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The Decline Of The Unions

June 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Why doesn't anyone like us anymore?

The loss of the recall vote against Scott Walker in Wisconsin gives further evidence of the decline of the unions in America. After the Second World War, the unions were all-powerful, with American blue-collar workers reaching a standard of living previously unimaginable. But that was at a time when America had no competition from the rest of the world, emerging as it did from the conflict unscathed and unchallenged. With Europe and Japan in ruins and China still a backwater, American companies faced little or no competition in the American market. The unions had reached an understanding with industry in America. They got rid of the radicals in exchange for which the workers got what Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL, said they wanted, in one word, “more.”

 

Even before the foreign auto industry began to invade the American market, hostility to the unions rose in a most unlikely quarter–among young Americans. The union-backed Students for a Democratic Society turned against their benefactors over the Vietnam War that George Meany and Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO steadfastly supported, as did their candidate, Hubert Humphrey. Construction workers attacked anti-war demonstrators in New York, increasing the growing anti-union sentiment amongst the young.

 

In the summer of 1972, I was attending a party at the East Hampton home of prominent labor lawyer Ted Kheel whose son was, like myself, working in the McGovern campaign that the unions opposed. I was wearing a McGovern button and I found myself confronted by AFL-CIO second-in- command, Lane Kirkland, who would rise to the top position following Meany’s retirement, and his wife Irena, both Vietnam War hawks. They raved and ranted at me, the two of them red in the face, until Kirkland finally stopped. When Irena continued, he told her it was “enough.” I had remained silent. It was a lovely party and a beautiful day and I did not want to start an altercation. But I remember what I was going to say to Kirkland before I decided to hold my tongue. “One day your union will need the support of people like me and you won’t get it,and it will fade away.” Later, after reading Ted Morgan’s “A Covert Life, his biography of labor leader Jay Lovestone, I learned how Lovestone, head of the AFL-CIO’s international division, was a CIA operative whose case officer was James Jesus Angelton, head of counter-intelligence at CIA. That made sense.

 

The rising new libertarianism amongst young Americans, many of whom supported Ron Paul, comes directly from this experience.

Cops: the Goldman Sachs of the public sector.

Libertarians are decidedly anti-war and they see in the power of the state the instrument that perpetuates the wars that have produced such uncontrolled federal debt. Many of the anti-war baby boomers came of age resenting the unions for their hawkishness. Across the country, Americans came to see the state and municipal workers’ unions as the reason for the threat of bankruptcy state and local governments face. Salaries of the county police in both Suffolk and Nassau Counties on Long Island where I live are over the top. Property taxes keep rising to keep up with the rising costs of local government. So it should come as no surprise that the unions lost the recall vote in Wisconsin. If the unions want to make a comeback, they need not only to remake themselves but to deal with their pasts. Unless they do, they will become increasingly insignificant, which will lead to the increasing income gap that threatens the stability of the country.

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A Political Boss & The Farms

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Old School.

The name Dominic Baranello no longer rings a bell but he once ruled the Democratic Party of Suffolk County as the last of the old-time political bosses. He rose to become Chairman of the Democratic Party of  New York State, making him one of the most powerful politicians in the country. Close to the unions, he backed the gigantic Southwest Sewer District that was going to pour tons of waste into the Great South Bay, once a rich source of seafood.  Jobs came before the environment for Baranello because those jobs would enhance his power.

Diminutive, with a bulbous nose, he was an orator of the old school, using soaring but sometimes incongruous rhetoric to make his points.  He was what one might call an Al Smith Democrat, an ethnic organization politician who was concerned only with bread and butter issues.  He once said that politics was a “business,” and he meant it.  He was not in politics because of any lofty ideals.

I knew Baranello because I had been the Democratic candidate for the Suffolk County Legislature as well as a member of the Southampton Democratic Committee.  Writing a column for The East Hampton Star, I championed the preservation of the farms while opposing the Sewer District.  I researched the project and discovered that the figures being handed out by the then county legislature from the then First District legislator, Joyce Burland, were highly inaccurate.  The project was going to be far more expensive than she was alleging.  It was also a gigantic patronage trough, with firms hired to do the construction that had no previous experience building sewers. Some of them had alleged Mafia connections.  And Wall Street had its hands in that trough, with the Smith Barney firm floating the bonds.  Only Brecht could have done it justice.

In Great South Bay? Really?

Week after week I did my best to expose the hoax the project was.  The people who lived in the district were going to see their property taxes soar.  The Great South Bay was threatened.  I attacked Joyce Burland mercilessly as well as the pro-sewer environmental commissioner, Ed Flynn.  Things got really sordid when Flynn’s mistress murdered him in a fit of rage. But before that happened, he somehow learned I was going to be a visiting lecturer at the Duke University of Environmental Studies and wrote to the dean denouncing me.  When the dean, Ben Jane, told me what was in the letter, he said I should keep a copy as a reference.  We had a big laugh over that.

The more I attacked Burland, the more the local Democrats hated me. She was the daughter of Clark Clifford, Lyndon Johnson’s last secretary of defense.  She was Democratic Party royalty, tall, blond and aristocratic. A Vassar graduate, she didn’t let you forget it. The leader of the East Hampton Democrats kept phoning me, taping our conversations, which Democratic committee members listened to.  Asked to attend a meeting with several East Hampton Democratic friends of mine, I found myself being grilled as if it were a Stalinist interrogation

Undeterred, I continued to write, not just in the local papers but also in The New York Times and Newsday, denouncing the five Democrats in the Suffolk County Legislature for opposing farmland preservation legislation.  One of them was married to a LILCO executive when the power company was fighting the legislation because it would cost them business by stopping the building of more houses. I had drafted the farmland preservation bill with the assistance of Russell Stein, lawyer for the Group for America’s South Fork, an environmental group I had founded with investment banker, Harold Witt.  The bill provided for the county to buy the development rights to farms whose owners would voluntarily sell those rights.

I gave speeches all over the county and helped to organize a sizable rally on the property of artist, David Porter.  I

Worth saving.

was a member of a group that called itself the Emergency Committee to Save Suffolk County.  The developers wanted the farms and if they got all of them our beloved East End would be no more.  But in spite of this, we were getting nowhere.

I also kept up my attack on the sewers and published a major article in a then influential publication called Empire State Report. It included not only a report on the loss of farmland, but a more severe assault on the sewers than any I had written to that point.  To my surprise, the article got a lot of attention amongst the powerful in the county, one of them being Dominic Baranello.

Then one day I got a surprise phone call from Baranello, inviting me to meet with him at his office at party headquarters in Hauppauge.  He said there was something he wanted to discuss with me, but said no more.  At the appointed time, I walked into his office to find him with his feet up on his desk, smoking a cigar as he chatted on the phone.  The person at the other end of the line proved to be Meade Esposito, the powerful Democratic boss of Brooklyn. Baranello was delighted to inform me of this because I had written often on what I had concluded was the relationship between these two old-time bosses.  “You would walk in while I was on the phone, with Meade, “ he joked as he gestured for me to sit down.

He cut to the chase.  The five Democrats in the legislature that I had called “the gang of five,” who were opposing farmland preservation, were recalcitrant.  “But if you stop writing about the sewers, I will get you the votes for the farms,” he said.  I jumped out of the chair and extended my hand. “Deal,” I said.  “Deal,” he shot back, a big grin on his face.  Not long after our meeting, I read in Newsday that the county legislature had passed the farmland preservation bill, with all five Democrats supporting it.

Baranello was a man of his word, the secret of political power.  He did not often give his word, but when he did, he kept it.  He didn’t double deal.  He was tough and ruthless and we had had many a shouting match.   But in the end, he came through.  Although we haven’t saved as many acres as I had hoped, there are still working farms on the East End, saved by that legislation that never would have passed without him.  Barnello died in a nursing home, a forgotten man at a time when his son was sent to jail for bribery.

“Power,” as Spiro Agnew once said, “is an illusion.” That may be true, but in this one instance, the power of one old-time boss saved at least some of the farms. I remember him fondly for that.  There is something to be said for the old-style politics of wheeling and dealing; it was never a zero-sum game as it is in Washington today.  If you played it right, everybody won something and went home to to tell their constituents what a great job they were doing for them.  No ideology, ever.  What a relief.

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Recession & Unemployment

January 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Hire workers? Nah, I'd rather light my stoagie with it!

With American corporations awash in cash, why are they not hiring?

The answer has several components.  First, companies have engaged in cost-cutting measures, including the layoff of workers,  that have increased profit margins.  The problem with this is that the layoffs perpetuate the unemployment because those who are out of work are no longer consumers, reducing demand.  Second, the corporations are playing chicken with the America workers.  They won’t start hiring until the workers accept lower wages and fewer, if any, benefits.  The corporations are in the driver’s seat because of surplus labor engendered by the recession.

It wasn’t always so.  After the Second World War America emerged as the world’s only economic super power.  Fueled by the defense industry that went into high gear after the war because of the Cold War the economy boomed with workers finding good paying jobs.  Those making decent money at the defense plants had the cash to buy cars, creating more jobs in Detroit among the unchallenged Big Three automakers.  The powerful unions, such as the UAW, negotiated new contracts with ever-increasing pay and benefits and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they went on strike.  This was no longer a radical union movement.  Samuel Gompers and his successors ousted the radicals and developed what Gompers described as the objective or organized labor “more.”  And more was what they got.   Steel workers, autoworkers, miners and others moved into the middle class, enjoying new homes, appliances and automobiles.  There was no outside competition and life was good.   America, not the Soviet Union, became a workers’ paradise, with the wealthiest Americans paying taxes at a ninety percent rate, which created a more egalitarian society.

But when the European nations and Japan recovered from the war and  began to assert their economic muscle, American business found itself less able to compete  because of the high pay and lavish benefits of the American workers.  Foreign cars  that were cheaper than their American counterparts flooded the market. As market share shrank, the American car makers could not make adjustments because of the contracts that bound them to an ever higher pay scale and benefits like health care, which became ever more expensive.

Featuring the hit, "How to Compete in the Global Economy!"

With The Great Recession and the collapse of the American auto industries and other manufacturers, a new day dawned.  Foreign car companies opened non-union plants in America, paying lower wages than the Big Three with no benefits.  The workers were responsible for their own health insurance.   The use of TARP money to rescue the auto industry led to major compromises by the unions, with reduced wages and with health care covered by a union fund.

But other businesses that were never in bad shape saw the opportunity to become leaner and meaner to be better able to compete in the global market. When they weren’t shipping jobs overseas, they were cutting back on jobs in America. Their argument was that they were obligated to do so because of their responsibility to their shareholders to produce profits.  Their position was strengthened by the influx of immigrants prepared to work for less.  Not for nothing did Reagan grant amnesty to twelve million illegal aliens.  Corporate America was on its way to do what Eisenhower said was impossible.  They were breaking the backs of the unions.

Today, allied with the radical right, the Republican Party is engaged in a process to turn back the clock to pre-New Deal America when there was no Fair Employment Practices Act or National Labor Relations Act.  Their unified goal is a union-free America with capitalism triumphant.  With Communism defeated, the class war was over and the capitalists had won.   Capitalism had almost sunk itself in the financial meltdown but because of its political power, it not only survived but also prospered thanks to the bailouts paid for by the taxpayers who have not benefited at all.

America is now radical-free.  The liberals are in dire straits and the move to the right is gaining, not losing momentum by virtue of a brilliant propaganda machine that has scared the American public into believing they are on the road to the serfdom of socialism.  The fear generated by the campaign against health care reform was unprecedented in American history, with the American Establishment covertly behind the Tea Party movement.  For example, C.  Boyden Gray III, George H.W.Bush’s counsel and a scion of a blueblood family, became a founder of Freedom Works, the Republican-run organization that has funded the Tea Party in America.  Gray is also part of the Western Imperium foreign policy Establishment, also no accident.   America’s Western European allies, including Britain, are in the process of dismantling the Welfare State that had been used as a way to defeat Communism.  The wealthiest in these societies, including America, are in great shape, getting tax cuts here while Congress cuts benefits to those less well off.  With a defeated and disheartened populace, there is no danger of social unrest.  This is the new normal.  Perhaps it is only all those out-of-work law school graduates who might conspire to upend this new normal as a way to get rid of their enormous debt.   Lawyers are often the revolutionaries–John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lenin, Castro.  Somewhere, they are plotting the next revolution.

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1/36 – 85/16

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Who does Obama think he is, calling me a 'fat cat'?

1/36-85/16 represents the current state of wealth distribution in the United States.  The top one percent owns thirty-six percent of the wealth, whilst eighty-five percent owns sixteen percent of the wealth.  With such disparity, it is no wonder the economy is in shambles.  America’s most prosperous era, when there was a solid and growing middle class, was from the early fifties until about 1972 when there was considerable balance in the distribution of wealth.   Working people, such as the autoworkers, were moving into the middle class, buying homes and sending their children to college.  New suburbs sprang up and commerce blossomed largely because more people had more money to spend.

That all began to change after Richard Nixon’s reelection when the long slide of the middle class began. Until then executive pay was not excessive in relation to the pay of the workers. This was a time when the unions had clout and all Democratic candidates for president launched their campaigns at Cadillac Square in Detroit.  Wall Street represented a modest percent of the GDP with manufacturing and agriculture making up most of the country’s wealth.

Part of what happened can be attributed to the Vietnam War.  Up until then Lyndon Johnson functioned as the legitimate heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, finally fulfilling the promise of Civil Rights and creating Medicare and Medicaid.  It looked as if Conservatism was beginning to be a fringe element led by Barry Goldwater whose campaign was a disaster.  Johnson was determined to wipe out poverty and his administration organized town meetings around the country to promote the Guaranteed Annual Income.  The liberal Democrats were in the ascendancy and the conservative Republicans who were staunchly opposed to the government playing any role in the redistribution of wealth seemed to be irrelevant.

But the impossible happened. Johnson got Congress to adopt the Tonkin Resolution and escalated the Vietnam War, dividing the Democratic Party, which proceeded to tear itself apart.  The assassination of Robert Kennedy engendered a sense of despair amongst the divided liberals. The 1968 Democratic convention that was accompanied by riots in Chicago gave the nation the impression that the Democrats were no longer fit to govern.  In the end they nominated Hubert Humphrey who was probably the most liberal candidate in America’s history. But Humphrey had been a supporter of the Vietnam War and many liberals could not find it in themselves to support him. He rallied towards the end but lost by a slim margin to Nixon whose comeback defied conventional thinking.

What Nixon had done during his exile was to speak to right-wing groups all over the country.  If one looks at the clips of some of those speeches, not a few before racist audiences, Nixon appears almost Hitlerian in his demagoguery.  To get the nomination and defeat Nelson Rockefeller at the convention he went around telling the Southern delegations that he would not enforce the Civil Rights laws.  He assured the wealthy that things were going to change and they did.  After his election he gutted the anti-poverty program and pandered to the alienated white blue-collar Democrats who resented Civil Rights and the Anti-War Movement, effectively destroying the old New Deal coalition.

The New Deal's dead! Whoopee!

Nixon went down in flames but the Democrats nominated and elected a conservative Southerner, Jimmy Carter, who had no social justice agenda whatsoever.  With Reagan’s election the transformation of American politics was complete.   Conservatism triumphed with the revision of the tax code that dramatically lowered the tax rates for the wealthy.  At the same time American manufacturers started moving their factories to poor counties to capitalize on the cheap labor.  Reagan then granted amnesty to twelve million illegal immigrants, all of whom were prepared to work for less that the union workers.  This cycle destroyed the power of the unions, the backbone of the liberal coalition.  Theodore Lowi, a professor of political science at Cornell, wrote a book called THE END OF LIBERALISM that came out during the Carter administration and became a kind of gospel.

But as powerful as Reagan’s pro-rich conservatism was, the defining statement was made by Nixon when he inverted Kennedy’s rhetoric by saying, “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you can do for yourself.”  In the end it was this ethos that came to dominate America and we all became “Nixon’s Children.”  Idealism was out, cynicism was in.  After Bush and the financial and economic collapse that led to the election of Barack Obama and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, many believed this signaled the return of liberalism.  But with the battle over health care that illusion quickly shattered and the pro-rich Republicans were swept back into power. The best the Democrats can do is to return to  Clintonian triangulation thus ending what was left of the progressive movement. Obama caved on the tax cuts for the rich and the disparity of wealth goes on.  And as long as it does the chances for an economic recovery will remain slim. With no middle class there is no purchasing power.  All that can happen is that Americans will go further into debt, creating an illusion of recovery.  What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

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