Roll the union!

 The United Autoworkers strike against the Big Three car companies in late 2023 gained national attention and enthusiasm. That might have just been the beginning. 

Following the successful strike, which linked issues related to class and climate, the UAW turned its attention to organizing the unorganized. Those efforts have recently been crowned with success by the overwhelming vote of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  

The vote was 2,628 in favor of joining the union and 985 against, meaning around 73% supported the drive. Earlier efforts to unionize the facility failed in 2014 and 2019. Next month, workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama will also vote on joining the union. 

If this trend continues, this win in the traditionally anti-union South could be as historic as last year’s victory—or the epic organizing drives of the 1930s. 

It’s no secret that for decades corporations have been shifting production to southern states, where the power of unions has traditionally been thwarted by so-called “Right to Work” (RTW) legislation. I call it “Right to Work for Less.” 

RTW laws lower labor standards, undermine the democratic process, weaken unions, and allow free riders to benefit from collective bargaining agreements without providing dues to support the process. And unfortunately, these laws have spread beyond their southern origins. 

Many people may not be aware, however, of the vile and explicitly racist origins and motivations of RTW. 

The person who came up with the name and launched the movement to enact it as law was a Texas businessman and politico named Vance Muse, who lived from 1890 to 1950. An unabashed racist and anti-Semite, he bitterly opposed the labor law reforms of the New Deal, which he referred to as “the Jew Deal.” 

At the time, the labor movement was making huge advances and helping to build working-class power. However, it faced serious obstacles in the South, where a racial caste system divided workers and kept wages low for everyone. 

Vance and his allies in the “Christian American Association,” an organization he founded to promote RTW, were opposed to unions not only for their promotion of better wages and conditions but also for their potential threat to the system of racial segregation. But they soon gained powerful supporters beyond the South and began to win major victories. 

According to Dartmouth historian Marc Dixon: “The Christian American Association out of Houston was the first to champion Right-to-Work as a full-blown political slogan in 1941. The organization stood out in a crowded field for its fiery rhetoric against President Roosevelt and especially labor. But Right-to-Work quickly moved from the fringe to the mainstream. After the war, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers championed the laws with great effect. By the early spring of 1947, fourteen states had adopted Right-to-Work, and the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress later that year, solidified the rights of states to pass and enforce these laws.” 

Muse was able to play on racial biases to promote RTW with considerable success — but not a lot of subtlety. Some of his anti-Black and antisemitic remarks are too inflammatory to include here. Suffice it to say that he believed anti-labor laws and repression were necessary to “keep the color line drawn in our social affairs” and “protect the Southern Negro [sic] from communistic propaganda and influences.” 

When union organizers with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) dreamed of launching “Operation Dixie” in the 1940s to organize southern workers and overcome segregation, Muse’s wealthy backers of millionaires, corporations, business associations, and demagogic politicians were able to largely neutralize the effort. 

It won’t be easy, but perhaps this most recent UAW victory will be a major step toward undoing that shameful legacy of racism and greed. 

I don’t know of anyone who spoke the truth about RTW—and the connection between the struggles for racial and economic justice—more clearly than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work’” he said. “It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.” 

King elaborated that RTW’s “purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.” 

Amen to that. 

(This appeared on the AFSC website. The UAW has won another victory since this came out.)

Told ya

 Some of the hardest fights and most painful losses of the last few years were the passage of state anti-labor laws in a state with a long and proud union history. Specifically, these include passage of union busting right-to-work-for-less (RTWFL)  and the repeal of prevailing wage for public construction projects. Union members and supporters of working families fought those tooth and nail.

Supporters of these anti-worker bills promised the moon. Employers and workers were supposed to flock to West Virginia with the passage of RTWFL. The repeal of prevailing wage was supposed to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. None of those things happened. In fact, the state has lost around 60,000 people since 2015.

WV Governor Jim Justice admitted that these were epic fails yesterday. Here's a snip from MetroNews:

“Really and truly, let’s just be brutally honest,” the governor said about a half-hour into Wednesday night’s town hall. “We passed the right-to-work law in West Virginia. And we ran to the windows looking to see all the people that were going to come — and they didn’t come. We got rid of prevailing wage. We changed our corporate taxes and we’ve done a lot of different things. And we’ve run to the windows and they haven’t come.

“We’ve absolutely built the field in a lot of different places thinking build the field and they’ll come, and they didn’t come.”

 Lots of us were saying "No ****" when we heard that. Unfortunately, the governor was saying that while all those things failed, this time around repeal of the state income tax will REALLY work.

It reminds me of the cartoon Peanuts when Lucy repeatedly held the football for Charlie Brown only to yank it away at the last minute. Will we fall for that again?

The good guys won one

If you're hungry for some good news, working people got some this week when Missouri voters overwhelmingly defeated so called right to work (really right to work for less) legislation. They didn't just beat it by a few percentage points: they crushed it by a two to one margin. This is the first time the union-busting measure was defeated by a referendum.

Here's wishing that West Virginia will remove this blot of shame from the state code before too long.

From the Goat Rope archives, here are a couple of posts on just how evil "right to work" legislation is and the slimy history of its racist origins.

From the WV teachers' strike to the wave of unrest it helped spark to this victory, it's clear that organized workers are a force to be reckoned with--if and when they choose to be.

Some words of Dr. King to consider in WV

 (Image by way of wikipedia. Circa 1963.)

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.

Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.” —Martin Luther King, speaking about right-to-work laws in 1961

Mark me as a "no"

On the latest Front Porch podcast, we debate "right-to-work-(for-less). Check it out here.

Looking under a rock

This op-ed of mine about the ugly history of so-called "right to work" legislation ran in today's Gazette-Mail:

The ancient Chinese sage known to us as Confucius was once asked what he would do if he ever came to a position of influence in a kingdom. His answer was a little surprising. He said he would begin with “the rectification of names.”

Then as now, a great deal of damage can be caused by misleading language. As he put it, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

The 20th century writer and thinker George Orwell made pretty much the same point in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” where he wrote “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. … The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Misleading language, he argued, is designed to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Hence the term Orwellian language. In his dark novel 1984, political slogans such as “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” abound.

A great example of Orwellian language is a policy now being considered by the Legislature known by the misleading name of “right to work” (RTW). After all, who could be against the right to work?

Actually, the policy would lower labor standards, undermine the democratic process, weaken unions and allow free riders to benefit from collective bargaining agreements without providing dues to support the process.

Unfortunately many people today may not be familiar the ugly history behind RTW.

The person who came up with the name and launched the movement to enact it as law was a Texas businessman and politico named Vance Muse, who lived from 1890 to 1950. An unabashed racist and anti-Semite, he bitterly opposed the labor law reforms of the New Deal, which he sometimes referred to as “the Jew Deal.”

At the time, the labor movement was making huge advances and helping to build what would become the great American middle class. However, it faced serious obstacles in the south, where a racial caste system divided workers and kept wages low for everyone.

Vance and his allies in the “Christian American Association,” an organization he founded to promote RTW, were opposed to unions not only for their promotion of better wages and conditions but also for their potential threat to the system of racial segregation. But they soon gained powerful supporters beyond the south and began to win major victories.

According to Dartmouth historian Marc Dixon: “The Christian American Association out of Houston was the first to champion Right-to-Work as a full-blown political slogan in 1941. The organization stood out in a crowded field for its fiery rhetoric against President Roosevelt and especially labor. But Right-to-Work quickly moved from the fringe to the mainstream. After the war, organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers championed the laws with great effect. By the early spring of 1947, fourteen states had adopted Right-to-Work, and the Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress later that year, solidified the rights of states to pass and enforce these laws.”

Muse was able to play on racial biases to promote RTW with considerable success — but not a lot of subtlety. At one point he warned that without such laws, “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

He promoted the rumor popular among some white segregationists that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was organizing subversive “Eleanor clubs” which supposedly encouraged black domestic servants to oppose their employers. At one point, he warned that such imaginary clubs were a “RED RADICAL scheme to organize negro maids, cooks and nurses in order to have a Communist informer in every Southern home.”

He also told supporters that anti-labor organizing would “keep the color line drawn in our social affairs.”

Ironically, back in the 1940s, labor organizers dreamed of launching “Operation Dixie,” which was to organize southern workers and overcome segregation. Instead, thanks to Orwellian language and bankrolling by billionaires and big business groups, Muse’s successors have rolled back labor laws in many northern states. And we may be next.

Before West Virginia takes Muse’s bait, maybe we should consider these words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.

“Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

NOTE: sorry for slow posts. Goat Rope was offline several days this week when a falling tree took out some wired. Ahhh the joys of rural life.

Getting it right

This op-ed of mine ran in yesterday's Gazette. It's about the study of right-to-work-for-less mandated by the legislature earlier this year. It also gave me a chance to give some love to one of my dear departed professors.

Most people probably had a teacher or professor who left a mark. One who did for me was late Marshall sociology professor Bill Westbrook, who some readers may recall.

When I knew him, he taught basic and advanced research and statistics, four classes I avoided as long as possible. Given the option, I preferred to BS my way through theory classes. But you couldn’t BS Westbrook.

He taught that doing research right really matters, especially when peoples’ lives are at stake.

A case in point is the Republican-led Legislature’s decision to have WVU study proposed “right to work” legislation (RTW), which I think of as “right to work for less.” I believe this legislation, if enacted, would reduce wages, benefits and living standards for workers across the state, union and non-union.

But love it or hate it, it’s important to get the research right. We’re playing for real marbles.

Westbrook emphasized three things relevant to any credible RTW study: causality, validity and reliability.

We’re great at shooting from the hip about cause and effect. Turn on any talking heads TV show or listen to many conversations and you’ll hear all kinds of wild claims about this causing that.

For example, a friend of mine believes that unpleasant events are caused by the planet Mercury being in retrograde, whatever that means. A school friend once went on an extended rant about how juvenile misbehavior was caused by teaching evolution. (I was tempted to interject that the delinquents I knew didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of natural selection, but he was on a roll.)

Supporters of RTW often claim that huge benefits will follow as a direct result or that harm is done by not implementing it.

I learned from Westbrook that before you can say X causes Y, three criteria need to be met, two of which are easy and one of which isn’t. First, the proposed cause and effect have to be associated or correlated. Second, the cause has to come before the effect. Then the kicker: you have to be able to rule out everything else. Most of the time, direct causality is hard to establish. Often, the best we can do is to calculate how much we can reduce our errors if we take certain variables into account.

Two other key ideas for a credible RTW study are validity and reliability. To be valid, the methods chosen need to be ones that can actually measure what one is trying to study. Thermometers are great for measuring heat, but not so much for measuring speed. Clocks are great for measuring time but lousy for measuring weight. Individual case studies or surveys might be right for some kinds of research but not for others, which may require statistical analysis, controlled experiments or other methods.

Reliability simply means that if others repeat the study using similar valid means, they should get the same result. That too can be a kicker. Several years ago, some scientists made worldwide headlines that they’d discovered cold fusion. If that was really true, it would provide a clean and virtually endless supply of energy. Alas, their research couldn’t be replicated.

Now back to RTW. Recently, two heavy hitting economists, Dr. Richard Freeman of Harvard and Dr. Paula Voos of Rutgers, sent WVU a letter outlining five standards for a credible (i.e. valid and reliable) study of the subject. Here goes:

•  First, the study should measure outcomes most directly impacted by RTW (i.e. weakening unions and lowering wages and benefits), rather than factors such as per capita income, which includes things like profits, dividends and interest income.

n Second, the data should cover a relevant time period, with more recent information given greater weight. “Data that go back to the 1950s or 1960s are less relevant to assessing the likely impact of a RTW law in 2015 than data for recent years, when globalization and inequality have massively changed the U.S. labor market.”

•  Third, the study should select “appropriate and robust statistical design.” This means controlling as much as possible for other factors that could influence a state’s economy and growth, such as geography, natural resources, etc. Translation: not shooting from the hip about causality.

•  Fourth, the study should compare with already existing research and “consult the major, rigorous studies done by other organizations,” particularly a recent study by the University of Kentucky. In addition, “It is critical that any study make its data and methodology transparent and available to the public so that others can test and confirm the results.” Translation: transparency helps ensure the study was valid and its results will be reliable.

•  Finally, the study should rely on quantitative evidence, not anecdotes or testimonies from business groups, unions or other interested parties.

Freeman and Voos argue that this is a big decision that should be made only after a careful look at all the possible upsides and downsides and a careful review of how this would or would not fit in with the state’s economic development strategies.

This is no time to shoot from the hip — especially when West Virginia’s working people are the targets.

Of roosters, monkeys, sea monsters and guys

I have probably noted more than once that living amongst roosters has helped me understand more about human behavior. Especially male human behavior.

Roosters, like their very distant primate cousins, compete and sometimes fight over status and access to the good things of life (which would perhaps include hens). Many male animals scramble for status and dominance.

Sgt. Rory Miller, author of Meditations on Violence, calls it the Monkey Dance. Among young human males, it usually starts with hard stares, moves on to verbal challenges, and then proceeds to closing the distance, shoving and quite often a swinging punch with the dominant hand. When it stops short of physical conflict, this is sometimes referred to around here as a, pardon the expression, pissing battle.

There is a bit of such a match in the early part of Beowulf, after he arrives amongst the Spear Danes and announces his intention to kill Grendel. His character foil is a Dane named Unferth, whose name may have meant something like "not-peace."

In the poem, Beowulf is pretty much the perfect hero, mighty in deed in youth and age, but courteous and not arrogant. Unferth comes across at first as a jealous and insecure person intent on knocking Beowulf down to size. He's obviously trying to compensate for something, including the fact the Beowulf is there to take on a job he couldn't handle. On meeting Beowulf, he immediately begins ragging on him about supposedly losing a days-long swimming match (in full armor, of course) with the warrior Breca:

Are you the Beowulf who took on Breca
in a swimming match on the open sea,
risking the water just to prove that you could win?
It was sheer vanity made you venture out
on the main deep...

He asserts that after a week's worth of swimming in the open sea Beowulf lost to Breca, just as he would lose to the monster Grendel.

Beowulf is too polite to hand Unferth his hind quarters,although he does dismiss him as a fratricide destined for damnation. Mostly though, he sets the record straight with the poem's first monster killing story of his epic battle with sea-beasts. The Monkey Dance was narrowly averted and the sea battle story was pretty awesome...about which more tomorrow.

RIGHT TO WORK (FOR LESS) explained here.

SPEAKING OF UNION BUSTING, Ohio's state senate got its hands dirty.

FEDERAL BUDGET CUTS. The latest poll shows strong public unease over cuts to programs that affect peoples' lives.

FOR MICE ANYWAY, exercise is the fountain of youth. It doesn't hurt people either.

URGENT HAGFISH UPDATE here. Jeez, are those things ugly.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GHOST STORIES AND RUNAWAY MONSTERS

Public domain image courtesy of www.moviewallpapers.net.

One dark and story night in Switzerland in 1816, the story goes, a bunch of high strung artsy types decided to write a ghost story. If you were making odds at the time, the smart money would have been on the poetic host, Lord Byron, or his best known guest, the romantic poet Percy Shelley.

Score one for girl power instead. The hands down winner in the eyes of the ages was the work of Percy's young wife Mary, who gave us Frankenstein, which has become the source of many movies, cartoons, comic books, songs, toys, spoofs, etc.

According to Mary, the inspiration came from a waking dream:

I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some power engine shows signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

Maybe one reason why the story of Frankenstein's monster has such (anonymously "donated") legs is that it was a prescient metaphor for modern life, when our own creations and actions sometimes get away from us and do a lot of unintended damage.

At the very least, it ought to help fill up a week's worth of blogging...

SPEAKING OF UNLEASHED MONSTERS, if you haven't already seen Newsweek's "After Bush" item, here is a little sampling:

Today, by almost all objective measures, the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed. While the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs, at this point it has reversed itself on many of its most egregious policies—from global warming to North Korea to Iraq.

In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush—a cheering prospect for his foes, a dismaying one for his fans (however few there may be at the moment). In 19 months he will be a private citizen, giving speeches to insurance executives. America, however, will have to move on and restore its place in the world. To do this we must first tackle the consequences of our foreign policy of fear. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

HIGH ROAD OR LOW ROAD? There's been a lot of talk among WV's anti-labor right wing about "unleashing capitalism." I think they are at least 100 years late. Also, I'm not aware of too many people here who advocate for state ownership of the means of production or the collectivization of agriculture (although the possibility of having the goats around here confiscated sounds pretty good at times). The real question is, how can we promote high quality economic development for West Virginia in a way that benefits its people?

The economic royalists want a war on labor, starting with pushing for so-called "right to work" laws, which are more like right to work for less, as I argue here. That would be the low road.

There is a better way, one which might actually work:

West Virginia’s future economy is dependent primarily on one thing — investment in people, said Tom Witt, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University.

“We need to keep an eye on this ball,” he told the Charleston Rotary Club on Friday. “This is going to affect our long-term economic development.”

Investing in people means more education, on-the-job training and health care, so people can become productive in the labor market, Witt said. People must also be encouraged to take part in the economy by actively seeking jobs and/or education, he said.

That would be the high road.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED