Workers’ Menace Becomes a Threat to Commuters

Elaine Chao, Bush’s Labor Secretary, is Trump’s Pick for Transportation

By Lane Windham

First appeared in The American Prospect

Donald Trump's big swamp drain has dredged up Elaine Chao, a right-wing ideologue who was George W. Bush's Secretary of Labor. Tapped by Trump for Transportation Secretary, Chao is a consummate Washington insider who was the only member of Bush's cabinet to serve throughout his entire eight-year presidency. Chao is also married to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

I was at the AFL-CIO during Chao's entire tenure, and witnessed first-hand the havoc her policies wrought on workers and unions. Political at every turn, she saw her role as Labor Secretary as cooperating with corporations, rolling back overtime protections, weakening enforcement of wage and hour laws, and pursuing labor organizations - - especially those that had supported Democrats. John Sweeney, then AFL-CIO President, called her the most anti-labor labor secretary he had ever seen.
If you ask many labor leaders what they most remember about Chao, they'll tell you about the time she brought a thick dossier detailing union-related corruption to the 2003 AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting, and then read it aloud to the nation's top labor leaders. She singled out the International Association of Machinists, spotlighting investigations that the union itself had flagged for the Department of Labor.

Chao also successfully urged Bush to issue a back-to-work order in a West Coast ports lock-out that ground shipping to a halt. It was the first time in 30 years a President had invoked the Taft-Hartley Act to end a labor dispute.

Chao's tenure, however, ultimately did more damage to average workers than to labor leaders and unions. She rolled back workers' overtime protections, allowing employers to reclassify rank-and-file workers as "team leaders" or "professionals," so they wouldn’t qualify for overtime pay after 40 hours worked in a week. Under Chao's overtime "fix," many restaurant and retail workers who spent most of the day ringing up customers were suddenly "executives" exempt from overtime. The Economic Policy Institute later estimated that Chao's rules robbed as many as six million workers of overtime pay.

The Obama Administration's Labor Department has since issued new rules on overtime that would repair much of Chao's damage. By raising the salary threshold under which workers must receive overtime pay to $47,000, the Obama Labor Department sought to restore overtime rights to millions of those "managers" whom Chao had excluded. A Texas federal judge has since ruled that the DOL didn't have the proper authority to raise the overtime salary threshold, and the Obama Administration has fought back with its own lawsuit. Ironically, Chao's Labor Department also raised the salary threshold for overtime, using the same rule-making authority rejected by the Texas judge. Chao, however, set the bar so low that it helped few exempted workers.

Workers were also no safer on the job after Chao's tenure. One of her first actions was to champion Congress' roll-back of an ergonomics rule aimed at reducing repetitive-motion injuries, like those suffered by poultry workers on wickedly-fast disassembly lines. The rule had been in the works since the presidency of Bush's father, and Bill Clinton issued the rule in his final months in office. Instead, Chao's Labor Department issued ergonomics "guidelines" with little worker protection.

The Labor Department is responsible for mine health and safety, and yet it put forward no meaningful mine rules or regulations until after the 2006 Sago mine explosion that trapped a dozen West Virginia mineworkers in a methane-filled passageway. All but one died. Wilbur Ross, Trump's pick for Commerce Secretary, owned the mine at the time and had little to fear from Chao's Mine Safety and Health Administration, even though before the explosion workers at Sago had been injured three times as often as workers in similar mines.

Indeed, most damaging to workers was what Chao did not do as Secretary of Labor. The Labor Department is supposed to enforce the rules that protect workers, such as those guaranteeing a minimum wage. Chao's Labor Department was a cop that refused to lift a finger to enforce the law. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a blistering report in early 2009 that detailed the multiple ways that Chao's Wage and Hour Division had left low-wage workers vulnerable to wage theft and abuse. The report found that under Chao, the Labor Department had failed to investigate workers' reports that they had been denied minimum wage, overtime pay and even their last paycheck. It even cited a report of child labor that Chao's department had never investigated.

As Secretary of Transportation, Chao will have enormous influence over how a Trump Administration impacts average people's lives. She will oversee enforcement of the rules that govern our nation's roads and airways, and will determine whether corporations' needs take precedence over public safety. She will weigh in on decisions about whether new infrastructure is built by unionized workers, and will be in charge of policing new technologies, like self-driving 18-wheeler trucks. If the labor movement's experience is any guide, it may be time to start depending on your bicycle. As Transportation Secretary, Chao is likely to stick closely to a right-wing ideology that will have her bowing to big business' needs at every turn.

Lane Windham is a fellow with Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. She served as AFL-CIO media outreach director until 2009. Her book, Knocking on Labor's Door, is due out from UNC Press in 2017.

Union Erosion Crumbled the Blue Wall
by Lane Windham

Here's my latest piece on why the decline in union membership, and collective bargaining, enabled Trump's victory From The Hill

Democrats had good reason to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would remain a solid fixture in their "blue wall," the bulwark of states that had voted their way in the previous six elections.

The race seemed tight in Pennsylvania in early November, but national polls consistently gave Clinton the edge, and hardly anyone thought Michigan and Wisconsin were truly in play. What a difference a couple of weeks makes. The thunder of that blue wall's crash has since shocked the world.

What brought the Democrats' wall down? Much of the post-election commentary blames the white working class. Economic anxiety was key, especially among the lower middle-income voters most likely to vote for Trump. Trump lassoed their fear of falling economically to regressive views on race, gender and immigrants. We now know that this strategy was enough to turn key states red, in part because many decent people became willing to look the other way. Almost no election analysis, however, has taken a deeper look at the structures that supported the blue wall in the first place.

Labor unions long served as the blue wall's load bearing bulwark, and their steady erosion finally allowed it to give way. It's not just that union members and their families tend to vote more Democratic. They did so again in 2016, albeit by smaller margins than for Obama.
What matters most is that we've reached a tipping point at which unions are too weak to effectively improve large numbers of workers' lives, and that void leaves working people vulnerable and angry in the face of tumultuous economic changes.

America has long had a fraught relationship with its unions. The idea of workers' collective power holds an uneasy seat within a culture that prizes an up-by-the-bootstrap mythology. Yet collective bargaining was central to the mid-twentieth century prosperity that Trump supporters idealize. Strong unions balanced corporate power and set higher wage and benefits standards not only for union members, but for much of the economy. Unions made sure that rising productivity translated into rising wages and so made sure that the economy's fruits were widely shared.
Inequality started to grow in the 1970s. That's when a more globalized and financialized economy took root, and when well-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector started to lose ground to far worse jobs in retail and service. Meanwhile, unions shrank and fewer workers benefitted from collective bargaining's equalizing effects.

Thirty years ago, nearly one in four working people in Wisconsin was a member of a union. Today, a mere eight percent have a union. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, union membership has dropped by half. Private sector union membership has reached a paltry 6.7 percent, a nadir not seen in the United States since 1900.

Unions did not just fade away, but came under heavy attack. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the state's GOP set their sights on unions in 2011, and effectively stripped unions of their base. Public-sector workers must now vote each year on unions and can't even volunteer to have dues deducted from their paychecks.The national offense against unions started decades earlier, however, when employers began to squeeze unionized workers and began to break labor law more frequently. Democrat after Democrat did too little to defend workers' access to unions, and so quickened labor's demise.

We are now living through the latest contest over the terms of a new global economic system. What will be the rules and whom will they serve? It's part of the same struggle that undergirded Brexit and is fueling right-wing parties throughout Europe. We find ourselves at a dangerous moment. Diverse and inclusive democracies thrive best when prosperity is broadly shared, yet today inequality thrives and backlash surrounds us.

The Republicans' sweep means that they will be a position to rewrite the rules for the new economy, and it's clear they will soon escalate their attacks against workers' unions. They will attempt to do to the nation's union members what they did to Wisconsin's union members.
Shoring up unions must be at the core of the Democrats' plans at a deeper and more meaningful level than at any time in the last 30 years. Our democracy depends on economic equality more than ever, and unions remain one of our best tools for achieving it.

Windham holds a PhD in history and is a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Her book, Knocking on Labor's Door, is due out from UNC Press in 2017.

Best Read for Labor Day 2016

Lane Windham

Best Read for Labor Day 2016: Tamara Draut's Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America (Doubleday, 2016)

Like me, are you bone weary of hearing non-stop news coverage of Donald Trump? Do you roll your eyes when the pundits “discover” the working class at election time, and then groan when you realize that by “working class” they really only mean white guys? Are you itching for an entirely different public conversation?

Tamara Draut’s Sleeping Giant offers a sharp and widely-accessible discussion about the future of America’s working class, and so brings welcome relief in this election season. Her premise is that there is a “new” working class, compared to that of thirty years ago, that is more racially and ethnically diverse, more female and more likely to work in retail and service. Pointing to the Fight for $15 and the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, Draut posits that this “sleeping giant” may be in the beginning of effecting larger social and economic change.

In a swift and conversational style, Sleeping Giant distills much of the current research on inequality, bad jobs, and precarious work, and couples it with original interviews with workers and activists. We learn, for instance, that only five of the thirty fastest-growing U.S. occupations will require a bachelor’s degree; so much for the elite’s insistence that education will be the great leveler. The chapter on the “New Indignity of Work” could serve as an undergraduate primer for perils in today’s economy such as subcontracting, just in time scheduling, franchises and the “1099” independent contractor relationship.

Unlike many in the punditry class, Draut has read her history, and we see the work of Nelson Lichtenstein, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Judith Stein woven in here as she traces how America’s working people became so economically insecure. She tackles the legacy of racial and ethnic exclusion, and correctly finds great hope in the combination of the immigrant workers’ rights, fair wage and racial justice movements of today.

Yet in Draut’s insistence that today’s is a “new” working class with a new level of activism, she ultimately may do the “sleeping giant” a disservice. First, such a framing erases the extent to which people of color and women have long struggled and organized as part of the working class, as wage workers, enslaved people, and through their neighborhoods and families. In the long arc of history, mid-twentieth century steelworkers were anything but normative. Fight for $15 activists are part of a centuries-long struggle against capitalism, and they should benefit from owning that.

Second, Draut misses the major working-class activism of the 1970s. What we are seeing today is not a “new” working class, but a continued reconfiguration of the working class that started in the 1970s and grew from changes wrought by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As these women of all backgrounds and men of color got new access to the full employment market in the 1970s, they made up a reshaped American working class that organized for more social and economic justice, including by pushing to form private sector unions. Draut covers how employers ramped up their resistance to unions in the 1970s, but somehow skips the decade’s worker’s movements that inspired the corporate resistance. When we re-write the 1970s struggles back into the story, it becomes more clear that today’s labor activists are part of a much longer movement by women and people of color to gain full access to the New Deal’s economic promise, a story that grows more even more rich with the inclusion of new immigrants since 1980.

Despite these omissions, this is a commendable and inspiring book that covers an enormous amount of material in a short space. Do yourself a favor this Labor Day: put down the Washington Post and pick up a copy of Draut’s Sleeping Giant.

Lane Windham holds a Ph.D. in U.S. History and is a fellow with Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

The Global Threat from the Right: Labor's Trans-Atlantic Conversation

The Global Threat from the Right: Labor’s Trans-Atlantic Conversation

By Lane Windham
for LaborOnline, the Labor and Working-Class History Association blog

The timing couldn’t have been more apt: a trans-Atlantic conference on the rise of the right, just days after Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee.

Leaders from the labor movement in ten nations gathered to strategize in the face of the new threat from the right. That threat’s drivers are clear: a dangerous fear of immigrants coupled with an overwhelming sense of economic dislocation among working people.

But how much of today’s populist right-wing turn is truly economic, and how much is more based in xenophobia and racism? U.S. progressives have been divided on this question. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman, for instance, recently argued that Trump’s rise isn’t mainly about “economic anxiety,” but is more driven by white resentment about race. In fact, Trump’s supporters come from a broad economic spectrum; their median income is higher than that of the U.S., though lower than the Republican median income.

Yet the extent to which economic and racial / ethnic issues are deeply intertwined across the globe was center stage at the May 10 conference, co-sponsored by the AFL-CIO, Working America and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-profit German foundation.

Participants in country after country described how the rising populist right is a reaction to the neoliberal policies that were the bulwark of the right wing for the last 30 years - - policies that the left elite also often embraced. Too few political and economic elite addressed the issues of dislocation by trade, the new “precarious” work and the shifting of the entire economic relationship.

Economic anxiety feeds the anti-immigrant sentiments. As Thorben Albrecht, State Secretary of the German Labor Ministry put it, the resentment against refugees grows in part from the fact that there has not been sufficient attention paid to housing, schools and jobs, even before the massive migration waves. It was a sentiment echoed by the AFL-CIO’s Policy Director Damon Silvers: “An ambitious economic agenda… has been kept off the political playing field by the hegemony of the neo-liberal agenda.”

“Don’t blame and shame workers,” urged Luca Visentini, the Italian who is now General Secretary of the ETUC (European Trade Union Confederation). Rather, he argued that labor and the left must offer viable alternatives for tackling the systemic economic problems. It’s not enough to just be against austerity, he argued. We must understand that the people attracted to the right, especially young people, truly do not feel protected in the market.


So what is to be done?

In the immediate future, the conference participants discussed the need to have a new level of conversations with working people. Neither false promises nor moralizing will work; rather, labor must engage people on the issues that matter most to them. Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America, described talking with working people in Pennsylvania who were all over the map in their support of presidential candidates. She sees there an opening to talk with many people who may have been closed to a left-leaning message in the past.

Antonia Bance, head of Campaigns of Communications of the TUC (Trade Union Congress) in the UK, pointed with great hope to the recent election of Sadiq Khan as London’s mayor. A British Muslim, he campaigned on improving public housing and transportation, and pushing back against extremism.

Sharan Burrow, the Australian who serves as General Secretary of the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation), offered a long-term solution: building a new “global architecture” for labor that will hold corporations accountable and will demand a new level of economic sustainability, including on issues of climate.

The May 10 conference was primarily a North America / European conversation. What might global South trade unionists have brought to the conversation on the political push from the right? Perhaps an expanded conference will be next on labor’s agenda.

Lane Windham is a post-doctoral scholar with Penn State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights. She has also worked as a union organizer and communicator. Her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door, is forthcoming from UNC Press in 2017.

Let Penn State Grad Students Decide on Whether to Form a Union

My latest piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Penn State's decision to enlist its faculty in resisting their graduate employees' efforts to unionize. Spoiler alert: I'm not with the administration on this one.



By Lane Windham


A directive on how to fight graduate employees’ unionization efforts was the last thing I expected Penn State University’s Graduate School to plop in my email in-box on Friday morning. Yet there it was. Under the heading of “Guidance for faculty and other supervisors of graduate student assistants,” the document clearly seeks to enlist faculty and staff in its resistance to graduate employees’ burgeoning union campaign at State College.

The Coalition of Graduate Employees at Penn State launched a union organizing drive in February, gathering on the steps of Old Main to sign union cards one chilly morning to assert their basic freedom to form a union. There are 3,500 such graduate employees who work as research and teaching assistants, helping the work of the state’s flagship university campus hum along. They grade the papers, teach the discussion groups and staff the research labs that turn out the university’s cutting-edge research.

Yet these workers receive stipends that do not cover basic living expenses and have suffered recent cutbacks in their health care coverage. They say they do not feel respected by the university and would like to have an independent voice, and so are gathering union cards in an effort to trigger a union election under the Pennsylvania Public Employee Relations Act.

Many people will agree with these graduate employees’ choice. Others may not. Yet everyone should respect their freedom to make their own choice on a union. Everyone except Penn State, it seems.

I’m a post-doctoral scholar at Penn State, and the graduate school’s “guidance” document contains the same kind of boilerplate, union-busting language I routinely see in my historical research on anti-union companies and law firms in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, Penn State follows the typical “managing to stay nonunion” script verbatim.

The memo assures faculty members that they are free to “explain some of the known aspects of belonging to a union” such as strikes, dues and initiation fees. It encourages faculty to “inform” graduate employees that “the university does not have to honor their current arrangements” if the employees form a union. Union-avoidance lawyers typically call this bargaining from scratch. The administration urges faculty to tell graduate employees about “the competitive nature” of their stipends and benefits, and to tout the benefits they presently “enjoy.”

Of course, Penn State lawyers have made sure the university covered the legal bases. My “guidance” email makes clear that faculty should not threaten, interrogate, make promises or conduct surveillance, as these actions are illegal. Yet it also urges faculty to explain to graduate assistants “what would change with unionization versus the current state, such as currently being able to work directly with faculty mentors regarding scheduling and other matters … ” If you heard that from your faculty adviser, wouldn’t you see this as a veiled threat?

Many Penn State faculty members and staff support employees’ freedom to make their own choice on unionization, and these faculty members now have a decision to make. What will they do in reaction to the administration’s directive on graduate student unionization?

Penn State graduate employees are not alone in their efforts to form a union. Graduate employees at Temple University have a union, as do those at six of the 14 schools in the Big Ten. Thirty-two universities nationwide have graduate-employee unions. Graduate employees in many states are organizing because they know that with a collective bargaining agreement they will earn more and have a greater say in their working conditions.

Penn State alumni, parents, faculty, staff and students should urge the administration to remain neutral on graduate employees’ efforts to form a union. The university does not need to support the graduate employees’ efforts, but neither should it put up a fight. Any administration claim that it was simply trying to “inform” its faculty about the union is disingenuous, given the cookie cutter, anti-union language of its “guidance” letter. The administration might have offered faculty real advice on how to stay neutral on the union question; instead, Penn State chose the low road.

Lane Windham is a post-doctoral scholar with Penn State’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights in the School of Labor and Employment Relations. Her forthcoming book, “Knocking on Labor’s Door,” is due out from UNC Press in 2017.