So, college graduates are flocking to our more progressive cities in search of not only high-paying skilled work, but also the cultural amenities, low crime rates, and better quality air. Of course, this means fewer college graduates for every place else, which means dumber congressional districts, which means a dumber Congress.
The lesson progressives should draw from this is that the labor movement is more important than ever for the political prospects of the left. The labor movement crosses the racial divide, but also the educational and skills divides, and is much broader geographically than our urban areas alone.
Whether you care about labor unions or not, you should see their importance to the progressive coalition. The weaker they get, the more isolated we become politically.
Yes. Will have more to say on this later.
Whether you care about labor unions or not, you should see their importance to the progressive coalition.
Do elected Democrats? I’d say barely, if at all. And lets not mince words. The president has a decidedly mixed record on this. He’s hired goons like Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan after all.
The Democrats were once considered to be the party of the working man. They managed to squander that advantage first through indifference and neglect, then through open warfare when Clinton signed NAFTA. The latest blows fell when Obama embraced Rahm Emmanuel and Arne Duncan.
You know that we’d be wise to foster the labor movement and I know that we’d be wise to foster the labor movement – the party’s leadership seems clueless. Of course this is the same party leadership that abandoned the 50 state strategy that won the House for us in the 2006 midterms so maybe we need to grade on the curve.
Yes.. but doesn’t this migration also mean we should care less about what happens in those “dumb” congressional districts? I think it does.
It also probably means progressives need to find other ways to achieve their goals because congress and the federal government have been rendered useless.
you are on the money BooMan with this.
But realistically, with all the barriers to unionizing how do we grow the labor movement? Maybe change what we think a union is, I don’t know.
I find this attitude fascinating. If “all the barriers to unionizing” exist, and are undesirable, WHY NOT CHANGE THE LAWS WHICH CREATED THE BARRIERS? With that, more people will have a fair chance to gain representation and collective bargaining, and unions will become a positive force in the lives of more people. That will make the anti-Union propaganda of the plutocrats progressively less effective. With more people organized in Unions, the rest of the liberal agenda will be much easier to achieve.
In the U.S., around 60% of private sector workers say they want a Union, but only about 8% have representation. That gap, which takes in tens of millions of Americans, has been created by laws which incentivize business owners to fire, harass, intimidate, demoralize and confuse workers who want to bring a Union into their workplace. The paltry fines meant to enforce the paltry laws in this area are easily seen as the cost of doing business for owners who want to artificially depress compensation and working conditions.
The Employee Free Choice Act would have been an enormous help here. The failure of the Senate to move that important Bill in 2009 reflects a big problem in our movement. On the Executive side, it is valuable that Obama has appointed strong Secretaries of Labor and nominated very pro-Labor experts to the National Labor Relations Board. But, his empowering of Arne Duncan’s Labor-undermining rhetoric and policies is a big betrayal, and is one of a number of decisions the President has made which reflects a lack of solidarity with the working people who got him elected, and re-elected.
There are inventive actions happening today around a re-thinking of what a Union is. That can, and should, happen at the same time we rebalance the rules around traditional Union organizing. Shrugging our shoulders and just saying “oh well, it’s up to Labor to unbury itself” is dangerous for all of us.
Yes. This.
Hot spots:
Anywhere there is fast food and retail national franchises.
Southern automotive: Chattanooga (VW); Nashville (Nissan); Greenville-Spartanburg, SC (BMW, Michelin); Tuscaloosa, AL (Mercedes)….there are others
Information plantation cube farms: Silicon Valley CA, Research Triangle Park NC, Austin TX, Richardson TX, …there are oodles of others.
Public employee unions: Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, and others under Tea Party assault.
Fossil fuel industry; West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana,….to begin with.
IT and MIS comprised my second career from the Nineties until my retirement. At present, attempting to unionize those information plantation cube farms pretty much summarizes a fool’s errand. Whether they’re political or not, whether they even know it, techies tend to lean libertarian and, to my knowledge, they’d laugh at the notion that they might need a union.
This may change in time as techie labor, like most other labor, becomes commoditized. For the present, I’d direct my efforts toward the other sectors you mentioned.
In my lifetime,the greatest blow to the middle class here has been the decline of Labor. That we now have minimum wage earners who badmouth unions and increasing the minimum wage says it more clearly than I can.
You can see this close up by comparing Denver to Colorado Springs, its neighbor 1.5-2 hours to the south. Colorado Springs had a chance of becoming something like Portland, with Colorado College and the Olympics HQ and a great symphony and youth symphony, but excessive reliance on the military for the local economy meant permanent right wing local government which really got in the way. Then the funnies decided to centralize here around Focus on the Family and that was all she wrote.
15 years ago during the dot com/Y2K boom a lot of true high tech (as opposed to low tech, like call centers) located here, but while attracting tech workers was easy with the great outdoors and low housing costs, keeping them turned out to be very hard. Their kids would come home and complain about the school being do instead by religious nuts and warmongers. While the Denver area was on a progressive mission of cultural centers and open space and trails and public transport and walk ability and bike rentals and neighborhood revitalization Colorado Springs was expanding sprawl while ignoring infrastructure and letting bad neighborhoods rot and older neighborhoods go bad. The brain drain was and is palatable. Few Colorado College grads stick around.
So most of the high tech either closed down or converted to medium/low tech. The tech that exists relies a lot on employees who do the long commute from the Denver area. And something funny happens to a creative group tha has all their non-conservative employees leave – they stop being creative.