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**NOVEMBER 14, 2023**
On the Prospect website
A Star Witness Against Google: Google's AI Chatbot
Bard is remarkably candid about the company's intentions to leverage
Big Data into AI to make its rivals, and the rest of the web,
irrelevant. BY DAVID DAYEN & LUKE GOLDSTEIN
Sean McElwee Consulted for New Centrist Polling Project
The Democratic strategist who was thrown out of his own firm for
gambling on races he polled, working for crypto firms, and allegedly
engaging in campaign finance violations is back. BY DAVID DAYEN
The Next Insulin Scandal
A generic cold medicine available in Europe also turns out to have
benefits for Parkinson's. Biden could prevent the usual effort to
patent it and jack up the price. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Freeway Disaster Presents Hurdle for Newsom's National Ambitions
Pennsylvania's governor delivered after his state's highway fire
five months ago. Newsom's crisis with the 10 Freeway in Los Angeles is
significantly more complicated. BY DAVID DAYEN
Meyerson on TAP
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**** At Tesla, Swedish Workers Can Do What
American Workers Can't
In support of striking mechanics, dockworkers there are no longer
unloading Teslas. Such solidarity isn't legal here.
Even as the UAW is planning organizing campaigns at the non-union
factories of Toyota, Honda, and Tesla, an organizing campaign among
Tesla mechanics in Sweden illustrates one path to successful organizing
that American workers used to take until conservatives closed it off.
Tesla has no factories in Sweden, but it does employ around 120
mechanics to tune up and fix their cars. The union of such workers, IF
Metall, has been trying for years to get Tesla to the bargaining table,
as is the norm in Sweden, where roughly 90 percent of the workforce is
represented by unions. The very idea is anathema, of course, to Elon
Musk, who believes such matters at the company, and perhaps in the world
at large, are best left to Elon Musk. After Musk responded with a flat
No to recognize the union, the mechanics walked off the job on October
27 and remain on strike.
What followed illustrates nicely what it means when a nation has
solidaristic values reinforced by solidaristic laws. A few days into the
strike, the union of Swedish dockworkers announced it would no longer
unload Teslas at the nation's ports. (The Teslas sold in Sweden are
shipped in from German and U.S. Tesla factories.) Then, the painters'
union joined in and vowed that its members would no longer do paint jobs
on any Teslas in need of a touch-up. Now, the Communications Employees
vows not to make deliveries to Tesla's offices if Tesla doesn't
recognize its mechanics union by November 20.
These are not actions that U.S. unions could undertake in support of a
UAW strike at Tesla. During the great period of union growth in the
U.S., however-roughly 1936 through 1947-such "solidarity strikes"
were legal and not uncommon. With the passage of the National Labor
Relations Act in 1935, they were seen, and codified, as a necessary way
to build worker power in a capitalist nation where undue power by
managers and shareholders was the default condition of economic
relations-a condition that had contributed to a catastrophic global
depression in the early 1930s.
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With the enactment (over President Truman's veto) of the Taft-Hartley
Act by a Congress dominated by Republicans and right-wing Southern
Democrats in 1947, however, secondary strikes and boycotts by workers in
support of striking workers at a different company or in a different
sector were outlawed. At the time, unions represented roughly one-third
of the American workforce, but under Taft-Hartley, their rise was
abruptly halted and within a decade began its 60-plus-year decline to
its current 10 percent level (just 6 percent in the private sector).
That puts the share of unionized workers about where it was before the
NLRA legalized workers' right to bargain in the mid-'30s.
Since the mid-1960s, every time the Democrats have controlled the White
House and both houses of Congress, they've tried to pass labor law
reform bills that would have restored to workers some of the rights and
much of the power they lost with Taft-Hartley's enactment. Democrats
have never been able to surmount the Senate's supermajority hurdle,
however. With public support and the Biden administration behind them,
and with a new crew of militant leaders at some key unions, labor is now
waging its most serious offensive in many decades.
For the movement to grow as it did before Taft-Hartley, however, would
still require major changes in the legal landscape. Most Democratic
elected officials finally seem to understand that; it's been the work
of decades, and taken the defection of growing portions of the working
class from party ranks, to get them there. Now that they're there,
labor needs more of them in public office to put Taft-Hartley out of its
misery, thereby lifting much of the working class out of its misery,
too.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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