Unions

Few developments have more cheered progressive activists than the perceived resurgence of labor unions. This has been sparked by largely symbolic efforts to unionize in places such as Starbucks and Amazon, as well as more sizable wins by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and United Auto Workers, the country’s most important private labor union. In 2022 strike activity more than doubled from the previous year. Yet ultimately these wins may turn out to be largely Pyrrhic.

It is only fitting that the low point of the American labor movement occurred in 2009, the Year of the Rat. The Great Recession may have started with Wall Street speculation in the housing market, but your average American had most likely never heard of Henry Lehman or his siblings until the day Dick Fuld drove the 150-year-old bank bearing their name into the ditch. But General Motors, Chrysler? Cars, even more than Hollywood, jazz and the semi-automatic rifle, are the quintessential American business. How could those get driven into the ground? As soon as freshly evicted homeowners finished packing the remains of their subprime split-levels into the backseats of their battered Tahoes, they went looking for culprits. They settled on the United Auto Workers.

Cockburn looked on at what he at first took to be a run-of-the-mill sports bar fight at 4:30 in the afternoon — only to realize it was Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin throwing down with Teamsters president Sean O’Brien in the hallowed halls of Congress. Mullin, a Republican, came in guns a’blazing to a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, saying he is “not at all against unions,” before listing the reasons unions are bad. The exchange between Mullin and O’Brien is painful to watch — and the transcript reads pretty much like what you'd expect to hear before a fistfight in a Chili’s parking lot. Cockburn has assembled, for your reading pleasure, a play-by-play highlight reel of the clash...

Economic news over the last few months has been bleak. Whether it’s inflation, supply chain disruptions, or the threat of recession, worrying news abounds. But among the headlines, there was a topic that briefly bubbled to the surface before being all but forgotten: a potential strike by the country’s railroad workers. Amtrak, in anticipation, canceled all cross-country routes, but Labor Secretary Marty Walsh averted a strike at the eleventh hour by negotiating quite literally through the night to find an agreement with the workers. It’s easy to forget about rail. In a time when inflation and potential recession are dominating headlines, transportation issues just don’t seem as interesting.