The Free Market Should be a Weapon Against the Rich

A GENUINE AMERICAN LIBERTARIAN

BY NICKY REID

 AUGUST 25, 2023
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Image by Alexander Grey.

“Every victim of statism has internalized the state to some degree… Should the taxpayers completely cut off the blood supply, the vampire state would helplessly perish, its unpaid police and army deserting almost immediately, defanging the monster.”

-Samuel Edward Konkin III

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

-Antonio Gramsci

Everybody hates the rich and why not? We have nothing, they have everything, and they fucking stole it from us. I may not be the Castro worshipping Bolshevik I was in my twenties but as the Russians like to say, the communists were wrong about everything but capitalism. Just take a quick look around you if you don’t believe me. As the world literally chokes and burns on the exhaust fumes of private jets and Reaper drones, contemporary global inequality continues to creep closer and closer to the rank levels of excess last observed at the peak of the Gilded Age and America still leads the heat with wider disparities of wealth between the rich and poor than any other major developed nation on earth.

From the Great Depression to the Great Recession, time and time again, the One Percent has dragged the rest of us to the edge of one abyss after another and they have learned absolutely nothing. If anything, they’ve gotten worse, exploiting every new crisis they provoke with another industrial complex that shakes us down for pocket change while they sodomize their cousins and bleach their assholes.

It’s little wonder that class warfare has never been more popular. In fact, it’s become downright mainstream with even the Republicans getting in on the outrage. As they desperately struggle to shed their well cultivated image as the greed-is-good party, the GOP is beginning to sound downright Maoist with their increasingly incendiary calls to use the heavy levers of big government to punish or even annihilate the coastal elites and their woke conspiracy to make working class heroes sit down to pee.

Naturally, it doesn’t take Antonio Gramsci to realize that this is just another work. The Republicans despise big tech and their partners in the burgeoning green economy because those cocky new upstarts pose a threat to the GOP’s own pet gangsters in the rusting industrial and extraction industries. What we’re actually witnessing here isn’t the working-class takeover of the GOP that populist gadflies like Steve Bannon like to wax philosophic about on their podcasts. What we’re witnessing is a growing civil war between competing cartels of oligarchs during the collapse of the morally bankrupt western civilization that gave birth to them both. In other words, the silver spoon riding whores of the Second Gilded Age are building even more industrial complexes to exploit the crisis of their own demise. Dante wept for there were no more hells left to dream of.

The only real service that the Republican Party’s new Hardhat Riot routine provides to the poor they seek to exploit is that this theater does a pretty fantastic job of exposing a lot of the long-standing myths about the GOP’s relationship with socialism and the free market. Contrary to the ramblings of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Republicans actually love socialism as long as it is the statist variety that transfers private property from the cold dead grip of the individual to the greasy mitts of big government. That’s because there is nothing particularly revolutionary about this mutant breed of socialism. It’s all about empowering an untouchable taker class to rob working people of their agency and this kind of socialism is actually precisely how the rich became the rich in the first place.

Gore Vidal wasn’t just being cheeky when he called capitalism “Socialism for the rich.” Every single billionaire, every global conglomerate, every Fortune 500 company is the direct product of the state. Without big government there would be no big business. Without highway subsidies and eminent domain there would be no Walmart. Without copyright laws and patents there would be no big pharma. Without the World Bank and the Fed there would be no George Soros. Without standing armies and world wars there would be no Exxon Mobile, no Lockheed Martin, no nuclear arms race, no global fucking warming.

No, Gore Vidal wasn’t being cheeky at all when he called capitalism “Socialism for the rich.” If anything, he didn’t take that logic far enough. Any form of state socialism ultimately becomes just another luxurious plaything for the rich. Hell, even Castro died a millionaire. But state socialism isn’t real socialism and capitalism doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with the free market.

Socialism at its base is any system that grants workers full control over the means of production. The very existence of the state renders this feat impossible by putting a permanent bureaucracy between the workers and the means of production, essentially monopolizing these means in the process. The free market or at least any truly free market is likewise rendered impossible by the existence of the state. The free market is essentially just the free exchange of goods and services without the intervention of coercive forces.

Quite possibly the greatest kept secret in the history of modern civilization is the fact that real socialism actually requires a truly free market to thrive. The original socialists of western Continental Philosophy, your Godwin’s and your Proudhon’s, the motherfuckers Marx ripped off, bastardized and then conveniently demonized, were all free marketeers because they recognized the free market as the greatest weapon in the working man’s arsenal.

This isn’t to say that the free market is an end unto itself. That kind of foolish utopian navel gazing is precisely what turned the International into a league of flatulence huffing dogmatic assholes. I don’t fetishize the free market as some kind of silly Randian Lalaland of flowing wine and low hanging fruit. It is a tool to get what I want and what I want is the autonomy for all poor people to live in any kind of voluntary society that doesn’t force its will on others because this level of universal working-class autonomy is likely the closest thing to a guarantee of living free that my own little tribe of Queer agrarian freaks is ever going to find. A simple social contract that reads ‘get weird as long as I can get weird too.’

Needless to say, this unorthodox philosophy finds me at the awkward crossroads of some very strange territory. I now consider myself to be not just post-Marxist but post-left because I don’t feel like any current left-wing movement has much to offer my people aside from crass tokenism and pandering assimilation.

Quite frankly, Queer people seemed to be a hell of a lot better off in indigenous heathen tribes that pre-existed this whole left-right paradigm by a millennia. But I do believe that if the left wants to have any chance of achieving their goals, which are still largely my goals too, then they need to do the polar opposite of what the populist right is doing right now. They need to embrace the free market as a weapon against the rich as do we all.

We need to stop voting and start organizing. We need to diversify our tactics and we need to target the fixed capitalist market itself with a revolutionary campaign of guerrilla counter-economics. What the left-libertarian Gramsci, Samuel Edward Konkin III, called agorism, a complex and expanding network of voluntary exchanges that occur completely outside of the state’s grasp. This wild territory already exists in the form of the black market with sex work, cryptocurrencies, dark web chatrooms, digital silk roads, undocumented labor, bootlegging and counterfeiting.

But this market needs to be radicalized with the inclusion of co-ops, homesteads, mutual aid associations, communes, free schools, squats and syndicalist trade unions. We need to integrate the underground into a united front of divided tribal organizations that can exist and thrive without the state and then we need to drop out, sit back, crack open a cold bottle of knock-off Coke and watch the billionaires of the vampire class starve without a neck to suck dry.

Because when and only when egalitarians of all stripes return to their free-market roots will the pigs of the One Percent’s days of plenty truly be numbered and this is one free-market post-Marxist who’s looking forward to that day with bated breath and a sharpened butcher knife.

Free the market! Fuck the rich!

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.

The 100 Largest Low-Wage Employers Have Spent $341 Billion on Stock Buybacks Since 2020

BY SARAH ANDERSON

 AUGUST 25, 2023
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In response to strikes and union organizing drives, corporate leaders routinely insist that they simply lack the wherewithal to raise employee pay. And yet top executives seem to have little trouble finding resources for enriching themselves and wealthy shareholders.

In 2021 and 2022, S&P 500 corporations spent record sums on stock buybacks, a maneuver that pumps up stock prices by reducing the supply on the open market. Since stock-based pay makes up the bulk of executive compensation, CEOs reap huge — and completely undeserved — windfalls.

CEOs could watch cat videos all day and still reap huge windfalls through stock buybacks.

The Low-Wage 100

A new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2023, reveals how these financial shenanigans have widened disparities at the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.”

Between January 1, 2020 and May of this year, these companies reported a combined $341 billion in stock buyback spending.

Lowe’s led the buybacks list, plowing nearly $35 billion into share repurchases over the past three and a half years. In 2022 alone, Lowe’s spent more than $14 billion on buybacks — enough to give every one of its 301,000 U.S. employees a $46,923 bonus.

I’m guessing rank-and-file Lowe’s employees, half of whom make less than $30,000 per year, could find more productive uses for that money.

During their stock buyback spree, Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings increased more than three times as fast as their firms’ median worker pay. At the 65 buyback companies where the same person held the top job between 2019 and 2022, the Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings soared 33 percent to an average of $184.7 million. Median pay at these firms rose only 10 percent to an average of $31,972.

FedEx founder and CEO Frederick Smith has the largest stockpile in the Low-Wage 100. With $3.6 billion in stock buybacks since January 2020, Smith’s personal stock holdings have grown 65 percent to more than $5 billion. By contrast, median pay for workers at the notoriously anti-union company fell by 20 percent to $39,177 during this period.

Taxpayer support for huge CEO-worker pay gaps

What makes all this even more upsetting? Taxpayers are actually supporting, through federal contracts, the buyback-fueled disparities at FedEx and 50 other Low-Wage 100 firms.

FedEx pocketed $6.2 billion in fiscal years 2020-2023 for mail services for the Veterans Administration and other agencies. The largest federal contractor in the Low-Wage 100 is another company known for union-busting — Amazon. Over the past few years, Amazon has pocketed more than $10 billion in web services deals from Uncle Sam while spending nearly $6 billion repurchasing their shares.

Fortunately, support is growing for solutions to our CEO pay problem.

Solutions to executive excess

Before 1982, stock buybacks were viewed as market manipulation and largely banned. President Joe Biden hasn’t yet called for reinstating that ban, but he did rail against buybacks in his State of the Union address this year and called for quadrupling a new 1 percent excise tax on share repurchases.

The Biden administration is also starting to use federal money going to corporations as a lever for change. In an important first step, the administration is giving preferential treatment in the awarding of new semiconductor manufacturing subsidies to companies that agree to give up buybacks. Now they should extend that policy to all corporations receiving taxpayer money.

Buybacks are not the only trick CEOs can use to inflate their own paychecks. Over my decades of research, I’ve documented how corporate leaders have used myriad shady means to hit personal jackpots, from cooking the books and moving executive bonus goalposts to creating housing bubbles and other reckless financial schemes.

To tackle this systemic problem, policymakers need to go bolder. Executive Excess 2023 offers an extensive menu of CEO pay reforms. One of the most innovative: tax penalties for companies with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. Two major cities — San Francisco and Portland, Oregon — are already generating significant revenuethrough such taxes. Seattle is now considering a similar approach.

The idea that the person in the corner office is hundreds of times more valuable than other employees is a myth — even if that person is not just watching cat videos. All employees contribute to the profits of a corporation, and our economy would be far healthier if the fruits of our labor were more equitably shared.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Possible US auto strike as unions flex muscle in 'Hot Labor Summer'

New York (AFP) – With the clock ticking down to a possible strike, Detroit carmakers are staring at tough contract negotiations with an emboldened auto workers union led by a fiery new president.

Shawn Fain, who was sworn in as president of the United Auto Workers five months ago, is laying the foundation to potentially strike if there is no agreement by September 14.

"Record profits deserve record contracts," Fain told a rally on Sunday in Michigan with workers from the Detroit Three: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

While the plan is not to strike, "we'll get it done by any means necessary," Fain said.

The UAW's push comes in a period dubbed #HotLaborSummer as unions flex muscles in a still-tight employment market. Hollywood has been virtually shut down by writer and actor strikes, while UPS avoided a stoppage following difficult negotiations.

A strike at all three companies would involve about 150,000 workers, with a potentially wide-ranging economic impact on suppliers and industry-adjacent services.

The talks are on the radar of President Joe Biden, who recently called for a "fair" contract that ensures workers' rights are strengthened during the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

The UAW is expected to announce on Friday the results of strike authorization votes.

United Auto Workers members hold signs outside the Stellantis auto plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on July 12, 2023

 © JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP

Fain has signaled a willingness to strike at all three companies, although labor experts think if there is a strike, a stoppage at just one company is more likely.

Fain has argued workers should get the same 40 percent salary boost given to auto executives. Other demands include a restoration of cost of living adjustments (COLA), guaranteed pensions for all workers and elimination of a multitiered compensation system.

At the rally, Fain defended his call for a 32-hour work week, slamming a system that allowed executives to work from home during the pandemic while "our members were expected to risk their lives and some sacrificed their lives."

The pandemic helped "create a sense among the American workforce that they don't have to tolerate bad working conditions anymore," said Michelle Kaminski, a professor at Michigan State University who specializes in labor relations.

"These are the most favorable conditions for unions in decades," she said.

Reform candidate

Fain, 54, who worked as an electrician at a Stellantis factory in Indiana, narrowly won the first UAW presidential election with direct voting by rank-and-file members. The voting was overseen by a court-appointed monitor after a corruption scandal led to prison terms for two former UAW presidents.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain (R) is feeling US labor's renewed strength ahead of contract negotiations © JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP

In the campaign, Fain ran as a reformer, criticizing other UAW leaders for an overly cozy approach with management and a legacy of plant closures and lower pay for junior employees.

He has maintained an aggressive posture since taking office, shunning a ceremonial handshake with auto CEOs when the talks kicked off.

In a streamed bargaining update earlier this month Fain plunked Stellantis' proposal in the trash, a gesture the company criticized as "theatrics and personal insults."

Stellantis said it was committed to reaching an agreement "based on economic realism" that reflects the pressures of competing with nonunionized automakers.

"Agreeing to Mr. Fain's demands could endanger our ability to make decisions in the future that provide job security for our employees," Stellantis said in a letter to employees.

Autoworkers gather outside the Stellantis plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on July 12, 2023 UAW contract negotiations with Stellantis will begin on July 13; with Ford on July 14; and with General Motors on July 18. In a break with tradition, there will be no public "handshake ceremony."

 © JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP

GM said it has "been working hard with the UAW every day to ensure we get this agreement right for all our stakeholders," while Ford said it looks "forward to working with the UAW on creative solutions ... when our dramatically changing industry needs a skilled and competitive workforce more than ever."
Compromise?

Fain's strategy with the Detroit Three has taken a page from that of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who also presented regular livestream updates and organized "practice pickets."

UAW President Shawn Fain took the reins of the union only five months ago 

© JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP

UPS workers overwhelmingly approved a contract that included hefty wage increases and an elimination of a two-tier wage system.

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who noted the UAW's long history of striking, said Fain could "claim victory" with hefty wage hikes and elimination of the tiered system.

Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell's School of Industrial & Labor Relations, said a compromise could include a cost-of-living adjustment and a narrowing of pay gaps in tiers.

Fain "will definitely deliver a favorable contract," Katz said. "It's all a question of how favorable."

But Katz said there is also a decent chance of a strike if either side misreads the situation. While the UAW has some leverage over the carmakers, it has less compared with the Teamsters in the UPS case, given the heavy number of US vehicles built by nonunion automakers.

© 2023 AFP

Hot Labor Summer… In More Ways Than One

BY FARRAH HASSEN

 AUGUST 25, 2023
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Photo by Markus Spiske

This summer has been a hot one for labor as strikes and other worker actions have swept the country. At the same time, workers have been toiling in one of the hottest summers ever recorded due to the ongoing climate emergency. This has put millions at greater risk of heat-related illness and death.

The 340,000 UPS workers, represented by the Teamsters union, made excessive heat in the workplace a top priority in their recent contract negotiations with the company. Between 2015 and 2022, at least 143 UPS employees had been hospitalized for heat injuries, according to company records obtained by the Washington Post.

To protect their health, workers demanded that UPS provide air conditioning in their signature delivery trucks. For the first time, the company agreed to equip them in all new delivery vehicles. But it’s outrageous that UPS workers had to bargain over the basic human right to a safe workplace while their CEO took home $19 million last year.

Federal and state governments, meanwhile, have largely taken a hands-off approach to protecting workers facing such dangerous conditions.

In the midst of an unprecedented heatwave, Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed a bill that will rescind mandatory rest and water breaks for construction workers. “It’s inhumane and cruel,” remarked Eva Marroquin, who cleans up construction sites in the Austin area.

Abbott’s egregious move grabbed national headlines, but it’s not just Texas workers who are vulnerable.

Regulations protecting outdoor workers from heat have only been implemented in a handful of states, including California, Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. Indoor workers, such as those employed at warehouses without air conditioning systems, also lack heat safety regulations in most states.

No federal laws currently impose heat safety standards for workplaces. In 2021, President Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to produce heat safety standards, but the agency still hasn’t issued them.

Anticipating that workers would face life-or-death summer heat, attorneys general from seven states petitioned OSHA to issue an emergency temporary order earlier this year that would require employers to provide water, rest breaks, and shade when temperatures top 80°F. The agency refused.

As heat records continue to be broken, the dangers are overwhelmingly borne by workers whose jobs directly expose them to heat, like farmworkers, construction workers, landscapers, and maintenance workers, among others. These jobs are predominantly low-income and more often held by people of color.

In San Antonio, a 24-year-old construction worker, Gabriel Infante, died this July from severe heat stroke. A 29-year-old farmworker in South Florida, Efraín López García, died that same month after experiencing symptoms consistent with heat illness. Extreme heat killed another young farmworker in Florida earlier this year after his employer failed to provide water breaks and shade.

Sadly, these and many more worker deaths across the U.S. could have been avoided.

President Biden has taken small steps to address this health threat. His Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su issued the first heat hazard alert reminding employers of their responsibility “not to assign work in high heat conditions without protections in place for workers.”

But for workers and their families, an “alert” is no replacement for a nationwide, legally enforceable heat standard that must be issued as quickly as possible. Absent an OSHA standard, Congress and states can still act to protect workers.

Workers’ lives are on the line. Until they are safe on the job, there will be many more “hot labor summers” in the forecast.

Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

SEIU & The Carpenters: Still “Changing to Win” or Changing the Wrong Way? 

BY STEVE EARLY

 AUGUST 25, 2023
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Photograph Source: ProgressOhio – CC BY 2.0

In a recent conversation with an otherwise well-informed young labor activist, I made a passing reference to Change to Win, a national labor federation formed in 2005 by defectors from the AFL-CIO. “Change to what?” she asked. “Never heard of it.”

Her response was not surprising, given the short shelf life of the organizational brand in question. Launched with much media fanfare, Change to Win initially represented 5.5 million workers, about one-fifth of the AFL’s total membership. Its founders—the Service Employees, Teamsters, Carpenters, Laborers, United Farm Workers, Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE-HERE—saw themselves as the second coming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CWA), the rival federation created in the mid-1930s to spearhead mass organizing in that era.

To “build power for workers” seventy years later, key CTW strategist favored organizational consolidation—in the form of more mergers between national unions and internal consolidation of members into larger regional or multi-state locals. One cheerleader for that approach, Professor Ruth Milkman, penned a NY Times opinion piece hailing CTW as ​“labor’s best hope — maybe its only hope — for revitalization.”

CTW did not live up to such hype. It was soon wracked by internal conflict, precipitated by then-SEIU President Andy Stern’s controversial restructuring of healthcare locals in California and his disastrous meddling in the internal affairs of UNITE-HERE. That organizing-oriented union and two other founders of CTW– UFCW and the Laborers– returned to the AFL-CIO and were welcomed back.

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters quit CTW but did not rejoin the federation. Instead, under the heavy-handed rule of President Douglas McCarron, a former drywall hanger from Chatsworth, CA., the Carpenters continued to battle other AFL-CIO construction unions. Instead of contributing to any progressive political tilt by labor during the Bush Administration, McCarron became George W’s biggest union backer, endorsing other Republicans like his brother Jeb when the latter ran for governor of Florida.

Strategic Organizing?

Last year, under new and improved national leadership, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters finally quit CTW. This led SEIU, the still tiny Farm Workers, and my own union, the Communications Workers of America, an AFL-CIO affiliate which opposed the creation of CTW, to rebrand their current collaboration as a “Strategic Organizing Center.” The SOC maintains a small staff to produce what it calls “cutting edge research for innovative campaigns.” On its modest new website, Change to Win (and its original pledge to devote nearly a billion dollars to new organizing) is relegated to the memory hole, getting no mention at all.

More than a decade after the rise, decline, and now official disappearance of CTW, labor activists interested in strategic thinking associated with two of its founding unions should check out some new titles from the University of Illinois Press. In Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU, co-editors Louis Aguiar and Joseph McCartin have assembled a collection of laudatory essays, by labor-oriented academics, on SEIU’s history as a healthcare, public employee, and service sector union, how it developed signature campaigns among janitors and fast food workers, and then promoted its “organizing model” among labor federations abroad (even as CTW floundered back home).

Unfortunately, there is no Purple Power report on the current Starbucks drive, backed by Workers United, an SEIU affiliate acquired (at UNITE-HERE

expense) during the Change to Win crack up. That more worker-led effort has gained far greater shop-floor traction–via 250 representation election wins and an on-going first contract struggle–than SEIU’s past more community-based agitation for fast food wage increases (aka “the Fight for Fifteen”).

Purple Power’s most interesting feature is its focus on the career of SEIU’s best known organizer, Stephen Lerner, the key strategist behind its multi-city Justice for Janitors campaign in the mid-1980s and later. Lerner got his start in labor, like many others, as a UFW volunteer, then organized factory workers and public employees. Within SEIU, he eventually became its building services division director and a national executive board member, before being pushed out of the union after Mary Kay Henry replaced Stern as president in 2010.

Lerner is now a research fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, directed by Purple Power co-editor McCartin, a Georgetown University Professor. In McCartin’s view, as a labor historian, 1.8 million workers greatly benefit from the work that Stern, Lerner, former AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and many others did to make SEIU “the most successful union in North America, and one of the most influential in the world.”

Restoring Dignity

In The Way We Build: Restoring Dignity to Construction Work, Mark Erlich, a now-retired regional leader of the Carpenters, provides a detailed account of the daunting challenges facing U.S. construction workers. A graduate of Columbia University, the author is a rare Sixties’ radical who joined the conservative building trades, rather than “colonizing” in white-collar or industrial union workplaces where left-wing labor traditions, however tattered, seemed easier to revive fifty years ago.

Erlich worked 13-years as a rank-and-file carpenter in Massachusetts. He was employed, for the next three decades, by either his state Building Trades Council or his own affiliated union. He was elected business manager of a small Carpenters local in Boston, before becoming a creative and energetic regional organizer for the union. In 2005, he won a contested election for Executive Secretary-Treasurer of a New England-wide Carpenters Council with 24,000 members and an appointed staff of 100. In that leadership role, he became one of the highest paid building trades officials in eastern Massachusetts. During his full-time union career, he penned two earlier books and, after retirement, returned to the Ivy League as a research fellow at the Center for Labor and A Just Economy at Harvard Law School.

Both Purple Power and The Way We Build include valuable studies of industries where workers once had bargaining clout and then de-unionization occurred, which required new membership recruitment strategies in response. In SEIU, this open shop trend hit its traditional core jurisdiction—building services. As Lerner recounts, “the original roots of the union were dying—cities were going non-union. The industry was getting contracted out [and SEIU] was accepting concessions in an attempt to protect union contractors from lower-paying non-union contractors.” As documented in Purple Power (and previous books or films like Bread and Roses, SEIU organizers succeeded in mobilizing a now largely immigrant workforce through strikes, building occupations, protest vigils, and civil disobedience which sought union recognition and master contracts in more than 30 cities in the U.S. and Canada. At its peak, JfJ activity helped win improvements for several hundred thousand janitors by making their plight a much-publicized labor cause celebre, locally and nationally.

Lost Market Share

Since 1971 in the building trades, Erlich reports, “real wages have plummeted by an astonishing 15%, a function of the decline in union density and the corresponding growth of the lower-waged, non-union sector.” The resulting two-tier workforce included union members–on big projects with public or private funding in regional union strongholds–who have apprentice programs, good wages and benefits, along with workplace safety protections.

But a much larger pool of construction workers, particularly in the South, Southwest, and Rocky Mountain states, have “lower pay, unsafe conditions, no benefits, no collective voice, and periodic wage theft.” One key management tool for union-busting and lowering labor standards has been the widespread mis-classification of workers as “independent contractors.” In the race to the bottom in construction, nothing gets you there quicker than shedding normal employer responsibilities for providing group health insurance or workers’ comp coverage and paying payroll taxes for Social Security, Medicare, or state-level unemployment benefits.

As Erlich notes, the resulting loss of “union market share” led the Carpenters to “streamline and reduce the number of struggling locals.” Beginning in the 1990s—and with greater impact during Doug McCarron’s 28-year reign—the union “established regional councils as intermediary bodies to reflect changing dynamics in the industry, to mirror an increasingly regionalized group of employer counter-parts, and to replace the chaos of decentralized and sometimes contradictory decision-making by autonomous local unions with a more uniform set of policies and guidelines across multiple states.”

According to Erlich, “managing the tension between the efficiencies of a streamlined operation and the democratic nature of local grassroots activity” can be a challenge. However, as the author points out (without citing a single illustrative example), “centralization can come at a cost” because “centralized power can and has been abused.” As the Association for Union Democracy has documented for the past half century, top-down control in the building trades remains a major obstacle to their revitalization because it breeds organizational corruption, involving pay-offs from employers or rip-offs of union treasuries and benefit plans by officials already collecting outlandish salaries.

Despite having only 430,000 dues-payers, the Carpenters Union pays 73-year old McCarron more than $600,000 a year—an amount twice Mary Kay Henry’s pay for presiding over a membership four times larger. Convention election of top Carpenters’ officers is tightly controlled and internal restructuring has deprived rank-and-filers of the ability to directly elect key officers in the union’s regional councils. (After Erlich retired, his own 6-state council was subsumed into a new North Atlantic States Regional Council that includes members from New York.) Under McCarron—like SEIU’s Andy Stern—dissident locals were put under trusteeship and members seeking more democratic internal structures were forced to disaffiliate.

In 2007, for example, thousands of British Columbia carpenters won a decade long struggle to create an independent union called the Construction Maintenance and Allied Workers. CMAW followed a trajectory similar to that of the 15,000-member National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). The latter was formed in 2009 after Stern seized control over SEIU’s third largest affiliate United Healthcare Workers-West because the elected leaders of its 150,000 members had questioned his healthcare organizing and bargaining strategy.

A Mega-Local Mistake?

In Purple Power, an Andy Stern loyalist heavily involved in that California fiasco, now seems to have developed second thoughts about top-down restructuring elsewhere in SEIU. In a chapter entitled “The legacy of Justice of Janitors and SEIU for the Labor Movement,” Stephen Lerner recalls his original advocacy of “creating larger locals within geographic areas that mirrored how the [building services] industry was structured” and could better coordinate organizing and bargaining involving common employers. But, when SEIU headquarters continued this consolidation trend—over Lerner’s objections, he reports– the result was multi-state entities like NYC-based Local 32BJ which now boasts 150,000 members from Boston to Miami.

According to Lerner, this restructuring was “a mistake which cut the heart out of Justice for Janitors” because such “mega locals” began operating “as

regional fiefdoms, focused on negotiating and organizing regionally [thereby] undercutting a national industry wide strategy.” Worse yet, SEIU now has giant affiliates “that in some ways mirror building trades locals in that they align with the industry and oppose ideas like rent control because the industry opposes it.” With great hind-sight, Lerner faults Stern and his SEIU e-board allies for believing they “could have a different kind of relationship with the industry that no longer required pitched battles.”

“We [in Justice for Janitors] believed in using our base and power to build a mass movement and exponential growth. They [Lerner’s bureaucratic foes] believed in incremental gains and finding ways to show employers the union could be a good partner. It was often called ‘peace plus.” Meaning SEIU needed to convince employers that not only did settling with the union bring ‘peace’—no strikes—but the settling with the union also meant we would be their ally on issues like zoning, rent control, etc.”

Similar labor-management partnering and transactional politics have long been the conservative MO of construction unions–with the mixed results described by Erlich. Conspicuously missing from his argument for craft union innovation in the 21^st century is much discussion of who can propel “the trades” in a better direction?

The Painters Union gets a shout out for electing its first African-American president, Ken Rigmaiden. Before his recent retirement, Rigmaiden took the enlightened stance that “we need to support our current members but also support those workers who want to do the same work we do—people of color and newly arrived workers in this country.” Just as SEIU, in its Justice for Janitors heyday, formed coalitions with immigrant rights organizations, some building trades affiliates have linked up with community-based groups fighting wage and hour law violations, worker misclassification, unsafe working conditions, and other exploitation of the undocumented.

Agents of Change?

In other sectors of organized labor, institutional change of the sort favored by Erlich has required membership activity, inspired or led by reform movements operating at the local or national level. That’s not an “internal organizing” model that either Erlich, Lerner, or other contributors to Purple Power pay much attention to. Instead, they downplay or ignore the importance of union democracy in ousting entrenched leadership and making labor bureaucracies more effective vehicles for new organizing, effective contract campaigns and strikes, and greater membership participation in legislative/political fights.

In fact, Lerner’s catalytic role in rallying immigrant janitors didn’t deter him from later helping to crush a nascent network of SEIU members in California, who favored reforms like direct election of top SEIU officers and board members. Lerner’s reward for that 2008-9 UHW trusteeship work was getting purged himself not long afterwards, when he lost his “political fight” with Andy Stern’s successor over organizing strategy, a parting of ways obliquely referenced in Purple Power.

Meanwhile, Mark Erlich kept his head down in the domain of Doug McCarron, a key building trades CEO never mentioned once in The Way We Build. Erlich was able to leave the Carpenters without any publicly embarrassing push out the door, like Lerner got. And they are both now free to promote “best practices” for labor in books, articles, interviews, or campus-based consulting work. But any blue-prints for union revitalization–based on newly- articulated critiques of SEIU or the building trades–aren’t worth much if workers have little decision-making power within those unions and few structural mechanisms to improve their organizational functioning.

Labor campaigns for dignity and justice on the job are essential progressive causes. But they would have more movement-building impact if the democratic rights of rank-and-file members were more widely respected and restored, rather than curtailed in the name of union modernization and consolidation.

Steve Early has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was an organizer and international representative for the Communications Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com

This Labor Day, It’s Time to Talk About Disabled Workers

BY OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN

 AUGUST 25, 2023

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Illustration of the first American Labor parade held in New York City on September 5, 1882 – Public Domain

This issue is personal for me. I debated for years about whether to disclose my disability status to potential employers.

I have rheumatoid arthritis, which is largely managed thanks to medication. I’m extremely lucky — I get to choose whether and how to disclose my disability, instead of needing to disclose it to get access to tools I need to succeed on the job. Usually, the only visible evidence of my disability at work is when an occasional flare-up gives me pain.

At least one out of every four Americans has a disability, and conditions like long COVID may have bumped that number even further. Millions of disabled American workers rely on a variety of visible and invisible workplace accommodations to help them do their jobs and do them well.

A Crossroads for Workers with Disabilities

Olivia Alperstein

As the U.S. Department of Labor explains on their website, workplace accommodations “may include specialized equipment, modifications to the work environment, or adjustments to work schedules or responsibilities.” That can mean anything from adaptive technology to ergonomic office furniture to a hybrid or fully remote work schedule.

We still have a long way to go to make American workplaces around our country more accessible, inclusive, and more likely to hire and retain disabled workers. Labor Day is the perfect time to talk about how to raise the standard across the country when it comes to disability accommodations in the workplace.

Three years into the pandemic, changes in remote and hybrid work policies have transformed the job market for disabled workers, vastly expanding opportunities for employment and making it more feasible for disabled workers not only to survive but to thrive. Workplaces in turn benefit from disabled workers’ talents, perspectives, and adaptiveness.

Disabled workers are a growing portion of the labor force and a vital asset to our economy. But with a growing employer pushback against remote work and other basic accommodations, these pandemic-era gains could end up being temporary if we’re not careful.

We’re at a crossroads: we can either continue to build on this progress that has opened doors for an entire section of the labor force — and for improved labor policies in general — or we can undo those great strides and shut disabled workers out.

Despite some protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which just turned 33, disabled workers still face stigma when it comes to hiring, employment, and navigating workplace environments that require accommodations.

Although a lot of progress has occurred over the past several decades, workers like me can still face an uphill battle when trying to access workplace accommodations to fulfill our job duties. Doctors’ notes, medical records, complicated human resources processes, and other hurdles can be a barrier to getting even the most basic requests accommodated.

The cost for employers tends to be pretty small. A May survey of employers by the Job Accommodation Network found that fulfilling an accommodation request cost half of them nothing at all. Of those that did incur an expense, the median cost was just $300.

Meanwhile, staff-wide workplace measures like flexible scheduling, paid sick leave, intermittent breaks, or ergonomic office furniture tend to benefit everyone, not just disabled employees.

Let’s raise the standard this year. Let’s treat disability accommodations like we treat safety standards or anti-discrimination statutes — as common-sense measures that help employers retain great employees and ensure their full potential, for the benefit of everyone.

Olivia Alperstein is the Media Manager Institute for Policy Studies.