Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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University of Michigan’s transient and graduate student teachers, who voted Sunday by 90% to strike, draw closer to a Thursday walkout:

Despite an impasse on wage and job security issues, the two sides managed to agree upon another contract article at yesterday’s meeting, this one regarding how the University posts its available job positions. Since bargaining began in August, 18 articles have been tentatively agreed upon in what will become the first contract between LEO and the University.

…LEO President Bonnie Halloran said the organization is still focused on its three key issues, which were not resolved yesterday. “We are looking for significant progress on the issues of salary, job security and benefits, so the agreement on job posting is not sufficient progress,” said Halloran, a lecturer on the University’s Dearborn campus.

…English lecturer George Cooper said LEO likely will strike. “A walk-out will draw students’ attention to the number of lecturers on campus. It will also draw the attention of the University,” he said. “If half of the classes don’t run on Thursday it will be a physical reminder of who teaches the classes, and you can only hope that this information leads to better decisions.”

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Deja vu all over again:

Four soldiers from a New York Army National Guard company serving in Iraq are contaminated with radiation likely caused by dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops, a Daily News investigation has found.
They are among several members of the same company, the 442nd Military Police, who say they have been battling persistent physical ailments that began last summer in the Iraqi town of Samawah.

“I got sick instantly in June,” said Staff Sgt. Ray Ramos, a Brooklyn housing cop. “My health kept going downhill with daily headaches, constant numbness in my hands and rashes on my stomach.”

A nuclear medicine expert who examined and tested nine soldiers from the company says that four “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded American shells manufactured with depleted uranium.

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Speaking of unions in politics:

Nationally, the trend is to link with faith-based, nonprofit and neighborhood organizations. It’s no different in Greater New Haven. “Union members alone aren’t enough to turn the corporate onslaught,” said Gwendolyn Mills, a training facilitator and organizer for the Federation of Hospital and University Employees.

The Rev. Emilio Hernandez, of Knowing God Ministries, said churches throughout New Haven neighborhoods are standing with organized labor in the “social contract” movement. “For the first time, there is an awakening in the people,” Hernandez said. He said citizens are registering to vote, learning more about elections and how town committees operate. “We have the power at our fingertips to bring change to our communities by talking to people and by being organized,” Hernandez said.

Actually, it is different in New Haven, and not only because Emilio Hernandez and Gwen Mills are rockstars of the progressive movement – also insofar as the breadth and depth of New Haven’s social contract movement, and of its strategic allies, is too rare these days in this country. But it’ll continue, God willing, to spread.

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I agree with most of what Alyssa has to say here:

There is simply no precedent for the outpacing of C.E.O. compensation and other corporate profits in comparison to what the people who actually make companies run earn as it happens in America today. It’s telling that in the wake of major corporate scandals, rather than condemn Tyco executives, for example, for their terrible, destructive greed, jurors in their corruption trials dismiss accounts of profit gone mad as a waste of time. Our views on fair compensation, respect for employees, and the value of organized labor are vastly off-kilter.

…Unions will always have limited power if their strength is confined to the workplace, where they can fight employers, but lack the ability to define some of the structural constraints, like the minimum wage, that affect their members. It is vital that unions be organized well enough so they can make their members’ voices heard in both the workplace and the voting booth, and make sure that they are united behind strong, progressive policies.

I do have a couple points of disagreement or, at least, of divergent emphasis. First, I think Alyssa inadvertently minimizes the significance of the two moments she highlights which we agree offer new hope for American labor, the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides and the HERE – UNITE merger:

The former represents a willingness to be flexible in the face of party re-alignment and a recognition of the progress of globalization. The second represents a committment to getting leaner and meaner, and an understanding that you need both money and killer organizing to beat a strong resurgence of anti-union sentiment.

While there’s certainly a good deal of truth in the argument that the merger represented a union with members but no money and a union with money but no members joining forces, I think there’s a much broader point here, one that I’ve mentioned on this site before: Labor has to be as well organized and as unified as management, and as labor organizes across boundaries between nations, we must organize across boundaries between unions, something most folks who were watching and have the freedom to say so agree didn’t take place effectively in California. Nathan Newman has argued recently that union competition marked labor’s most effective period by providing a spur to all sides to organize; unfortunately, union competition also marked one of labor’s most tragic moments, its divided and self-destructive response to the growing Red Scare, in which all too often those very union competitions eased the process of conservative unions siding with Uncle Sam against their more radical counterparts. Among the biggest losers there, not surprisingly, were the workers of color whom only the left-wing unions of the CIO were effectively organizing. Of course there are good reasons for the AFL-CIO to be composed of different unions divided in some cases by job type, in others by region, in others by organizing strategy – but too often those barriers are arbitrary and costly. As has played out on Andy Stern’s blog and in its comments, finding innovative ways to foster broader strategic alliances while maintaining and building industrial democracy and democratic leadership on the local level is key (David Moberg explores this further in this week’s The Nation in an article which isn’t yet on-line). So the UNITE HERE merger, bringing together one union which launders the second union’s uniforms and a second union which serves the first union food at lunch hour, bringing together two unions with a proven commitment to progressive organizing, is an urgent model – although it may not have been carried out in a way consonant with the best values of these unions.

Speaking of progressive organizing, I think that to articulate the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides as a response to a shifting national and international landscape both understates their significance and lets labor off to easily for a historically (up to the mid-90’s) anti-immigrant stance that at no time was in the big picture interests of union members. Daivided labor markets – be the axis of divison race, religion, gender, or immigration status – have always been lucrative for employers, who’ve proven all to eager to exploit a vulnerable group’s marginal position in society (and too often in the labor movement as well) to drive down their wages and benefits, and to use the threat of that group’s therefore cheaper labor costs to drive down everyone else wages and benefits and pit natural allies against each other in an ugly race to the bottom. Historical examples of course abound; here in Philadelphia, a union movement which had succesfully organized and won the ten-hour day screeched to a halt as first-generation Catholic immigrants and second-generation Protestants in different trades started killing each other in the Kensington riots. Organizing the unorganized workers, rather than engaging in a futile campaign to stop them from working is the only morally defensible and genuinely pragmatic approach. God bless John Wilhelm, Maria Elena Durazo, and the unrecognized others who brought the AFL-CIO around.

The other area where my perspective may differ from Alyssa’s somewhat is on the role of unions in politics. I’m a major proponent of the New Unity Partnership, which would enshrine organizing in the workplace and political organizing as unions’ major functions and major expenditures. But while Alyssa urges unions

picking politically viable candidates and proving that they can turn out large numbers of supporters for them…severe layoffs, a slowdown in organizing, and bad choices of candidates have made unions look less credible politically than they did in 2000…

let’s not forget what the Democratic party, after the Clinton years, which on the one hand brought the Family and Medical Leave Act and an increased minimum wage, and on the other wrought NAFTA and Welfare Reform, has to prove to American workers and American labor. Labor has been most effective in this country not by letting its support be taken for granted by Democrats but by organizing so powerfully that the Democrats (read: FDR) feared that if they didn’t find enough to offer labor it would sink them. I’m glad Kerry wants a Labor Secretary from the “House of Labor.” I’d like to hear more about this legislation on the campaign trail though.

That said, I’m stoked for SEIU to make history by devoting its resources this election not into soft-money TV ads but by getting thousands of its members leaves of absence to organize their neighbors to vote Bush out of office, and to hold our national leadership accountable through November and beyond. The party machines could learn a lot from them; today’s New York Times suggests they’ve begun to already.

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Israeli police restrictions force the UN to stop food relief in the occupied territories:

Efforts to persuade the Israeli authorities to lift the restriction on the transport of UNRWA’s empty food containers out of Gaza have so far failed, forcing the Agency to suspend the delivery into Gaza of 11,000 tons of food from Ashdod Port to avoid a bottleneck which would result in prohibitive costs. Under normal circumstances, UNRWA delivers some 250 tons of food aid per day in Gaza alone as part of a wider programme of emergency assistance to refugees, initiated shortly after the outbreak of strife in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000. Since then, the Gaza Strip has been locked into a deep socio-economic crisis resulting from the prolonged closure of its border with Israel, the destruction of thousands of homes as well as of agricultural and local industrial assets. Almost two out of three households in Gaza live below the poverty line, and more than half its workforce is unemployed.

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As well he should:

Democratic Senator John Kerry said he’d appoint a union member to be secretary of labor if he defeats President George W. Bush in the November election.

“You deserve the ability to get ahead in return for hard work,” Kerry told a conference of 2,000 building trade union members in Washington by satellite from Boston, his hometown. “You deserve a secretary of labor from the house of labor, and most importantly you deserve a president who puts jobs first.”

The last U.S. president to choose a labor secretary from a union was Republican Richard Nixon, who in 1973 appointed Peter J. Brennan, a New York state building and construction trades labor leader, to the position.

Assuming Ronald Reagan isn’t the union member in question, this is very good news.

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Alyssa slams the critics of the movement for real partnership between Yale and New Haven:

Such a train of logic completely ignores the fact that just as New Haven’s reputation benefits from Yale’s presence here, Yale is lucky to be located in New Haven. This is a city that, because of its accessible size and deep connections to the University, offers unprecedented opportunity for student involvement and leadership in the community and that embraces its students as full citizens when they venture off campus. Because they live in New Haven, students have opportunities for civic engagement in an incredibly diverse city and at a level that simply doesn’t exist at other colleges.

At the same time, writers like Goode seem to forget that there are people in New Haven who are hurt by Yale’s policies. The university’s programs of economic development in the Ninth Square, Chapel Street, the Shaw’s area, and Science Park are intended to create a safe buffer zone around campus, but they also bring in businesses and restaurants that many New Haven residents can’t afford to patronize, and provide jobs that New Haven’s public school system often doesn’t prepare residents to apply for. As Yale reaches further out into New Haven and transforms communities in ways that dramatically change the lives of long-term city residents, that New Haven worries about losing its independence and integrity to Yale developments, that New Haven may become, because of Yale’s economic influence, nothing more than a company town.

That doesn’t mean that New Haven residents are greedy or stupid. Goode’s assertion that “they [meaning Yale’s critics] don’t really seem to appreciate that Yale actually has an educational mission that transcends its corporate identity,” is unfair. To most New Haven residents, Yale’s corporate identity actually is more important than its educational mission; there are many more New Haven residents getting paychecks from Yale than there are New Haven public school graduates getting degrees. The consequences of Yale’s development decisions affect more city residents’ homes and neighborhoods than dorm rooms housing Yale students. Yale’s unionized employees don’t have the same opportunities to take University classes that their Harvard counterparts do. If Yale’s critics don’t appreciate the University’s educational mission, it’s probably because most of them have never been a part of it.

Check out her blog too.

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Nathan Newman offers a reality check on the latest in Nicholas Kristof’s messianic campaign to teach the left how he learned to love neo-liberal corporate-driven gloablization:

If the children aren’t allowed to work, adults elsewhere will be allowed to work, and almost invariably at a higher wage, so they will have more money to bring home and possibly pay the taxes to fund schools for their children.

Repeat that– you take a job away from a child, you are creating a job slot for an adult, improving his bargaining leverage, and increasing the collective wages paid to the poor in the developing world.

Those who talk about the benefits of child labor invariably tell some story of a particular child, but ignore how the pathetic wages paid to that one child has undermined wages for adults in that country overall. This is why child labor was banned in the United States– not just because of empathy for children but from hard-headed strategy to deny corporations an easy way to avoid paying adult wages.

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Wal-Mart Watch: Stymied by local government concerned about its devastating costs for local communities, Wal-Mart gambles on the referendum process to escape regulation:

The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood’s planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A.

…”We were told, basically, `Don’t waste your time,’ ” said Peter Kanelos, the Southern California coordinator for Wal-Mart’s community affairs division. “But these groups are not representative of the community,” he said. “Organized labor is attempting to bully Wal-Mart and its customers. If organized labor and those elected officials they put into power think they’re going to attack Wal-Mart, then they better expect Wal-Mart to fight back.”

The project’s opponents say that Wal-Mart is the one doing the bullying. They noted that the company paid signature gatherers for the ballot initiative more than it pays its average clerk. And they say that Inglewood will be a test case. If the initiative succeeds here, they say, it will become a model for Wal-Mart sovereignty across the nation and around the globe.

“This is the first time in the country they’ve tried to do something this extreme,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, leader of the Coalition for a Better Inglewood, a group formed to fight the Wal-Mart project. “They are driving a Mack truck through California land use, planning and environmental law and trying to create a Wal-Mart government on this 60-acre site. If they succeed in doing this, it will be their blueprint.”

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Erin Scharff, in her first post on her new site, considers the Rwandan genocide, which began a decade ago this week, in light of ongoing trials there for crimes against humanity, and the implications of Tutsi resettlement for the Zionist response to the Holocaust:

It struck most people at the time that reintegration was an impossibility and in truth, few survivors really wanted to return. My grandfather was treated to a less than receptive welcome in Poland when he return home, and when he and my grandmother testified in Munich at de-nazification trials, they refused to spend the night in Germany.

After the Shoah, my grandmother’s father brought her over to New York, while my grandfather, also from Lithuania, stayed in Munich to work for two years before they brought him over as well.

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Wednesday, I went from a conversation with an 1199 member at Yale – New Haven Hospital to a dinner at Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life with Marvin Lender (that’s right – the one with all the bagels), prominent Jewish philanthropist and Chairman of the Board of the Hospital. The topic? Jewish tradition and business ethics.

I showed up with fifteen-some friends eager to discuss, in light of Jewish tradition: the Hospital’s three-year refusal to make a contract offer with across-the-board raises for its unionized food service workers, who’ve now twice gone on strike (although in a meeting with students a few months back, the Hospital’s Vice President for Public Relations claimed that they hadn’t, and he had to be corrected by the Vice President for Labor Relations); the paralyzing, and empirically justified, fear of the Hospital’s non-union workforce, who make significantly less than the Local 34 and 35 members who perform identical work beside them, that discussing organizing will cost them their jobs; and the Hospital’s failure, even after its latest reforms, to formulate a policy which ensures access to healthcare for New Haveners lacking full health insurance.

Lender’s response to the first few questions along these lines have two basic parts. First: He could serve on “any board I wanted to,” but “I chose Yale – New Haven Hospital” because of its work helping people. “My heart goes out” to “those poor people” who work there and “love their jobs” but “are being targeted by the unions.” The Hospital “is too busy helping people” to “get into a – excuse me – a pissing contest with the unions.” Second: Secular organizations, like Yale – New Haven Hospital, “aren’t like Jewish organizations,” in that there’s a rigid structure and so “my job isn’t to tell [Yale – New Haven Hospital President] Joe Zaccanino what to do.” The Board just “hires and fires” him. So “it would be inappropriate for me to comment on specific issues.”

When we questioned Lender’s categorization of a non-profit Hospital’s service to the poor and treatment of its workers as “day-to-day issues,” he became visibly more uncomfortable and markedly more curt. He was relieved to get a question from one of the couple people in the room not there to talk about the hospital, this one about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and spoke sympathetically and articulately about his responsibility, as a confidante and ally of leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations, to pressure them to commit to a two-state solution. So I expressed my agreement with his principle that those in positions of influence over powerful leaders who’ve gone astray have a moral obligation to speak out, cited some sources from Leviticus, Megillat Esther, and Pirkei Avot to that effect, and urged him to push Yale – New Haven Hospital into line with our shared ethical tradition. His response: “Are you trying to tell me that Esther or Mordechai with Chairman of a Board?”

Lender became increasingly rude as Jared Maslin, drawing on his experience at SHOUT helping the poor file applications for Yale – New Haven Hospital’s Free Bed Fund, tried to briefly describe the process to contextualize his question. “Are you going to ask me a question or not?” Lender asked, to which Jared replied that he wanted to make sure everyone in the room could understand the situation, prompting Lender to tell him that that was a waste of time. Jared, taken aback somewhat, suggested that he and Lender could talk about the issue after the dinner, to which Lender responded adamantly, “Now we won’t.” So Jared related that his experience suggests that the application system intentionally erects intimidating and often insurmountable beuracratic boundaries to dissuade those who need assistance from seeking it, and asked Lender what he would think of giving a third-party of some kind oversight over the process. Lender’s response: “It would be inappropriate for me to comment on that ‘yes’ or ‘no.'”

Shaking his head in his hands during questions, Lender announced, in a supreme moment of irony, “I’d didn’t come here to talk about this. I didn’t come here to talk about the Hospital. I came here to talk about business ethics.” That just about said it all. He then accused us of being rude and insisted that he was being “respectful” anyway, and accused us of “wasting the time” of all the people there who didn’t care about the Hospital, a peculiar sentiment given that all but a few of us had come specifically to discuss with one of the most powerful leaders of the Hospital how it’s treatment of the New Haven community clashed with religious and ethical values and what he planned to do about it.

Towards the end, Lender insisted that those who wanted to talk about the Hospital should “send me a letter.” That sounds like an invitation to me.

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The Washington Post spills an obscene amount of ink on the worst-kept secret of the Presidential race:

Some critics say Bones produces elitist leaders who are myopic on America’s social and economic challenges. Others argue that for presidential candidates to profess loyalty to a secret society — particularly one that for a time didn’t admit minorities and women — is contrary to democratic principles.

Chicago writer and educator Steve Sewall, son of revered Yale English professor Richard B. Sewall, has even called for Bush and Kerry to resign from Skull and Bones. “They can be loyal to it, but they can’t place that loyalty above the loyalty to the nation they serve,” he argues.

“It is really by definition an extremely exclusive club for the wealthy and connected,” says Bill Minutaglio, a Texas journalist and author of “First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty.” “Put all that together and suddenly, in the year 2004, realize the two men who are running for the most important office on the planet Earth come out of that exact same mausoleum, and it should give you pause and reason to think about what it means to be privileged, enabled and protected in the United States.”