Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

APPLE STORE WORKERS SHARE WHY THEY WANT TO “WORK DIFFERENT”

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When news broke last month that Apple Store workers were talking union, some commentators seemed puzzled about what issues workers could have at such a seemingly hip job. I have a new piece up at Working In These Times sharing what Apple Store workers told me about what it’s really like to work there:

A Bay Area employee described what happened last year when he and about a dozen co-workers realized employees with years of service were being paid less than new hires doing the same work. Agitated about the situation but concerned about retaliation, the workers committed to a plan: during the approaching round of annual one-on-one meetings between workers and managers, they would each ask about pay disparities.

Those workers who did ask received a consistent response: “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple.” Instead, managers said, the chance to work at Apple “should be looked at as an experience.” “You can’t live off of experience,” said the worker interviewed.

That story in particular reminded me of stories I heard in college when I interviewed veterans of the Yale clerical and technical workers’ organizing drive in 1984.

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EARTH TO A PATRONIZING PLANET

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The Netroots Nation conference has traditionally been an occasion for mainstream media types to take a whack at the unreasonableness of the left. Michael Grunwald offered up, if not a classic, a fairly representative example of the genre on Swampland yesterday. Take this paragraph designed to dispatch left criticisms of Barack Obama with patronizing parentheticals:

It’s true that President Obama is not as liberal as some Daily Kos bloggers would like him to be. (Although he has blogged at Daily Kos.) He continued some of President Bush’s national security policies. (Although he did end the war in Iraq.) He ignored left-wing calls to nationalize troubled banks. (Which turned out to be the right call.) He’s pushed for middle-class tax cuts and public-employee wage freezes that his base dislikes, and he’s outsourced most of the Republican-bashing that his base craves. (Which may be why he’s way more popular than his party.)

Let’s take the parenthetical potshots one at a time:

It’s true that Obama has posted on Daily Kos – although the most prominent instance was when he took to Daily Kos to criticize progressives for being too hard on senators that backed John Roberts (more on that one here and here).

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#2011PREDICTIONS SIX-MONTH CHECK-UP

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It’s been observed that pundits are better at making predictions than at owning up to them. We’re nearing the halfway point in 2011, which makes this a good time to check in on the predictions I made in December about what this year would bring. So here are my 2011 predictions, ranked based on how well they’ve held up so far – from best to worst. I’ll do a final accounting at the end of the year.

– “Governors Rick Scott and Paul LePage will both become very unpopular”: They have! In polls last month, LePage clocked in at 31 percent, and Scott at 29%.

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THE IRONIC SEXISM OF THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

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The Adjustment Bureau, which comes out on video this week, is about a man (Matt Damon) who discovers that a shadowy group of men is secretly making decisions large and small about his life, without his knowledge or consent. Which makes it ironic that the same man spends the movie making choices about what’s best for the woman (Emily Blunt) he’s supposedly in love with. (Spoilers Ahead)

In the middle of the movie, Damon’s faced with a choice between his and Blunt’s career ambitions and their chance to be together. Does Damon let Blunt in on the decision? Nope. Instead he ditches her in a hospital in a way that could be tragic if it was necessary or he was sympathetic, but instead is just frivolously obnoxious. Then, when he sees that rather than waiting for him to reappear as a non-jerk, she’s about to marry someone else, he changes his mind about what’s best for her and chases her down to get her to call off the wedding. Once he finds her, he deploys winning lines like “You cannot marry that man” and “You have to trust me” while doling out the smallest amount of information he thinks he can get away with. Seems he picked up more than a hat from the Adjustment Bureau.

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IRANIAN LABOR LEADER PREDICTS ECONOMIC CRISIS

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Last week Dissent published my interview with Homayoun Pourzad, the pseudonym for a leader in Iran’s labor movement. He had too many interesting things to say to fit into the article. So as a supplement to that piece, I wanted to share his dire predictions for Iran’s economy:

Eidelson: So what are we going to see happen with the economic situation in Iran over the next few months?

Pourzad: Even with rising oil prices, the government is not going to have enough money to continue cash subsidies.

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PAID SICK LEAVE PASSES PHILLY COUNCIL

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Philadelphia’s City Council just passed a paid sick leave bill by a 9-8 vote. Now it heads to Mayor Nutter’s desk. As I reported for Alternet on Monday:

In Philadelphia, after a series of delays for amendments, a city council vote on paid sick days is scheduled for Thursday. Mayor Michael Nutter has indicated his opposition but has not said whether he would veto the bill. This year activists built a coalition of 100 organizations to help lobby City Council and gathered 17,000 postcards which they strung around the perimeter of City Hall. Marianne Bellesorte, senior director of Policy for Pathways PA, said she expected “a tight vote” Thursday, but expressed hope that the bill would pass and that Mayor Nutter would decide against a vetoing a policy with demonstrated popular support.

Bellesorte’s hopes were echoed by Dewetta Logan, a former social worker who now directs the Smart Beginnings Early Learning Center. “A child is not to supposed to be in our care if they have certain illnesses,” she said, “but there’s nothing I can do if a parent just can’t leave” to pick a sick child up.

In a statement released this afternoon, Bellesorte hailed the passage of the bill, calling it “a common sense measure to preserve public health and promote economic security.”

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FINALLY, CT TO BECOME FIRST STATE WITH PAID SICK LEAVE LEGISLATION

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I have a piece up at Alternet reporting on the Connecticut’s historic new paid sick leave legislation and how activists from Philly to Seattle are working to make their cities follow suit. The piece also gives you a taste of what one major opponent of the bill believes about service workers:

Kia Murrell, who lobbied against paid sick leave for years for the Connecticut Business and Industry Alliance, claimed the bill will lead to lost jobs, worsened benefits and workers replaced by machines. She said businesses don’t offer paid sick days “because they can’t afford it,” and that if service workers working sick were a real threat to public health, “we would all be sick all the time.” Murrell suggested workers really come to work sick because they’re saving their sick days “for pleasure.” She also faulted workers for being too quick to call in sick: “A high-powered executive, if they get a cold, is more likely to tough it out.”

Check it out.

5 THINGS THAT MOST SURPRISED ME AT TONIGHT’S GOP DEBATE

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These are the things that actually most surprised me at tonight’s debate (already vented my sarcasm via Twitter):


5. Newt Gingrich’s gleeful implication that Muslims should be treated the way suspected communists were. It’s not his first explicit appeal to religious bigotry, but honestly I was taken aback watching this one.

4. Seeing Mitt Romney pass up a softball question inviting him to say something nice about Sarah Palin. Would seem like an opportunity he’d want to grab, given how much less likely she seems now either to run or to be a frontrunner if she does get in. Why not pander to her admirers? Didn’t feel like it? Looking ahead to the general election?

3. Rick Santorum going to lengths to tout his desire to phase out ethanol subsidies (with goodies for Iowans over the next five years). Would not have expected him to highlight that position, given Iowa is the place he has the least bad chance at a not totally humiliating showing.

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JIM CROW: NOT JUST DRINKING FOUNTAINS

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There’s a lot of silliness in this Politico piece reporting that Republicans (and one anonymous Democrat) would like Debbie Wasserman Schultz to be less strident in criticizing them. It’s worth noting that whereas Republican Chairman Michael Steele took hits in the media for criticizing Republicans, Democratic Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz is now taking hits for…criticizing Republicans. But what’s most pernicious in Molly Ball’s article is its selective memory about Jim Crow:

The congresswoman’s latest blunder came Sunday, when she said on television that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”

The equating of state legislatures’ efforts to require voters to show identification with laws that required separate schools and water fountains raised hackles, particularly in racially sensitive Democratic circles, prompting a quasi-retraction from Wasserman Schultz.

This raises the perennial question: Is it better to be obtuse intentionally or unintentionally?

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR IRAN?

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My interview with Iranian labor leader Homayoun Pourzad is now up on Dissent, just in time for tomorrow’s two-year anniversary of Iran’s contested election:

JE: How do you see the role of religion in terms of mobilizing people in the movement or suppressing the movement?


HP: For millions of people, including some workers, religion is the only language that they know in terms of culture and politics. Religious language and symbolism were used masterfully to mobilize people against the Shah. And the regime has been able to keep the mobilization going, even deepening it, with Ahmadinejad, with the same language and the same worldview. There is no reason why the democratic movement and even the labor movement shouldn’t use the same language. After all, many workers are devout religious people and most Iranians are believers, maybe over 80 percent. So this is not an opportunistic deployment of the other side’s tactics or language. It belongs as much to us as it belongs to them. So when in defiance of the regime people go on the rooftops and say, “God is great,” it really shakes the regime. Because that is exactly the language that they have used, and they have been able to dupe people with. And now it’s being hijacked. The same thing is going on in other Middle Eastern countries. And so I think religion could play a huge role in that sense.

We also talk about the evolving relationship between the labor movement and the Green movement, the challenges each faces, and what the US government should do. Check it out.

JOURNAL BURIES BOEING LEDE

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Jim DeMint Communications Advisor Amanda Carpenter yesterday tweeted a link to a Wall Street Journal story on a motion filed by three South Carolina Boeing employees working with the National Right to Work Foundation. Boeing, as I explained in this piece, is charged by the NLRB’s General Counsel with retaliating against union members in Washington State by transferring a new line of airliners to South Carolina. The three workers, at least one of whom was active in campaigning to get rid of the Machinists union at the South Carolina plant, want to intervene in the case in defense of Boeing. Carpenter is presumably tweeting (on her personal feed) the article because she likes seeing Boeing employees siding with the company (at least three, that is). But I’d say the most revealing piece of the WSJ story is buried in the sixth paragraph (emphasis mine):

When Boeing bought one of the pre-existing 787 facilities in the state, the production employees working there at the time were represented by the Machinists union and Boeing was “more than willing to work with” the union, the motion says. Still, one of the three employees now seeking to intervene successfully led an effort to decertify the union at that plant in September 2009, in part to improve Boeing’s chances of building the new facility, the motion says.

So one of the Boeing workers thought going non-union would improve the chances of Boeing moving production to South Carolina. How does that help Boeing’s case that it doesn’t retaliate against union activity? Would be interesting to know if any Boeing management suggested to this worker that getting rid of the union would be seen favorably by the company. (That could have been grounds for another Unfair Labor Practice charge). Maybe the Journal could do a follow-up story on the topic.

I tweeted at Carpenter yesterday to get her take on this part of the story, but so far no response.

Update: The NRWF motion is on-line. In his declaration, Dennis Murray says
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WHAT IF PAUL RYAN PROPOSED A HEALTH INFLATION TAX ON SENIORS INSTEAD?

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In honor of Paul Ryan, I have a thought experiment up on the Washington Monthly blog:

“My fellow Americans, it’s time for straight talk, tough decisions, and tight belts. Health care inflation is a prime driver of our long-term debt. That’s why I’m going to save Medicare with my Health Inflation Tax. It’s a simple solution: each senior will just have to pay a tax equal to the increase in the cost of their Medicare to the government beyond 2.7% a year. So if your individual Medicare costs us 10 percent more next year, your tax will cover three-quarters of the increased cost of your care (the other quarter is on us!). Here’s the best part: if you want lower taxes, you just need to use less healthcare. And you can be proud knowing that as your Health Inflation Tax goes up and up, Medicare’s net cost to the government will never increase by more than 2.7% again. Now let’s come together and get my Health Inflation Tax passed. No demagoguery allowed.”

How popular do you think this plan would be? Would it have gotten the same forty Senate votes Ryan’s plan did on Wednesday?

Read it here.