https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/what-now-for-unions/
or conservatives, the much-anticipated Supreme Court decision in the Janus v. AFSCME case may be coming eight years too late. If, as expected, the five Republican justices on the Court rule for the plaintiff, which would end public employee unions' ability to collect dues from all the workers they represent, they will significantly weaken the nation's largest unions, among them the two teachers unions, as well as AFSCME and SEIU. These are also among the most significant organizations in Democrats' voter-mobilization programs and, more generally, in supporting progressive groups and causes. Even more fundamentally, the right plainly hopes such a ruling will also drive the final nail into the coffin of the American labor movement.
While a pro-Janus ruling could strengthen the Republicans electorally, when it comes to killing unions, the right is simply too late. The current configurations of the union movement may well shift, but the growing public support for labor suggests that in one form or another, worker organizations are not going away.
Eight years ago, in the trough of the Great Recession, the nation's view of unions was a good deal more negative than it is today. For the first time since it had begun polling on the issue, the Gallup organization reported that support for unions had fallen below 50 percent. The United Auto Workers' role in securing federal funds to bail out General Motors and Chrysler, and news reports that characterized UAW members as overpaid (which an inept UAW leadership did nothing to refute) contributed to a general decline in union support.
To many Americans, the movement was a dinosaur, a collection of cossetted workers in dying industries or on the public payroll, still collecting pensions while everyone else struggled to get by on 401(k)s or nothing at all.
That, however, was then. Today, both the Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew, a good 20 to 35 percentage points higher than the approval ratings of President Trump and the Republican Congress. Among Americans under 30, unions' approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent. As was the case in the 1930s, pro-union sentiment has grown only after the recovery was well under way.
At first glance, young people's support for unions is puzzling: With union membership down to 10.7 percent of the workforce, and with many states having hardly any union presence, it's a safe inference that most millennials have had no contact with a union at all. And yet, it's young workers who are joining unions today, as the successful organizing drives among graduate students and the (disproportionately young) journalists at digital media outlets attest. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than three-quarters of new union members in 2017 were under 35.
Millennials' support for unions, I'd argue, is of a piece with their 2016 support for the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Both are rooted in the economic adversities afflicting the young, including employment insecurity, student debt, unaffordable housing, and more. These struggles feed millennials' apprehensions that the middle class they seek to join is further out of reach for them than it was for their parents and grandparents.
Unions' new members are not merely younger; they also are increasingly either professional or technical workers. In 2003, 34 percent of all union members were professionals or techs; today, that figure has risen to 42 percent. A recent analysis by The Boston Globe concludes that a majority—51 percent—of union members in the six New England states are professionals or technical workers.
These occupational numbers are not necessarily good news for unions. Most likely, they reflect the fact that the only workers with the clout to organize are workers who cannot easily be fired for joining a union. It's no accident that professional athletes and screen and television actors have some of the strongest unions; as is not the case with workers in fast-food outlets or on assembly lines, managers can't sack professionals with the assurance that they can find a ready stream of plausible replacements.
This is one reason why West Virginia's teachers won their strike: Even the Republicans who control that state's government knew there was no way to easily replace them. Conversely, this is also one reason why the efforts of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to organize fast-food workers, while yielding landmark minimum-wage hikes in many cities and states, have yet to increase the union's ranks by a single member. The bosses at McDonald's and their peers know that they can fire their pro-union employees and replace them with no great difficulty, and that any sanctions imposed on them under an enfeebled National Labor Relations Act are negligible. We have no basis for assuming that a young worker in a retail outlet is any less desirous of joining a union than, say, a young professor, but we know that management is emboldened to fire the former and constrained from firing the latter. That's one reason why industrial unions like the UAW and the United Steelworkers have devoted resources to organizing—often successfully—at universities.
The growing share of union members who are both younger and professional is probably one reason why digital mobilization played such a key role in the West Virginia teachers strike, and is so crucial to similar labor actions in Oklahoma and elsewhere. Nearly all of West Virginia's 20,000 teachers were signed on to a strike-participation Facebook page leading up to their walkout, and when the two teachers unions in the state struck a deal with the governor to end the strike in return for a promise of a 5 percent raise, it was the spontaneous Facebook-page resistance of teachers—some local union officials, some not—to going back to work before the deal was actually done that prevailed. Both the universal rank-and-file walkout and, then, the universal opposition to returning to work without a deal would have been impossible without Facebook.
Indeed, it's clear that Facebook provides workers with a form of mobilization that both complements and eclipses unions' own capacities. West Virginia has only 75,000 dues-paying members in all of its unions, and only a fraction of those are teachers—yet nearly every one of the state's 20,000 teachers walked off their jobs. In Oklahoma, a state with a unionization rate of just 5.5 percent, and where all unions claim a bare 84,000 members, a Facebook page called "Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!," started by one rank-and-file teacher, has 55,000 members and has been the key instrument for building support for a strike.
As University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued in Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, the world-shaking mobilizations in New York's Zuccotti Park, Cairo's Tahrir Square, and Istanbul's Gezi Park—all of which she attended—were inconceivable without social media. However, she argues, since the crowds they generated had no organizational structure or capacity to reach decisions, they were incapable of winning concessions from the powers they had assembled to oppose. In that sense, the West Virginia teachers strike occurred within what we might term the Tufekci Sweet Spot: It relied on social media to mobilize mass support, and had just enough decision-making structure provided by the teachers unions (and directed by bottom-up sentiment made clear through Facebook) to strike a deal with the state.
What, then, will the future of workers' movements look like in a time of growing pro-union sentiment, mounting millennial militancy, enhanced mobilization capacity, and the increasing impediments to union strength likely to be decreed by the Supreme Court? The immediate, and intended, effect of a pro-Janus, anti-union ruling will be to diminish and divert union resources, thereby constraining Democrats' electoral capacities (though the anti-Trump surge may compensate for that). In the non-electoral sphere, West Virginia may provide us with something of a template, if chiefly for professional workers. Teachers, not just in Oklahoma but in a range of states, are considering striking for higher pay and benefits. Even where union membership isn't strong, they clearly have the capacity to mobilize, and the material motivation as well: On average, teachers are making more than $3,000 less today than they made in 2009, while their family health insurance costs $1,400 more than it did a decade ago.
As with teachers, so with a rising number of other professional and technical workers whom management can't readily replace—even if, as in West Virginia, the workers' actions take place outside the legal framework of collective bargaining. Indeed, if the Court rules for Janus, which would diminish the number of union members, we may be in for a spate of professional-worker job actions among both members and non-members, in which unions (or, for a preponderantly non-union workforce, pop-up unions) chiefly help frame demands and negotiate the contract—serving less as the mobilizer and more as the closer.
For most American workers, however, the legal impediments to unionizing, already formidable, will grow even more so in a post-Janus world. Should the Democrats recapture the federal government after the 2020 elections, they will need to do something that no Democratic Congress has mustered the will to do in the last 70 years: Change labor law to bolster workers' right to organize—and, if the Democrats can figure out how to do so, do the same for workers who are independent contractors and temps.
They will have strong public backing to make such changes. The anti-plutocratic, pro-democratic politics of the young in particular apply not just to the polity, but to the workplace as well.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
LONDON – The world will soon witness a historic test of wills between China and the United States, two superpowers whose leaders see themselves as supreme. In the immediate sense, it will be a battle over trade. But also at stake is the strategic leadership of East Asia and, eventually, the international order. As things stand, China holds a stronger position than many people realize. The question is whether Chinese President Xi Jinping will feel confident or brazen enough to want to prove it.
The test of wills was hardly China's choice; but nor does it come as a surprise. US President Donald Trump's recently announced import tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other Chinese-made goods are in keeping with his brand of economic nationalism. And his decision to accept North Korea's invitation to hold bilateral talks on its nuclear program reflects the same "bring it on" attitude that he applied to the North's earlier threats of war.
The upcoming test will be historic because it promises to reveal the true strengths and attitudes of the world's rising power vis-à-vis the weakened but still leading incumbent power. For better or worse, the result could shape the world for decades to come.
On the trade front, China's large bilateral surplus with the US could mean that it has more to lose from a trade war, simply because it has more exports that can be penalized. It is often said that surplus countries will always be the biggest losers in any tit-for-tat escalation of tariffs and other barriers.
But this assumption misses multiple points. For one thing, China is more economically resilient to the effects of a trade war than it used to be. Trade as a share of its total economic activity has halved in the past decade, from more than 60% of GDP in 2007 to just over 30% today.
China also has major advantages in terms of domestic politics and international diplomacy. As a dictatorship, China can ignore protests by workers and companies suffering from US tariffs. In the US, where mid-term congressional elections will be held this November, the outcry from exporters, importers, and consumers facing higher costs will be heard loud and clear.Of course, Trump, too, might ignore protests against his trade war if he is convinced that taking on China will please his core voters and win him re-election in 2020. But congressional Republicans will probably feel differently, especially if their states or districts are among those being singled out by Chinese import tariffs.
In terms of international diplomacy, Trump's trade war will help China present itself as the defender of the rules-based international order and multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization. To be sure, not all countries would follow China's lead. The WTO does not recognize China as a market economy, owing to the Chinese government's significant involvement in industry and alleged theft of intellectual property.
But China will have a chance to play the victim, while arguing that the US now poses the single largest threat to the global trading system that it helped create. And if a US-initiated trade war drags on, China's case will become only stronger as more countries suffer the disruptive effects of tariffs.
Of course, China may choose not to fight Trump's trade war at all. With symbolic concessions – such as an agreement to import US-produced liquefied natural gas or promises to offer new guarantees for intellectual-property rights – it could convince Trump to stand down. But if Xi suspects that a show of strength will bolster China's international standing while undercutting that of the US, he may decide to act accordingly.
The North Korea issue is more complicated. But here, too, China will have an advantage. Even barring real progress in the talks, China already looks like a good global citizen. Over the past year, it has been pressuring the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, to negotiate. By participating in coordinated economic sanctions against the Kim regime, and by reportedly capping vital exports of oil and other essentials to the North, China has played its part in bringing Kim to the table.
On paper, the fundamental question is whether North Korea will be willing to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, the fruit of more than 30 years of work. And as China well knows, North Korea would never give up its nuclear weapons without major changes in the military balance on and around the Korean Peninsula.
Kim will likely offer to denuclearize solely on the condition that the US withdraw its forces from South Korea, and perhaps from Japan, too. Barring that, he would not feel secure enough to do without the nuclear deterrence on which he has staked his regime's survival. For his part, Trump could not possibly accede to such a condition. At best, he could agree on a process through which such extraordinary moves might be discussed at a later date.
Either way, China comes out on top. In the event of stalemate, it will have gotten Kim to the table and put America in the position of being a refusenik. And if the US does agree to any military concessions, China's strategic position will be strengthened.
The only real question for Xi, then, is whether he wants to assert China's top-dog status now, or sometime in the future.