Corey Robin's Blog, page 111

The Kochs’ Libertarian Hypocrisy: It’s Worse Than You Think

In response to my last post, Gordon Lafer sent me an email:

Unsurprisingly, there’s a glaring contrast between the standards that the Kochs and other employers insist on for themselves—i.e., they should be maximally free to tell their employees who’s worth supporting for public office— and what they are trying to impose on workers’ organizations around the country.

For instance, Alabama’s Act 2010-761, an “ethics” law adopted in 2011 which banned payroll dues deductions for unions that engage in any type of political activity, also includes this:

Any person who is in the employment of…any…governmental agency, shall be on approved leave to engage in political action or the person shall be on personal time before or after work and on holidays.  It shall be unlawful for any officer or employee [of the government] to…coerce or attempt to coerce any subordinate employee to work in any capacity in any political campaign or cause.  Any person who violates this section shall be guilty of the crime of trading in public office and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined or sentenced, or both…

The law defines “political activity” very broadly, to include: “engaging in… any form of political communication, including communications which mention the name of a political candidate.”

So…school teachers can’t talk to each other about which candidate their union endorsed, or who attacked teachers’ rights, when they’re on lunch break or in the break room or pissing in the men’s room, without fear of fine and imprisonment.  And certainly an administrator or senior teacher can’t tell junior teachers that they hope they’ll be out there at the rally in support of school funding.

When it comes to public employees mobilizing around politics, the law upholds a very strict standard.  But in the private sector, supervisors and owners telling their dependent subordinates how they should vote—which in pre-Citizens United law was treated as implicitly coercive because it would dissuade employees from wearing buttons, sporting bumper stickers or being seen at events of the opposition candidate—is no problem.  Like Stephen Colbert’s “I don’t see race,” the Kochs, the Chamber of Commerce, and ALEC “don’t see employer coercion.”

When I asked Gordon to clarify the Kochs’ role in the Alabama law, he wrote back:

The bill was co-sponsored by Alabama Senate Majority Leader James Waggoner, a member of ALEC.  It was trumpeted as a key bill by the National Right to Work Committee and supported by the Alabama Policy Institute, a local ALEC-affiliated think tank.  Both ALEC and the NRTW Committee receive financial support from the Koch brothers.  That’s all the smoking gun there is.  But the Kochs support things like this more explicitly in other states. Americans for Prosperity, the most clear-cut Koch vehicle, doesn’t have an Alabama chapter, but in Arizona was a key backer of another bill banning union dues deductions if those deductions were used for broadly construed “political” purposes.

The Koch Brothers Read Hayek

One of the things Hayek disliked about Social Security was that it gave the government—in this case, the agencies responsible for collecting and dispensing Social Security—a ready-made vehicle for the dissemination of propaganda. Particularly propaganda on behalf of Social Security.

It confers on the organization a power over minds that is in the same class with the powers of a totalitarian state which has the monopoly of the means of supplying information.

As good libertarians, the Koch brothers have naturally read their Hayek. Which is why they do stuff like this.

In a voter information packet obtained by In These Times, the Koch Industries corporate leadership informed tens of thousands of employees at its subsidiary, Georgia Pacific, that their livelihood could depend on the 2012 election and that the company supports Mitt Romney for president….

The packet arrived in the mailboxes of all 45,000 Georgia Pacific employees earlier this month. The cover letter, by Koch Industries President and Chief Operating Officer Dave Robertson, read:

While we are typically told before each Presidential election that it is important and historic, I believe the upcoming election will determine what kind of America future generations will inherit.

If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills.

…

The Koch’s in-house campaigning for the GOP is part of a larger trend of corporations exercising new freedoms under Citizens United. The Supreme Court decision overturned previous FEC laws prohibiting employers from expressing electoral opinions directly to their employees.

Ironically, while the Kochs have been taking advantage of Citizens United to expand political communications to employees, they have also capitalized on weak labor laws to limit the political speech of those employees.

In September, a number of unionized employees at Georgia Pacific’s Toledo, Ore. plant posed for a photo in front of their union hall with Democratic state Senate candidate Arnie Roblan. When the Koch Industries voter information packet arrived in the workers’ mailboxes a few weeks later, they saw that Roblan was not on the list of Koch-endorsed candidates in Oregon.

It was then, says Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers (AWPPW) Vice President Greg Pallesen, that he started receiving some of the strangest phone calls from workers he’s fielded in his 30-plus years of union involvement. The unionized workers in the photo were worried that they might be fired from their jobs if the image got out on the Internet, because in the backdrop of the photo, the Georgia Pacific plant could be seen.

Their fear comes not only from the mailing, but also from a new Georgia Pacific social media policy implemented earlier this year that warns, “Even if your social media conduct is outside of the workplace and/or non-work related, it must not reflect negatively on GP’s reputation, its products, or its brands.” Given the policy, the workers were scared to appear next to a candidate the Kochs do not support with the plant in the background.

…

In the new era ushered in by Citizens United, Koch Industries is not the only company seeking to control its employees’ political activities, including speech, lobbying efforts, donations and votes.

This week, Gawker obtained an email from the CEO of Westgate Resorts, Florida billionaire David Siegel, informing his 7,000 employees that a vote for Obama would endanger their jobs. Like Dave Robertson of Koch Industries, he couched this as an economic analysis rather than a threat.

Meanwhile, a new expose by Alec MacGillis of The New Republic reveals that the largest privately held coal company in the nation, Murray Energy, has routinely coerced its employees in to giving to GOP candidates. In the process, Murray Energy workers became the second largest block of donors to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner’s 2009-2010 coffers. “We have been insulted by every salaried employee who does not support our efforts,” wrote company CEO Robert Murray in a March 2012 letter to employees obtained by The New Republic; attached was a list of employees who had not yet attended fundraisers.

And last year, Talking Points Memo reported that Delta offered free rides, even bumping paying customers, for its flight attendants to fly to Washington, D.C. to lobby for an FAA bill that would make it more difficult for airline workers to organize a union. “A lot of flight attendants told me that their supervisors would encourage them to book a flight to Washington to go lobby,” says Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) spokesperson Corey Caldwell.

Libertarianism in Honduras

My friend Greg Grandin writes on Facebook:

One of the stranger fallouts from the 2009 Honduran coup has been the scheme hatched by an NYU economist, Paul Romer, along with free-market libertarians—including Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri; you can’t make this shit up—to start a bunch of “year-zero” cities in the country, free-market utopias with their own laws, etc. It’s like Empire’s Workshop meets The Shock Doctrine meets Fordlandia (except Henry Ford at least had his year-zero city provide free health care). If they were to come to fruition, they would be little more than free-trade maquila zones, like the kind that run along the US-Mexican border, except more savage.

In any case, the plan has hit a snag in that a committee of the Honduran Supreme Court has declared them unconstitutional, though that ruling could be reversed by the full court. Recently, a lawyer who argued for their unconstitutionality was gunned down, joining the long list of decent people killed as a result of the US-endorsed coup.

By the way, related to the discussion Corey Robin had on his blog about whether Hayek’s and Friedman’s support for dictatorships were inherent to their thought or just situational, Patri Friedman has cleared that point up, saying, in relation to these kind of start-up cities, that “Democracy is the current industry standard political system, but unfortunately it is ill-suited for a libertarian state.” Peter Thiel, founder of Paypall and bankroller of FB and another supporter of the Honduran scheme, wrote: “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Glad that particular contradiction has gotten resolved. Adelante.

I Have the Most Awesome Students in the World. And You Can Help Them.

As some of you know, I have a day job as a professor. At Brooklyn College, where I teach political science.

One of our cherished little secrets at Brooklyn College is that we have the most awesome undergraduates in the world. Listening to my students in class, I often feel like I’m teaching the 21st century’s New York Intellectuals: only instead of hailing from Odessa and Poland, they come from Nigeria, Grenada, Palestine, and Tajikistan. My students have gone onto Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, graduate degrees at top universities in the US and elsewhere, transformative activism with labor unions, community groups, antiwar coalitions, Occupy, and more. I’m not the sentimental sort, but the simple truth is: I love these guys. They make my job what it is.

The political science department has a scholarship program, which grants competitive awards to our majors. That program, as you can imagine, is woefully underfunded. I’d like to ask you to make a donation so that my students can go on to do the fabulous things they’re meant to do. Because many of them are poor, your money—$50, $100, $500—makes a huge difference. It can help a junior buy her semester’s books. It can mean a semester’s tuition. It can pay a month’s rent for a senior’s first year of grad school.

So please make a donation. Here’s how:

1. By check: Make checks payable to The Brooklyn College Foundation. In the memo of your check or in a note included with your check, please indicate that your donation is being made in support of the Political Science Department Award (31606156). All checks should be mailed to The Brooklyn College Foundation, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11210.

OR

2. By credit/debit card online:  Go to this link at the Brooklyn College Foundation. In the �”fund designation” box, please write 31606156. And in the “additional comments or questions related to this donation�” box, please indicate that your donation is being made in support of the Political Science Department Award (31606156).

It’s that simple. And yet—as Candice Bergen used to say—that complex. Can’t find that clip right now, so you’ll have to settle for this.

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I am so loving that lesser evil!

Two Democrats—from California and New York City, no less—are leading the charge against legislation that would give domestic workers lunch breaks and paid sick days, among things. Salon‘s Irin Carmon has the story.

In fact, two policy prescriptions that are catching on across the country – modest by the standards of other industrialized nations, but radical enough to inspire feverish opposition from Chamber of Commerce types — have recently been opposed by Democrats apparently seeking to appear “pro-business.”  One is the domestic worker’s bill of rights, which passed in New York state in 2010 but was vetoed by California Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday. It would have provided overtime pay and meal breaks to the 200,000 childcare workers and housecleaners — disproportionately women of color, many of them immigrants — who are currently filling the care gap in a relatively ad-hoc fashion. Brown claimed in his veto that he had questions about “the economic and human impact on the disabled or elderly person and their family” and whether this would mean fewer jobs for domestic workers overall.

Meanwhile, the New York City Council has enough votes to pass a paid sick-days bill to override a veto from Mayor Michael Bloomberg — if only Democratic mayoral aspirant and current speaker Christine Quinn would bring it to a vote. A spokeswoman for Quinn told the Times last week, “Given the current economic reality, now is not the right time for this policy.”

Thank God we have those Democrats to protect us against the Republicans.

Getting on Board

Alex Gourevitch is no stranger to this blog. He was one of my co-authors, along with Chris Bertram, on the Crooked Timber post about workplace coercion. He also has a terrific blog of his own, The Current Moment, which I recommend you check out. Here, in this guest post, he does a double-take on Matt Yglesias’ double-take.

• • • • •

Prompted by Gary Shteyngart’s op-ed today chronicling a disastrous American Airlines flight, Matthew Yglesias produced a little nugget explaining that AA’s delays are the product of pilot slowdowns. American—well, its executives—are trying to save their hides by using bankruptcy courts to screw the unions. Pilots are fighting back by zealously following all kinds of obscure rules—what Yglesias dubs “overscrupulous maintenance requests”—that slow down or force flight cancellations, or by refusing to do those extra things that patch otherwise troublesome and expensive problems.

Yglesias observes:

What management is discovering right now is that formal contracts can’t fully specify what it is that “doing your job properly” constitutes for an airline pilot. The smooth operation of an airline requires the active cooperation of skilled pilots who are capable of judging when it does and doesn’t make sense to request new parts and who conduct themselves in the spirit of wanting the airline to succeed. By having the judge throw out the pilots’ contract, the airline has totally lost faith with its pilots and has no ability to run the airline properly.

Yglesias is certainly right about what it means to do a job, and it isn’t just true of skilled airline pilots. All contracts are ambiguous; that’s why these bankruptcy schemes and labor counter-actions happen. Every day at the job involves an effort to create and define that job. As Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and I argued a while back:

The problem with most employment contracts, then, is…they are highly and necessarily indeterminate. As economic and legal theorists regularly tell us, all contracts are incomplete, but inside the workplace they are especially so…The promised performance of any job means that every movement and moment, gesture and statement, of the performer’s day (and increasingly night) is up for grabs. The terms of the contract are inevitably indeterminate—especially in a dynamic economy, where technological innovation means that work routines are revolutionized all the time. Itemizing all these ins and outs in advance would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, to borrow a phrase.

This indeterminacy—plus the fact that employers want to squeeze as much work as they can from workers while paying them the least, and the fact that workers want the opposite—means that there is a constant struggle over terms of employment well after any contract is signed. That, in turn, is why things like unions, strikes, and full employment policies, which strengthen the hand of workers, matter. The workplace is a site of struggle and power, not just expertise and contractual performance.

Yglesias didn’t understand or get our argument the first time around. Nice to see he’s on board now. Better late than never. Delays, after all, are better than cancellations.

Matt Yglesias’s China Syndrome

Commenting on the recent labor unrest in China, Matt Yglesias makes a comparison with the past and present of the United States.

Conditions in contemporary China have much more in common, structurally speaking, with conditions during the heyday of western labor activism than does anything about the Chicago teachers strike or the apparent American Airlines sickout. The rapid pace of Chinese industrialization means the average wage in a Chinese factories has managed to lag behind the average productivity of a Chinese factory worker (roughly speaking because it’s dragged down by the absymal wages and productivity of Chinese agriculture) which creates a dynamic ripe for windfall profits but also for labor activism. The repressive nature of the Chinese state is an unpromising ground for union organizing, but by the same token Chinese labor organizations have much less to lose (in terms of union-managed pension funds, union-owned buildings, etc.) if they break the law with “wildcat” strikes and the like.

Why are workers rioting in China? Because, says Matt, of the large gap between labor productivity and labor compensation there, which is similar to how things once were in the US and Western Europe but is unlike anything in the contemporary US.

Oh really? Since 1973, labor productivity in the US has risen 80.4 percent. Yet median wages have increased only 4 percent, and median compensation as a whole—which includes benefits—has only increased 10.7 percent.

This is hardly a state secret; mainstream economists talk about it all the time. Which is why I was so puzzled by Matt’s claim.

So I asked him about the discrepancy. He  responded: “I should explain the difference more clearly. US is a median issue, China is a mean issue.” I’m not clear what point he’s trying to make here, but it seems to work against him: if the mean worker wage in China is being depressed by very low wages in agriculture, that means factory work pays better than agriculture, so workers should be flocking to the factories. An increase in the labor supply is not usually conducive to labor activism.

Back to the US.  So where did all that productivity growth between 1973 and 2011 go? Writes Paul Krugman:

One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.

2/3 of the productivity, in other words, went to the “windfall profits” that Matt speaks of above. Not so unlike China after all.

And what about labor activism? Matt is right, of course, about the repressive Chinese state. But as I’ve long argued, a good deal of worker activism in the United States also gets repressed. One in 17 of every eligible voter in a union election gets illegally fired or suspended for his or her support for a union. While it’s true that the American state is not the equivalent of the Chinese state, it’s also true that a great deal of repression in the US has always been outsourced to the private sector—even in “the heyday of western labor activism.”

Over the summer, when Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch, and I were advancing our thesis about workplace tyranny, Matt repeatedly professed bafflement as to why we were even talking about this issue. Well, this is one reason: repression and coercion in the workplace actually prevent the union organizing that helps ensure that that growth in worker productivity translates into higher pay and benefits for workers.

Matt gets it. In China.

This post is cross-posted at Crooked Timber.

Hurting the Kids

Though the final contract has not yet been hammered out, here are just some of the things the Chicago Teachers Union have won with their seven-day strike [pdf]:

Almost 600 new art, music, and gym teachers
Guaranteed textbooks in the first day of class
$1.5 million for new special education teachers
$.5 million for reductions in class size
More than twice as much money for classroom supplies

No question: they’re hurting the kids.

NPR Says Karen Lewis is Too….Something to Speak for Teachers

Because of Rosh Hashanah, I’m a little late to this story. And now that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has voted to suspend the strike, it might be moot. But still, it’s worth noting.

On Sunday, the CTU voted to continue striking so that its members could have additional time to discuss and debate the terms of Chicago’s contract offer (which is still not final).

You’d think that decision would have been held up as a triumph of deliberative democracy. Here you had union members demanding time and space to discuss the rules that govern their everyday lives, not waiting passively for their leaders to determine their fates. If this happened in other countries, we’d call it a Chicago Spring (or something). Right?

Leave it to NPR to spin the story as a troubling sign of CTU President Karen Lewis’ potential failure as a leader and increasing inability to serve as a spokesperson for the teachers’ cause. No reason is given as to why she can’t serve as that spokesperson; no evidence is provided that she hasn’t. But, hey, there’s just something about her…What might it be?

Have a listen to the NPR report here.

Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.

Like Doug Henwood, I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why people—particularly liberals and pseudo-liberals in the chattering classes—hate teachers unions. One could of course take these people at their word—they care about the kids, they worry that strikes hurt the kids, and so on—but since we never hear a peep out of them about the fact that students have to swelter through 98-degree weather in jam-packed classes without air conditioning, I’m not so inclined.

Forgive me then if I essay an admittedly more impressionistic analysis drawn from my own experience.

Like many of these journalists, I hail from an upper middle class background. I grew up in Chappaqua, an affluent suburb of New York. My parents moved there in 1975 for the schools, which were—and I believe still are—terrific. From elementary school through senior year, I had some of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered.

Two of my social studies teachers—Allan Damon and Tom Corwin—had more of an impact on me than any professor I ever had in college or grad school. In their classes, I read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox, Hobbes, Locke, Richard Hakluyt, Albert Thayer Mahan, and more. When I got to college, I found that I was considerably better prepared than my classmates, many of whom had gone to elite private schools in Manhattan and elsewhere. It’s safe to say I would never have become an academic were it not for these two men.

We also had a terrific performing arts program. Phil Stewart, Chappaqua’s legendary acting teacher, trained Vanessa Williams, Roxanne Hart, Dar Williams, and more. We put on obscure musicals and  destabilizing plays like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ronald Dunn, our choral teacher, had us singing Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Vivaldi’s Gloria, and the works of Fauré. So inspiring were these teachers that many of us went onto organize our own plays, musicals, and a cappella groups, while we were still in high school.

Despite this, many kids and their parents held teachers in contempt. Teachers were not figures of respect or gratitude; they were incompetents and buffoons. Don’t get me wrong: like most people, I had some terrible teachers. Incompetents and worse. But like most people I’ve also had some terrible friends, some terrible co-workers, some terrible neighbors, some terrible doctors, some terrible editors, and some terrible professors. Mediocrity, I’d venture, is a more or less universal feature of the human condition. But among the upper classes it’s treated as the exclusive preserve of teachers.

It’s odd. Even if you’re the most toolish striver—i.e., many of the people I grew up with—teachers are your ticket to the Ivy League. And if you’re an intellectually ambitious academic type like me, they’re even more critical. Like I said, people move to Chappaqua for the schools, and if the graduation and post-graduate statistics are any indication—in my graduating class of 270, I’d guess about 50 of us went onto an Ivy League school—they’re getting their money’s worth. Yet many people I grew up with treated teachers as bumptious figures of ridicule—and not in your anarchist-critique-of-all-social-institutions kind of way.

It’s clear where the kids got it from: the parents. Every year there’d be a fight in the town over the school budget, and every year a vocal contingent would scream that the town was wasting money (and raising needless taxes) on its schools. Especially on the teachers (I never heard anyone criticize the sports teams). People hate paying taxes for any number of reasons—though financial hardship, in this case, was hardly one of them—but there was a special pique reserved for what the taxes were mostly going to: the teachers.

In my childhood world, grown ups basically saw teachers as failures and fuck-ups. “Those who can’t do, teach” goes the old saw. But where that traditionally bespoke a suspicion of fancy ideas that didn’t produce anything concrete, in my fancy suburb, it meant something else. Teachers had opted out of the capitalist game; they weren’t in this world for money. There could be only one reason for that: they were losers. They were dimwitted, unambitious, complacent, unimaginative, and risk-averse. They were middle class.

No one, we were sure, became a teacher because she loved history or literature and wanted to pass that on to the next generation. All of them simply had no other choice. How did we know that? Because they weren’t lawyers or doctors or “businessmen”—one of those words, even in the post-Madmen era, still spoken with veneration and awe. It was a circular argument, to be sure, but its circularity merely reflected the closed universe of assumption in which we operated.

Like my teachers, I have chosen a career in education and don’t make a lot of money. Unlike them, I’m a professor. I’m continuously astonished at the pass that gets me among the people I grew up with. Had I chosen to be a high-school teacher, I’d be just another loser. But tenured professors are different. Especially if we teach in elite schools (which I don’t.) We’re more talented, more refined, more ambitious—more like them. We’re capitalist tools, too.

So that’s where and how I grew up. And when I hear journalists and commentators, many of them fresh out of the Ivy League, talking to teachers as if they were servants trying to steal the family silver, that’s what I hear. It’s an ugly tone from ugly people.

Every so often I want to ask them, “Didn’t your parents teach you better manners?” Then I remember whom I’m dealing with.

Update (September 13, 12:45 am)

I’ve gotten a fair amount of flak from liberals, on Twitter and in the comments, who claim I’m being unfair to liberal critics of the teachers union—I’m not taking their arguments seriously, making assumptions about their elitism, etc.

I want you all to have a listen to one liberal critic—Andy Rotherham, who has a column at Time— on the Diane Rehm Show.  This is what he says (at 50:30):

Part of this strike, it’s pretty clear, is that the union needed to have some theater for its members, let them blow off some steam, and that’s increasingly obvious.

Remember, he’s talking about a union led by an African-American woman, in a school district where 40 percent of the kids are black. Look at ‘em all, blowing off steam.

Yeah, I was really being unfair.

(Also on the show is the indispensable Diane Ravitch, who does a pretty excellent job — when Rehm lets her speak — of debunking the liberal shibboleths in this debate. If you’re wondering why I don’t engage the arguments more, it’s because Ravitch already has. Again and again and again and again.)