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OCTOBER 31, 2023
On the Prospect website
*
**Jarod Facundo** &
**David Dayen** look at the Biden administration's framework for
regulating AI
*
**Bob Kuttner** debunks the latest attacks on Social Security
*
**Lee Harris** reports on the federally subsidized hydrogen industry's
opposition to regulations
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**Sean Kirkpatrick** responds to Harold Meyerson's leaving DSA
Meyerson on TAP
How to Roll the Union On
Building on workers' historic victories in auto plants, delivery
trucks, hospitals, campuses, and (maybe) Hollywood
The gap between that portion of the American workforce that has a union
contract and that portion that doesn't is beginning to widen again, as
it largely hasn't in recent decades. The landmark gains that the UAW
has made in its contracts (yet to be voted on by members) with the Big
Three, that the Teamsters secured with their UPS contract, and that
health care support staff has made at Kaiser Permanente go far beyond
the pay and benefits that workers receive at their non-union
counterparts, including such firms as Tesla, Toyota, and Amazon.
The last three are all companies that the UAW or the Teamsters have
effectively pledged to organize, and the contrast between their new pay
scales and benefits and those of, say, Amazon and Tesla employees will
doubtless be a major part of their sales pitches. Still, given all the
loopholes in labor law that have enabled employers to fend off unions
even when the vast majority of their workers want to join them, those
sales pitches will be necessary but not sufficient to enabling such
workers to actually go union.
What else is needed? Worker and community mobilization. A supportive
government. Low unemployment. A pro-worker, anti-billionaire zeitgeist.
Both the UAW and Teamster victories owe a lot to those unions'
mobilization of their own rank and file to shut down plants (the UAW) or
to credibly threaten a massive strike (the Teamsters). It's no
accident that both unions had new leaderships elected, as they had not
been previously, by the rank and file, and that both those new
leaderships had won election campaigning against an ancien régime. The
actual accident, if we can term it that, was that both unions had
experienced such egregious leadership corruption that the federal
government, as part of the terms of its settlements with those unions,
required them to abandon the practice of electing their leaders at
delegated conventions (an almost universal practice throughout the union
movement), and to switch to a vote of the general membership.
While a number (not a huge number) of unions today have dedicated and
savvy convention-elected leaders, there's now no gainsaying that
enlisting the rank and file in leader selection can (
**can**, not
**will**) yield candidates more in touch with members' frustrations
and grievances, as well as a large cadre of members willing to walk the
walk on picket lines to push for greater workplace gains. In the
aftermath of their victories, both UAW President Shawn Fain and Teamster
President Sean O'Brien can count on their respective unions' cadres
to join union staffers in organizing efforts at the big non-union
companies.
That's the first condition for rolling the union on. The second is a
high level of community support. In many struggles for unionization,
unions customarily enlist local clergy, elected officials, and such to
join in the efforts. That's a strategy to which unions need to devote
even more resources than they currently do, particularly inasmuch as the
level of popular support for unions is at a 50-year high.
Beyond that, they need the state to weigh in heavily on their side. That
means not just having the president on a picket line, groundbreaking
though that was, but also having the rules, under the National Labor
Relations Act, devised to enable workers to collectively bargain
strengthened so that, for the first time in half a century, they
actually do that. That's exactly what President Biden's NLRB is now
doing, with rulings that make it considerably harder for employers to
thwart unionization when a majority of employees favor it.
They also need a government that understands how important a low rate of
unemployment is to low-wage and working-class Americans, and how it also
empowers unions. The Biden administration's American Rescue Plan Act
of 2021, by providing an economic stimulus that boosted purchasing power
to the point that it squelched the expected recession, did just that.
While Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress
following the 2024 election is not a sufficient condition for rolling
the union on, it most surely is a necessary one. In hailing the UAW's
victory yesterday, Biden said, "Worker power-worker power-is
critical to building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up."
Even as American progressives are currently focused on the
Israel-Palestine conflict, they can't lose sight of the class war in
America, and still have to pose the "which side are you on" in
**that**war question going into next year's elections.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
[link removed]
White House to Force Companies to Share Artificial-Intelligence Data
It's part of the administration's new framework for regulating AI.
BY JAROD FACUNDO & DAVID DAYEN
Debunking the Latest Attack on Social Security
Warmed-over arguments claim that the old have it too good at the expense
of the young. But the real division in America isn't
generation-it's class. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
After Historic Subsidies, Hydrogen Giants Threaten Regulations Could
Throttle Industry
A Clinton-era hydrogen company, Plug Power, fights to embed its business
model in the tax code. BY LEE HARRIS
DSA Is United for Palestinian Freedom
A response to Harold Meyerson's resignation from Democratic Socialists
of America BY SEAN KIRKPATRICK
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