Planting Liberally

I wanted to write something clever and brilliant about the WGA writers' strike, but I see Nathan Newman already beat me to the punch. Newman's take is that the writers' strike showcases perfectly how unions make sense for professionals. In our economy, technological innovation radically reinvents the work of professional workers at a blinding clip. For the writers, the introduction of home video in the 80's was followed quickly by DVD's in the late 90's, and Internet video delivery in the last few years. This video explains perfectly what all these technologies mean for the writers: With this kind of technological backdrop, effective legislation that guarantees fair rights for workers and enables industry growth is nearly impossible to craft. The government simply doesn't move quickly enough, and technological change is accelerating, meaning the problem will only get worse. Union contracts serve as a kind of second tier of law, allowing workers and management to creatively restructure the industry. When workers and management work together creatively, they can determine the appropriate rights and compensation for workers while keeping up with the pace of technological change and maintaining their companies' competitive edge. Union contracts are typically renegotiated every couple of years, whereas the government rewrites things like intellectual property law very rarely. As a result, as Newman puts it, "contracts look quite different in the construction industry compared to the auto industry compared to Hollywood compared to baseball", as they should. I think it's particularly interesting that one of the first shows to be affected by the strike, The Office, serves as a giant exclamation point on this argument. Anyone who's seen the show knows that it is a constant reminder of exactly the reason for professional unionism. Corporate policies are frequently bone-headed, and corporate management all too frequently promotes the wrong person into the wrong job. On top of that, many offices are fraught with many tiny instances of worker abuse which by themseles aren't enough to inspire any kind of drastic action like quitting; but taken together, these thousands of paper cuts create an abusive or simply unpleasant environment which could be made considerably more pleasant with a formal grievance system, like that provided by a union and a responsive shop steward. If you've ever worked in an office, it's easy enough for you to watch the show and sympathize with this basic point. But if you're an office manager or corporate supervisor, you should pay even closer attention. After all, the lack of union representation costs the fictional Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch dearly: sales are lost, good salespeople quit, and precious time is wasted routinely, all becaue the fictional office workers don't have any way in which to protest their condition without fear of being fired. As if the point is too subtle as is, the show examined the boneheadedness of coporate union-busting quite explicitly in a recent episode. I'm also struck, as Digby is, by the solidarity between professionals and blue-collar workers in California. If just compensation and sane working conditions are the meat of a union contract, this kind of class-crossing solidarity is the potatoes and gravy. White-collar and blue-collar unionism are natural complements, since white-collar and blue-collar workers often work side-by-side (in the case of Hollywood, there are several tiers: union actors from SAG, union writers from WGA, and union electricians form IATSE.) The ability to work together with people of a different class background is a rare but important benefit in an increasingly segregated country, and outside of the labor movement, there are very few places which offer that kind of opportunity. More than the intangible benefit of solidarity, though, white- and blue-collar unions can be powerful economic allies: one group of workers can help the other in contract and organizing disputes, by refusing to cross picket lines, slowing-down work, boycotts, and similar means. There's no reason that white- and blue-collar workers should struggle separately under the weight of corporate greed; joint organizing can alleviate economic stress for both groups. If you'd like to support the writers, visit United Hollywood to keep track of the strike and find out how you can help. Let's all hope the writers succeed in getting their fair share of residuals, from DVD rentals, Internet downloads, and so-called "promos". Let's also hope that the WGA strike serves as a call to professionals in many different industries to seriously consider the benefits of union representation.

I've got some great new labor links to share with you this week! Check 'em out, and if there's something you don't see here, add it in the comments...

• A huge victory in New York: 28,000 child care workers joined the United Federation of Teachers, with help from both ACORN and Gov. Eliot Spitzer. This is great news, both for the workers and the children they care for, as standards of care for children, and quality of life for the workers, will both rise, and the city as a whole will benefit.
• American Rights at Work recently re-launched its website; they are now using the open source Joomla content management system. I know this is a very geeky thing to get excited about, but I'm lovin' their new RSS feed - it's the kind of thing that makes a blogger's day. Check out the new site and, while you're there, flip through ARAW's new report on Verizon's Broken Promises (PDF).
• An alert reader pointed me to U1TV on YouTube - it's a channel dedicated to pro-labor video clips. Bravo to David Williams for putting these videos online, and for adding some great Billy Bragg songs to the soundtrack. Next up? I'd love to see some videos about how to deal with abusive bosses, how to contact and join a union, what a union is about, etc. Even better? I'd like to see some of these videos make their way into mass media TV shows.
• A second round of bravos for David Williams are again in order for the recent launch of NoBusters, a site which exposes union-busting and leverages some of the videos on U1TV.
• There's a great piece in Alternet this week about Young Workers United, a new labor group which seeks to protect young workers from workplace abuse. In These Times has also published an interesting look at the Change to Win labor federation, asking whether the split from AFL-CIO resulted in tangible results.
• Last but certainly not least - some of you may remember my series of posts about an idea for an anti-union-busting blog aimed at employers and business owners. Well, we're all grown up now, with our own Google Group and everything. But we're still recruiting. So if you want to join an interesting project to help turn the tide against union busters, sign up! Just request to join the group (either in the comments or directly through the Google Groups interface) and I'll get you signed up.

Got anything else to share? Drop it in the comments!

Last Sunday, I wrote about In These Times's recent fascinating piece on union-busting, Union Busting Confidential. I wrote that the sleazy behavior of union-busters, combined with their high costs, should make it possible for a liberal entrepreneur to establish a pro-union employee relations firm which helps employers cooperate with unions, to the mutual benefit of employees and employers. That initial idea generated some enthusiasm, so I'd like to follow up on it and flesh it out a bit today. The goal of the pro-union employee relations firm was two-fold: first, to inform business owners and managers of the economic benefits of unionization, and consequently to discourage them from union-busting; and secondly, to provide employers with the services they need to cooperate with unionization efforts, in order to maximize the benefit for their company. The services provided by the firm would be the core of the company's sustainability model, while the company's pro-union educational efforts would help strengthen the labor movement by facilitating private sector unionization efforts. I'd really like to make some headway towards making this idea a reality, and I'd like to see if there are other MyDD readers who'd like to join. What I have in mind is starting a blog which discusses the economic benefits of unionization for employers. For now, I'm calling it "The Pro-Union Employer", for lack of a better term. The main challenge in establishing the blog would be deciding what to write, and how frequently. There are a few different topics the blog writers could choose; I've organized this list according to the topics which should probably be the most important.

• Discussion of unionization studies released by academic labor departments and economic think tanks, especially discussion of reports which directly address the question of the economic benefits of unionization.
• Commentary on union-related articles in the business press - including newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times; magazines like Businessweek, Fortune, Inc., and FastCompany; and, if possible, cable channels like CNBC and Fox Business News. Where possible, this kind of commentary would debunk anti-union assumptions or claims underlying these articles.
• Commentary on, and where necessary refutations of, blog posts in the anti-union blogosphere and the economic blogosphere.
• Profiles of union-busting firms, and coverage of scandals or court cases involving companies which have hired those firms. In fact, I could see this kind of content evolving into a resource center, where interested users could do research on the history of prominent union-busters.
• Development of anti-union busting materials, like slide shows and talking points, which highlight out the risks and costs of union-busting.
• Interviews with prominent labor leaders and company executives, discussing cases of unionization efforts that benefited both employers and workers.
• Coverage of ongoing organizing or contracting drives, and commentary on the good-faith behavior (or lack thereof) of company executives, and how it is (or isn't) serving the long-term health of the company.
• Discussion of union-related legislation, court rulings, and regulatory decisions, and how they might impact related industries.

This mix of content, especially the first three items on the list, would probably be enough to spark some interest among business managers and owners who are not rigidly anti-union. I would personally be very interested in seeing the blog take on a search engine marketing campaign meant to garner a high rating on certain keywords, like "union free", "union avoidance", "union vote no", and on the names of certain high-profile union-busters, like "Jackson Lewis" and "The Burke Group". I'd be even more interested to see a social networking marketing campaign, intended to reach employers through sites like LinkedIn. Such campaigns could be relatively low-cost and could be very effective in reach individuals who might be considering hiring a union-buster. Ideally, I'd like to see the blog written by a mix of pro-union business owners/managers, workers, and union activists/academics. But, I'd certainly welcome the efforts of anyone who'd like to help out. Unfortunately, the effort would be entirely volunteer, and would rely on donations, or perhaps merchandise sales, to support the costs of hosting and domain registration. That's not a sustainable business model, but there are a couple of ways the blog could become sustainable. First, it might be possible to encourage a union, academic labor department, or think tank to sponsor the blog and pay the salary of a part-time blogger. Second, it's possible that the blog could garner enough interest among labor law and HR professionals that it would eventually spawn a pro-union employee relations firm, which would then assume sponsorship of the blog. Those are both long odds, but that would be the long-term sustainability plan. The technical foundation of the blog could be quite simple; initially, it would probably take the form of a simple Soapblox account, with some fairly simple customization and a purchased domain name. I don't imagine that this blog will get a lot of traffic and a boatload of commenters. The volume of traffic to the site doesn't matter, but it is important that the blog reach the right target audience (i.e., business managers and owners who might be in a position to hire a union-busting firm). The blog would also require a reasonably active moderator and troll detection system, as the blog would be a likely target for anti-union commenters. However, because this blog would not be a "preaching to the choir" blog, it would be necessary for the blog to establish clear guidelines on acceptable and unacceptable behavior, and to fairly and consistently enforce those guidelines. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the anti-troll work would eat up a lot of time, and would be the most thankless and grueling work in maintaining the blog. However, I think all of this effort would be phenomenally rewarding, because it would establish a unique and powerful online resource: a blog whose focus is providing business managers and owners with pro-union arguments which speak to their immediate concerns of profitability and company health. By itself, such a blog would help undermine the union-busting industry. Moreover, it could be a springboard for further efforts to turn the tide against union-busting, like the establishment of a pro-union employee relations firm, or a resource center which provides union activists with materials they need to persuade employers that unions are good for business. Ultimately, I think this blog could be an important piece of the larger effort to revitalize the labor movement. If you're interested in joining this effort, please drop your name and email address (use (at) and (dot) to fool spam-bots) in the comments, and we'll take things from there. If you have critiques on the idea, include them in the comments below! I'd love to see this idea improve and take flight.

This week, In These Times published a fascinating piece on the ugly inner workings of the union busting industry. Assuming the identity of a small New York City business owner, Art Levine went undercover to an anti-union seminar held by Jackson Lewis, an infamous law firm which helps other companies bust unions. Levine's piece gives us a good look at the early stages of union-busting: a hush-hush seminar which starts out by frightening business owners and managers about the alleged dangers of unionization, and follows up with some basic anti-union legal advice. There's no surprise there; indeed, labor law is replete with loopholes which can be exploited to thwart unionization. What is surprising is the expense and difficulty which is imposed on the union-buster's client - i.e., the manager or business owner who wishes to avoid unionization. After all, to go to the seminar, Levine had to chip in travel expenses plus a $1,500 entrance fee, as well as two solid days of time. That amounts to a pretty serious cash outlay. What's more, participating in the seminar and doing business with Jackson Lewis don't sound like remotely pleasant activities. The seminar and follow-up free half-hour phone consultation which Levine describes both sound like fairly high-pressure ordeals meant to persuade participants to pay the firm exorbitant fees to solve what may be an imaginary problem. The Jackson Lewis attorneys sound like textbook cases of predatory salespeople. Because the union-busting industry is so replete with high costs, legal risks, and slimy sales seminars, being the client of a union-busting firm is unlikely to be a pleasant experience; there's a good incentive for employers not to bother. However, there is simply no competition to the union-busting industry. Unions organize workers; labor lawyers help unions win cases before the NLRB and the courts; and no one - as far as I can tell - works to advise employers on the benefits of unionization, and the best way to work together with a union. Why not? Why can't someone take the fight to the union-busters, and beat them at their own game? The core of the union-busting business is a sales pitch that convinces employers that they do not want to see their workers organized, and legal and communications expertise that shows employers how to bust a union. Union-busters frighten their clients with tales of companies allegedly run into the ground by union greed, and argue that employers shouldn't have to tolerate a "third party" or outside agent in the workplace. However, unionization is frequently a net benefit for an employer. Unionization could be a way to attract a higher caliber of workers, increase productivity, decrease employee turnover, improve the community spirit in the workplace, and otherwise improve workplace conditions and the company's overall health. Indeed, some unions, like SEIU and the Teamsters, have developed friendly and symbiotic relationships with the companies whose workers they represent, like Kaiser Permanente and UPS, respectively. Of course, union-busters do not discuss this aspect of unionization with their clients. Indeed, no one really tries to present this case to managers and business owners. While unions and labor-friendly organizations like American Rights at Work go to great lengths to publicize the ugly face of union-busting, the benefits of unionization to workers, and the ways that unionization can improve the health of a company, few organizations attempt to target people who might be tempted to engage in union-busting specifically. As a result, managers and business owners are unlikely to get a positive picture of unionization, and are more likely to engage in union-busting. I ran a little experiment this weekend with Google, and tried to put myself into the shoes of a business owner who might be interested in union avoidance. I searched for keywords like "union avoidance", "union free", "union vote no", "Jackson Lewis" and "The Burke Group" (the last two are prominent union-busting firms), and paid attention to the ads which popped up on the right. While there were plenty of ads for union-busting firms and anti-union websites like www.unionfreeamerica.com, www.proudtobeunionfree.com, and so on, there wasn't a single ad trying to make the opposite case, that unionization could be helpful to someone running a business. I think there is a real opportunity here for a liberal entrepreneur, to start a union cooperation firm. Accoding to The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States (PDF), union-busters are paid anywhere between tens of thousands, and several millions of dollars to help run an anti-union campaign. An entrepreneur who can figure out how to encourage employers not to hire a union-buster, and who can help an employer work productively and cooperatively with a union, could earn a lot of money while strengthening the labor movement considerably. Moreover, such an entrepreneur could become a neutral third party to an organizing or contracting campaign, helping guide the employer through the experience without leaving bad feelings among the workers. Undoubtedly, this is a tall order, but I think a sufficiently crafty labor-friendly entrepreneur could turn this idea into a very lucrative business, and could help turn back the anti-union tide. I'd love to hear your thoughts - is this an absolutely nutty idea, or one worth kicking around and eventually launching?

More and more, it seems, we in the progressive movement are bumping heads against what appear to be more-or-less insane corporate policies which are not only harmful to society at large, not only unprofitable, but more or less the conventional wisdom within an entire industry.  There are a couple of examples that come to mind immediately: the consensus opinion among cable news channels that talk shows should be predominantly conservative or right-center, and the consensus opinion in big business that unionization is bad and should be thwarted, even using illegal means.

These are just a couple of examples, but even these two have devestating consequences for the progressive movement and the country as a whole.  The conservative domination of cable news is part of the reason we're bogged down in Iraq, and it's a very powerful echo chamber that tends to silence the progressive voices in our party, and favors Republican and conservative Democratic candidates.  Meanwhile, the relentless union-busting ethos in corporate America is wreaking havoc on the economy, because it sharply exaggerates economic inequality; at the same time, it deflates the idea of solidarity in the workplace, which is one of the pillars of the progressive movement.

I became very curious about these phenomena when I read Jeff Cohen's book, Cable News Confidential.  The book provides incredible detail on the atmosphere at MSNBC in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, and some of the reasoning behind the managerial decisions which led to the failure of Donohue on MSNBC, and the increasingly shrill pro-war views expressed on all three cable news channels.  What's interesting is that, from Cohen's vantage point, these decisions were remarkably boneheaded, and appeared to defy simple business reasoning.  MSNBC was not trying to find a way to attract more viewers than Fox News Channel, it was simply trying to imitate Fox.  MSNBC did not shrewdly ascertain that Fox's success was based on its cultivation of a niche audience, and that the secret to success in cable news was finding a different niche and attracting that niche in novel ways; instead, it obtusely assumed that cable news consumers were emphaticaly right-leaning, and so it attempted to mimic Fox rather than provide an alternative.  CNN, which should have naturally been the beneficiary of MSNBC's bumbling inability to compete with Fox, instead appears to have done much the same.

In addition to being a terrible story of journalism gone horribly wrong, this is a fascinating case study of an entire industry failing, and failing badly.  Our textbook understanding of capitalism would suggest that large companies should be constantly doing battle with one another, looking for opportunities that their competition has not found, and exploiting those opportunities for profit.  In the case of cable news, we'd expect at least one of the channels to recognize that no one was adequately serving the needs of progressive cable news consumers, and to attempt to exploit that opportunity before the competition did the same.  Not only did cable news executives not notice this opportunity in the rabidly pro-war days of early 2003, they still haven't learned the lesson, despite ample evidence that there's a large audience of progressives hungry for round-the-clock news and opinion, and despite ample evidence that the few cable news shows which do cater to a progressive audience (Countdown, Daily Show, Colbert Report) do remarkably well.  So why aren't the cable news executives rushing to exploit this opportunity, and gain ratings and ad dollars while the competition sits on its hands?

I think part of the answer lies in the concept of "information cascades", described in The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.  In chapter 3 of the book, Surowiecki explores the concept of herding, which is a case of a large group of people imitating each other, on the assumption that some of the people in the group have a good reason for their behavior.  In many cases, this can be natural and beneficial behavior - Surowiecki cites the example of looking out the window to determine whether people on the street are carrying umbrellas, in order to determine whether it's likely to rain.  In other cases, however, this kind of behavior can be anti-competitive - Surowiecki explores data which shows that NFL coaches are overly cautious in football games.  The book also considers the case of the plank road industry, which appeared to be a profitable way to improve transportation between small towns in the early 19th century, and in fact proved to be a colossal investment disaster.

So what is behind such anti-competitive behavior?  There are a many competing theories.  Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point suggests that there are certain individuals who have unique skills which are instrumental in creating an "epidemic", which can range from a medical epidemic, to a crime epidemic, to an epidemic of stupid business decisions.  Surowiecki explores the research of economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch, which suggests that in cases where individual decisions are made with knowledge of prior decisions made by others, and where those decisions appear to have beneficial outcomes, an "information cascade" can form, allowing a large group of people to erroneously decide that the first early decisions were th right ones to make.  Welch, in fact, maintains a bibliography and resource reference on information cascades.

It's important to understand the anotomy of the right-leaning mindset in cable news, and the anti-union mindset in big business, in order to conquer and reverse these mindsets.  If there is, indeed, an information cascade among cable news executives which favors promoting conservative commentators, how do we stop that cascade?  Is the solution to boycott the news channels, regulate or sue the channels into providing balanced opinions, put public pressure on the executives through letter-writing campaigns?  Is it possible to create the competition we want to see - i.e., to start a new cable news channel which would consistently provide progerssive opinion and news, and thereby to capture audience share and advertising dollars from the current cable news channels?  Or is there some way to stop or reverse the information cascade, to flood the channels of communication that inform cable news executives, and thereby to convince them that conservative opinion per se is not the way to gain ratings on cable news, but niche-oriented programming is?

All of these questions could be applied to the union-busting industry, the gas-guzzling-cars industry, the anti-music-sharing industry, and any number of other industries in which corporate policy seems to herd around an anti-competitive and unprofitable consensus.  In this post, I've merely explored the question as it relates to the conservative-cable-news industry for the sake of example.  But I'd love to hear from you, particularly if you have some expertise on information cascades and similar fields of study - what do you think?  What is the smartest strategy for putting an end to anti-competitive conservative corporate behavior?

For those readers who are not experts in the field - would you be interested in a little bit of homework?  I'd like to see what we could accomplish by scouring the information cascade resources that Ivo Welch putting together, and seeing whether any of that material contains interesting ideas for understanding, and perhaps reversing, the information cascade in conservative cable news channels.  Let me know if that sounds interesting, and I'll try and organize it.