Corey Robin's Blog, page 110

American Feudalism: It’s Not Just a Metaphor

As many of you know, I’ve been calling our contemporary political order feudal for quite some time. But this post from the Roosevelt Institute’s Tim Price (h/t Alex Gourevitch) really blew my mind:

That could soon be the law of the land in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature has passed a bill that would, as Philadelphia City Paper blogger Daniel Denvir describes it, “allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers’ withheld income tax.” These workers will essentially be paying their employers for the privilege of having a job. Some have called this“corporate socialism,” but it also calls to mind an even older economic model that was once popular in Europe – except back then, the bosses were called lords. It’s a more modern innovation in the U.S., but combined with increased political pressure from employers and a crackdown on workers’ rights, it all adds up to feudalism, American-style.

The Pennsylvania bill is just the most recent example of state income taxes being turned into employer subsidies. It’s already the law of the land in one form or another in 19 states, and according to Good Jobs First, it’s taking $684 million a year out of the public coffers. The theory is that this will boost job creation. But the authors of the Good Jobs First report note, “payments often go to firms that simply move existing jobs from one state to another, or to ones that threaten to move unless they get paid to stay put.” In other words, it’s more like extortion than stimulus. With state governments facing a projected $4 trillion budget shortfall and continuing to cut social services and public sector jobs, they can hardly afford to be wasting money on companies that already have plenty and have no intention of putting it to good use. And the more governments turn over their privileges to businesses, the more the distinction between the two becomes blurred.

But if corporations have state governments over a barrel, they have their employees stuffed inside the barrel and ready to plunge down the waterfall. As I’ve noted before, some conservatives view all taxation as theft, but there’s surely no better term for what happens when employers promise their workers a certain wage or salary and then pocket some of the money for themselves. When you pay taxes to the government, you get something in return, whether it’s a school for your kids or a road to drive on or a firefighter to rescue you from a burning building. When you pay taxes to your boss, you… well, you give your boss your money. Your only reward is that you get to continue to “work the land,” so to speak. The lords didn’t consult with the peasants on which tapestries they should buy with the money they collected from them.

My Media Empire Expands

As some of you know, I have created a Tumblr page. I use this for short, quick posts or little quotations that capture my attention and that I don’t want to forget. In the past, I posted these on FB or Twitter. But now I’m trying to do at least some of them on Tumblr. If you’re bored or looking for fresh  material on those days (weeks) when I’m not really posting here, you can check it out.

Dictatorships and Double Standards

I’m hoping in the coming days to do a longer blog on the stories about employers instructing employees how to vote, forcing employees to attend rallies for Romney, etc. In the meantime, Gordon Lafer has one of the best pieces yet on this story. He makes the point, which came as news to me, that the Bush Administration repeatedly condemned elections in other countries where because in part bosses there were doing the exact same thing they’re doing here.

The Bush Administration, for instance, rejected Ukrainian elections as illegitimate, in part because international observers found that managers of state-owned enterprises had “instructed their subordinates to vote for [the ruling party].”

…

One step beyond even the Kochs is GOP mega-donor Bob Murray, who required employees at an Ohio coal mine to attend a Romney campaign event. The resulting photo-op could have been at home in the old East Germany – candidate standing before a crowd of miners, replete with banner reading “Coal Country Stands With Mitt,” with no notice that miners were attending under the direction of their boss, forced to give up a day’s pay in order to serve as human props. Again, we routinely condemn such charades when carried out by foreigners. The Bush Administration criticized Armenia’s elections, for instance, after observers reported that “factory workers … were instructed to attend the incumbent’s rallies.”  But what we reject for Armenians and Ukrainians, the business lobbies now want to institute at home.

He also responds to a claim I often hear—including on this blog—that since employers can’t really know how an employee votes, employers can’t be said to be intimidating or coercing employees.

An employee whose boss tells them hot to vote may still ignore this advice in the privacy of a voting booth. What they won’t do, however, is display a button or bumper sticker, write a letter to the editor, or be seen attending a rally of the opposing party. This strikes at the very heart of democracy.  Elections are only “free and fair” if voters are free to speak out, write in, and publicly support the candidate of their choice, without fear for their livelihoods.

…

What sets democratic elections apart from the sham votes of authoritarian regimes is not secret ballots – after all, even Saddam Hussein had secret ballots – but the ability of all voters to participate in what the Supreme Court termed “uninhibited, robust and wide-open debate” without fear of retaliation.

Update (October 26, 4 pm)

Gordon sends me a followup email:

You mentioned in your post about my article that even people on your blog wonder why it’s a problem for bosses to tell workers how to vote, since you still have the secret ballot.  I noticed similar comments on the The Hill site where the piece went up — even “why shouldn’t employers tell their employees what they think the impact of certain policies will be?” and “don’t they have a moral obligation to do that”?  I got similar questions yesterday afternoon in a radio interview about the Milwaukee manufacturer emailing his employees that they’ll lose their pension funds if Obama is reelected.

One of the things this makes me think about is this: If I as a professor told my students who to vote for, and even if I gave good reasons — the Republicans are going to de-fund higher education and destroy the economy, your future will be bleak, Social Security will be destroyed if you vote for them, things I actually believe are true and you could say I had a moral obligation to pass on to my students — if I told people who to vote for based on that, I’d be subject to ethics charges for abuse of power.  Because then any student who disagrees, who wants to wear a Romney button or submit a class paper that argues for GOP policy, they’d have to worry about how this would affect their grade.  Certainly, I think that if Wisconsin school teachers, for instance, went into class and told their students that Governor Walker is destroying the school system and destroying their chances of getting a middle class job when they graduate — they’d be accused of abusing their authority as teachers, and “politicizing the classroom.”  But the power teachers and professors have over students — giving grades and writing letters of recommendations — is much less than what bosses have over employees.

In Hollywood Hotel, Maids are Watched by a Dog Named Rex

From the you can’t make this shit up department:

A federal agency charged with enforcing labor law has issued a complaint against the Hyatt Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood, alleging the hotel illegally implemented a new electronic tracking device that monitors productivity of housekeepers.

The system, known as “Rex” because it is animated by a wagging-tailed dog by the same name, consists of tracking software managed on iPods that tells housekeepers exactly which room to clean and when. It requires housekeepers clock when they enter and exit each guest room. It can send a housekeeper and her heavy cart from one end of the hotel to the other, sometimes hundreds of yards away, potentially increasing travel time from room to room. Housekeeping work can lead to debilitating injuries over time, and the federal government has identified pushing heavy carts as one key source of strain on the bodies of women who clean rooms.

…

“What’s so insidious about this system is that it robs housekeepers of their ability to manage their own work. It’s the 21st Century way for Hyatt to rush housekeepers, micromanaging their moves from a computer and making a housekeeper’s already-tough job harder,” said Ada Briceno, UNITE HERE Local 11 Secretary-Treasurer. “What’s next – electronic ankle bracelets?”

Some housekeepers also said they felt offended by the symbol of the dog. For housemen, the avatar is a chili pepper.

“It’s true we run around to get the rooms cleaned in time for guests, but why a dog? We’re not animals. Couldn’t they have used the symbol of a person walking like at traffic corners? That would have been a bit more humane,” said Cathy Youngblood, a Hyatt Andaz housekeeper who testified to the NLRB about the tracking technology.

Eagerly awaiting the libertarian denunciations.

h/t David Kaib

Kai Ryssdal, Call Me!

Employer intimidation of voters is really breaking into the mainstream media. Yesterday, Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace profiled the story. Here are some of the questions he posed to University of Florida emeritus professor Joseph Little:

Is this legal? Can companies actually fire you if you don’t vote the right way? I mean I’ll be honest with you. This kind of floored me when I first read about this.

…

What’s the recourse? I mean I suppose you could always just try to find another job. But unemployment is almost 8 percent.

…

I imagine this is rare, right? I mean we’re talking the rare instance here.

We’ve been talking about this topic forever around here, of course. Mr. Ryssdal, if you’re reading, check these links out:

1. My Crooked Timber overview (written with Chris Bertram and Alex Gourevitch) of all the ways in which employers can dominate employees, which also addresses Ryssdal’s second question.

2. On bathroom breaks at the workplace.

3. AT&T prohibits workers from reading newspapers on their lunch breaks.

4. In 49 states, you can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all.

5. Nine “really weird” things that can get you fired.

6. More states protect your right to smoke off the job than they do your right to engage in political activity.

7. Your rights at work.

8. Towards a general theory of workplace tyranny and American politics:

a. Birth Control McCarthyism

b. Fear, American Style

c. Fear: The History of a Political Idea (part 2).

I Speak Out for Athletes Everywhere

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the wide world of sports. But I am a fan of labor unions, and in that capacity, I have noticed that there have been quite a few lockouts over the past couple of years—four in 14 months, to be exact. I assumed that was because of the general shittiness of the sports bosses. It is, but there’s another factor, as Dave Zirin reports here: the shittiness of the sports bosses’ lawyers.

A law firm called Proskauer Rose is now representing management in all four major men’s sports leagues, the first time in history one firm has been hired to play such a unified role. In practice, this has meant that in four sets of negotiations with four very different economic issues at play, we get the same results: lockouts and a stack of union complaints with the National Labor Relations Board. It’s been great for owners and awful for players, fans, stadium workers and tax payers.

Proskauer Rose partner Howard Ganz represents the NBA and Major League Baseball, and fellow-partner Bob Batterman has led negotiations for the NFL and the NHL. As Sports Business Daily reported, “Batterman and Ganz provide advice on strategy, as well as on issues that can emerge during talks, such as the legality of using replacement players.”

…

Proskaur Rose’s love affair with corporate power is not confined to representing professional sports owners. They boast on their website of having “one of the world’s pre-eminent private equity practices.” They are Bain, if Bain was smart enough to remain in the shadows. The firm’s other prize clients are a Murderers Row of Big Oil titans including BP America, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. Incidentally, this culture of representing polluters and union busters with pride and without societal concern seems reflected in the firm’s internal culture. Proskauer Rose is now being sued by their former Chief Financial Officer Elly Rosenthal, who accused the law firm of firing her following sixteen years as CFO after she took leave for breast cancer treatment. (Remember Elly Rosenthal the next time you see the NFL festooning its players in pink for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.)

As it happens, I know Proskauer Rose quite well. Years ago, when I led the grade strike at Yale, the administration hired Proskauer to represent them in an unfair labor practices suit we brought against the university (Yale had tried to break the strike by threatening us with mass firings, expulsion, which would have meant deportation for international students, and negative letters of recommendation.) My most vivid memory of that case was of the lead attorney Saul Kramer (the other one was this tool) yelling at me at the witness stand, reading aloud statements I had made in a meeting where I called for massive disruption—I think I may have even used the word anarchy—of the campus.

Proskauer, it should be noted, played the leading role in making sure that faculty at private universities could not be unionized. That eventually became a Supreme Court case, and old Saul was involved in that one too.

Anyway, these guys are now trying to screw over football players, basketball players, hockey players, and more. Again, not my cup of tea, but they’re workers and it’s a union. And though some people think they’re too rich to be in a union, as Bhaskar Sunkara noted over the summer, that kind of faux populism can put you in some bad company.

It’s a struggle between management and labor and management has made plenty of money milking a player like Lin for all he was worth—international media interest, jersey and ticket sales, the Cablevision deal, not to mention that without him the Knicks might not have even made the playoffs.

Big salary haters get it wrong when they factor the fans into the equation. Talking about Jeremy Lin’s “greed,” acting like he’s taking something from someone else when he’s got a motherfucking family to feed, may be a good way to sound like a populist. But it actually puts you in the operative position of siding with an owner who is way richer than Lin will ever be. That’s the kind of populism that put Bush in office.

Say we do manage to lower player salaries or restrict their mobility—who’s saying we’re going to get lower ticket prices or anything but higher margins for already wealthy owners?

So what’s to gain from the politics of resentment? It’s the same type of politics that fuels anger at teachers, firefighters, and other public sector employees. “Why them?” is the petty loser’s version of “Good for them. Why not me?”

And if Lin’s still earning a bit too much for our tastes, instead of waiting for him to funnel his bounty into the community and name youth basketball camps after himself, why not just tax his (and his boss’) income at a higher rate? We can take some of the money, trustee our favorite sports teams, and give away shares to players and fans jointly.

Lower ticket prices, better swag, less hating.

Don’t hate the sportsman; hate the sports.  And Proskauer Rose.

H/t Gordon Lafer for having put these pieces together and alerted me to Zirin’s piece; Gordon was also one of the leaders of our union drive and the driving force behind our ULP suit against Yale. If it weren’t for him, we’d have never had a suit.

Things Obama Says When Famous People Die

Obama’s statement on George McGovern’s death seems awfully anodyne, begrudging, and brief:

George McGovern dedicated his life to serving the country he loved. He signed up to fight in World War II, and became a decorated bomber pilot over the battlefields of Europe. When the people of South Dakota sent him to Washington, this hero of war became a champion for peace. And after his career in Congress, he became a leading voice in the fight against hunger. George was a statesman of great conscience and conviction, and Michelle and I share our thoughts and prayers with his family.

There’s no mention of the fact that McGovern was the presidential candidate of Obama’s party. That he led the fight against the Vietnam War. There’s just some oblique reference to the life of a man whose presidential campaign, for all its flaws, was one of the most transformative in Democratic Party history and which helped set the stage for the campaign and presidency of none other than Barack Obama.

Now compare what Obama had to say when Neil Armstrong died.

Michelle and I were deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Neil Armstrong.

Neil was among the greatest of American heroes–not just of his time, but of all time.  When he and his fellow crew members lifted off aboard Apollo 11 in 1969, they carried with them the aspirations of an entire nation.  They set out to show the world that the American spirit can see beyond what seems unimaginable–that with enough drive and ingenuity, anything is possible. And when Neil stepped foot on the surface of the moon for the first time, he delivered a moment of human achievement that will never be forgotten.

Today, Neil’s spirit of discovery lives on in all the men and women who have devoted their lives to exploring the unknown–including those who are ensuring that we reach higher and go further in space. That legacy will endure–sparked by a man who taught us the enormous power of one small step.

Okay, that’s Neil Armstrong, about whom people in this country have strangely strong and sentimental feelings. But listen to what Obama had to say when Arlen Specter died.

Arlen Specter was always a fighter.  From his days stamping out corruption as a prosecutor in Philadelphia to his three decades of service in the Senate, Arlen was fiercely independent – never putting party or ideology ahead of the people he was chosen to serve.  He brought that same toughness and determination to his personal struggles, using his own story to inspire others.  When he announced that his cancer had returned in 2005, Arlen said, “I have beaten a brain tumor, bypass heart surgery and many tough political opponents and I’m going to beat this, too.”  Arlen fought that battle for seven more years with the same resolve he used to fight for stem-cell research funding, veterans health, and countless other issues that will continue to change lives for years to come.  Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Joan and the rest of the Specter family.

I mean: Arlen Fucking Specter!

I get it: McGovern was a loser, and Obama’s heading into the final stretch of a close campaign; the last thing he needs is any reminder of McGovern’s defeat. But for God’s sake…Arlen Fucking Specter!

H/t Jordan Adam Banks for McGovern and Specter statements.

The Army as a Concentration Camp

Reading this terrific piece about James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, I stumbled across this passage from Jones’s WWII, a nonfiction treatment of the Second World War:

Everything the civilian soldier learned and was taught from the moment of his induction was one more delicate stop along this path of the soldier evolving toward acceptance of his death. The idea that his death, under certain circumstances, is correct and right. The training, the discipline, the daily humiliations, the privileges of “brutish” sergeants, the living en masse like schools of fish, are all directed toward breaking down the sense of the sanctity of the physical person, and toward hardening the awareness that a soldier is the chattel (hopefully a proud chattel, but a chattel all the same) of the society he serves and was born a member of.

I don’t know how accurate a representation of military life Jones’s description is, but it sounds remarkably similar to Hannah Arendt’s account of the camps in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the individual, his unique identity….

The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person are numerous….They begin with the monstrous conditions in the transports to the camps, when hundreds of human beings are packed into a cattle-car stark naked, glued to each other, and shunted back and forth over the countryside for days on end….The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to manipulate the human body—with its infinite possibilities of suffering—in such a way as to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental diseases of organic origin.

…

It is more significant that those individually condemned to death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them, that there were scarcely any revolts….For to destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death….

How Could Mere Toil Align Thy Choiring Strings? A Breviary of Worker Intimidation

In the past few weeks, there’s been a flurry of articles about employers coercing or intimidating workers to vote for their preferred candidates (usually Republican). This is not a new topic on this blog, but the brazenness of these efforts is beginning to get a fair amount of traction elsewhere (in part because of the election).

Anyway, here’s a quick roundup:

1.  Alec McGillis kicked off the most recent round of stories with this report in The New Republic on Murray Energy’s forcing its workers to support Romney. (Though I had already commented on this story back in August, McGillis has a lot of new details.)

2. Mike Elk then broke the story, in In These Times, of the Koch brothers trying to get their workers to vote for the right candidate. (In case you missed Gordon Lafer’s followup on the hypocrisy of the Kochs, check this out.)

3. Mike then followed up—again, in In These Times—his piece with a report on Romney’s own role in encouraging this kind of behavior.

4. George Zornick contributed to the Nation some additional reporting on Herman Cain’s role in all this. (The Nation also ran an additional piece summarizing some of these stories.)

Then there was a bunch of thoughtful analyses of what all of this means…

5. In Salon, Josh Eidelson placed it in some historical context (with some quotes from me).

6. In The New Republic, McGillis speculated that it reveals how vulnerable employers now feel.

7. At Gawker, the inimitable Mobuto Seko Seko—no, not that one—did what only he can do, which includes, in what may be a first, citing a Crooked Timber post at Gawker (the one I wrote with Chris Bertram and Alex Gourevitch last summer.)

8. And last weekend, Chris Hayes had a lengthy roundtable on the issue (though I think most of the panelists, especially Josh Barro, got the free speech implications of the issue almost completely backward.)

But if you really want to understand what this all means, and why it happens, you should buy my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Part II—”Fear, American Style”—explains not only how it is that a liberal democracy can tolerate all this employer intimidation and coercion, but why and how it actually encourages, even requires, it. You also get to see one my favorite lines from Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge” —”How could mere toil align thy choiring strings?”—put in the service of political analysis: to suggest how central work and the workplace are to the organization, coordination, and execution of political repression in America.

Update (11 pm)

For some idiotic reason, I forgot this excellent piece from Mark Ames on the same topic. I can’t think of anyone in the media who has devoted as much attention to this issue, throughout the years, both as a reporter and as an analyst. Mark was also one of the very few, from the very beginning, to take notice of my work on this issue, and he’s continually made sure to keep it right there in the spotlight.

Update (11:05 pm)

Steven Sherman, a FB friend, reminds me of this piece in Business Week, just one of several, on David Siegel’s instructions to his employees.

Update (11:07 pm)

Bill Moyers is on it!

Forced to Choose: Capitalism as Existentialism

I’ve been reading and writing all morning about Hayek, Mises, and Menger. And it occurs to me: the moral secret of capitalism, its existential fundament, is not that we are free to choose but that we are forced to choose. Only when we are confronted with the reality of scarcity, says the Austrian economist, only when we must reckon with the finite resources at our disposal, are we brought face to face with ourselves. In deciding how to deploy those limited resources—whether they be time, money, effort—we’re compelled to answer the great questions of life: What do I value? What do I believe? What do I want in this life, in this world? (“Every man who, in the course of economic activity, chooses between the satisfaction of two needs, only one of which can be satisfied, makes judgments of value,” says Mises.) That decision must not only remain free; it must also remain mine. Most important of all, says the Austrian economist, it must remain a decision. Should what he calls the “economic situation” disappear from the human world, the disciplining agent of all ethical action—the necessity to choose among a limited set of options—would go with it. If our “ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning,” as Mises says, it’s also true, as Menger discovered, that economy alone is what gives our ends meaning. That, it seems to me, is the center of gravity of free-market economics.