L.A .Teachers Vote No Confidence in Deasy and Their Own Union

The Los Angeles times reported that LAUSD teachers “overwhelmingly expressed ‘no confidence’ in superintendent John Deasy last Wednesday, the first time such a vote has occurred in the nation's second-largest school system.

It is certainly significant that a majority of LA teachers voted no confidence in their superintendent—and not at all surprising, considering Deasy’s war on teachers. Under his watch, LAUSD has implemented teacher evaluations based on student test scores. There have been numerous charter school conversions, furloughs and layoffs, as well as ongoing budget shortfalls. There have also been abuse scandals in which the district has covered up misconduct or obstructed investigations and then punished teachers en masse for the wrongdoings of one or two teachers, while trying to redirect blame onto the union.

However, it would be a gross exaggeration to say that teachers overwhelmingly supported the no confidence vote. Only about 17,770 teachers (slightly more than half of UTLA’s 32,000 members) participated in the vote. Of those who voted, a whopping 91% expressed disapproval. Yet, as a percentage of the total membership, this only constitutes slightly more than 50%. Looked at differently, one could say that nearly half of Los Angeles teachers did not feel strongly enough to vote at all.

Low voter turn-out for UTLA is nothing new (see here and here). Poor organizing by the union is one likely explanation. Simply placing “vote no confidence” posters on its website is not enough to get teachers to actually participate in the vote. They should have had organizers talking to teachers at every site and agitating for action, should the vote go their way, because in the end, a vote of no confidence has no teeth. If LA teachers want Deasy out, they’ll have to drive him out. Indeed, Deasy responded to the vote by asserting he was too busy trying to provide quality education to needy children to be bothered with such “nonsense.”

Another likely reason for the low voter turnout is general discontent with UTLA by its members. As bad as Deasy has been, UTLA has been complicit with many of his policies, including evaluation reform and furloughs.

Ironically, another measure on the same ballot that criticized UTLA only won 77% approval (probably because the teachers most frustrated with their union didn’t bother to vote). This resolution explicitly criticized UTLA for “weakening and dividing” its members, and for not organizing and mobilizing its members and community allies. The measure called for a reduction in standardized tests for evaluating teachers and an end to reconstitution of staff at low-performing schools.

The Times reports that UTLA president Warren Fletcher embraced the second resolution, despite its criticism of his leadership. Question is, will he do anything about it?

W[h]ither the Labor Movement?

I recently came across an interesting blog piece by Stewart Acuff called The Future of the American Labor Movement. One thing I liked about his piece is that he correctly identified several important areas the labor movement has ignored over the years. However, like many on the left, he completely misunderstands the relationship between labor and capital and this leads him to the erroneous belief that the interests of workers can be saved entirely through political action, while ignoring labor’s most effective weapon, the strike.

Acuff points out that the 1935 Wagner Act, which was revised and reborn as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), does not cover large percentages of workers (e.g., public sector workers, agricultural workers and domestic workers). These latter two groups comprise many of the lowest wage and most abused workers in the nation. For those who are covered by NLRA, the law significantly limits their freedom to form unions, bargain collectively and strike. He argues that the labor movement needs to fight NLRA-type protections for all workers and start to vigorously organize the millions of non-unionized workers in the country, while also fighting for legislative changes that would improve workers’ living standards, including a higher minimum (living) wage and single payer health plan.

Unfortunately, Acuff misunderstands the relationship between labor and capital, claiming that the lack of “real and full freedom to form unions and bargain collectively is the core of our economic crisis.” The economic crisis is, in reality, a crisis of capital—the temporary failure to acquire as much profit as desired in the usual way. To be sure, times are tougher now for the rest of us, but the economic relations are essentially the same as they have always been. The employing class owns the means of production and thus controls the conditions of work, while the workers are dependent on the employers for a job and wages. This allows employers to pay workers less than the value of their labor and pocket the difference as profits (i.e., exploitation). When times are tough for capitalists, they slash wages and jobs and demand more from those who remain, thus ensuring continued profits over and beyond what they need to live far more lavishly than their employees.

Unions and collective bargaining merely allow workers to negotiate their working conditions and compensation with their bosses, but never to actually challenge their subservient relationship, let alone demand full autonomy, power or control over the means of production. Thus, unions and collective bargaining help perpetuate the continued profit-making by the capitalist class by insuring that workers stay on the job to be exploited (i.e., paid less than the value of their labor).

Furthermore, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, in and of itself, does little for workers if they cannot mount an effective strike. During collective bargaining, each side makes proposals, argues its case and they either come to an agreement or not. The boss can always say “no” and the workers have little recourse when this happens except to appeal to his compassion or threaten to harm him. Although there are a number of tactics that have been used by workers over the years, the strike (and its variants) is the most effective means to extract concessions from bosses, as it hurts their bottom line. The longer workers remain off the job, the longer they lose profits.

While union membership has been on the decline (partly as a result of downsizing, union busting and outsourcing), unions have also become increasingly reluctant to engage in strikes and other job actions. Acuff laments how “35 years of assaults on workers and unions have led to 35 years of stagnant wages,” yet the unions have done little to resist this. Indeed, by increasingly choosing political action over direct action, the unions have been complicit in this.

Like many on the Left, including the leaders of the unions, Acuff has misconstrued the problem as a political problem: “What does the absence of organizing and collective bargaining rights say about freedom and democracy in the United States?” In actuality it says very little about freedom and a lot about the relationship of democracy to capitalism.  We do, in fact, have the right to form unions, strike and bargain collectively, but the state has imposed numerous restrictions and limitations and it has done so legally and democratically and for the benefit of the bosses. What most on the Left fail to recognize is that despite its definition (rule by the people), democracy is not the same thing as People Power and does not serve the economic interests of the masses.

Though Acuff sounds like a critic of mainstream unionism, his critique suffers from many of the same faulty premises. While it is true that governments can take away collective bargaining rights (as they recently did in Wisconsin), organizing is something that people can and sometimes must do, regardless of rights and laws. Likewise, before we had a legal right to strike, workers still struck and risked jail, beatings, deportations and murder. Unfortunately, the major unions have accepted the rules and laws imposed on them by capital (i.e., they obediently follow the dictates of NLRA and Taft-Hartley) and even undermine wildcat initiatives by their members, thus squelching rank and file autonomy and passion. In Wisconsin, when workers started talking about a General Strike (which is illegal under the Taft Hartley Act), the major unions sent their members home from the state house occupation, arguing that the most strategy was to vote the crooks out of office.

It is true that wages have been stagnant or declining over the past 40 years and that working conditions have deteriorated (e.g., longer hours, speedups, increased workloads). It is also true that the wealth gap has grown rapidly in that period and living conditions for most of us have declined as a result. In response, the unions have done virtually nothing to fight to reverse these trends. Rather, they have almost universally negotiated contracts that merely slowed down the process. Ultimately, if unions want to increase their membership and status among workers, they will have to demonstrate that they have the power to make aggressive demands on the bosses and win them through strikes. Until then, unions will seem like a burden to many workers that simply take a cut of their already meager wages in exchange for more status quo.

Today in Labor History—January 11

Blake's "Lovers' Whirlwind" Illustration for Dante's Inferno (from Wikipedia)

January 11, 1804 -- The Sussex Examiner reported that English poet William Blake was tried for sedition for saying "Damn the king and damn his soldiers." (From the Daily Bleed)

January 11, 1908 – A General Strike occurred in Buenos Aires Argentina.(From the Daily Bleed)

New York Modern School, 1911

January 11, 1911 – The first American "Modern School," based on ideas of Francisco Ferrer, was founded by a group including Leonard Abbott, Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, in New York City. (From the Daily Bleed)

Children of Striking Textile Workers Being Sent to Live With Family in NY

January 11, 1912 – The IWW-organized (Industrial Workers of the World) "Bread & Roses" textile strike of 32,000 women and children began on this date in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The first to walk out were a group of Polish women who, upon collecting their pay, exclaimed that they had been cheated & promptly abandoned their looms. The Strike lasted 10 weeks, beginning after the legislature cut maximum working hours for women and children from 56 to 54 hours per week and the employers cut their pay along with the hours. Many sent their children to live with family or comrades in New York during the strike. The Modern School organizers and parents took in many of these children. (From the Daily Bleed)

January, 11, 1936 – Auto workers engaged in a sit-down strike at General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. (From the Daily Bleed)

Most New Jobs Low Pay, Despite Unions & College Degrees

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Studies indicate that those with college educations are more likely to have jobs and earn more money in those jobs than those who lack a degree. Similarly, union workers tend to earn more than workers in similar jobs who lack union contracts. Yet the majority of jobs lost over the past few years were in the middle range of wages, while most of those added during the recovery have been at the lower end of the income range, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, suggesting that neither degrees nor unions provide the same security they did a generation ago.

The report examined 366 different jobs covered by the Labor Department, dividing them into three groups based on average wages. The middle group, which included jobs in manufacturing, construction and information, with wages ranging from $13.84 to $21.13 per hour, accounted for 60% of the job losses between 2008 and 2010, the New York Times reported. These same fields made up only 22% of the job growth, and higher-wage jobs, with wages ranging from $21.14 to $54.55 per hour, made up only 20% of the job growth. The bulk of the job growth during the recovery (58%) has been in the lowest wage occupations (e.g., retail sales and food preparation), with hourly wages ranging from $7.69 to $13.83.

Since 2001, lower-wage job growth has been 8.7%, while mid-wage jobs have declined by 7.3%. According to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, worker productivity in the U.S. has risen by 80% over the past 40 years, while wages have declined by 11%. This has been a boon to the bosses, who have been able to extract even greater profits from their workers. Greater productivity means more widgets per hour per employee. This would benefit capitalists even without cutting wages. However, they have also downsized, getting fewer employees to produce the same or more widgets, without raising wages, resulting in a downward spiral of both working and living conditions for the majority of American workers.

Over the past 40 years, union membership has declined by 50%. This is part of the problem. Union workers do tend to earn more than their nonunionized counterparts, while regions with high union membership also tend to have higher wages for other workers in the area, even the nonunionized workers. Rising health care costs have taken a cut out of workers’ compensation packages (at least from those who are lucky enough to get health benefits). Outsourcing is another cause of both declining union membership and wages, as workers find themselves accepting lower wages just to keep a local job.

Yet it is not accurate to blame these problems entirely on the capitalist class, though its members are certainly the driving force and sole beneficiaries. The mainstream union leadership has all but given up unions’ two main sources of power—organizing and striking—in exchange for the safer, easier and more comfortable tactics of lobbying and hobnobbing with the bosses and politicians, thus hastening the demise of unions and losses for workers.

The unions have also taken the strategically stupid tactic of valuing job protection/creation over compensation and working conditions, thus contributing to the downward spiral of wages. This was perhaps best exemplified by their Detroit compromise/sellout, in which the UAW accepted a two-tiered wage and benefits package giving new workers salaries that were half what autoworkers had traditionally been earning, all in exchange for an agreement by autoworkers to lay off fewer workers.

While being jobless certainly sucks, having a job that kills or injures or keeps one living in poverty is not much better. Unfortunately, most Americans accept that jobs are the only solution to the problem of feeding and housing ourselves. Thus, when Romney or Obama promise more jobs, people cheer, ignoring the quality of job, whether it is low wage, high stress, degrading to the soul or the environment.

Yet if worker productivity has really increased by 80%, then why not let the workers work 80% less for the same wages or increase their wages by 80%, thus lower the wealth gap or the number of unemployed workers? Certainly not a revolutionary idea (the bosses would still own the means of production and the employees would still be at the mercy of the bosses to keep them on the job and pay them), but one that would be justifiable considering they are the ones whose productivity has increased.

This kind of thinking is alien to both the bosses of the workplaces and the unions. Workers are seen by bosses as a means to an end: pay them $5 for a product or service that can be sold for $20 and pocket the profits. Increased productivity means only one thing to them: they get to pocket even more of the profits.

Bosses and employees truly have no common ground. The bosses have the power to hire and fire, set wages and working conditions, speed up, layoff, shut down and outsource. Employees are dependent on bosses, both to offer jobs in the first place and to pay wages, since the only thing they have to sell is their time and their bodies and minds, and this is the only way they have to put food on the table. So if the boss wants to keep all of the rewards of increased worker productivity, the workers can either accept it and hopefully keep their jobs and current income, or risk being replaced by striking for more.

The union bosses actually have interests more in line with the workplace bosses. Laid off workers do not pay dues, thus cutting into the pool available for the wages and benefits of the union leaders. A strike is risky for the union bosses, not only because the pool of dues paying members could decline, but because the union itself could be cut out of the picture. If they lose the right to collectively bargain, the union leaders could end up unemployed themselves. Thus, protecting jobs and collective bargaining (through lobbying and campaign contributions) become far more important than protecting working conditions and compensation for the workers (through organizing and job actions). The former keeps the union leaders materially comfortable, while the latter is just a lot of work and risk for someone else’s benefit. 

Generation Hot—Why Aren’t Parents Fighting Climate Change?

Mark Hertzgaard’s recent article, “Parents Need to Act Against Climate Change,” in the Daily Beast, is a moralistic diatribe against parents’ apathy in response to climate change. Since the worst effects of climate change are only just beginning, our kids will be inheriting a lifetime of catastrophic storms, heat waves, droughts, famines and economic hardships. Therefore, he argues, parents should be terrified, outraged and aggressively fighting to reverse the crisis. Yet for the most part they are not.

The current U.S. heat wave—the worst in 56 years—has now encompassed 1,000 counties and is affecting fully one-third of Americans. There have already been nearly 100 deaths (which is significant, but still miniscule compared with the 70,000 who died in Europe’s heat wave of 2003). Ranchers are considering selling off their herds for slaughter early because they cannot afford to feed them. Food prices are expected to rise dramatically. And scientists are claiming that the heat wave, drought, fires in the Southwest and other extreme weather events of the past few years are what climate change looks like.

Climate change is indeed the most significant issue of our day as it threatens life on the planet in the long-term and our living conditions and material wellbeing in the short-term. Hertzgaard is correct in his assessment that American’s are relatively apathetic on this issue. He is also correct that our children, whom he dubs “Generation Hot,” will inherit much more serious consequences than we are currently experiencing if the trend is not reversed.

However, people (parents, children and everyone else) cannot be beaten into action with moralizing and guilt tripping. They will not suddenly jump to the barricades because Hertzgaard, or his organization, have made them feel guilty about leaving a moribund planet to their children.

Nor will partial or inaccurate analyses lead them into action. For example, Hertzgaard suggests that parents “don’t know, or choose not to believe,” the science because the media covers climate change through “political rather than scientific lenses.” This overly simplistic analysis deemphasizes the role of the heavily funded PR machine that the coal and petroleum industries have used to deliberately mislead and confuse the public about the facts, much like the tobacco companies have done to try to convince the public that tobacco is safe.

There are other problems with this analysis, too, like the assumptions that if the media talked about climate change “through a scientific lens” the public would necessarily understand the science, its implications, be outraged and take action. None of these assumptions is necessarily true. The facts about tobacco’s health consequences encouraged some to quit. However, increased regulation (e.g., tobacco taxes, mandated warning labels, laws regulating where and how tobacco could be sold and advertised) together with public health outreach campaigns, have contributed to significantly more dramatic reductions in tobacco usage.

Hertzgaard also suggests that the facts are just too depressing for many parents to face, leading many to ignore them or pretend climate change is not happening. Of course the facts are depressing, while the only solutions likely to reverse the trend involve dramatic reductions (or elimination) of fossil fuel consumption and significant reductions in overall consumption seem hopelessly unlikely in our current economic and cultural climate.

However, I Hertzgaard’s analysis here is dismissive and disparaging. Parents are not the cause of climate change. They are its victims. And while we are all complicit in it by continuing to consume polluting products and services, we have little choice in the matter. We need to get to work and heat our homes and eat, and these are all heavily dependent on greenhouse gas emitting technologies. Changing this requires massive regulation, which depends on the goodwill of a political and economic system that benefits handsomely from the status quo, or dramatic socioeconomic changes that are unlikely to occur without considerable violence and suffering.

Furthermore, while climate change may be the most significant issue of our day, it is still largely a long term problem in most people’s eyes, particularly when juxtaposed with our day to day needs, like putting food on the table, which for most Americans has become much more difficult as a result of the economic crisis. It may be that Americans do indeed recognize the gravity of the climate problem and are not simply shoving their heads in the ground. Rather, they also recognize the socioeconomic challenges of fighting it and the urgency of their own material needs, and choose to go on with their lives with as little disruption and stress as they can.

In many respects, climate change is just another front in the class war the ruling elite has been imposing on the rest of us for generations. The primary beneficiaries of carbon pollution are the industries that are allowed to dump carbon into the atmosphere or sell polluting products without charge (e.g., petroleum, coal, shipping, automotive, construction, owners of large buildings, big agriculture, etc.) They increase their profits by externalizing these costs onto the public. Regulation has not been possible because these beneficiaries of carbon pollution have spent billions of dollars on PR, ads and lobbying to convince the public there is no problem and to convince politicians not to regulate them. Convincing parents to get angry and get into the streets is no more likely to change this than the Occupy movement was in getting Congress to regulate banking.

Of course regulation alone cannot solve the problem. We don’t simply need better rules governing how industries pollute. We need social changes that dramatically reduce or eliminate carbon pollution combined with heavy investment in carbon neutral technologies combined with dramatic reductions in overall consumption combined with stiffer penalties and better policing of industrial pollution. Most of these enormous long-term socioeconomic changes will require directly confronting the ruling elite and capitalism itself and therefore also require comprehensive community and workplace organizing. This is most effectively done by getting into the streets, communities and workplaces and talking to people one on one and listening to their concerns, not by getting on your high horse and talking down to them.