, we came to the unpaved road that led to the Abrams Falls trailhead. We put on our backpacks and began to hike. Soon we were in our element. The trail overlooks a stream surpassing in its beauty, meandering its way to the falls. Along with other hikers, we enjoyed the wildflowers, singing birds, and the wonderful waterfall, which pours into a large and inviting pool. We talked to some hikers and for a couple of hours forgot about the loop road.

When we got back in our car again, traffic was much heavier and slower. At every homestead, church, and barn, tourists snapped pictures from their automobile windows. We got behind a car from Louisiana and moved at a crawl for more than an hour, the driver appearing to revel at the long line of vehicles behind him. I got so mad that I began to mumble that I ought to get out and douse him with bear spray. At last, the road ended, and we returned to the highway back to Gatlinburg, talking about what we had seen. I knew that I had to find out something about the history of Cades Cove, to discover how a town dies and becomes a tourist attraction.

Before white settlers came to the Cove, Cherokee Indians used it as a summer hunting ground, and a trail they traversed from North Carolina through Tennessee crossed the area. A series of treaties forced upon them by a U.S. government intent on increasing its territory and whites wanting access to land, compelled the Indians to relinquish their historic home, most of them eventually leaving under direct military command.

The first permanent white settlers arrived in 1818 and many more soon followed, attracted by the wide, relatively flat, valley, which had rich soil for farming, trees for buildings and heat, abundant water sources, and plentiful fish and game. It is, without doubt, a place of great beauty, surrounded by mountains and laced with clear, sparkling streams. By 1850, nearly 700 people called the Cove home. They farmed and produced nearly all of what they needed to live, trading for dry goods and other necessities in a nearby town.

Contrary to the stereotype we often have of mountain men and women, those who lived in Cades Cove were not primitive, isolated, backwoods hillbillies. They had a post office in 1833; roads connected them to the outside world by the 1850s; and telephone service began in the 1890s. They also knew about and participated in the national politics of the day. Most were strongly opposed to slavery, and abolitionist preachers often gave sermons in Cove churches. A stop on the Underground Railroad helped escaping slaves get to the North and freedom.

When the national park was being conceived in the late 1920s, the inhabitants of the Cove were told that their lands would not be part of it. Soon, however, the federal government reversed itself, and the residents were subjected to eviction by eminent domain. They strenuously fought against their displacement, but they ultimately lost. For many years, into the 1960s, they continued to use their churches, resisting the power of the National Park Service.

As we learned this, we were saddened by the knowledge that for more than one hundred years, people lived in Cades Cove, supporting themselves through their labors and developing a strong community. Then they were kicked out. Why was this necessary? The entire area comprises only about 2,000 of the park’s 500,000 acres, and it certainly was not essential for the park’s existence. The Cove’s farmers had deforested some of the land, but surely this problem could have been addressed without compelling them to leave.

We can’t know, of course, what would have happened to Cade’s Cove had it not become part of the national park. Maybe the landowners would have sold to developers. Maybe one or two of the most successful farmers would have bought ought the others, and these would have begun to mass produce chickens or hogs. But would these have been worse than creating a make-believe setting for tourists in cars, polluting the air as they drive bumper to bumper at five miles per hour?

Among the barns, houses, grain mills, and churches built by the residents of Cades Cove, the Park Service tore down the most modern ones, which were typical of the way the farmers were living in the 1920s and 1930s when they were forced out. Left were the oldest buildings, such as log cabins and primitive churches, which park employees maintain. Public funds are used to keep buildings in better shape now than they were when people lived there. What this means is that visitors are given a false impression of how the people of Cades Cove improved the ways in which they lived. We can’t help but believe that this was intentional. Tourists peer at the fields and restored buildings and think that they have a window onto the past, onto how these people lived an unchanging, primitive, but heroic life. The stuff of legends—and movies.

But this is a lie. What is missing are the things that matter most: the ups and downs of daily life in the Cove, the richness and sadness of life there, the skills the farm families developed, the zeal of their religious beliefs, the hardness of their bodies, the generosity of their spirits, and the fierceness with which they tried to keep their land. These have been lost, and we are the poorer for it.

What the Park Service has done at Cades Cove is idealize and falsify the past. What lessons can we take from such a whitewashing of our heritage? It would have been better had the government simply allowed every structure to decay and every field to become full of tall trees. The progeny of the pioneers would still have returned to plant flowers on the old gravestones, and we could have wondered what life was like those many years ago.

The post Cades Cove: History Is So Much Fun! appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

 Bruce Williams was my best friend for nearly all the years I was a teacher. Although he wasn’t happy when I told him I was retiring, I knew that we would keep in close contact from wherever I traveled.  Then, suddenly and sadly, he died, twelve years ago, on March 27, 2001. For awhile afterward, Karen and I would have an adventure or meet an interesting person, and I would say to myself, “I’ll have to remember to tell Bruce about this.” Then I’d remember he was dead. I still think sometimes, “I bet Bruce would appreciate this.” So much has happened to both of our families since that day. His son got married. His daughter, my goddaughter, has a new life in San Francisco. His wife survived a terrible illness. Karen and I have a granddaughter. Life goes on, as they say. Sometimes I wish it didn’t. That we could all be forever young.

Here is the eulogy I gave for Bruce’s memorial at the college, held a few weeks after his death. Bruce, I hope you are still resting in peace.

I could tell you a hundred anecdotes and stories about Bruce. I have known him for 31 years. He was my first adult friend, and there was a time when we spoke on the telephone almost every day.  We played basketball nearly every day for 25 years; we spent innumerable nights in local taverns; I spent many evenings in his home; and I even lived with his family for awhile. Here at UPJ [University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown] we were so close that for a long time, people spoke of us in the plural. “Bruce and Mike,” “Mike and Bruce.”  “What are they up to?” Our late Division Chairman, Bob Hunter, once said to us that we were always “stirring up the pot.” Yes, indeed, we were, and many a tale could be told of our doings on campus.

But I don’t want to tell stories. A man’s life is a serious thing, and his death is more serious still.  So I want to take the few minutes allotted to me to say why Bruce was important – to me personally, to UPJ, to the local community, and to the world at large. We all know that Bruce was a famously social person. He did not very much like to be alone. Once we went to an early Saturday morning breakfast at the old Topp’s Diner on Scalp Avenue.  Bruce had been working in a coal mine in Barnesboro, doing fieldwork for his dissertation. His family was away, and he missed them.  I am sure he did not want to go home to be alone in his big house in the Eighth Ward of town. So after breakfast, he looked at me and said, “What do you want to do now?” I was taken aback. I was used to being alone, and I went to my office every Saturday morning to work. I said, “Jeez, Bruce, I have lots of things to do. Maybe we can get together tonight.” I am sure he went home and called someone else.

This event amused me and showed me that we were very different persons. But over the years I came to see that Bruce’s need to be with people was more than just his not wanting to be alone.  Because if anything is true about Bruce, he was not an adherent of the creed of individualism held by so many people in this society. In fact, he believed, as do I, that such a philosophy is pernicious and the source of much that is wrong with us. What Bruce did believe was that each of us is born into and lives within a complex set of social relationships. We are, by our very nature, social beings, and this is to be embraced as the essential part of our humanity. It is the job of the social scientist to unravel the complexity of our social relationships, to comprehend them and lay them bare for us to see and comprehend in turn. This, I think, Bruce tried to do. What made him good at this was precisely his own sociableness. For it is not possible to grasp society unless you live and act in it, not as a distant observer but a full participant.

Now if a person lives fully in society and at the same time tries to uncover the mysteries of our social relationships, this is a fine thing and much to be commended. And if Bruce had done nothing more than this, he would deserve great praise. However, Bruce took things a step further, and this is where he really stands out. He came to see that our social relationships include a large number that are marked by a thoroughly repugnant inequality. He saw the worst of these in Africa – in Malawi, South Africa, Chad, and the Central African Republic. He saw many in the United States, among the Samoans in San Francisco, among the working people of Johnstown (especially in the Black community, which has experienced an outrageous racism), and yes, here at UPJ too. Of course, you might say, “Well, that is fine, but a lot of people know about inequality.” I might respond that a lot fewer people than one might think are aware of these things. What is even rarer, though, is a willingness to do something about it. Bruce not only understood the fundamental inequalities rooted deep within society, he also had the courage to struggle against them. He did what he could to help the downtrodden personally, as when he took Titchinonga Zishiri, from Zimbabwe, into his home and enrolled him at UPJ. More importantly he fought collectively with his friends and allies to see to it that justice was done, which in the end meant to participate in and lead the struggle against the powers that be. What I admired about Bruce was the fact that he was not afraid to stand up to those who had power and to fight to achieve some power for those who had little of it. For years now I have heard faculty say that they can not speak out until they get tenure. Well, Bruce helped to lead a union movement here when he was still an instructor.

The hardest thing in the world to do is to speak truth to power. Bruce did this early on and often.  At UPJ, in the local community, and in the world at large, people like this are so badly needed.  Bruce was such a person, and we have lost a great deal by his death.

I want to conclude with part of what is a sermon by the poet and minister John Donne. I think it captures, at least in part, Bruce’s spirit:

No man is an island, entire of itself;

every man is a piece of the Continent,

a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by

the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am

involved in mankind. And therefore never ask for

whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The post Bruce and Mike appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

Monthly Review Press is proud of the books we have published on Venezuela, books which describe, analyze, and show solidarity with Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, its road to democratic socialism. A key element in building a revolutionary, new society is to ensure the health of the people. This has been one of Chávez’s singular achievements; millions of poor Venezuelans have received (free) medical care for the first time. In cooperation with Cuba, Venezuela has begun to construct a system of patient-centered, decentralized, and preventive health care, a process examined in Steve Brouwer’s Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba Are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care. Remarkably, peasants and workers are themselves trained to be doctors, in a work and study program pioneered by Cuba.

Under Chávez, Venezuela has striven to secure its political and economic independence from the United States, which has had a sordid history of intervention in the country and in all of Latin America, overthrowing democratic governments, occupying countries, and participating in assassinations of popular leaders. Not only did he help to engineer a strong economy not dependent on the United States, but he never hesitated to challenge with words and deeds its imperialist practices. Given the implacable hostility of the United States to Venezuela, examined with great care by Eva Golinger in Bush versus Chávez Washington’s War on Venezuela, it is remarkable that Chávez remained in power, winning democratic elections and surviving a Bush-engineered coup, This is a testament to the depth of his revolution and the growing power of Latin American governments to steer a course independent of the United States, a power inspired by Venezuela. Right after the April 2002 failed coup, when massive popular protest propelled him back to the presidency, Chávez sat down with Marta Harnecker and provided insights into his own political trajectory and the nature of what he called “socialism for the twenty-first century.” His words were published by us in Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution.

The Press has other connections to Chávez and Venezuela. Economist Michael Lebowitz lived in Venezuela after his retirement and helped to build the organizations of popular power that the government encouraged and which the people demanded. Lebowitz’s pathbreaking studies of revolutionary change, Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” each published by Monthly Review Press, were all deeply influenced by his experiences in Venezuela. In an interview he gave in Croatia in November, 2012, about a month after Chávez was elected to a fourth term as president, Lebowitz discussed the elements of popular power that he wrote about in his books:

I’m describing, in particular, the development of the communal councils, institutions at the local neighborhood level in which people have the power to deal with problems that affect their own communities. These communal councils come together to form communes to deal with larger problems.

This is a process that has been described by Chavez as one of creating the cells of a new socialist state. As well, there is a process of development of workers’ councils. Here again it is a process of transforming people, of creating the conditions in which they are able to develop all their capacities. In particular, the Bolivarian Revolution has been creating people with a sense of dignity and pride.

Perhaps no Monthly Review Press author had a closer connection to Hugo Chávez than did  Marxist philosopher, István Mészáros. Not only was Mészáros among the first to recognize Chávez and his Bolivarian revolution as of the greatest importance for radical social transformation, but the president, himself, was an avid reader of the philosopher’s works, most notably Beyond Capital, published in 1995, and which he considered to offer the way forward toward a new society. He called Mészáros the “Pathfinder of Socialism,” and in 2009, presented him with the  Libertador (Bolívar) Award for Critical Thought. The influence that Mészáros had on Chávez tells us at the Press that we have done good work.

While Monthly Review Press must sell books to remain in operation, our main purpose has always been to promote radical thought and action. And not just in the United States but in all the world. We have published books in which authors have expressed the deepest admiration for Hugo Chávez, but praise for a radical leader is never our goal; it is the empowerment of the masses of workers and peasants we want to help achieve. And yet, it must be said that our love for Chávez has been amply repaid.

On Saturday, April 2009, at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad, Chávez arose from his seat, walked over to where Barack Obama was seated and handed him a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s classic work of the centuries-long exploitation of  Latin America by the great imperialist nations, including, of course, the United States—Open Veins of Latin America. He inscribed the book, “For Obama, with affection.” As word of this spread around the world, sales of the book, the English edition of which we published, skyrocketed, reaching Number 2 on Amazon’s sales charts. This was a great boon to Monthly Review Press and to our distributor, NYU Press. We were inundated with emails and phone calls, and I remember having to quickly re-read the book (which I had used in my classes when I was a teacher), so that I could write and deliver, within one day, a review to an Australian magazine.

Let us hope that as the Venezuelan revolution continues and as the imperial power of the United States someday diminishes in response to popular revolt here, it won’t be necessary for the president of one country to give such a book to the leader of another. Because Hugo Chávez’s dream and that of every revolutionary person will have been realized. That there be no rich and poor, that there be no exploiter and exploited, that there be only one healthy and happy humanity.

*A shorter version of this essay appeared at http://www.fromthesquare.org/?p=4500

The post Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian Revolution, and Monthly Review Press appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

Every slogan has a context, circumstances that give rise to the words and make them effective. For example, when the Chinese communists were waging their long struggle against the army of Chiang Kai-shek, they relied upon mass support from peasants, who formed the base of the Red Army. China was still a largely feudal society, and peasants were brutally exploited by rich landlords. Those who worked the land wanted it, and the communists promised to give it to them. “Land to the Tillers” expressed this desire and the Party’s commitment to it. Even today, after decades of capitalist restoration, China’s rural people still have land rights won in revolutionary struggle.

The catchphrases of political upheaval are always somewhat vague. In China, there were the farmers who tilled the soil and the landlords who owned it. However, both classes included people of varying economic means. There were small, medium, and large landholders. Not all peasants lived in squalor and destitution. Yet, all landlords tended to be lumped together, and all of their land was fair game for expropriation.

The imprecise nature of political slogans is a virtue. Actual political programs do not derive from words alone but from the balance of class forces that exist at a particular point in time. What slogans do is clarify the most basic political cleavages; they help people develop the mindset most suited to active participation in whatever struggles are at hand. In China, “land to the tiller” said that those who worked the land should possess it; those who owned but did not till, should not. That some both owned and tilled did not and should not have mattered. Such complexities would have to be dealt with later, when a new constellation of class forces had come into being.

The worldwide Occupy movement that erupted in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in September 2011 took as its watchwords, “We are the 99 %.” These words resonated with large masses of people as few others have in a long while. To understand why, it’s important to look at the context that generated the slogan.

“We are the 99%” derived its power from the devastation experienced by so many people during the Great Recession that erupted in December of 2007. The roots of this economic crisis go back to the mid-1970s, when an employer-led attack upon the working class began in response to lower corporate profit margins, the result of the declining global economic dominance of the United States. U.S. businesses faced strong economic competitors in Japan and Europe; the costs of the War in Vietnam were generating inflation and higher wages; and the brisk demand for U.S. capital goods diminished as the rest of the world completed post-Second World War reconstruction.

A weakened and class-collaborationist labor movement accommodated a rapid victory by capital, in what we typically call neoliberalism: a political project that included the deregulation of finance, privatization of public services, elimination and curtailment of social welfare programs, open attacks on unions, and routine violations of labor laws. These left working people with lower wages, less generous benefits, and growing insecurity.

The deregulation of capital markets gave rise to a host of new financial instruments, which grew by leaps and bounds as cash-strapped workers began to go into debt by borrowing against their houses and maxing out their credit cards. All of this generated growing income and wealth inequality; raised the financial sector to the commanding heights of the economy; and made production more vulnerable to financial crisis. The Great Recession was the product of the interaction of these three factors, and it generated a scale of worldwide misery not seen since the 1930s. While the downturn officially ended in June 2009, much of the working class is still mired in debt, employed in low wage/ no benefit jobs, either unemployed or fearful of job loss, and not very hopeful about the future.

While there were periodic protests against neoliberalism, it was not until the Great Recession that these broke out into mass struggle. This first emerged in the Arab Spring, but it soon spread to the entire world, from Spain to China and from Canada to Chile. In the United States, the Wisconsin Uprising of early 2011, led by public employees, inspired workers across the country, demonstrating that when pushed hard enough, in the right circumstances the working class would revolt and do things no one had imagined possible. Then, within a year of this, OWS erupted. Young people, led mainly by anarchists, took over Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan and waged protests against one of the greatest symbol of the 1%—Wall Street. When the police began to suppress the dissent, thousands of Occupy supporters descended upon the center of finance. Soon amazing displays of cooperative action and self-education deepened the struggle.

As the OWS phenomenon spread to cities and towns in the United States and then the world, the objects of the protestors’ scorn and anger increased geometrically—all those who oppressed the 99%: police, bankers, landlords, employers, universities, politicians, the media, and the military. In response, the powers that be began a coordinated campaign to slander and suppress what had the potential to disrupt both production and commerce. Ultimately, OWS encampments were closed, mainly by police force, but OWS-inspired struggles live on, and the memory of what happened is very much alive.

Critics of OWS and “We are the 99%” say that the slogan is inaccurate. I disagree. It is true that there are well-to-do people in the 99%, and there are many in the 1% who are not that rich. The cutoff yearly household income for the 1% varies, ranging from $380,000 using the Census definition of income to nearly double that using that of the Federal Reserve, which includes capital gains. In some parts of the country, $380,000 would qualify a household as rich, while in others it would not. The flip side of this is that there are many people in the 99% who are not poor. There is a big difference between an income of $379,000 (just below the Census 1% cutoff) and $20,000, the cutoff for the poorest 20 percent of households.

We could argue as well that using income to divide the 99% and the 1% is inaccurate because what matters most is wealth. Ownership of stocks, bonds, real estate, unincorporated businesses, and the like is much more skewed than income, and it is at the top of the wealth distribution that economic and political power reside. The richest 1% of households now own an astonishing 42.4 percent of net financial assets (these exclude homes and mortgage debt).

But these arguments about the accuracy of the slogan miss the point. “We are the 99%” suggests an “us versus them” politics that foreshadows the class perspective so badly needed in the United States. Those who feel unfairly maligned because, although their incomes are high, they are not rich are free to ally themselves with their poorer brethren. And those who are objectively poor are done no harm by being lumped together with those whose incomes are higher. What the slogan does is help nurture a worldview that understands that not only is inequality out of control but that the position of the 1% comes at the expense of the rest of us. To invert and paraphrase the words of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, “their triumph is our agony.” We can build upon this to create a politics that transcends the populism that passes for radicalism in the United States.

The issue here is not the literal meaning of the “1%,” but power. Whether we speak of income or wealth, power resides in the households of the 1%. They own our workplaces and control our labor. They construct nearly every aspect of society—government, media, schools, culture—to maintain and increase their dominance over us. What the slogan, “We are the 99%,” has done is bring power into the open and help change the political landscape.

Another criticism of “We are the 99%” argues that it implies a liberal politics of income redistribution and not a critique of capitalism. However, this ignores how OWS took shape. Public spaces were occupied; clashes with police ensued immediately; diverse discussions and debates took place; the movement spread rapidly across the nation and then the world; and millions of people were energized and made to feel part of something of great importance. Open air classrooms scrutinized critical issues. People learned that they could make decisions and effectively organize daily life. Those camped out in Zuccotti secured food and shelter, took care of sanitation, and solved complex problems of logistics every day.

These actions, combined with the anarchist and youthful sensibility and leadership of so much of OWS, gave rise to the posing of fundamental questions. What is democracy? Why don’t we have it? How do we dispense with ubiquitous hierarchies? Why is there so little solidarity, compassion, love? Why aren’t there enough jobs? Why is work so meaningless? Why do we devote so much of our lives to it? Why are we obsessed with making money and consuming things? Why are we destroying the environment that sustains us? Why does our government wage war against ordinary people, the 99%, all over the globe? These questions cannot be answered and the issues they raise resolved by more progressive taxes or a few expanded social welfare programs.

Our collective future is grim. Under our current political economic system, none of our major problems can be solved. Insecurity, inequality, and environmental destruction will get worse unless we take radical actions, repeatedly, for as long as necessary. OWS and “We are the 99%” were, and continue to be, ingenious interventions in what promises to be an era of growing class struggles. Other slogans will supplement “We are the 99%,” but I hope that the idea that “we are the many, they are the few” remains foremost in our minds as we combat our class enemies.

*This essay was published on counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/27/occupy-wall-street-and-the-significance-of-political-slogans/  A different version of the argument appeared in the Winter 2013 issue of New Labor Forum.

The post OWS and the Importance of Political Slogans appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

In every industry in the United States, there are more people seeking employment than jobs available. Conservatives and liberals alike say we have to put men and women to work. They differ in how they would achieve this, but both shout out the mantra, “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Little is ever said about the kinds of jobs that need to be created. What will they pay? Will they provide benefits? Will they be interesting, safe, fulfilling, socially useful?

Perhaps the reason we don’t ask such questions is that we take our work for granted, beyond our control and as inevitable as the rising sun. But looked at in the long sweep of human existence, the jobs we do and the way we do them are unlike anything we did before the rise of capitalism.

For most of our time on earth, we both conceptualized our labors and performed them. There was no separate group that figured out what we should do and then ordered us to do it. All work was skilled, and the pace and location of it were determined by us. No sharp distinctions were made between work and other social activities. It is true that with class societies such as slavery and feudalism, we were severely exploited, but even in them the unity of conception and execution remained mainly intact. To the extent that wages were paid, they were set by custom and tradition and not by an impersonal market. Unemployment was unknown because we were tied directly to the land and tools that, with our labors, gave us sustenance.

Once capitalism entered the world stage, the jobs we performed and the work we did underwent profound changes. The connections we had to the land were torn asunder, and we became radically “free,” free of what allowed us to live. To survive, we were forced to become wage laborers.  In capitalism our capacity to work thus became a commodity, something bought and sold. The buyers, our employers, owned this capacity just as they owned the buildings, and like any privately owned property, the owners were legally free to use our labor power as they saw fit.

Our bosses, themselves hired managers, had one goal—to see to it that their companies made as much money as possible. Then the capitalists took the profits and expanded their businesses. To make these things happen, they did whatever they could to convert as much of our labor power as possible into actual work effort. This, in turn, dictated that our employers control the way we did our jobs as tightly as possible. No matter what goods and services we produced, we could not be allowed to interfere with the smooth flow of labor, tools, land, and materials into saleable commodities.

Capitalists have employed a variety of “control mechanisms” to accomplish their goals. They  herded us into factories, so that they could watch us and make sure we worked with due diligence for as long as possible each day. Factory whistles told us when to begin and when to end our daily labors; failure to obey their commanding sounds resulted in us being disciplined or fired. The managers who observed us discovered that we divided our tasks into simpler details, to make our efforts more efficient. Why not, they reasoned, assign different workers to each detail, and in this way economize on skilled labor and lower the overall cost of producing a pair of shoes, a straight pin, or a piece of meat. When they had to, they hired women and children to do the least skilled jobs; they got the kids from orphanages when we wouldn’t send our children into the dark, satanic mills.

Repetitive detail work lent itself to the introduction of machinery. Soon series of mechanically connected machines were  configured into assembly lines. These controlled more completely the pace and intensity of our work. In Karl Marx’s famous words, we became “appendages to the machines.”

Once these basic mechanisms were employed, industrial engineers and scientists systematized everything, and control became ever more refined and insidious. The process was complicated, but the thrust of it was simple. The engineers studied our motions and how long it took us to make each one. They then reorganized these to minimize both, demanding that we carry out each job’s motions and times according to their specifications. Or else. They began to recruit us systematically, with batteries of tests and interviews, so that those of us hired were best suited to take orders and labor as we were told. The bosses instituted “team production,” so that, in military fashion, we were inculcated with a sense of duty to our team members and not to the working class. Our jobs were continuously stressed—by speeding up the assembly line, reducing the number of members in our teams, denying us materials. Then they pressured us to figure out how to get production back up to standard. We soon learned that there would never be relief from the stress.

The great capitalists organized the markets in which we toiled  so that core firms—automobile manufacturing plants, for example—were surrounded by parts supplier plants—such as those producing automobile steering assemblies. The supplier companies delivered the parts “just-in-time,” that is, only when needed by the core companies, thus saving money on inventories, storage space, and, most importantly, our labor. Employers also used modern electronic technology and the enormous pool of underutilized labor worldwide to offshore and outsource as much production as possible to places with lower wages. They used their tremendous political power to get governments  to do their bidding: through laws, subsidies, tax breaks, and austerity measures that raised our economic insecurity.

It might be argued that tight managerial control was the price we had to pay for decent wages, benefits, and a modicum of security. Unfortunately, the bargain was a false one. In this richest of countries, nearly 28 percent of all jobs pay a wage that, with full-time, year-round work, would not support a family of four at the meager official poverty level of income ($23,021 in 2011). Wages have stagnated in terms of purchasing power for the past forty years; for production and nonsupervisory private sector workers they are barely higher today than in 1973. Fewer and fewer of us have pensions other than social security, which itself has become less generous. The same can be said for health care, paid vacations and holidays, and paid leaves, none of which are legally mandated. Unemployment and part-time work threaten all of us, and insufficient employment is made more likely both by the control mechanisms described above (for example, the job displacement effects of mechanization and outsourcing) and the greater likelihood of financial meltdowns in the global economy. Except when the federal government extends the coverage of the unemployment insurance system, fewer than half of us even qualify for benefits.

We have resisted control when we could. But whether we did or not, our work became ever more controlled and stressful. On the automobile assembly line, workers labor fifty-seven seconds out of every minute. At a Nabisco plant in California, employees had to wear Depends diapers because there were no mandatory breaks. Hotel room attendants have to clean more than twenty-five rooms a day. At a Walmart in Alabama, a supervisor punished some infractions by his team by making them have a thirty-minute meeting in the freezer. In the booming North Dakota oil and gas fields, workers suffer “burns from hot water,” “hands and fingers crushed by steel tongs,” and “injuries from chains that have whipsawed them off their feet.” Pick a workplace, any workplace: call centers, chicken processing plants, grocery stores, hospitals, colleges. A litany of horrors awaits us there. Our bodies and minds are ever more the worse for wear because we work. We are all, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, caught in the tentacles of mechanisms beyond our control.

A recent Facebook post gives us a remarkable insight into work life today. When the phrase “work makes me . . .” was made the subject of a Google search, here are some of the words Google put forward as the most common endings to this phrase:

depressed

suicidal

nervous

feel sick

ill

anxious

tired

unhappy

sick

cry

Where is “joyous,” “happy,” “feel socially useful,” “human,” “more physically and mentally developed.” We can’t imagine such endings. What an indictment of that which should be an integral part of our lives, something that gives us worth and shines a light most brightly on the essence of our humanity.

* This essay was first published in counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/01/the-perils-of-work/

The post Why Is Our Work So Meaningless? appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

Episode 7, which is mainly about the War in Vietnam (or the Second Indochina War as it is also called), riveted me to the screen. Stone atones for whatever guilt he has felt about being a soldier in Vietnam by laying out the horrors of the war, the sheer murderous violence of it, in vivid detail. I came of political age in those years, and I got angry all over again watching the bombs and defoliants falling, the victims screaming, and the politicians and generals lying. It will be a joyous day when that master liar and war criminal Henry Kissinger dies and joins his cohorts in mass slaughter, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. His name should become a synonym for murderer.

The carnage brought to Southeast Asia by the United States is mind-boggling, as Stone and Kuznick document:

*nearly four million Vietnamese killed.
*more bombs dropped on Vietnam than by all sides in all previous wars throughout history, and three times more     dropped than by all sides in the Second World War.
*19,000,000 gallons of herbicide poisoned the land.
*9,000 of 15,000 hamlets destroyed in the South of Vietnam.
*In the North, all six industrial cities devastated; 28 of 30 provincial towns and 96 of 116 district towns leveled by bombing.
*The United States threatened to use nuclear weapons thirteen times. Nixon chided Kissinger for being too squeamish about this. Nixon said he, himself, just didn’t give a damn.
*After the war, unexploded bombs and mines permeated the landscape and took an additional 42,000 lives. Millions of acres of land have still not been cleared of live ordnance.
*Agent Orange and other defoliants have caused severe health problems for millions of Vietnamese.
*Nearly all of Vietnam’s triple canopy forests were destroyed.
*3,000,000 tons of ordnance struck 100,000 sites during the “secret” war in Cambodia, causing widespread social dislocation, destruction of crops, and starvation. The U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia was directly responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot and the genocide that took place afterward (The United States actually sided with Pol Pot when Vietnamese troops finally ended his reign of terror). Stone and Kuznick quote a Khmer Rouge officer:

“Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched. . . . The ordinary people sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them. . . . Sometimes the bombs fell and hit little children, and their fathers would be all for the Khmer Rouge.”

*2,756,941 tons of ordnance dropped in Laos on 113,716 sites. Much of the Laotian landscape was blown to bits.

At a news conference in 1977, in response to a reporter’s question asking if the United States had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, President Jimmy Carter infamously replied:

The destruction was mutual. We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people. I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.

Mutual? Carter’s statement reflects both the arrogance of power and a vulgar sense of imperial righteousness. There were 58,000 U.S. soldiers killed during the war, and 300,000-plus wounded, and plenty of mental and physical illness, suicides, broken families, and other kinds of distress. Stone nicely captures all of this with a statement made to a journalist by a mother whose son was at My Lai, “I gave them a good boy, and they sent me back a murderer.” But whatever happened here, it pales in comparison to what took place there. There was no mutuality whatsoever, and it is obscene to say there was. What the United States did in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos ranks with the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. If the peoples of Southeast Asia had done to us what we did to them, and the same share of our population was killed as in Vietnam, the Vietnam Memorial wall would have about 20,000,000 names on it.

Our political rulers have continued ever since 1975, when the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front militarily liberated their country, to not just erase the horrors of Vietnam from public memory but to paint the war as what President Reagan called “a noble cause.” Since he took office, President Obama, an admirer of Reagan, has gone further than any president to do this, attempting to perpetrate another U.S. atrocity, albeit in another form than war, by proclaiming the “Vietnam War Commemoration.” The 2008 National Defense Authorization Act empowered the Secretary of Defense to organize events to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the War in Vietnam. A thirteen-year commemoration is envisioned, from Memorial Day 2012 until November 11, 2025.

In his Proclamation urging us all to participate in what amounts to an orgy of self-congratulations and forgetfulness, President Obama said,

As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away from everything they knew and everyone they loved. From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.

This made me want to cry. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese suspected of being insurgents or sympathizers assassinated in the CIA’s Phoenix Program; the forcible removal of more than five million villagers from their homes into “Strategic Hamlets”; political prisoners jailed and tortured in “tiger cages”; the intentional bombing of North Vietnamese dikes and hospitals; the murder of some 500 women, babies, children, and old people (many were first raped and later butchered) by GIs at My Lai. What kind of valorous efforts were these? What kind of grand ideals did these embody?

The Secretary of Defense is to organize all of the Commemoration’s programs to satisfy these objectives:

1. To thank and honor veterans of the Vietnam War, including personnel who were held as prisoners of war (POW), or listed as missing in action (MIA), for their service and sacrifice on behalf of the United States and to thank and honor the families of these veterans.

2. To highlight the service of the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War and the contributions of Federal agencies and governmental and non-governmental organizations that served with, or in support of, the Armed Forces.

3. To pay tribute to the contributions made on the home front by the people of the United States during the Vietnam War.

4. To highlight the advances in technology, science, and medicine related to military research conducted during the Vietnam War.

5. To recognize the contributions and sacrifices made by the allies of the United States during the Vietnam War.

These are all awful, but the fourth one would make the Nazis proud.

The current chairman of the Commemoration is former Nebraska Senator and Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel. He is also under consideration to become the next Secretary of Defense. If he does, he’ll become the chief organizer of everything connected with it. Some progressives claim that Hagel will be a rare voice of reason and decency at the top of the U.S. killing machine. But how reasonable and decent can a man be who would agree to chair this trunkful of lies?

I hope that radicals will do what they can to counter this celebration of atrocities. Monthly Review magazine, with which I am affiliated, will be running a series of essays from our archives, as well as newly written contributions, on the war. The first of these was published in November, 2012, a wonderful review of Oliver Stone’s film, Platoon, by former Marine Leo Cawley, who was poisoned by Agent Orange and died too young from its effects. It’s a good antidote to the most recent attempt to rewrite the history of the war in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War should never be forgotten. It was a stain on our country and on humanity itself. To glorify it is an ignominious crime. We should instead honor the Vietnamese people, who fought more valiantly and suffered more for their liberation from foreign rule than we ever did for our own.

*This essay first appeared in counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/10/oliver-stone-obama-and-the-war-in-vietnam/

The post Oliver Stone, Obama, and the War in Vietnam appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

I didn’t like wearing old garments, but lots of other kids wore them so there was no shame in it. Besides, I spent my days playing baseball, reading dime novels and comic books, building my train set, and inventing games connected in one way or another to sports. Who cared about old flannel shirts with two pockets and pants that didn’t quite match the size and shape of my legs?

Things changed when puberty reared its strange and disconcerting head, somewhere between the age of twelve and thirteen. All of a sudden, what hadn’t mattered before did now. Girls, cars, clothes. Games and toy trains didn’t seem to hold my attention like they used to.

At my parents’ urging, I got a job delivering newspapers. The route was large, 105 customers spread out over more than three miles. The weight of the papers carved grooves in my shoulders, especially on Thursdays when advertisement inserts nearly doubled the size of the bundles Old Man Nelson delivered to our front porch every afternoon. The pay was a meager $6 every two weeks. It was so low and the work so hard that within a short time, I confronted my bosses at the local newsstand and insisted on a raise. The boy who had taught me the route was now in college, and I figured that they wouldn’t be able to teach anyone else since only I knew it. Remarkably, they met my demand, boosting my wages to $9.80.

Most of my pay went straight into a bank account, to help finance part of the college education it was assumed I’d get someday. Mom and dad also hired me out to neighbors to mow their lawns. They must have figured that if I was willing to lug those heavy paper sacks around the nearby hillsides for two to three hours six days a week, there might be no end to my ambition, to my desire to make an honest living by the sweat of my brow.

I didn’t relish my labors. But I did enjoy having money. I spent what I was allowed to keep at the bowling alley, on a baseball glove, and on two brand new Arrow shirts. Shirts made of cotton, with one pocket. Button-down shirts! Five dollars each. When I wore the green one to high school that fall of 1959, I felt just like everyone else. Maybe better, especially when the pretty girl who sat behind me in Latin class said she liked it. I had a crush on her that entire year.

Clothing ads in magazines soon became an obsession. Arrow and Van Heusen shirts, or better yet, Hathaways and Manhattans. And the holy grail—a striped shirt from Brooks Brothers. One of these, with a pair of Florsheim penny loafers, well, that would have been paradise. If clothes made the man, then I wanted to be swathed in fine fabrics.

Except for the girl in Latin class, not much went well that first year in high school. For a month, two guys beat me up every day after Science class. I didn’t make the Freshman basketball team. It was confusing to keep changing rooms for each class. I was the youngest guy in ninth grade, and that didn’t help my self-confidence. I found myself longing for the weekends. In November, I couldn’t wait for Thanksgiving and then the wonderfully long break for Christmas.

When you’re young, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas seems an eternity. As the days ticked slowly by, I started looking for where my parents hid our presents. I begged my mother to let me open one early, but she wouldn’t give in. I was hoping for, aching for, some new clothes. Tapered shirts, chino pants, a nice pair of gloves, maybe those penny loafers. No doubt my parents had noticed that I was no longer a kid. I had a job. My voice was changing, and my chubby body had grown lean and strong. I wasn’t a man, but I wasn’t a child either. Surely they saw that I had outgrown the gifts you’d give a boy.

There were four children in the house then, two sisters, a brother, and me. We opened our presents on Christmas morning, which usually began about 3:00 AM, with us trying to sneak down the stairs and Mom ordering us back to bed. She’d always relent about 5:00, and we’d make a beeline for the living room and start to rip the wrapping paper and ribbons from our packages, arrayed in four piles under the tree.

As I surveyed my booty, my heart sank. The size of the boxes wasn’t right; too big or too small for those things I wanted so badly. I opened them in a daze, trying to keep a smile on my face. A couple of dumb board games, a plastic model kit of an aircraft carrier, and in the biggest box a set of plastic bowling pins and two balls. What? For a thirteen-year old? This was a game for a small child, not a teenager. What a stupid Christmas. I pretended to be happy and thanked Mom and Dad for everything. But I quickly put that bowling set in the cellar, lest the relatives who would soon enough be visiting saw them. I spent the next couple of days in a state of anxiety, worrying that I would be forced to show someone my childish presents. For a change, I was grateful that my mother always took down the decorations and the tree a few days after Christmas and soon had the house looking like the holidays had never come.

I am glad now that I didn’t let my parents see my disappointment. I was embarrassed to get those presents, and I never told my friends what they were. But I put that model aircraft carrier together and displayed it proudly on my bedroom desk. I was pleased to show it to my uncle, who had been a cook on just such a ship during the Korean War. As for that silly bowling game, I wore out the plastic balls and pins practicing in the cellar. It was as much fun as the imaginary baseball games I had invented, and I know it improved my bowling considerably. My parents must have been annoyed at all the noise I made, but what could they say? They’d bought it for me! And surprisingly, my infatuation with clothes soon ended. I spent the money I managed to keep out of that bank account on pizzas and hot sausage sandwiches downtown, and on baseball and bowling gear. I didn’t buy another shirt until the summer before I left for college. I wore plenty more hand-me-downs. My only sports coat, the one in my high school yearbook photo, came from that next door neighbor, as did the clip-on tie.

I’ve thought about that Christmas many times. When I had kids and didn’t want them to grow up so fast, I gained a new appreciation for the perils of parenthood. How can you guide your children and please them at the same time? How can you relinquish the joys you feel when they are young, and innocent of the bittersweet things the world has in store for them? You can’t. There is a song I like by Loudon Wainwright III titled “Your Mother and I.” A father is talking to his son, trying to explain his divorce. The last line is something I try to remember. I think it’s true for most of us. “Your parents are people and that’s all they can be.”

The post My Christmas Story (for Tatiana) appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

Petroglyphs are designs incised onto the rocks, and they are both more recently made and more common than pictographs, which were painted onto the rocks, typically more than 1,500 years ago. It is always special to find rock paintings. We wonder how they have lasted so long, and we marvel at their beauty. Their strangeness forces us to ask what they might mean. What were these ancient artists thinking when they created them?

We saw our first major concentration of pictographs at Sego Canyon in Utah. We knew they were there, but somehow it took us many visits to nearby Moab before we went to find them in 2011. So far, we have made three trips to marvel at what can only be described as astonishing works of art. No matter how many times we look at them, we are endlessly fascinated and filled with joy.

These glorious rock paintings, made during the archaic period (roughly 8,000 to 1,500 years ago), are a short trip from Exit 187 on Interstate 70, which is forty-four miles from the Utah-Colorado border. The road off the exit passes through the nearly deserted town of Thompson Springs, named for E.W. Thompson, who operated a sawmill in the area. There was a railroad stop here, and cattle were shipped from it. A spur line from a coal mine five miles up the canyon gave further life to the place, but the collapse of mining in the 1950s when trains stopped using coal and the building of Interstate 70 spelled the demise of Thompson Springs. The 2010 Census notes a population of thirty-nine.

The pavement ends when the town does, and we drove on a dirt road across open cattle range for about three miles, chuckling at the cows and calves glaring at us as we bumped along. We found a small parking lot and with great anticipation began our rock art search. We scrambled down and up a deep ravine of crumbling dirt and found walls that contained a mix of petroglyphs and pictographs. The latter depict shields and animals, including horses, which suggest that they were made more recently by Ute Indians.

We hiked across the ravine again, and gasped when, on a long cliff wall close to the dirt road and just a short distance from the parking lot, we saw the pictographs for which Sego Canyon is best known. We carefully climbed onto a rock ledge to get a close-up view. Image and after greeted us, at least thirty of them. The designs are mainly large human-like figures, painted red. They have a ghostly appearance and lack eyes, arms, and legs. Strange appendages sprout from some of the heads. There are other kinds of figures as well, possibly representing animals and hunting weapons.

Across the road from the rock ledge, above a small cattle pen, there are more pictographs and petroglyphs. The ledge beneath them is less accessible, but we managed to get on it. Many of the images have been damaged by the guns and graffiti of vandals, a fate the major panel has inexplicably and luckily avoided.

Archaic pictographs in this region are done in what is called the Barrier Canyon style, named after the famous rock art at the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon (formerly Barrier Canyon), which is a detached part of Canyonlands National Park. The people who made them were gatherers/hunters who no longer followed and hunted large animals such as mastodons, which had become extinct. Climate changes about 4,000 years ago had made the landscape drier and harsher, and humans had to adapt to it. They did so by hunting smaller game and learning to make baskets and stone structures for the storing of what they gathered. Their area of movement contracted somewhat, as they more intensively utilized their desert home. Perhaps this greater attachment to place allowed them the time to make the pictographs.  They may also have developed ideas and social structures to cope with the mysteries of human existence, especially the greater scarcity of game.

The pictographs they made were often—as they are at Sego Canyon—large anthropomorphs (stylized human figures), with no or vacant eyes and ghost-like bodies with no hands or feet. Sometimes, the torsos have designs in them, as, for example, the “intestine man” in Seven Mile Canyon near Moab, or the nearby anthropomorph with a snake in its mouth. Colors are often red, black, or white, though the snake-in-mouth figure has blue eyes. Maybe the figures reflect some sort of religious practice. Perhaps as a drier and hotter climate made game-hunting more difficult, shamans produced the pictographs (and also twig figures found in caves that, according to researchers, bear a striking resemblance to the pictographs) as a kind of shamanistic intercession with the spirit world to bring more game or give the group a successful hunt.

The paint came from natural pigments such as ochre, with urine, blood, animal fat, and plant oils used as binding agents. It could be applied by brushes made from animal hairs, by fingers, or by blowing paint onto the rocks in a spatter from the artist’s mouth. A hand print, for example, could be made as a stencil, with paint spattered onto the rock around the artist’s hand to form a reverse image.

No matter why the pictographs were done or how they were created, the results are, to our modern eyes, beautiful and inspiring, showing us that these ancient people were thoughtful and aware, with a sense of shape and form that makes us feel a kinship with them.

 Further along the Sego Canyon road, there is a fork. We turned right and drove to what used to be the mining town of Sego. We knew we were in what is left of Sego when the road literally turned to coal. The black rock reminded us of the miserable mining towns in which we were born, and immediately a sense of foreboding and depression filled us, the exact opposite of the elation we felt at the rock art sites we’d just left. I thought of grandma, mom, and Uncle Danny unloading dynamite from the trucks at the coal mine, and all the misery that went with that gruesome labor. Did the Sego miners hate their work, their isolation, and poverty? What joy did they find in this bleak place?

Sego was originally named Ballard, after Henry Ballard of Thomson Springs. Ballard discovered anthracite coal in the canyon in 1908 and began to hire local workers to mine it. He sold his holdings to a Salt Lake City business man, B.F. Bauer, who began to mine on a much larger scale, using a wider pool of laborers, including European immigrants. He formed the American Fuel Company, and with Ballard financed the building of a rail spur between the town, now called Neslin after the mine superintendent, and Thompson Springs. The wash plant installed by Bauer was the largest west of the Mississippi.

The mining was plagued by troubles from the beginning, mainly by both the lack of water so necessary for coal mining and track-destroying flash floods. These problems caused the mining to be sporadic and sometimes stopped it altogether. The resultant fall in profits led the owners to cut wages or stop paying them. Miners were paid in scrip, redeemable at the company store. If they tried to shop in Thompson Springs where prices were lower, they were threatened with dismissal. Regular cash wages weren’t paid until the early 1930s when the miners joined the United Mine Workers union. The company was reorganized in 1916, and the town’s name was changed in 1918 to Sego, after the Utah State flower, the Sego Lily, an ironic choice given the glaring ugliness of the place. Neither event changed the fortunes of the owners.

Mining continued, fueled mainly by railroad demand, but by 1947, costs so outweighed revenues that the company decided to end production. By then, employment was down to twenty-seven miners (from a peak of about 125). The remaining men pooled their money and with the aid of two banks, bought the mine. Unfortunately, bad luck haunted them: floods, fires, and the replacement of coal by diesel as the power source for the trains. By the middle of the 1950s, Sego was no more. People moved away, and some buildings were hauled to Thompson Springs, Moab, and Fruita, Colorado.

All that remains of Sego now are the shell of the stone company store and fragments of homes, railroad trestles, and the old boarding house, all scattered among the desert bushes and trees. The company had built houses, but it had also allowed the miners to build their own shacks and dugouts, primitive housing to say the least.

The final insult to Sego was hurled in 1973:

For several decades, the canyon was still lined with many homes and buildings, but in the spring of 1973, nature’s worst enemy — people — destroyed much of what was left. On that terrible day, two carloads of treasure hunters were seen searching the old town with metal detectors. Unfortunately, later in the day, many of the buildings lay in smoldering ruins, as the treasure hunters sifted through the cooling ashes. Very sad that the greed of a few destroyed much of what was left of this old mining camp.

On our way out of Sego, we paid our respects at the town’s cemetery. We walked around it, and saw flowers still placed at some of the humble graves. Not everyone who lived there is forgotten.

The close proximity of the magnificent pictographs in Sego Canyon and the sad remains of Sego made me think of how the quality of human life sank between the periods when archaic people gathered and hunted in the southwestern deserts and the miners of Sego eked out their precarious and hardscrabble existence. From what the anthropologists and archeologists tell us, the artists who made the pictographs had life expectancies and overall vigor that must certainly have been greater than that of the miners and their families. Once sedentary agricultural societies arose, life expectancies fell and diseases increased in human communities. Improvements didn’t occur until well into the industrial era, thanks to better sanitation, advancements in medical science that reduced infant mortality, and the brave actions of aroused working classes.

When I remember the polluted mining town in which I was born and the hard life of the people there, even in 1946, the year of my birth, I know for certain that I would rather have lived as an archaic hunter and gatherer, in clean air and open surroundings than as a miner is Sego, living in a hovel, breathing foul air, and risking my life and the well-being of my family every day I went to work. Work I might add that was done to enrich a few men and not to feed my community, which, had I been an ancient man, would have been so tightly knit that there would not even have been a word for “I.”

The post Sego Canyon: Rock Art Glory, Mining Town Ruins appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.

We will never know what a Romney administration would have done to working people, and it is impossible to say what the exact impact of Obama’s policies on the working class has been. However, we can say two things. First, the labor movement has continued its march to economic and political irrelevance during the president’s initial term, faring slightly worse than during a similar period under George W. Bush. During the first three years of the Obama administration (2009, 2010, 2011), union density fell from 12.3% to 11.8%, a decline of 4.1%. For the first three years of the George W. Bush presidency (2001, 2002, 2003), density went from 13.3% to 12.9%, a drop of 3%. Union membership declined by 563,000 during the Obama years, and 520,000 for Bush. So all of those wonderful things Obama did for workers didn’t translate into more union members or higher union density.

Second, the demise of the U.S. labor movement predates Obama and Bush by several decades, and the reasons for it have been much discussed. But what does the elimination of labor unions in much of the economy and the loss of power in most of the unions still standing mean for working people? For the society as a whole?

Let’s look at the economics. Unions improve wages and benefits not just for their members but for the working class as a whole. The latter effect occurs because nonunion employers might pay higher wages and benefits to avoid unions in their workplaces, and because union gains in such things as pensions, health and safety, and grievance procedures might become the standard for many other workers.

Lawrence Mishel and his colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute have documented the union impact on wages and benefits in the latest edition of The State of Working America. For all workers in the United States, the union wage premium in 2011 was 13.6%. That is, on average, union members earn this much more than their nonunion counterparts. The comparison is made especially significant since it holds the following wage-determining factors constant: experience, education, region, industry, occupation, race/ethnicity, and marital status. This means that if we compare those with the same education, race, occupation, etc., union workers still make more money. We get similar results if we look at benefits. Union employees are more likely to have employer-financed health insurance (28.2%), pensions (53.9%), and time off (14.3%). Union benefits are also better. For example, union workers have lower deductibles and copayments in their healthcare plans and are much more likely to be covered when they retire. They are more likely to have defined benefits pensions (in which they are guaranteed certain pension payments, as opposed to defined contribution plans in which employees pay fixed amounts into an individual retirement account but are guaranteed nothing in terms of pension pay-outs).

The collapse of union membership, especially in the private sector of the economy, has reduced the union advantage considerably. In terms of the impact of this decline, it is useful to look at specific categories of workers. Unions in the United States have always benefitted blue-collar and less formally educated workers the most (The same is true for racial minorities). The decline in union membership among these groups has been precipitous. For blue-collar employees, union density fell from 43.1% in 1978 to 17.8% in 2011, and for high school graduates, it dropped from 37.9% to 14.9%. These declines were associated with a weakening of the union impact on wages between these two years from 11.5% to 3.5% for blue-collar unionists and from 8.2% to 2.6% for union members with a high school education.

The weakening of the union impact on the wages and benefits of blue-collar and less formally educated workers doesn’t just lower their standards of living. It also leads to greater inequality in wages; the gaps between college-educated and high school graduates and between white collar and blue collar workers have been growing at the same time that union densities have been falling. According to The State of Working America, “. . . deunionization can explain about a fifth of the growth in the college/high school wage gap among men between 1978 and 2011.” And “[the] lessened effect of unionism can account for 76.1 percent” of the growth of wage inequality between white- and blue-collar employees. What is more, the growing disparity between those at the top of the income and wealth distributions—the infamous 1% justifiably vilified by the Occupy movement—and the rest of us has its roots in the rapidly growing power of the rich and the dwindling power of workers. As unions lose strength, so too do all those who labor. The unions themselves begin to make concessions that boost corporate profits and the incomes of those who own the businesses. It is a rare union in the manufacturing sector that has not agreed to a two-tier wage system in which new hires receive a fraction of what senior employees earn for the same work. Hard-won work rules are discarded, giving companies free reign to compel more work effort from those producing our goods and services. This is combined with brutal workforce reductions, which place heavier burdens on those remaining. Once unions make concessions, it is open season on nonunion workers. The “threat effect” of unions disappears, and employers have a free hand to impose draconian “lean production” techniques (such as kaizen or “constant improvement,” which relentlessly speeds up production by making fewer workers produce the same or greater output). Productivity and profits rise, but workers get no more money, and this further increases inequality.

As inequality rises, a host of social problems intensify. These are best exemplified by the old saying: “Them that’s got is them that gets.” Inequality diminishes democracy, as the rich come to rule the government with an iron hand. Those with bundles of money vet the candidates for public office, finance their campaigns, and place insurmountable pressure on politicians to put in place laws and regulations that benefit them and harm those without the requisite cash. The fortunes of the ultra-rich are so vast today that a handful of billionaires, including the infamous Koch brothers, can lead a successful assault on public education, or anything else they don’t like. By moving their money from country to country, they can bend most governments to their will, compelling them to abandon or privatize social welfare programs and the provision of public services. Their control of the mass media makes a mockery of public discourse and investigative journalism. The economic elite mass their power to make any attempts to slow the accumulation of capital—never-ending increases in profits and ever more rapid growth—impossible, which means, among other things, that our climate catastrophe will continue unabated.

Inequality has many socially harmful consequences that get little attention despite their serious nature. If we consider different places (for example, states in the United States or countries) with similar average incomes but dissimilar degrees of income inequality, those with greater inequality display less social cohesion and more individual pathologies. In a recent essay, I wrote that “inequality is also harmful to the formation of the social bonds so necessary for human well-being. It isolates us from one another; in effect, there are two worlds, that of the rich and that of the rest of us. The rich exert power over us and, by doing so, deny us our full humanity.” Eric Schutz, in his book, Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class, puts this in terms of alienation:

The concept of alienation clarifies both the extent and the significance of what is lost for those subordinated in social power structures. Not only is their full self-initiative denied … but the full development of their faculties and intentions in all other realms of life is thereby stifled and more or less permanently stunted. People . . . manifest behaviors ranging from withdrawal to social or intellectual incompetence, from distraction to aimlessness or apathy, from anger, confusion, depression and anxiety to obsession and neuroses and, in some, violence of one kind or another.

In one study comparing U.S. states:

States with greater inequality in the distribution of income also had higher rates of unemployment, higher rates of incarceration, a higher percentage of people receiving income assistance and food stamps, and a greater percentage of people without medical insurance. Again, the gap between rich and poor was the best predictor, not the average income in the state.

Interestingly, states with greater inequality of income distribution also spent less per person on education, had fewer books per person in the schools, and had poorer educational performance, including worse reading skills, worse math skills, and lower rates of completion of high school.

States with greater inequality of income also had a greater proportion of babies born with low birth weight; higher rates of homicide; higher rates of violent crime; a greater proportion of the population unable to work because of disabilities; a higher proportion of the population using tobacco; and a higher proportion of the population being sedentary (inactive).Lastly, states with greater inequality of income had higher costs per-person for medical care, and higher costs per person for police protection.

While the collapse of organized labor harms workers economically, both directly through lower wages and benefits, and indirectly by generating greater inequality, it also has other consequences for laboring men and women. Unions give employees a voice in their workplaces they otherwise wouldn’t have; they give you the power to fight your employer instead of quitting and finding another job. With a union, you can’t be legally discharged for standing up to the boss; without one, you are in most circumstances an employee at will, and your employer can get rid of you for any reason at all. If your supervisor told you to vote for a certain political candidate, and you said it was none of his business how you voted, he could discharge you on the spot. With a union, if this happened, you would have powerful legal recourse, and you would get your job back plus lost wages and benefits. The sense of collective empowerment that unions can give us at work helps build the solidarity necessary for any challenge we might want to make against those who wield power over us.

A union can also be an educator. We can learn valuable lessons about democracy, power, and our own capacities just by participating in union meetings, collective bargaining, strikes, picketing, and boycotts. In addition, a union can provide more formal and general education for its members, through its own education programs or by funding member enrollment in labor studies programs. Members can thereby learn things they didn’t in school and be better prepared to wage class war against their oppressors.

We see then that the entire U.S. working class has lost much as a result of the downward spiral of union membership. Therefore, a great deal would be gained if this spiral were reversed. Millions of words have been written about what needs to be done for this to happen. I have written some of them. Right now, I am not optimistic. I hope that the examples of the Wisconsin Uprising, the OWS revolt, and the Chicago Teachers strike will resonate with working people and they will build on them to revitalize the labor movement. However, our economic and political systems have a great talent for absorbing and deflecting protests, as the recent all-out support by labor unions for Obama clearly shows. And most unions have no interest in educating their members, in democracy, in building class solidarity, in waging war against their class adversaries, in political independence. Employers, on the other hand, are united and confident. They will continue to escalate their war on workers. Their goals are more sharp declines in union membership and the ultimate dismantling of what little power unions still have. For now, look for their victories to continue.

This first appeared in counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/09/the-state-of-the-unions/

The post The State of the Unions appeared first on Cheap Motels and a Hotplate.