American Watch

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US labor law currently permits a wide range of employer conduct that interferes with worker organizing. Enforcement delays are endemic, regularly denying aggrieved workers their right to an “effective remedy.” Sanctions for illegal conduct are too feeble to adequately discourage employer law breaking, breaching the international law requirement that penalties be “sufficiently dissuasive” to deter violations.

Unfair union election rules allow employers to engage in one-sided, aggressive anti-union campaigning while denying union advocates a similar chance to respond and banning union organizers from the workplace or even from distributing information on company property. If confronted with clear evidence of employee support for a union, employers can force a formal election and manipulate the often lengthy pre-election period to pound their anti-union drumbeat and, in many cases, violate US labor laws, confident that any penalties will be minimal and long delayed.

Workers who overcome these obstacles and successfully form a union may still be unable to conclude a collective agreement, in large part because weak US labor law provisions fail to meaningfully punish illegal employer bad-faith negotiating or to adequately define good-faith bargaining requirements.

Human Rights Watch: The Employee Free Choice Act, A Human Rights Imperative

Nothing spooks the U.S. managerial cadres more than unions. I have always been surprised, for example, at the money universities spend to prevent unionization or to fight an existing union. Administrators would cut their own salaries before they would stop paying a retainer to their union fighting law firm.

If you have never been around contract negotiations, or an organizing drive, you probably think this is just one of those lefty myths about the big bad Capital wolf waiting at our door. If you want a feel for the reality of the paranoia, though, you just have to do a quick search on the act. It’s very real.

What’s so interesting is that all of the fear assumes that people don’t really want unions. The law, then, won’t make it easier for people to make a decision about unions, it will make it easier for unions to manipulate people. Because, of course, no one in their right mind wants a union. I bet those law firms know better.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Union, War, Writing

How Change Happens

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Economic storms historically have prompted more adults to seek shelter in the classroom. But this time around, two-year colleges and private for-profit institutions are especially optimistic about attracting more students—and many of those older students will probably take courses online, according to one of the authors of a recent survey.

The 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning, released in November before the extent of the recession was clear, found that while all types of colleges anticipate enrollment bumps because of high unemployment, two-year and private for-profit institutions expect to increase their rolls more than others since they “tend to offer programs that have traditionally been tailored to serve working adults.

Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses, STEVE KOLOWICH, January 9, 2009

Step by step, we are creating a new education system without any sense of where we are going. The outlines of the new system have begun to become a little clearer, however. Much of this change is dependent on historical timing. There was the internet boom, which led to the dot-com crash, and then the housing boom. This created a new sort of infrastructure fed by an Utopian ideology that said these technologies ought to be in every home and classroom.

The internet boom jump-started the internet infrastructure, and the collapse of that bubble fed the housing boom, which bought everyone enough time to get these technologies to the point where their effects cannot be reversed. Utopia got us over the rough spots. Now that the housing bubble has burst, dragging the entire economy with it, more people will take advantage of the new infrastructure to use education to improve their chances on the job market, once the bust plays itself out.

All of this is just the public theater of change; behind the scenes, more profound transformations are taking place. As a profession and a public service, higher education has become lopsidedly bifurcated. An increasingly small minority have what was once a relatively secure position in full-time, tenure track positions. The majority do not. Similarly, the old liberal arts model of education threatens to become the privileged experience of a minority.

I understand the funding concerns but I don’t think this is a funding problem. if something is a priority– say, a bank or auto bail out– the money is available. The real questions have to do with the nature of jobs and job security and with the purposes of education. Conservative ideology has made the notion of job security seem antiquated. That magical force, “the market” has supposedly made such a thing impossible. Why should professors be any different?

And technology, rather than education in the old liberal arts mode, has the Utopian edge that pushes people into long term commitments and projects. Don’t get me wrong. I make my living teaching on the internet and I can see the reality of how these new infrastructure has made a certain kind of education more accessible. I worry, though, that as we are busily trying to get through this recession we are normalizing some deep cuts in our expectations.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, War, Writing

Bourgeois Economics

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Next, back to basics. Remember that houses are homes, not abstract transactions that can be made profitable with unreasonable levels of leverage/borrowing. I am not advocating a return to the horse-and-buggy days of lending. There is still a role for more conservative securitization, in which packages of home mortgages are sold to the restructured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and a well-regulated private market. However, preserving the connection between originator and borrower is more likely to reduce fraud and consumer abuse.

This will require political and economic leadership to encourage Americans to return to the tough, unpleasant discipline of saving. At the heart of the current meltdown is a stark reality: America is the world’s biggest debtor in both the public sector (budget deficits) and the private sector (financial institutions and corporations). The U.S. financial system is now at the mercy of foreign sovereigns and institutions sitting on enormous piles of cash, much of it from the sale of oil and other products to us.

Back To Basics: Restoring the Human Connection in Mortgage Lending, Emma Coleman Jordan

It sounds like standard vulgar Marxist criticism, but this sort of faux economic talk does no one any good at all. It’s not just the awful sentimentality of the ‘it’s a home, not just a house’ variety, although that is bad enough. It’s the pig-headed insistence that the solution to our economic problems, and by implication the origins, lie in individual discipline, or the lack there-of.

It seems only logical to assume that the savings rate must be related to several structural factors, all beyond the control of any individual. Wages, to start, have not exactly been climbing in the last thirty years or so. The ‘Second Gilded Age” initiated by Reagan’s “Morning in America” promoted hyper-consumption as the highest value. Then you have those pesky medical bills.

What we need is strengthened organized labor and higher wages, national health care, and a vigilante government regulation system. The entire point of the current system is to insulate capital from its own excesses by neutralizing the checks and balances in a democracy. It’s capital, not labor, that needs the ‘tough discipline’ of markets designed to meet human need.

Posted in: Economics, War

McCain’s Stunt

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Yet his choice is risky – not just for McCain’s campaign but for America’s future. Yesterday McCain celebrated his 72nd birthday; he has a history of skin cancer; if elected, he would be the oldest American ever to serve. Hence, his choice of vice president is critically important because the odds are much higher than normal that such a person would have to assume the office of the presidency.

Sarah Palin has been a governor of state inhabited by more moose than people for twenty months, and before that mayor of a town with a population smaller than two blocks of downtown Manhattan. Although she has barely exercised power, she is already under federal investigation for abuse of it. And while Ms. Palin is perfectly entitled to believe that evolution is a myth, that women should be barred from choosing to have abortions, and that global warming has yet to be proven, these views all run counter to the views of mainstream America.

Robert Reich’s Blog: McCain, Palin, and the Important Difference Between Boldness and Riskiness.

I’ve been thinking about the so-called judgment issue ever since McCain made this announcement, and I think Reich sums up my problems with Palin very well. McCain has his formula for everything: “a noun, a verb, and ‘prisoner of war.’ ” This is supposed to be the ultimate sign of strength and leadership.

The real question isn’t what he did in the camp but afterwords. Once he was freed, he turned not so much to a life of public service as much as to a life of service to power. His political genius seemed to be knowing how to differ from his political elders just enough to stand out but not enough to be locked out.

Palin seems to fit the pattern well, perhaps accelerated by McCain’s desperation in the face of Obama’s historic campaign. It’s difficult to compete, so McCain pulls the biggest stunt of his career. It may well be his last big stunt; even if he wins, he won’t run again. It says a lot about who he has become.

Posted in: Composition, Miscellaneous, War, Writing