My good friend and colleague, John Dowd, called my attention to an April 7th speech by Richard L. Trumka, President, AFL-CIO, at the Institute of Politics, Harvard Kennedy School. The speech was titled “Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen”. Trumka’s speech sums things up quite nicely and you should read it, but I can’t help but wonder if the messenger is too dead to be heard.
Trumka strikes many of the right notes. The sad thing is that, generally speaking, the American union movement has been so undermined, mainly by savvy corporate opponents, but also by internal corruption and internecine conflict, that it has lost its ability to galvanize public opinion. Even worse, the union messenger has been so thoroughly discredited, that his message is presumptively declared DOA.
Trumka casts his net in the right direction by appealing to the national intelligentsia to stop serving economic elites, but history is not on his side.
First, the intelligentsia are deeply beholding to elites and those who have strayed have been rewarded with reduced funding and even excommunication by the institutions that charter them.
Second, the intelligentsia have long been regarded with suspicion and loathing by the American electorate — a fact that has been well exploited by corporate elites.
As I continue to argue on my blog, the science of economics (science in name only) is nothing more than an elaborately contrived apologetic for the exploitation of labor and ever-increasing polarization of wealth.
During the Great Depression, when workers actually understood that they were “workers”, unions were able to construct a cause célèbre around that shared identify. During the post-war boom, those same unions became part of the system, and thus were co-opted into the the negotiating game — “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” — and thereafter systematically vilified as greedy obstructionists. It is highly unlikely that they will be able to rise from those ashes.
Today there is no center of gravity around which a new cause célèbre might take shape. “Workers” have become absorbed. Academia remains elitist. Politics remains the art of compromise with power. Disenfranchised youth live in confusion, fear and loathing.
Where might a new center of gravity be realized? I have no idea.
Marc,
Agree with all you say. It is worth noting that virtually the first thing
Reagan did was bust the Air Traffic Controller’s Union. What a destructive
piece of excrement he was. And we’re naming airports and money after him…
The union movement in this country has never recovered. I have gone into more
than one factory in America and pasted up on the wall as a line item in the
“Corporate Mission” statement is “remain union free”…imagine if you were an
hourly worker there.
And what’s worse is that there are workers out there who buy it. That’s how
discredited the fat cat union movement had become.
This was one of the thoughts as the W. Va. mining disaster developed. Here
are a group of poor working class Americans savagely exploited by a company
and a man (Blankenship) that is like something out of the 19th century and not
only is it tolerated, it is the rule in the mining industry. Even ignorance
does not let congress off the hook and they are NOT ignorant. And the
bitterest irony of all, is that the workers probably all vote Republican in
their little bible belt township and are grateful for the occasional piece of
cake, thrown their way.