Allison and Jamie kindly had me back on Citizen Radio to talk about how textbooks distort the labor movement and how companies get away with firing labor activists. Here’s the audio of the episode, which also features a great interview with journalist Steve Horn on the big oil backing of a supposedly objective documentary on natural gas extraction.
Tag Archives: law
JOURNAL BURIES BOEING LEDE
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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DOCK MANAGEMENT SUES OVER SOLIDARITY SHUTDOWN – IS SETTLEMENT IN THE WORKS?
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.
MORE ON EXPOSURE VERSUS ENDORSEMENT
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?
THE RIGHT FUSS: WHY ARE ANIMAL RIGHTS GROUPS FOR BANNING DEPICTIONS OF ANIMAL CRUELTY?
The most memorable video we watched in middle school showed the treatment of animals in the beauty industry. Students squirmed as they saw what happens to a rabbit’s eyes after lipstick has been shoved in them. Many kids covered their faces. Others protested having to watch.
It bothered me then, newly a vegetarian, to see students shielding themselves from confronting cruelty. But today it troubles me more to see animal rights advocates defending a law to banish images of cruelty entirely.
The federal law, Section 48, prohibits selling any “depiction of animal cruelty” across state lines. The Supreme Court is now considering whether the ban – targeted at violence fetish “crush” videos of people stomping animals, but far broader in scope – violates the First Amendment. Animal rights groups and the Obama administration are asking to Court to restore Section 48, which was overturned by 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, along with the conviction of Robert Stevens, who created and narrated dogfighting videos using others’ footage. Stevens had been sentenced under Section 48 to three years in jail for making the films. Michael Vick served one year less for running a dogfighting ring.
CHOOSING THEIR WORDS
Over at the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru is defending anti-choice folks against criticism for highlighting Tim Tebow’s mom’s choice not to have an abortion while pushing to take that choice away from her. I’ll grant that it’s not contradictory for someone to both want abortion to be made illegal and to like it when women who legally could have abortion choose not to. But it’s intentionally misleading for a movement seeking a ban on abortion to appeal to the electorate’s good feelings about choice by invoking individuals’ choices as an argument for prohibition. It’s especially cynical given that it’s the pro-choice movement that stands up for women threatened coercive abortion or sterilization by the government or their employer. I wrote more about this (in an exchange with my brother, who’s sadly hopped off the blog wagon) here and here.
As for Tim and Pam Tebow, apparently they share Focus on the Family’s belief that it should be illegal for women like Pam whose doctors advise them to terminate their pregnancy to choose to follow their doctors’ advice. So why won’t their ad say that? Why not say:
“I’m Tim Tebow, football great. I’ve been blessed with so much in life. I know my life itself is a blessing. Doctors in the Phillipines recommended my Mom abort me because of serious complications in pregnancy. Good thing abortion was illegal in the Phillipines. It should be illegal here in America too.”
I think Focus on the Family isn’t running an ad like that because they know the median American has discomfort about abortion but doesn’t want to see it banned. But what does Ramesh Ponnuru think is the explanation?
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A CAVEAT OF YOUR CHOOSING
I am so sick of reading quotes like this:
I am pro-choice, but I must say that with the caveat that I have never had to make that decision, and I don’t know if it’s a decision I could make myself. It’s one of the hardest decisions any woman could ever have to make.
That’s Connecticut GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon qualifying her self-description as “pro-choice” by adding that she herself might not choose an abortion if she had the choice. Guess it could be that she says “caveat” to distinguish herself from some abortion-happy pro-choice stereotype she doesn’t buy into herself. But the plain reading of her quote is that she’s not that pro-choice because she might choose against abortion. Which is bogus. Unfortunately, McMahon’s quote echoes the most common media frame on the abortion debate: pro-choicers pushing abortion across the board, anti-choicers pushing back against it, and women somewhere in the middle making hard choices. Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s pro-choicers who believe women should be able to make those sometimes hard choices at all. And when the government or the boss tries to force women not to give birth, it’s pro-choicers who have those women’s backs.
DEVOLVE TO ME!
As our friends at The Corner debate whom conservatives should blame for losing the reigns of government, Jim Manzi argues that on social issues like abortion and gay marriage
many people who share the same country disagree in good faith, and are unlikely to be persuaded within our lifetimes. As I have argued at length, I think that the only workable compromise is not to try to force the creation of uniform national law when no national consensus on the morality of these issues exists. Instead, I believe that we should have an agenda of devolving as many of these social issues, as a matter of law, to as local a level as possible.
If we really want to devolve these questions – is abortion permissible? What about same-sex marriage? – to as local a level as possible, how about the individual? I can have my abortion, and my neighbor can opt for adoption (maybe by the gay married couple down the street).
Of course conservatives have all kinds of arguments about why my liberal choices will hurt my neighbor. And liberals have our own arguments about how our economic choices affect each other in a different way than our social choices (making it a good idea to ban $1/ hour labor but not condoms). But it’s just not true that a state is the most local level to which we can devolve decision making on charged issues.
Part of what gets lost amidst right-wing rhetoric about courts reaching down to take away Americans’ freedom is that in taking decisions away from state governments, actors that are bigger than particular states can uphold the autonomy of actors smaller than those states: individual Americans, who shouldn’t reasonably be expected to move from California to Massachusetts to get married because 52% of their neighbors don’t want them to.
CULTURE OF LIFE/ CHOICE
In the comments, Ben – who we can all agree should start his own blog ASAP – offers a thoughtful response to the last post:
Don’t you think a person can consistently hold that (1) under current law, abortion is a matter of individual choice; (2) as long as abortion is a matter of choice, there is a single right answer that women ought to choose; and (3) since many women nevertheless make the wrong choice (in this person’s view), and the harm of making the wrong choice is sufficiently great, the law should not leave abortion to individual choice? This constellation of beliefs would explain, without contradiction, feeling pride in another person’s choice not to have an abortion while supporting legislative measures to take the choice away from them. Similarly, “Choose Life at Yale” can consistently pursue a two-pronged agenda: (a) as a stopgap measure, advocating for women to exercise their choice under current law in a particular way, and (b) on the assumption that (a) will not be 100% successful, advocating for denying women the choice in the first place. In this way, Palin’s rhetoric about her daughter doesn’t seem different to me than a moral vegetarian’s both feeling pride in a child’s decision to be a vegetarian and favoring the criminalization of meat-eating.
Absolutely, I agree that it’s philosophically consistent (a) to want abortion/ animal cruelty/ awful haircuts banned and (b), for as long as the practice remains legal, to support/ admire people who choose against it. I think very few people, whatever the practice in question is, would maintain (a) and not (b). Lots of people, however, maintain (b) and not (a) (and not just on bad hair-cuts). That is, lots of Americans believe abortion is a choice that should be available but that should not be chosen. Others wouldn’t go so far as to say abortion is always the wrong choice, but will admire and be more comfortable with people who choose against it. These pro-choice voters who (whether always, or just usually) want people to choose life represent a huge chunk of our electorate. That’s the reality politicians on both sides of this issue face.
Fortunately for these “(b) but not (a)” voters, there are a lot of “(b) but not (a)” politicians out there. Depending on where you set the bar, you could count most pro-choice members of Congress in this group. So voters who are uncomfortable with abortion but don’t want it banned tend to have ample opportunity to vote for representatives who reflect their desire for abortion to be both legal and rare.
Anti-choice politicians need these voters to choose instead to vote for someone who shares their discomfort with abortion but not their opposition to banning it. There are different ways to do this: emphasizing abortion restrictions that these pro-choice voters may support and the pro-choice candidate does not, chipping away at the sincerity of the pro-choice candidate’s desire to reduce abortion, and more. Another is to shift the focus away not just from Roe v. Wade, but away from policy questions entirely, so that (b) is the only issue.
I say the way Palin talks about these issues is misleading not because I doubt that she and others maintain both (a) and (b) with conviction and consistency, but because (setting law-breaking aside) (b) is only an issue given her failure to achieve (a). And emphasizing (b) in the way Palin does regarding her daughter, and the way some of her admirers do in talking about Sarah’s choice to birth Trigg, obscures the most significant policy question here – abortion’s legality – while appealing not just to voters’ negative feelings about abortion but to their positive feelings about choice.
And when anti-choice politicians talk about their respecting their daughters’ choices – particularly when they are fathers like John McCain – it helps take the edge off their anti-choice politics by making them seem tolerant of the whole range of choices women make, even or perhaps especially when they cite their admiration for pro-life choices. I don’t have reason to doubt that John McCain or Sarah Palin would continue loving a daughter who chose abortion without throwing her out of the house. But if they had their way with the supreme court, those daughters could be thrown in jail. So I think non-coerciveness as parents is a distraction from coerciveness as politicians.
There’s also a class issue here, in that as long as abortion is legal but subject to the cocktail of restrictions anti-choice folks are pushing at the state and federal level, women from families like the Palins and the McCains can go on making their choices while those “small town voters” they vouch for have less and less choice to make.
DISTINGUISHING
I have to believe Frank Rich knows better than this:
Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s.
Look, I like to gloat as much as the next guy, but let’s not do it at the expense of reality. And Rudy Giuliani has indeed gotten more traction than many (myself included) thought he ever could, despite James Dobson et al’s significant discomfort with him. But he’s not a pro-choice candidate (he’s not a pro-gay rights or pro-gun control candidate either). He believes abortion is immoral, and he’s made it clear to anyone who’s paying attention that he’ll appoint judges who will make abortion illegal. The intermediate question of whether he has nice things to say about laws banning abortion is a detail (he’s also reversing himself on laws that make it more difficult for women to access the right to choose). While the Senate on a good day can hold back particularly crazy nominees, the only people who come their way for confirmation are the ones the president sends over. And in case you haven’t noticed, drafting strategies on how to overturn Roe isn’t enough to deny you confirmation votes from Democrats.
WHO’S BARRING WHOM?
Seeing Asheesh allude to his disagreement with “progressives who think military recruiters should be barred from targeting students on campus,” I have to ask: Who is barring military recruiters from targeting students on campus? Because if he’s referring to the legal battle between several universities and the Defense Department over the Solomon Amendment, it’s worth noting at the issue at stake is whether the federal government can force private universities receiving federal money to provide military recruiters with access to students as great or greater than that available to other recruiters. The question is not whether universities can bar military recruiters from the premises. The question is whether the federal government can force universities to invite military recruiters to university-sponsored career fairs.
While conservatives will tell you that these cases are all about communist academics purging institutions they don’t like (watch your back, Central Intelligence Agency), what kept the US military out of the rarified air of the college career fair was its unabashed policy of discrimination against gay people. It’s because of the military’s discrimination against a class protected by many universities’ non-discrimination policies that those universities have chosen not to invite them to use university-sponsored events to recruit only heterosexual students.
I can’t speak to other universities, but at Yale you can frequently spot recruiters in public spaces on campus. We get Jews for Jesus, too. On some occasions, recruiters have even set up shop in the same indoor space where friends of mine who were Yale students at the time were detained by the police for leafletting. They were not detained by the police.
Are other universities driving military recruiters off their streets?
Look, I know one or two people who were classmates of mine who believe that military recruiters should be physically barred from all university property. I think they’re wrong. And I think some of the left-of-center supporters of the Solomon Amendment are right to be concerned about the division between attendees of elite universities and enrollees in the US military. But it’s hard for me to see how forcing open the doors of college career fairs to military recruiters who will only consider heterosexual college students will spark an influx of those students into the service. If that’s the goal, forcing open the doors of the military to enrollees of all sexual orientations would be a good start.
MONEY, IT’S A HIT
Something else about Lieberman-Lamont: Their race brings together two of the less popular archetypes in American public life: the incumbent creature of Washington and the guy with more money than God.
That’s not a coincidence.
Under the “one dollar, one vote” system undergirded by the “money is speech” regime set forth in Buckley, the ability to raise and spend money ranks high on the already frightful list of institutional advantages held by incumbents. The ability to raise money is the first mark of legitimacy in the eyes of the media and political establishments who too often serve as gatekeepers between would-be challengers and the attention of the electorate. Ostensibly liberal people pledge fealty to the doctrine that serious candidates should be able to raise serious money.
Some millionaire candidates, of course, fail spectacularly. Some spend enough of their dough to leave the incumbent at a significant spending disadvantage. Some do both.
But wherever one comes down on what we should or shouldn’t assume about millionaires’ character and suitability to represent us, the difficulty of unseating an incumbent without being one should concern us.
Josh Eidelson 