HPR: Have recent divisions in the labor community hampered labor’s ability to wield influence in Washington?

Richard Trumka: There’s two kinds of unity: there’s unity of name and unity of purpose.  Unity of purpose is the most important thing. When it came to electing Barack Obama, we had unity of purpose. When it came to health care reform, we had unity of purpose. When it came to the Employee Free Choice Act, we had unity of purpose. When it came to re-regulating the financial economy, we had unity of purpose. On all the big issues, we’re still in the same direction. It would be better if we were together, by the way, but politically I don’t think it has hurt us.

HPR: With regard to the Employee Free Choice Act, how satisfied are you with the bill and the process of getting it through Congress?

RT: Well first of all, it’s been too slow. Wages have stagnated for 30 years, and in a consumer-driven economy, the less people have wages, the more the economy stagnates. The best way to get wages spread fairly is through collective bargaining, so the longer we go without that, the harder it is for the economy to recover. I think we’ll end up with a  bill that is very good and that will give us the tools we need to be able to organize people in a fair and responsible way and give us higher penalties so that employers can’t just scoff at the law, take a slap on the wrist, and go on their merry way.

HPR: Could you talk a bit about what “card check” is? It’s a term that gets used a lot, and rarely defined.

RT: Right now the employer gets to decide how the employees get a union. You can have 100% of employees say they want a union, but the employer can say, “I  don’t care, I want a secret-ballot election.” And they use that secret-ballot election to delay and to intimidate and harass and even fire union supporters in an effort to erode union support. Now what card check would do is reverse the situation back to the way the law was originally intended. It would put the decision in the hands of the employees, so that if 51% of employees say they want a union card, the employer is required to give it to them.

HPR: Given that card check has been such a controversial part of the current legislation, do you think that it’s likely to remain in the final product?

RT: A version of it, yes.

HPR: Under Hilda Solis, the Department of Labor has been making a more proactive effort at enforcement of labor laws than under the previous administration. Has the AFL-CIO noticed a change in the regulatory environment?

RT: Oh, considerably. First of all, the approach to everything is completely different. She understands that workers have rights and she wants to make sure that all workers’ rights are enforced. Her budget includes more inspectors, more people who are able to protect those rights. She’s enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act, which ensures that people get fair wages whether or not they have a union. It’s a night and day difference between Hilda Solis and the previous administration.

HPR: Over the past 40 years, labor has experienced a drop in private-sector union participation. Has the labor movement changed as unions become increasingly populated with public-sector employees?

RT: Right now we have about a 50-50 split between public and private employees in the AFL-CIO. We’ve always worked together, and by us being together under the same umbrella, we’re able to educate each other. Public workers need a union as much as anybody, and they help out a significant amount.

HPR: After the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, what are your priorities going forward?

RT: Jobs, jobs, and more jobs. It doesn’t do you any good if the place you’ve organized gets shut down. So we’ll be working on that. We’ll be working on re-regulating the financial economy to get them back in check. We’ll be working on pension reform to make sure that pensions are protected from some of the excesses that caused people to go bankrupt and lose money. Immigration is an important issue for us, too. And we still have a long way to go on health care reform.

HPR: Some have suggested that the recent Citizens United decision will allow labor to play a larger role in elections. Others have said it gives power mainly to larger corporations. How do you feel about the decision?

RT: It’s a really bad decision. We didn’t want the results that came out of that. We had challenged a specific provision that referred to the sixty days right before an election. But our participation is mostly at the grassroots level anyway. That decision made corporate America stronger. They can flood the airwaves using shareholders’ money without the shareholders having any say about it. So I think it’s a bad decision and bad for our democracy.

Alex Copulsky ’10 is the Assistant Managing Editor Emeritus. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo Credit: Bill Burke/Page One

It was awesome.  It was everything I thought about the Tea Party and more.  There were Birthers.  There were signs calling for state nullification.  I think signs calling for “Civil War 2012″ were trolling, but who knows. I’m pretty sure the “MIT Nukular Engineers for Palin!!!1!” were trolling.  The guy dressed as Hitler rocking an Obama armband? Not trolling, he was very real and had a beautiful mustache. Which was not real.  It was very evident who the Tea Partiers were, namely old white people wearing American flag apparel.  This being Boston, however, roughly a quarter of the attendees were liberals like myself who had just come to check out the scene; or to troll. My favorite was the dirty hippie carrying a massive sign saying “Fake America Welcomes You, Sarah”. He was chill.

The speech itself was nothing more or less than I expected.  She didn’t do the usual pandering to the crowd by giving local flavor; I somehow doubt anyone would really believe Sarah Palin saying how much she loved Boston.  But of course she invoked the actual Boston Tea Party and taxation without representation.  The applause lines were more or less standard boilerplate (I didn’t have a notebook, so these might be slightly off): “We know how liberals love to say “Yes, we can.” But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  This November, the American people will tell you “No, you don’t”.  She dissed the “lame-stream media”.  And of course, she got a chant going of “Drill, baby, drill”.  Having seen her say it in action, both me and my companion agreed it was highly sexual, and on purpose.  The first thing her follow-up speaker said was “Conservative women; they’re smarter than you and way hotter than you!”

I was actually expecting more whining about the media and about how they hate on her, she managed to keep her speech more or less on-target and tossed out a lot of red meat. There was a lot of God stuff, which actually sounded something of a dissonant note.  I didn’t see a single sign out there with religious overtones, they were pretty much universally about spending and debt and so forth.  She also obviously didn’t articulate any sort of positive platform (other than “We should use the rich energy resources God has given us”), but devoted her speech mainly to harshing on the President.  Her lines that weren’t about how awful liberals were all concerned how awesome America is, and about how God has chosen us to be a shining city on a hill, etc.  There really was a lot of God stuff; even if it’s not the Tea Party tune exactly, that’s kind of her brand (and likely also something she really believes).  Scott Brown was not mentioned, having recently turned down an invite to speak at the event.  The crowd ate it up, even the long-stale lines about government being the problem (not the solution).  And when Sarah’s speech was done, hordes of flag-wearing seniors swarmed back across the Common to Park Street station to enjoy the benefits of subsidized mass transit from the People’s Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“The Democratic majority decided, well look, while we’re at it, let’s have another Washington takeover,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a former federal education secretary. “Let’s take over the federal student loan program.”

He just tried to demagogue the federal government taking over a federal program. Let’s reflect on that for a bit, and move on.

This summit has expressed in a microcosm the simple reality that Congressional Democrats really should hitch their wagon to Obama as much as they humanly can.  He’s much more intelligent, a much more effective communicator, and much more popular than them.  I’m not really sure why they insist on asserting their independence when it seems that their best hope for re-election is to associate themselves with him.

Also, the Republicans clearly have an incentive to kill the bill rather than negotiate.  Which is as it should be! They don’t believe that it’s proper for the government to extend health care coverage to everyone, and that’s completely their prerogative.  Their arguments won’t convince Barney Frank that we should abolish the estate tax either. It’s a real mystery why Democrats believe there’s anything to be gained from negotiating with them.

Indeed, on quite a number of those the Democrats have rather obviously been AIDING the injustices that they campaigned against.  They legalized ex post facto most of the worst excesses of Bush’s spying, and have been sticking to Bush’s plan for withdrawal from Iraq.  Congressional Democrats have been some of the worst impediments to closing Guantanamo and enacting financial reform.  Let’s not even discuss health care.  Long story short, if Congressional Democrats go into the election of 2010 having delivered exactly nothing that they’ve promised in their election campaigns of the last four years, they’re obviously going to lose badly. Any politician who so badly misjudged the electorate probably deserves to be fired for rank incompetence.

More to the point, the use of less firepower against the Taliban is a feature rather than a bug.  The point of the American offensive is not to obliterate the town of Marja or to drive a hostile occupying army out of it.  The Taliban are really very lightly armed, few in number, and militarily amateur.  The ideal outcome for them is that the US bombards Marja and turns impressionable Afghan civilians to their cause.  The US is deliberately taking more risk on its fighting forces by eschewing air power in order to not alienate the population.  That’s the reason that America deployed so many more troops to Afghanistan in the first place.  With all due respect, Ms. Dadkhah’s suggested strategy of punishing strikes into Taliban country supported by air power has been tried before.  It was called the Vietnam War.

This war is definitely not a self-evidently justified one at this point.  It seems strategically unnecessary and entailing much more potential downside (and actual downside) than potential upside.  But it doesn’t help anyone to go about it stupidly, especially by being determined to repeat the mistakes of an old war.

I think Goldberg has hit on a very important truth here.  He suggests that young American Jews are less likely to be “reflexive” supporters of Israel than their parents, and this has been my experience.  I strongly believe in the right of Israel to exist, but I feel very uncomfortable about the actions of the Likud government.  Who can defend a government willing to appoint a racist, extremist wackjob like Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister?  Their constant pandering to the settler lobby is not only indefensible, but seems calculated to draw them further into occupation of hostile Palestinian territory.  Despite my strong feelings about Israel’s continued survival, I have zero interest in using my tax dollars to underwrite Lieberman’s colonial ambitions. The Israeli government can’t afford to lose the American public, and it seems determined to do so.

If Greece’s credit rating takes a hit, its debt becomes more expensive and it starts spiraling towards default and probable crisis. Since Greece doesn’t control its own currency, it can’t get bailed out by the IMF, it needs the EU and thus Germany is needed.  Germany doesn’t want to bail out Greece due to their domestic distaste for bailouts (other than for the German banking or auto industries).  So a Greek downgrade could lead to a rapid spiral as other European sovereign debts are attacked, potentially ripping apart the Eurozone and probably leading to some sort of financial crisis.  But a Greek bailout could necessitate bailing out the much, much larger combined economies of Portugal, Spain, and Ireland. It’s not an easy choice, but some sort of unified and decisive action is probably necessary.

So the European governments have decided to take a firm line on “meh”. Good work, team!

The Democratic reform proposal was mild, to say the least.  Regulations aren’t going to be strengthened that much, and the Senate is now out to remove the only comprehensible and popular part of the bill, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  No one understands derivatives trading regulation, not the public and certainly not the Senate.  However, an agency which will make sure banks don’t screw you over?  That’s easy to understand and polls well.  So naturally centrist Democrats are out to kill it.  Chris Dodd, head of the Banking Committee and thus for these purposes far more powerful than President Obama, also wants to make sure the bill is “bipartisan”. That worked out well for health care.  Oh, and the new Senator from Massachusetts is bought-and-paid-for by the financial industry.  While I’m guessing that the Congress is more likely to pass something called “Financial Regulatory Reform” than “Health Care Reform”, there really doesn’t seem any way that anything with teeth passes. After all, there’s really nothing in the House bill which would prevent more bailouts, and it’s likely to be totally rewritten to banks’ specifications in the Senate.

Long story short, this is just another part of the Democratic Congress’s very visible and baffling determination to commit political suicide.  They’ve had a year with nominal total control and haven’t managed to do anything popular.  The stimulus was watered down so far that unemployment hit 10% AND as a bonus completely discredited the idea of fiscal stimulus.  Health care is probably dead, happy-talk notwithstanding, and will be remembered as a fiasco.  Beyond these obvious policy failures, the Congress has spent the entire year giving the finger to the Democratic base.

While centrist Democrats like to talk all the time about how the Democratic Party is overreaching, speaking as a bona fide member of the far-left base I can tell you that this Congress has done nothing large to appease us.  There are a number of things Obama or Congress could have done to throw the base a bone. A single one of these would fit the bill: Close Guantanamo, stop domestic spying, restore some measure of civil liberties, make meaningful contributions to peace in the Middle East, withdraw from Iraq, reform health care, reform immigration, repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, reform the financial industry, cap carbon emissions, all things he promised on the campaign trail. There are more.  Both Obama and Congress have conspicuously failed to do a single thing that would motivate the base to vote in November or indeed to significantly distinguish them from the last two years of the Bush Administration.  Sure, Republicans have no platform or plan other than slashing the deficit while cutting taxes and not cutting any spending; the prospect of them holding power is terrifying.  But at this point, what exactly have the Democrats done that justifies them continuing to hold power? If the last year is to be believed, Congressional Democrats’ ideal situation is to continue to indefinitely hold the majority and indefinitely do nothing with it.

“At least we’re not Bush” is starting to wear extremely thin.

This has not always been the case.  In 1945 President Harry Truman proposed a system of universal health insurance similar to the Canadian model, a radical change from the status quo ante.  Of course, some things stay the same; Truman’s initial proposal claimed bluntly, and unconvincingly, that, “This is not socialized medicine.”  Truman’s healthcare innovation was part of a proud bipartisan tradition of bold leadership and radical change.  President Roosevelt was unabashed about trying to completely reshape the relationship between the government and private industry, and Nixon in trying to reshape the Cold War by forging a relationship with China.  In contrast to the bold policy initiatives even in the postwar era, it is not hard to see American politics since 1992 as static and small-bore.

Despite a marked difference in rhetoric, the similarities between the policies of Democrats and Republicans can be striking.   Both parties are committed to maintaining the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, preventing a nuclear Iran, ensuring a “pro-business” regulatory environment, protecting the employer-based health insurance system, continuing the War on Drugs, cutting taxes, subsidizing agriculture and feeding the military-industrial complex.  In the most recent Presidential campaign, only two candidates seriously addressed any of these key issues, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, and were laughed at for their trouble. For making the commonsensical statement that perhaps Muslims resent a half-century of American meddling in the Middle East, Ron Paul was resoundingly booed.  For suggesting that the U.S. scale back its massive network of military bases around the world, Kucinich was ridiculed.

This political complacency suited a world where America was the unchallenged hegemon.  During the Cold War, politicians could not avoid trying to tackle tough issues, not with the Soviet Union waiting to pounce on American weakness.  The fall of the USSR left the United States free to languish in the status quo, and our apparent triumph left the American model politically unassailable.  Perhaps this is the best light in which to understand the conservative response to Obama’s agenda as “socialism”; that any challenge to the status quo is a rejection of everything that differentiated America from its Cold War foe.  Unfortunately, America did not win the Cold War because of its complete perfection.

America needs policy innovation today more than ever. The long-term deficit is a very real concern.  There is no way it can be addressed when entitlement and defense expenditures are politically untouchable; non-defense discretionary spending is a mere 17% of the federal budget.  The War on Drugs is stuck in the trenches.  The War on Terror is even worse, and certainly more costly.  Populists left and right rage against the seeming capture of the government by Goldman Sachs and other big banks.  America’s wars overseas seem to be going nowhere fast, soaking up endless amounts of money and continuing to kill American soldiers.  And Iran is inching ever closer to a nuclear weapon.  It should be clear that the conventional wisdom is bankrupt and, as they like to say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Our best thinking got us here.”

Of course politicians don’t want to address hard questions, for hard questions demand difficult answers. Ultimately, though, if the status quo is unsustainable, it will not be sustained.   The time of complacency has passed, and even the somewhat incoherent Tea Party movement shows that voters have begun to demand serious change of some kind.  Counterintuitively, the slow deterioration in the American way of life may create the conditions for its renewal.