The Powerful Movement To Micromanage and Defund Public Schools Has Been Awfully Quiet About Police
Police are violently suppressing street protests across the country in mutiny against community demands for democratic accountability and respect for human rights. Their brutal rejection of basic demands for greater oversight and penalties has fueled larger demands for defunding police departments, if not outright abolition and replacement with other bodies. In this context, some activists are calling for a crackdown on police unions, which they say protect police from democratic accountability. That these calls are not being joined by a seemingly obvious ally is telling. There is already a political movement that blames unions for the harm done to Black communities by publicly funded institutions. Its adherents argue that these public bodies misspend the money they have and deserve no additional resources. It is well-funded by the philanthropy world, hyped by celebrities, cloaked in the rhetoric of civil rights and showered with uncritical media coverage, and has been successful in […]
This May Day, It’s Time to Cut Work Down to Size
[This article was co-authored by Leo Gertner.] Every year, the rest of the world marks the first of May with worker celebration and protest. American unions that sprung up in the years after the Civil War picked the day to launch their inspirational campaign for a better balance between work and life, captured in their slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.” Back then, the average manufacturing worker toiled 100 hours a week. Conditions have improved, but we’ve hardly achieved the eight-hour day. Today, half of all Americans report working more than 50 hours a week, while millions of “involuntary part-time” employees at corporations like Walmart scramble to find enough hours of paid work to survive. Even Republicans recognize this crisis, with their recent belated proposals for paid family leave. These ask working people to fund their time spent caring for […]
Take This Bullshit Job and Pretend to Love It
The British economist Joan Robinson once remarked, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.” What kind of misery is it, then, if your particular form of exploitation is being asked to do nothing particularly useful? David Greaber explores this question in his thought-provoking and hilarious new book, Bullshit Jobs. Five years ago, he wrote an essay for the radical magazine Strike!, asking why people in the United States and England are not working the 15-hour weeks that John Maynard Keynes had predicted would be the result of technological advancement? In our post-scarcity society, he argued, only a tiny fraction of the population actually has to labor in order to provide for the material needs of all. “It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working,” he wrote. […]
Good job! New York State shows climate work can be union work
What if we could take bold steps to create thousands of good union jobs that also help save the environment? That’s the proposal of a New York State coalition of unions and environmentalists. Building trades, energy and transport workers unions have banded together to address the dual problems of inequality and climate change across New York State – and they’re winning. Without public policy that protects workers’ livelihoods as part of protecting the environment, many workers have to choose between good jobs or a healthy environment – a growing concern in New York State, and elsewhere. Climate change has hit New York hard. There was Super Storm Sandy as well as Hurricane Irene, unprecedented snowstorms, and more recently, Lake Ontario flooding, all of which have devastated communities across the state. To ensure cleanup and prevention jobs are good ones, Climate Jobs NY (CJNY) is a union-driven campaign to implement a […]
Company Towns Are Still with Us
On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. Meeting them at the station were the local police chief—a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud—and several out-of-work miners with guns. The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders. The street erupted in gunfire. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead—including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns. The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that […]
When Labor Fought Rock-and-Roll
Facing the world ain’t easy when there isn’t anything going Standing at the corner waiting watching time go by Will I go to work today or shall I bide my time So begins the Kinks’ song, “Get Back in Line,” one of the most hauntingly beautiful paeans to the forced idleness and stress of unemployment ever committed to tape. I’ve turned to this song for solace, a little too often for comfort, but I’ve always been discomfited by the refrain that follows. ‘Cos when I see that union man walking down the street He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line Is this just Ray Davies being a contradictory crank? He has, […]
Review of Sarah Jaffe’s “Necessary Trouble”
Something is happening. Socialism is no longer a dirty word (the “S-word”), but something a sizeable portion of Americans tell pollsters is their preferred vision for society. It’s no longer an anachronism to speak of “the Left.” A brave and quickly organized movement for black lives has not only sparked a new civil rights movement but has gotten many of us to see the criminal justice system for what it is: the evolution of Jim Crow. Oh, and a hell of a lot more workers are striking than before. There have been attempts to describe this emerging movement for social justice in book form before. The latest, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt by Sarah Jaffe, is the best so far. The Nation Books publication was released Tuesday. Jaffe, a freelance writer whose work has appeared everywhere from In These Times to The Guardian and The Atlantic, is a leading light […]
Why “Comrade?”
A friend and, dare I say, comrade wrote me and asked why I use the word “comrade” so freely, instead of the more accepted “brother” and “sister.” Won’t people associate you with James Bond villains and bomb-throwing radicals when you use that word? And it’s true. I do throw it around a good deal, both as a warm expression of solidarity and friendship and, a little bit, to make people a bit uncomfortable in otherwise stodgy rooms. Fuck it; I’ve already been blown up by Fox News for being dangerously un-American, so why pretend to be a safer person than I am? Besides, saying “brother” or “sister” instead of comrade is one of those bits of American exceptionalism, like not celebrating Labor Day on May 1 or calling football “soccer,” that really ought to be resisted as a matter of global solidarity. Comrade is the preferred salutation of the labor […]
Tuli’s Archives
Gothamist has a pretty incredible story about some newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics, to a song-never-recorded about Robert Moses. It’s easy to assume that the lyrics sheet is a hoax. But, because, it was discovered in the Tuli Kupferberg files, I’m inclined to regard it as legit. Tuli was a true American character. He was a member of the musical avant garde jug-band the Fugs, an early progenitor of the Village underground, a leftist and a proto-zinester. I first learned of him when, accompanied by a (paid!) intern, I poured through David McReynolds’ archives to find suitable material for the Socialist Party’s 100th anniversary conference journal. McReynolds was a long time leader of the SP, a pacifist and student of Bayard Rustin and A.J. Muste, a two-time candidate for President (I managed his second campaign in 2000; his first, in 1980, is purportedly the first time that an openly gay […]
Get Your Ticket to the NYAAF 10th Anniversary Celebration
It’s not too late to buy your tickets to the New York Abortion Access Fund’s 10th Anniversary Celebration. I’m Co-Chairing the event, and would love to see you there.