Planting Liberally

Right on time for the 2009 Green Jobs Conference, this week Change to Win released a report titled High Road or Low Road?  Job Quality in the New Green Economy.  The report looks at wages and conditions for jobs in a variety of green workplaces, and finds that not all is well in the green collar economy.

The bad news is that some green jobs are low-paying and subject to union-busting and off-shoring, just like jobs anywhere else.  The report cites wages as low as $8.25 / hour in a recycling plant and $11 / hour in renewable energy manufacturing.  Like other manufacturing jobs, green manufacturing for products like windmills can be offshored, and that is already happening.  And jobs everywhere are subject to aggressive anti-union activities - in fact, the head of the National Green Building Committee (an initiative of Associated Builders and Contractors) is W. Brewster Earle, president of Comfort Systems USA Energy Services, a large heating, ventilation, and cooling systems company which has sought to undermine union activity in its workforce for years.

There is, on the hand, plenty of good news to go around too.  That includes reports of stellar green employers, like wind energy manufacturerGamesa, and examples of good municipal initiatives to give workers good, green jobs, like the LA Clean Trucks program and the Newark weatherization training program.

As Tod wrote yesterday, it now appears that the stimulus package will be passed by the Senate within a few days.  Despite the out-of-whack priority given to tax cuts over spending, the stimulus should still include a good chunk of change for green spending.  The question now is, how much of that spending will support good jobs?  There is some language in the bill for enforcing wage protection laws, but that's about it in terms of worker protection.

While I'd ideally like to see stronger worker protection languge in the bill - for example, language which allows workers at any company which receives stimulus spending money to organize by card-check - it looks like that is unlikely to happen.  I think it will be incumbent on the Obama administration, as well as any local and state agencies to which the funds are distributed, to attach reasonable regulations to this money.  At a bare minimum, companies which receive stimulus spending should be paying a living wage.  More than that, they should not be allowed to engage in union-busting, and should be compelled to remain neutral in the face of union organizing drives (it also follows that they should also contract in good faith with their workers, although I'm not sure how easily good-faith bargaining requirements could be written into regulation.)  Such requirements will not water-down the green nature of the stimulus; on the contrary, they will make the green collar economy more attractive to workers, and will incentivize more and more people to enter this workforce and become available for the massive task of greening the economy.

Yesterday Andrea Batista Schlesinger and Rep. Jerry Nadler co-authored a piece on cleaning up our ports in the Huffington Post. The piece, partially inspired by the Clean Trucks Program in the port of Los Angeles, calls for a reversal of trucking deregulation in the early 80s which allows truck companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors.

That deregulation was a double-whammy hurting both the labor movement and the environment. On the one hand, allowing trucking companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors effectively prevents truckers from unionizing and negotiating for fair wages and working conditions. The Teamsters have been complaining about these unfair regulations for years; this argument is at the heart of their FedEx Watch campaign. On the other, it also allows the companies to force drivers to pay for their trucks; consequently, the trucks going through are ports tend to be poorly-maintained and not fuel efficient. And they tend to pollute the air, disproportionately hurting low-income communities that surround the ports.

Schlesinger and Nadler are calling for New York to follow LA's lead and to implement a Clean Trucks Program of its own. They argue that regulations which compel trucking companies to hire their drivers, coupled with clean truck regulations, will benefit the environment while helping workers.

The push to clean up New York's port prompted Jason Lefkowitz at Change to Win to remind us that green jobs must also be good jobs.  I think that is a key point as we move forward with the economic stimulus package - that greening the economy and making it equitable must go hand-in-hand.  I discussed this a bit in last week's review of The Green Collar Economy; as Van Jones argues, environmentalists need the support and participation of low-income people in order to assemble a winning political coalition.  But I think there's an essentialist argument to be made that's economic as well as political, and the cause of clean ports draws that argument into focus.  In an economy organized around pollution, green goods and services cost more money.  So long as the economy is inequitable, more and more people will be unable to afford to green themselves, their homes, and their workplaces, and environmental action will continue to be a boutique option for the rich.  But, as wealth and the externalities of business are more fairly shared throughout society, transitioning to a green economy will become more and more accessible.  Really, that's what the clean ports campaign is about - transferring the externality of trucking pollution to the trucking companies, where that burden properly belongs, in order to reduce the burden and raise the standard of living for truckers.

Although there's been a lot of talk about Obama's picks for Secretary of State, Attorney General, and Secretary of Treasury, we've heard comparatively little about Obama's nominee for Secretary of Labor; the post remains unfilled.  Although it's a low-profile post compared to some of the other Cabinet picks, the Secretary of Labor is of paramount importance to workers and unions.  A sympathetic Secretary can improve working conditions for millions or, as we saw under Elaine Chao, Bush's Labor secretary, can make life very difficult.

On Facebook this week, Mariya Strauss jump-started the dormant conversation on the Secretary of Labor with a campaign to nominate Mary Beth Maxwell for Secretary of Labor.  Maxwell is Executive Director of American Rights at Work, a research and advocacy group which keeps an eye on union-busting, hostile labor decisions, and other threats to workplace democracy.   In recent years, ARAW has produced hard-hitting reports exposing the union-busting industry, criticizing the Labor Department and NLRB for anti-worker decisions, and lauding employers for good employment practices.

Maxwell is not the only name being floated for Secretary of Labor.  Others include David Bonior, Linda Chavez-Thompson, Dick Gephardt, and Andy Stern.  David Macaray analyzed the labor position thoroughly shortly after the election, concluding that we need a true advocate for labor, not just a careerist or generically capable administrator. Macaray's choice for the position is Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer and author of Whose Side are You On.

I don't have a real favorite in this contest, but I certainly agree with Macaray on the principle that the next Secretary of Labor should be someone who understands threat to workers deeply, is serious about enforcing and expanding labor protections, and is committed to the vision of a strong and vibrant labor movement.  Vigorous protection for labor unions is key to revitalization of our economy and of the progressive movement; it is another progressive positive feedback loop.   I'd be curious to hear whether other folks have any picks for the position, or whether there are any thoughts on other key labor appointments, like the NLRB.

There have been a lot of interesting stories running across the wires in the world of progressive culture this week.  Unfortunately I don't have time to really analyze each of them in-depth, but I thought I'd point them out here:

 

• Michael Wolff profiles Roger Ailes, owner of Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal, in Vanity Fair.
• David Moberg has a great piece on Working America in The Nation.  Working America is the AFL-CIO's "community affiliate".  Essentially it's a large (2.5-million-member) list of non-union members who sympathize with the union's position on a number of bread-and-butter issues, and it gives the union the ability to extend its electoral might outside the boundaries of its membership.  What's more, Working America has also started enlisting its members in support of labor organzing drives, picket lines, and the like.
• Over at Build the Echo, Tracy van Slyke talks about digg moving to the left, and progressive new media activism inspired by The Young Turks. Progressive media creators, especially vloggers and podcasters: read this post!  Disclosure: van Slyke's organization, The Media Consortium, is a client of my company.
• Again at Build the Echo, Jessica Clark highlights this great video (another good example of progressive new media activism) about Obama's Challenge:
  
  That Amazon discount code, again, is: RGVTUIQY.  You can also buy the book at Powells.
• Global Labor Strategies has a challenging, thought-provoking post about the big-picture problems facing the labor movement, both in the US and abroad.  They argue that service sector organizing and EFCA won't cut it, given the ways corporations are reorganizing globally.  It's a fascinating piece, and well worth consideration.
• The UFT announces the opening of a labor-friendly charter school in New York City, by Green Dot Public Schools.  Given the way charter schools often pit public education advocates against teachers unions, and especially in light of all the hey made about the tiff between the DC city council and DC teachers' unions, I think this is an important development.  It's not a revolutionary one - Green Dot operates a number of schools in LA already - but something we should be keeping an eye on nonetheless.  Still, I think it is one more bit of evidence that these two progressive cultural institutions don't need to be at odds.

 

Right on time for Labor Day, the University of California has some good news for the labor movement: membership is slowly but surely bumping up. According to "The State of the Unions" series, union density stands at 12.6% of the labor force, up from 12.1% last year and 12.0% the year before that. Following a long, long trend of falling union density, these are historic numbers, and cause for celebration on Labor Day.

Now, these simple facts can obscure some important details under the surface. A good deal of the growth is due to organizing in the public sector, as well as rising unemployment among non-unionized workers. Furthermore, organizing a group of workers is not the end goal, but rather the first step on a road to a more equitable workplace. So in addition to being happy about higher unionization rates, we should also be concerned about the quality fo the contracts that unionized workers are getting, and the degree to which those workers have a say in their working conditions, terms of employment, and so on. More than that, there are still a lot of open challenges left for the labor movement to address: the movement is aging, and has not yet figured out how to organize the large, community-minded Millenial generation; new technologies are transforming the economy, and unions must find a way to organize green-collar, biotechnology, and computer technology workers; massive immigration is changing the face of the country, but unionization rates are a bit lower among foreign-born workers than they are among US-born workers. To be sure, in some areas the labor movement has already begun to address these issues. Efforts like the Blue/Green Alliance, Qvisory, the Freelancers' Alliance, and the political alliance between labor unions and immigrant rights groups, are all important initiatives to address these challenges.

So while we should enjoy Labor Day and the good news reported by the State of the Unions study, we should be mindful of the challenges ahead. The labor movement is growing, but we need to work harder to address some of the deep problems in our economy.

Last weekend's blog post on the eBay sellers boycott generated some very interesting comments, and I want to follow up with some more thoughts on organizing online workers.

As background, I've been arguing for a few months now that labor unions should do more to organize online workers. The argument goes that folks whose primary income is derived from activities as diverse as blogging, eBay auctioneering, Second Life merchandising, and so forth, compose a new industry segment which is already quite large and will grow in the future. Furthermore, despite the fact that these individuals are hard to organize due to the nature of online work, their livelihood is essentially at the mercy of a small group of executives at web companies like eBay and Linden Labs. Therefore, they comprise a group who have important collective needs, and who would benefit tremendously from workplace organizing.

While I still think most of this argument holds up, I'm less and less certain that a traditional labor union is the best vehicle for organizing online workers, for a variety of reasons. The primary reason is that online workers are not actually employees of the companies whose services they are working with; they are consumers of those services. Thus, the eBay sellers "strike" is not a strike at all, but a boycott. The more I think about this round peg/square hole problem, the more I believe that the solution is to just build a round hole. In other words, alongside a thriving labor movement, we need a powerful and well-organized consumer movement. Follow me across the flip for more, and tune in tomorrow for some practical follow-up.

 

The problem of organizing online workers is, in a sense, just a special case of the problem of organizing consumers generally. Consumers are notoriously hard to organize, since in many cases, they don't know one another. Whereas workers at a factory or an office see each other every day and have multiple chances to get to know one another, consumers of a single business generally don't, and indeed, many prefer it that way. Consequently, the consumer movement tends to be far less organized than the labor movement. Consumer groups tend to form in an ad hoc way around a specific issue, make some noise about that issue, and perhaps win a couple of victories before flaming out. While occasionally consumer groups become institutionalized, even regularly lobbying government around a key set of pet wonky issues and scoring a few important victories, they rarely make much noise on the electoral scene or gather significant and long-lasting commitments from their "base", as labor unions regularly do.

In fact, the differences in organizational power between the labor and consumer movements can be traced back to the legal rights afforded the one but not the other. Whereas workers have the right, under the National Labor Relations Act, to organize and force their employer to negotiate a contract with them collectively, consumers have no legal right to force the businesses they patronize to bargain with them collectively.

Nevertheless, consumer culture is becoming an increasingly important part of daily life. The extreme form of this trend, perhaps, is found among online workers, who derive their livelihood by consuming online services. But there are no shortage of consumers who, while they don't make a living as consumers, nevertheless derive a substantial part of their identity from being Starbucks snobs, Harley drivers, and everything in between. Dozens of books have been written about consumer culture and brand identity, including Juliet Schor's The Overspent American and Naomi Klein's No Logo.

I think the growing prominence of the Internet in daily life, and particularly the dominance of a few huge brands, like Google, Facebook and eBay, in many peoples' online experience, calls for the development of a more active and energized consumer movement. The Internet has created a long tail of consuming relationships into our lives. In a single day, I could conceivably spend a great deal of my online time at Google, Yahoo, and Bloglines, a moderate amount of time on Facebook, much less time at Powells, and an infinitesimal amount of time at places like the local coffee shop's website. As we add up the patterns over time and across a wide swath of web users, we end up with what's bound to be a very, very long tail of online consuming relationships. From the individual's point of view, we end up creating more accounts, and checking off more license agreements, than we can possibly remember.

More than that, the Internet gives us tools to organize ourselves as consumers in ways which were unimaginable a few years ago. These tools run the gamut from the consumer's blog, which allows consumers of a single brand to find each other, and to the corporate MySpace or Facebook page, which allows consumers to talk back, publicly, to the company whose products they rely on. Conceivably, we could even include the tools of open source software development in this list - after all, these tools allow software consumers to fight back against the policies of closed-source corporate software developers by directly competing with them.

On the whole, what we have are the ingredients for a more energetic and systematic consumer movement. I think we now have an historic opportunity for consumers to band together in order to sway corporate policy on a regular basis. Indeed, events like the eBay sellers boycott and the Facebook Mini-Feed and Beacon revolts could be seen as the early harbingers of a new consumers movement, or as a natural continuation of the open source revolt of the 1990's.

This kind of consumer movement will require the creation and development of a series of well-organized consumer membership associations, capable of representing consumers of companies ranging from Nike to eBay. Such associations would make it their business to maintain a regularly-updated list of consumers of a given brand or product; to build community amongst their members; to notify their members of corporate policy changes; to organize boycotts, to informally negotiate with cooperative corporate executives, and so forth. The funds for these associations would probably be derived from dues, meaning both that the associations would have to produce some kind of tangible benefit for their members, and also that these associations would necessarily represent only the most enthusiastic consumers of a given brand or product.

I think the development of this kind of consumer movement would be extremely beneficial to the labor movement, in the long run. On the one hand, the labor movement could provide organizers and others with experience when the time to boycott or take other actions comes along. On the other, the consumer movement can assist the labor movement in applying pressure to companies with bad labor practices. In fact, in some cases the consumer movement can do one better than that. Since some consumer groups (like a hypothetical eBay Sellers Association) will necessarily include businesses in their membership, those groups can make union-neutral corporate policy a prerequisite of membership, and thereby pave the way for more organizing victories. Of course, this kind of relationship is bound to have moments of tension - for example, in cases where consumers don't sympathize with striking workers, and don't choose to respect picket lines.

While I don't think it makes sense for labor unions to be actively involved in creating consumer membership associations from whole cloth - it's just too far afield of their core mission - I think it's absolutely incumbent on the progressive movement as a whole to be involved in germinating and nurturing an active consumer movement which acts in solidarity with the labor movement. Such an alliance, if properly organized and engaged, could be a powerful counter-balance against the creeping encroachment of corporate policy in our daily lives.

I'm not, incidentally, totally sure of the legal merit behind these ideas, and I'd welcome feedback from legal experts who know a bit more about things like anti-trust law and interstate commerce regulations. More than that, I'd be interested to hear what other folks think about the idea of organizing consumers into institutionalized membership groups capable of building community and lobbying corporate executives when necessary. What do you think?

Last summer, I wrote that the labor movement should begin organizing online workers. It appears that a group of eBay sellers are about to start striking, without any help from labor unions. At issue is the sudden imposition of policies by eBay which sellers deem harmful to their business. The policies will be imposed starting Feb. 20, and the strike will go from Feb. 18 - 25.

There are a couple of issues at play. One is that fees will increase by as much as 66% for some sellers. Another, apparently far more explosive, issue, is that eBay will soon turn off negative and neutral comments, requiring sellers to go through eBay's Security & Resolution Center to report bad behavior. This move will almost certainly tie up sellers in needless bureaucracy, in place of today's simple system for resolving disputes. CNN and Mashable have more.

While eBay boycotts aren't new, this one appears to be much larger than previous ones, and sellers appear to be genuinely furious. The boycott is related to the resignation of eBay CEO Meg Whitman, expected in March 2008. (Whitman, incidentally, seems to be a staunch Republican; she was on Romney's campaign and has been considered a cereandidate for CA-Gov in 2010.) Her replacement, John Donahue, initiated the new fee structure and policies earlier this year.

So far eBay doesn't appear worried about the strike, and it's hard to tell whether the company will budge an inch in light of the boycott campaign. More upsetting is the fact that - as far as I can tell by browing around labor blogs - labor unions seem to be entirely unaware of this grassroots strike. That's a real shame, because this could be an opening into a segment of the economy which is not heavily unionized.

There are a variety of interesting challenges in this strike. First, what is the standing of eBay sellers to organize a strike? What legal reforms or litigational victories would be necessary for the striking sellers to force recognition and collective bargaining? Moreover, given that the sellers are, for the most part, individuals working independently, how can they be reached and organized effectively?

I'd like to see the labor movement take a crack at some of these challenges, because I think they are the key to organizing a new class of workers which is only going to get larger and the economy becomes increasingly digitized. These are not easy questions to answer, by a long shot, but I think there is a group of workers who are yearning to organize and be recognized, and I think the labor movement should stand in solidarity with them.

Today American Rights at Work launched Shame On Elaine, a microsite which criticizes Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao's lackluster enforcement of US labor law. I provided a bit of advice and critique on the site, and I think ARAW has done a tremendous job with it. Go check it out!

Via CNN, it looks like the writer's strike may soon be over, with WGA leaders voting to recommend the contract negotiated last week with the AMTPA. In addition to support from the leadership, it appears that members who attended meetings in LA and New York yesterday generally approved the contract.

This contract includes provisions for royalties on Internet media, which was the major sticking point from day one. Unfortunately, contract clauses which would have allowed WGA to represent animation and reality TV workers were dropped. WGA will pursue these workers, but without guaranteed neutrality on the part of studios.

I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the industry to say whether the deal is a good one or a bad one, although it strikes me as very significant that the writers have won an agreement in principle to royalties for Internet distribution. That should lay the groundwork for the union to share in the prosperity of new media distribution. Moreover, I think the strike has been a very visible reminder to America's workers. First and most generally, that workers have power and that when they stick together, they can win. More specifically, that professional workers belong in unions and that union representation is highly relevant to them. There are, I hope, millions of professional writers, artists, designers, and software developers taking a look at what the WGA has accomplished, and the degree to which it has reshaped its industry, and thinking, "hey, I can do that."

Congratulations to the writers on a hard-fought victory!

There's been a lot of interesting news in the world of labor and in religion and politics lately. In case you're paying no attention at all to the Super Bowl tonight, some of this might prove interesting:

• The New York Times reports that the writers' strike may be nearing its end. The writers conceded their desire to represent animation and reality TV workers, but appear to have won concessions on royalties for content distributed on the Internet. The agreement now goes to the guild's governing boards, and then to the writers themselves.
• Last week was the celebration of the New Baptist Covenant, a group convened by Pres. Carter and composed of about 30 different Baptist denominations. The meeting's theme was unity, especially along racial and ethnic lines, and it appears that the meeting did indeed include a diverse cross-section of Baptists. While the group is expressly apolitical, it focuses on themes of social justice and peace, a notable divergence from the Southern Baptist Convention's focus on a conservative orthodoxy revolving mostly around sexuality. The SBC did not formally participate in the meeting, although individual SBC members were free to attend.
• Pastor Dan notes that the SBC is losing membership and is having trouble attracting younger folks, putting to rest the notion that only liberal denominations have those kinds of problems. Membership appears to be slipping away towards Pentecostal churches and non-denominational churches. (Full disclosure: my wife is a once-a-week front pager at Street Prophets.)
• Via Zack Exley, the Barna Group this week reported the results of a poll which show that born again voters no longer favor Republicans. This is a group which voted for Bush over Gore by a 57-42 margin, and for Bush over Kerry by a 62-38 margin. They now favor a generic Democrat over a generic Republican by a 40-29 margin. On the other hand, evangelical voters would vote for a generic Republican over a generic Democrat by a 45-11 margin, with 40% undecided. Evangelicals remain extremely conservative, with 72% self-identifying as conservative, 24% identifying as moderate, and 2% identifying as liberal.

Well, it's mostly religion news, but I thought the writers' strike news was pretty interesting too. So, is there anything interesting on TV tonight?