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It’s Labor Day - that very intentionally least-understood of US holidays. The fact that it’s in September and not on May 1st is, in itself, a fuck you to the Left. Today, it is quite possible that the average young American doesn’t exactly know what a union is
We are in a time when the long and vicious right-wing campaign - from Lochner and Taft-Hartley to Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Janus - has gotten #organizedlabor almost small enough to drown in a small bathtub 🛀 . But we persist nonetheless
Labor’s dire situation creates some new possibilities, though. Our Walmart pointed the way to a new form of organizing that circumvented the old model of union organizing through the NLRB. We’re trying something similar as United Campus Workers here in GA
Where everything is fucked and there’s nothing, there’s a chance to start fresh. Young Americans might not know what a union is, but they also do not have the anti union prejudices & presumptions that older generations of Americans learned from On the Waterfront etc
My grandpa was a radical unionist, a steelworker, carpenter, maintenance guy, etc. He believed in organized labor but he also lost his mind and became a fanatical anti-Semite and now practicing Trumpian. His old world is mostly lost to us anyway...
My mom and stepdad @HDfudd took on the extraordinary challenge of organizing their parts manufacturing plant in North Carolina, possibly the most antiunion state in the US (which is saying a lot). Their courage & principled fuck-you-ness has always inspired me
Yet, as much as we might want to go back to a fantasy of what organized labor’s heyday was, the reality is much more like the radical situation the CIO faced in the 1930s, or the WV mine wars. Labor basically has no protection and has to fight to survive (in a very literal sense)
New thinking is required if we are to survive at all. And in my view the biggest front in this war will probably be the care industries (healthcare and education), hence my so-called new project
I think that we will face a new situation of labor shortage in our lifetimes, after a long period of “excess” population that drove down wages globally and made neoliberalism possible. There’s a scholar @abenanav who has thought a lot about this & his work will be important
To me it seems that a future of great human needs and diminished labor supply will result in either slavery or liberation - rather than the jobless future that the automation people have in mind
