Baby steps

The victory of labor requires remedial education

I was sweating the final newsletter of the week — what new and exciting drug can I put Tubby on now? Perhaps a hallucinogen! — when I realized I was coming up on a big holiday weekend, and when it arrived in your inboxes most of you will have already retreated to your patios, gazebos, pavilions, pergolas, aeries, lairs, and what have you.

At least I hope you can, and have. But I will still say a word or two about the crown of thorns on the brow of labor.

In years past I have had a grim laugh or two at the moribund state of the movement on Labor Day, mainly by highlighting the disinformation spread about unions by conservatives — as in this alternate labor history about the Triangle Shirtwaist Suicide Bombers and other traitors to capitalism.

The brethren do lie and prevaricate about the bread and roses gang — saying shit like “As you watch your children board the school bus for the first day back to classes, consider this: that school bus driver is likely forced to pay fees to a union as a condition of driving that bus,” and “Americans don’t care about the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them,” etc.

Given the shittiness of American education, you have to wonder how many citizens know organized labor won working people such vestigial concessions as remain with us, like the 40-hour week and the eight-hour day. Perhaps they think these limits on our exploitation, not to mention Social Security and Medicare, are rather like the Ten Commandments — traditions that go back millennia and are observed reflexively and superstitiously rather than because if Capital fucks around they’ll find out.

And like the Commandments, they are more honored in the breach than in the observance; the gig economy, institutionalized underemployment, wage theft and stagnation, looted pensions — in every sphere where unions once planted the flag, the forces of Capital have really been pushing their advantage.

In my darkest moments I fear a total reversion to Gilded Age wage-slavery as soon as the bastards think they can manage it, maybe in a second Trump term. Crises are great for crackdowns, as we’ve seen with the beatdown they’re giving the Black Lives Matter protests now — a cooperative effort, I have to say, of the increasingly fascist right and the goody-goody left (see this bullshit from Van “Donald Trump became president in that moment” Jones, por ejemplo). Believe you me, they don’t want to end “riots” or they wouldn’t be waving in more Rittenhouses; they want the protests over and done with because they don’t like how deep they got under America’s skin.

Once that deck gets cleared, if there’s more Trump even with just one House of Congress at his disposal, all bets would be off. First up would be employers’ legal immunity from all liability for forcing their workers to return to their COVID-19 death traps — which, as I wrote in April, conservatives started pushing for early. Then, who knows? Maybe in the continuing emergency, minimum wage laws and basic worker protections would be declared an impediment to Recovery. It would only take some executive orders and some more of Trump’s usual dare-you-to-stop-me.

There’s a reason to be optimistic, though. It’s true labor as a movement is on the mat, with just about a tenth of workers in a union. And the old idea of labor solidarity as Joe Hill and Big Bill Haywood and even Walter Reuther would have recognized it is literally unintelligible to today’s Americans. But there’s one reason why Old Joe Biden is hanging in at the polls.

And it’s not because Americans are outraged by Trump — come on, these are Americans, did you see the top-grossing films of last year, do you see what they like to watch on TV? These people has no gorge to rise.

No, it’s because they feel they’re getting cheated. And if they know nothing else, they know that they don’t like that.

Look at this new CNN/SSRS poll. Notice that Biden has a nice eight-point lead on Trump — but Trump still leads Biden (albeit narrowly) on “the economy.”

That’s been Trump’s big claim throughout his presidency — how great “the economy” is. Even today he was exulting in how well the stock market is doing. But what does this classic signal mean to Americans who are currently locked down and experiencing 10.2% unemployment — even as major media outlets portray their nightmare as, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “Jobless Claims Ease, Showing Slowly Improving Labor Market”?

My guess is, Biden’s good marks on the other categories notwithstanding (and he pretty much beats Trump’s ass in most of them), his lead in the polls despite his deficit on “the economy” means that Americans have begun to tumble to a fact that the old labor movement never had to explain to them: That “the economy” is not their friend; that the success of the chancers and rentiers and parasites that make the stock market rise does not reflect their own fortunes; and that for their own lives to improve, something outside of “the economy” has got to change for the better.

Yeah, it’s remedial education, and we might have to sneak in some lessons about 40-hour weeks and eight-hours days and a lot of other stuff, too — but at least, and at last, the folks at home are beginning to look educable.

Good weekend, all. Take it easy — but take it!