Sandy and solidarity

Last Sunday, for some crazy reason my friend Todd and I took the train down to NYC to see the Jets game -- even as Sandy roiled her way up the coast, toward the same destination. As fans from across the tri-state area settled into their seats, awaiting the national anthem and the kick-off, the usual anticipation was palpably deepened by fear of what was to come. Todd and I worried about whether we'd be able to grab the last train out (we did). Others had much more profound worries.

I've been going to Jets games since the early 70s, and can't recall the last time the team decided to dispense with a paid performer for the anthem -- but that's what they did. They asked the crowd of 60,000 or so to sing it themselves. If you've ever been to an NFL game before, you know that they have become these incredibly artificial sensory environments. There is a non-stop overload of piped in sound, music, and flashing images -- much like our culture more generally, where we are constantly asked to look out, or perhaps inward in a superficial way, rather than to the people next to us. Suddenly, that stopped. It took perhaps 30 seconds or so, but gradually everyone found their voices, and began to sing. Look, I'm someone who is deeply ambivalent about public displays of patriotism. As a Jew, a large crowd of people singing about their country makes me profoundly uncomfortable.

But as we neared the end of the anthem, I found myself surprisingly moved. And I wasn't the only one.

I am constantly amazed at the ability of people from the New York area to shift, when it matters most, from the knowing assholishness that many of us show to the world on a daily basis. to the most profound acts of social solidarity.

Todd and I got out on the last train. But I've followed the selfless acts of many of my NYC friends through FB over the last week -- Scotty Elyanow, Gaby Moss and so many others -- and I know that no matter how much cynicism our leaders and institutions throw at us, that solidarity is still there. There is an irony, perhaps, in the fact that it was the portion of Manhattan containing the supposedly indispensable financial district and its 'Masters of the Universe' that went dark, and that ordinary people (and eventually government) once again came to the rescue.

It is that social solidarity, ultimately, that underpins things like Social Security, Medicare, and even progressive taxation and FEMA. And because it is so valuable, and may not in the end be a renewable resource, I do prefer to have a former community organizer in the White House than a financial speculator.

Solidarity, For Now? Liberalism and the Many Costs of Labor's Decline

Great piece today by Providence's own Joe Nocera, on what the decline of organized labor has done to the American Dream -- and a good day for it, too, as Scott Walker's revolutionary (non-union) train chugs into the Madison Station.

When I moved to RI in 2003 from Washington, I was rather stunned to hear many of my liberal friends repeat the media meme that organized labor was too powerful in the Ocean State [note:  I will use the term 'liberal' rather than 'progressive,' because in my experience people on the left my age and younger tend to substitute the latter for the former, without knowing the meaning of either].

My surprise stemmed from two sources:  the extent to which liberals of my generation (I'm 45) underestimate the vital importance of unions for the enactment and preservation of liberal measures and attitudes, and the extent to which these same liberals had completely misread the situation in their own state.

On the latter, read Scott McKay's brilliant take-down of the 'union rules RI' meme on NPR the other day.  As he notes, would the tax equity bill have gone down to defeat if unions truly ruled the roost?

Just under 18% of Rhode Islanders are represented by labor unions; it was 26% in 1964, and 22.5% in 1984.  In other words, the trend is the same here as everywhere:  downward.

The national trend, since the passage of Taft-Hartley in 1947:

The breakdown by state, since 1964:

There are many reasons for this decline.  Economic change, the shift of American industry and population to the South and Southwest, the restrictive nature of our labor laws, McCarthyism and red-baiting, poor and sometimes corrupt union leadership.  Unions were also victims of their own success; by helping to create the post-war middle class, many of their white constituents (and their children) decamped for the suburbs, and resisted seeing the struggles of the black (and eventually, Latino) working class they left behind as similar to their own, rather than a threat.  In other words, the American original sin of race infected -- had long infected -- even its most transformational social movements and institutions.  Perhaps our individualistic and materialistic culture has also become indifferent -- even hostile -- to the sensibility of solidarity, upon which the labor movement depends.

All of these things have mattered, but the most important cause of labor's decline, ultimately, has been the political success of corporate resistance, particularly since the early 1970s (on this, read Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Jefferson Cowie, as well as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson).  Many of my peers (and my students) seem to assume that unions are a thing of the past, and that the victories they won -- like the end of slavery and the enfranchisement of women -- are now written in stone, and we can move on.  In other words, progress gave rise to unions, and then tossed them on the scrap heap of history (with the American Anti-Slavery Society, The Women's Party, the NAACP, and affirmative action) when they had fulfilled their role.  Events in Wisconsin (and, of course, the Occupy movement) may have finally awoken at least some of these folks to the possibility that if the ship of history has moved in this direction, it may be because someone is steering it there.

As a labor historian and former organizer, I also had a hard time getting my head around the idea that unions could actually be too powerful -- both because I can't imagine that being the case anywhere in 21st America, and because I can't imagine that being a negative thing, on balance.  I would love to have to grapple with that problem, here and nationally.

Walter Reuther, vampire-killer...or life raft?

So why does the decline of labor matter, in Rhode Island and nationally?

Well for one, it is hard not to be struck by the apparent correlation between the decline of union power, and the emergence of increasing inequality, economic insecurity, and wage stagnation for large portions of our population since the early 1970s.  From 1940 until the early 70s, the economic benefits of the productivity of the American economy were widely shared, leading to what economists have called 'the Great Convergence':  a shrinking of income inequality, combined with a strong and steady increase in the standard of living for the vast majority of the population.

But since then?

So where did all that money go?  Did it go to those wealth-sucking and budget-busting public employees that Scott Walker keeps going on about?  Did those tax-and-spend liberals devour all of it, so they could rain manna on their special interest constituencies?

Um, no.

Is it any wonder why vampire stories seem to have captured the cultural zeitgeist?