Six on "our" Economy: Unions Need to Admit Their Most Important Failure; Saving Public Education Isn’t About Idealism, but S
panaritisp
"A fraction of a percent decline in union membership each year may not seem very big. But the point is that it is vital that union density in this country be going up. If it does not begin to go up in a meaningful way very soon, we are fucked. To say, “Well, times are hard for organized labor, and it only went down a little bit, so we did pretty good” is to look at the issue through the wrong lens. What we need to say is, “It is absolutely essential that union density rise in America. The fact that it has instead declined is devastating, and we must correct this as soon as possible.”
Every single year that union density goes down, not up, is a failure for unions in America. I want this sentence painted on the side of AFL-CIO headquarters.
This is an existential issue for organized labor. Anyone in a union leadership position in 2019 must recognize the importance of the fact that union membership must go up, not down. All of us—including our company, GMG, which is unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East—must prioritize an increase in union density, and be quick to acknowledge the fact that we are in fact still seeing decreases. Which is very bad.
But that acknowledgement is not forthcoming. Here is how AFSCME, a major public employee union, framed today’s numbers in a press release:
New Union Membership Data Reveal Anti-Worker Assault Is Failing
Bureau of Labor Statistics Update Shows Public Sector Unions Holding Strong
[...] Despite a multimillion-dollar, decades-long war waged by special interests on public sector workers’ right to join together for a better life—culminating in Janus, which was meant to “defund and defang” unions—official statistics show 2018 public sector membership held strong at 7,167,000, a marginal 0.5 percent decline, with total U.S. union membership at 14,721,000 million. Public service unions have all seen more membership joins than drops since the decision.
Here is the press release from the AFL-CIO’s Department of Professional Employees, of which our own union is a part:
Professional Union Membership Rose in 2018
WASHINGTON, Jan. 18, 2019—Professional union membership grew to 6.18 million in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annual report on union membership released today. This is an increase of approximately 28,000 professional union members from 2017.
The DPE did not include in their press release the fact that the percentage of professional workers in America who are unionized actually declined in the past year.
That percentage—union density—is what actually matters in the grand scheme of things. It is misleading bordering on dishonest to send out press releases spinning a decline in union density as good news for unions. It is not. It is bad news. The impulse to put a positive face on things is understandable, but it is counterproductive, because it conceals the true immensity of the mountain that organized labor has to climb. Both AFSCME and the AFL-CIO are extremely important organizations doing work that is extremely important to the future of America. I want their work to succeed. But we can’t get anywhere if we can’t even acknowledge that we are, right now, failing to do what we need to do: INCREASE UNION DENSITY IN AMERICA IN ORDER TO REDUCE INEQUALITY BEFORE EVERYTHING FUCKING CRUMBLES AROUND US."
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"Lazy media reporters who are too lazy to even actually speak to people anymore are instead constructing Potemkin Villages of fake hate, fake disgust and fake outrage. They’re Contemptkin Villages. No one really lives there. The laziest hacks can build them using tweets, even tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts. Somehow these hacks are employed at places like the BBC and the Times.
The instantly infamous Gillette ad calling out “toxic masculinity” that painted males as bullies and sexual harassers certainly spurred a lot of conversation. But were dudes outraged or did they just think the ad was misguided and wrong? Men aren’t going James-McAvoy-in-“Glass” Beastmode on Gillette. They’re just saying, “I’d rather not be lectured about what a bully and a creep I am, especially by my toiletries.” The New York Times quoted an obscure Irish deejay calling the ad “condescending” on Twitter as an example of “outrage,” alongside the British chat-show host Piers Morgan saying the ad was “pathetic.” “You’re pathetic” is an expression of outrage?
The BBC claimed breathlessly, “There have been calls for Gillette to post an apology video.” There have? Click through on the source for this tidbit, and it turns out to be a Twitter user with 18 followers who also demanded that everyone at Gillette be forced to read a men’s-rights book. Sure. Later in the piece the BBC cites another supposedly angry party to the controversy. That turned out to be an anonymous Twitter user with six followers."
https://nypost.com/2019/01/19/how-the-media-convinces-us-were-all-outraged-even-when-no-one-cares/
"At the conclusion of a three-day cabinet retreat in Sherbrooke dominated by escalating tensions between Canada and China on several fronts, the Trudeau government said warnings from China will not affect Canada’s decision on whether to ban telecom giant Huawei Technologies from supplying technology for next-generation 5G mobile networks.
“When a country like China starts to mix commercial interests with the imprisonment of citizens from another country, we are in situation where the application of the rule of law is not at the forefront," he said. "It is something that preoccupies me, that preoccupies many people around the world, and it is something that we are pointing out in a firm and respectful way with China, because it does not move us forward as individuals, as societies and as a community of nations if we don’t operate with respect, responsibility and integrity.”
The Prime Minister was responding to warnings this week by China of “repercussions” should Canada join its Five Eyes intelligence partners New Zealand, Australia and the United States in excluding Huawei. Britain, the other member of the alliance, has come to an agreement with the Chinese firm."
"That the law needs fixing is not in dispute. Why it needs fixing is most vividly illuminated by contrasting it with another massive piece of tax legislation, the Reagan-era Tax Reform Act of 1986.
In the months leading up to passage of the 2017 tax act, Trump administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress giddily compared the scope of their bill to that very law. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, called their new bill, “the first action in 31 years since President Reagan’s reforms in 1986.” Then-National Economic Director Gary Cohn said the legislation represented the “most significant tax reform legislation since 1986.”
Measured by the magnitude of changes to the tax code, that is true. But in terms of how the bills were developed, deliberated and drafted by Congress — not to mention their substance — the bills could not be less alike. And therein lies an illuminating — some would say frightening — story.
To wit, the 1986 bill took two years to create, with lawmakers holding dozens and dozens of hearings and taking testimony from thousands of witnesses. The process was a classic reminder, almost like those “How a bill becomes law” charts in school textbooks, of how Congress, with fits, starts and seemingly endless deliberation, inches its way toward final legislation.
Contrast that with the Trump tax bill, which, driven by threats from big GOP donors, was rushed from introduction to passage in just 51 days, leaving no time for substantive deliberation or negotiation — nor even a full understanding of how much debt it would create. Even some Republican tax experts are dismayed by the speed at which the legislation galloped through Capitol Hill — people like Dana Trier, a highly-respected tax tactician from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations whom the Trump administration recruited in spring 2017 to work on the bill."
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