Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

DOCK MANAGEMENT SUES OVER SOLIDARITY SHUTDOWN – IS SETTLEMENT IN THE WORKS?

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My reported piece breaking news about the employers’ lawsuit against ILWU Local 10 is up on Working in These Times:

April 4 saw hundreds of solidarity actions across the United States, but only one reported work stoppage. On the national day of “We Are One” actions defending the right to collective bargaining, thousands of longshoremen shut down the ports of San Francisco and Oakland for 24 hours by not showing up to work.

The Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which comprises the longshoremen’s employers, responded by filing a federal lawsuit against those workers’ union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers union (ILWU) Local 10. Now, only a month after filing their lawsuit, the employers have reportedly reached out to the union to discuss dropping their charges.

Check it out. I’ll be posting updates as the story develops.

LABOR BOARD DEFENDS WORKERS, CONSERVATIVES FREAK OUT

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My new piece debunking right-wing rhetoric about the NLRB’s Boeing complaint is up on Counterpunch and Common Dreams:

During the Bush years, many progressives gave up hope that the government could really make companies pay when they broke the law. Now a big company may have to pay a big price for illegally punishing workers. Last month the National Labor Relations Board, the federal body that enforces labor law, issued a complaint charging that Boeing illegally transferred the production of a line of aircraft out of Washington State. Boeing is accused of transferring the production to punish the workers there for going on strike. Punishing workers for union activity is retaliation, and it’s illegal. If Boeing is found guilty, it could be made to transfer the whole production line back. Naturally, the prospect of the Labor Board seriously enforcing labor law has Republicans freaking out…

Right-wingers are rising to defend Boeing, bash the NLRB, and blame Obama. But rather than debate retaliation against workers, conservatives want to conjure phantom menaces: bureaucrats micro-managing production, Democrats punishing “Right to Work” states, and union bosses paralyzing job creators.

Check it out.

Update (5/29): It’s now up on Talking Union and ZNet too.

ARE ARTISTIC STANDARDS ENOUGH?

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Alek Felstiner has posted a response to my response to his comment on my post on how progressives should criticize cultural products (based on what they endorse, not what they expose).

I’m inclined to tread lightly in terms of boycotting cultural products based on content (I’ll tread heavily when it comes to a boycott initiated by the workers who made the stuff). Among other reasons, it’s harder to critically engage with something in a robust way if you can’t watch it, listen to it, or read it. But I don’t see hypocrisy in making a legal defense of speech combined with a moral condemnation. I can see the downsides of a world in which moral scolds construct social norms placing an ever-greater percentage of art outside the range of what’s acceptable to browse, but I don’t think we’d be better off with a social norm against moral criticisms of art.

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MY TABOOS ARE BETTER THAN YOURS

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Earlier this month ex-Bush speechwriter Meghan Clyne took to the New York Post to pin Yale’s sexual harassment problem on a counterintuitive culprit: campus feminists. The feminists, apparently, have turned our alma mater into a “sexual cesspool” and “drenched students, faculty and administrators in images and vocabulary of graphic sexuality.”

Reading Clyne’s piece would leave you with the sense that the main problem with sexual harassment is that it means people are talking about sex. She suggests feminists are hypocrites for hosting events discussing drag and Dworkin and then complaining about rape threats. “These are the shrinking violets,” she writes, “shocked that a bunch of frat guys would gather around their front door crassly chanting about sex.” In other words, if you’re not embarrassed about sex, you shouldn’t be bothered by men threatening to force it on you.

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DAYENU, PAUL RYAN!

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Peeling through all the layers of deception and immorality in Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan requires a modern dayenu:

If he cut taxes further on the rich but didn’t end Medicare, it would have been enough.

If he ended Medicare but didn’t end Medicaid, it would have been enough.

If he ended Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t claim he was protecting them, it would have been enough.

If he claimed he was protecting Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t claim it would boost employment, it would have been enough.

If he claimed it would boost employment but didn’t claim unemployment would fall to 2.8%, it would have been enough.

If he planned to cut taxes for rich people and end Medicare and Medicaid but didn’t call it a deficit reduction plan, it would have been enough.

MORE ON EXPOSURE VERSUS ENDORSEMENT

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Alyssa’s post this week on Game of Thrones inspired me to dredge up a 2005 post I wrote on differences between the approaches liberals and conservatives bring to media criticism:

Is the problem what kind of behaviors and images are shown on TV, or what kind of ideology is advanced there? Do we care what the media exposes or what it endorses?

My original post is here. This led Alek to post a thoughtful response in the comments here. I don’t think Alek and I are too far apart on this.

I also want “a simple policy of letting media creators both expose and endorse whatever they want.” I don’t believe in obscenity laws (or the overturned ban on depicting animal cruelty, or libel laws for that matter). That’s why I started the post staking out my disagreement with Rick Santorum’s view that “if it’s legal, it must be right…it must be moral” (and thus if it isn’t moral, it shouldn’t be legal). But we should still talk about the stuff they’re creating, right?

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HALACHA-POLOGISTS (OR “LAST NIGHT I HAD THE STRANGEST DREAM”)

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Last night I dreamed that Newt Gingrich was prepping a run for President by calling for a constitutional ban on halachah law.

Dream-Gingrich warned the American people that there are millions of Americans who adhere to halachah – and they’ve already infiltrated the halls of Congress, the Cabinet, and the US Supreme Court. Some of these politicians have passed up political responsibilities because they were too busy with halachah obligations. Another performed an elaborate ritual to make a US embassy halachah-compliant!

And what does this halachah code include? Gingrich warned us not to be taken in by halachah apologists (halacha-pologists) who claim it’s compatible with democracy. Halachah is drawn from a text that commands the wholesale slaughter of entire non-believing civilizations. Halachah bars followers from drinking wine that has been touched by anyone that doesn’t adhere to halachah. Halachah specifies that only some of its mandates can be superseded by secular law. And halachah even includes “Noachide laws” regulating the behavior of non-Jews! As a sign of the graveness of the threat, Gingrich warned that the US Congress had already passed a resolution recognizing these “Noachide laws” – emboldening halachah-adherents to impose their way of life on the rest of us. And yet US judges appease halachists by arbitrating disputes under halachah law (more halach-apology!). Gingrich pleaded with peace-loving Jews to renounce halachah and any of their co-religionists that adhere to it.

Then I woke up and discovered Gingrich and the modern American Right he represents don’t want to ban halachah. They just want to ban sharia.

FROM THE COMMENTS: BI TV

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That last post draw a bunch of comments, mostly thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings’ link from Crooks and Liars (thanks!). A few favorites:

Alek Felstiner posted on Facebook:

This is why Tim Bayliss was such an uncomfortable character for everyone else on Homicide. I think, related to your point about lesbianism not being “sex,” there’s a sense in which male homosexuality is contaminant (except perhaps, notably, in prison, where the concept of masculinity is by necessity revised, and that revision recognized and tolerated on the outside), whereas female homosexuality is tangential and easily disregarded – if not encouraged and fantasized-over.

I make that point because most narratives, especially on TV, are about redemption. Ending up in a heteronormative relationship is a satisfactory conclusion for a mainstream American audience, but it only really works if it’s a woman (who finally finds the right man). A bisexual man eventually finding the right woman doesn’t offer the same narrative closure, because he’s already been “contaminated.

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WHERE ARE THE BISEXUAL TV CHARACTERS?

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My friend Alyssa Rosenberg has teamed up with Lux Alptraum to start a new site, Pop Culture Pen Pals, and they’ve kicked it off with a great exchange on the impoverished portrayals (or lack thereof) of bisexual or sexually fluid characters on TV. As Alyssa writes:

As long as studios are anxiously divining what audiences want, and audiences don’t know what they want from queer characters, no one’s going to pay attention to what realistic, deeply sketched queer characters themselves might actually want.


It’s a thought-provoking – and agitating – discussion, and I agree with most of what they each have to say. One dimension I’d be interested to hear them take on is gender. TV characters that aren’t exclusively hetero or homosexual are few and far between – but the ones that we do see tend to be women rather than men. In GLAAD’s survey of LGBT characters on Network TV, the LGBT male characters were all homosexual (14 to 0); the LGBT female characters were mostly bisexual (7 to 2). The number’s were more balanced on cable, but the pattern was the same.

Why is this? There are a lot of potential explanations. The (overlapping) ones I’m drawn to are all downers.

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THE RIGHT TO SAY NO

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In the wake of Walker’s Wednesday maneuver, National Review‘s Daniel Foster mourned the extent to which Americans still (or maybe more so now) recognize union rights as democratic rights, or as any kind of right at all:

To hear all the talk of the “rights” — even “civil rights”(!) — that have been stripped from public sector workers in this bill by the “far right wing” is to see Stockholm Syndrome on a massive scale…The fact is that no individual human being lost a single right in Wisconsin tonight.

The right that Scott Walker and company are desperate to deny is this: the right of a worker to sit across the table from her boss as an equal, with the security of solidarity and the leverage of collective action, and say “No.” It’s the right to say safety rules are too weak or healthcare is too expensive and to exercise voice with strength rather than to exit in hopes of finding a charitable boss somewhere else. And with it goes the right – also attacked by Walker – to act together to move your boss.

There are no workers that conservatives believe should exercise these rights -unless, maybe, they’re in a history book. Either the job you do is too important to be subject to your needs (like TSA screeners), or the business you work for is too small (like a store), or your company is too generous already (like Starbucks), or you’re not really a worker (like domestic workers), or your job requires too much independent thinking (like graduate teachers), or your job should be done by a teenager and you should go to college (like fast food), or – like public workers in Wisconsin – you don’t need an organized voice on the job because you get to vote on who runs the government.

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WHY SHOULD THEY GET WHAT WE TOOK AWAY FROM YOU?

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Was recently listening to the journalists on Slate’s Political Gabfest pondering why union density is so much higher amongst public sector workers than the private sector. None of them mentioned the most important difference: It’s harder for a government to get away with running a terror campaign against the union.

There’s more oversight and accountability to restrain public sector management from threatening workers for union activity, implying benefits to keeping out the union or danger with it, holding captive audience meetings against the union, or just firing union leaders. Only some of these tactics are even illegal. And bosses get away with those all the time. (Check out this reportfrom Human Rights Watch, or this one from Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner). Consultants get very wealthy guiding companies on how to run fear campaigns against employees trying to organize. It’s a lot harder for the TSA to cut anti-union consultants a check than it is for Wal-Mart. When it comes to organizing, the fundamental difference between public sector and private sector workers is that public sector workers have a better chance at organizing free from fear. So lots and lots of public sector workers do.

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