Your Humble Blogger as been following the Other Party and their shenanigans at some distance lately, only desultorily picking up the details on their assaults on collective bargaining, health insurance and education, so my impression is quite likely wrong. I do want to pass along that impression, so y’all can sharpen it or correct it, or otherwise give your impressions, so as to improve my perception of the universe.\n
Here’s the thing: you know the observation that Thomas Frank made, back in Kansas, that many working-class conservatives consider their cultural conditions to be essentially political, but their economic ones to be just business? If the Super Bowl engineers an offensive halftime show, that’s a political matter that you want your political representatives and pundits to weigh in on, but if the factory closes, well, watcha gonna do? In this way, Mr. Frank argued, the Other Party had managed to get people to vote against their current economic interests, in favor of upward distribution of wealth. Not everybody agreed with him, but I think the basic point, about what people thought about politics, was probably valid—and certainly interesting.\n
And if it’s true, of course, it’s bad for my Party. Not because my Party is on the wrong side of a cultural divide; if the Other Party wants my Party to be the Party of the Pill, we will win a lot of votes. No, it’s because Our Party sees factory-closings, workplace conditions and wages as essentially political matters, and if people don’t, it will be difficult to govern from that perspective after we win elections on the cultural stuff.\n
More specifically: an employee and an employer negotiate their relationship. In many cases, possibly most cases, the negotiation is Hobson’s Choice: you can have the job under my conditions, or you can walk. The employee accepts this much wage, this much vacation, this kind of health insurance, this much contribution to this kind of pension, these hours, these working conditions, this kind of clothing, this kind of behavior on the job, this amount of work, etc, etc, etc, or finds employment elsewhere. Now, in many jobs those things are in fact negotiations, either on hiring or later—you can ask for a raise, for instance, or for more overtime, or for an assistant. Often, I am told, those things are far more negotiable than the employee realizes. But for a lot of people, most of it isn’t negotiable, other than the choice to walk away. The leverage isn’t in balance at all; the Best Outside Alternative (to use negotiation jargon) for the employer is to pick up another application off the stack, while the Best Outside Alternative for the employee is to sell the house and move back in with the parents. Obviously, this isn’t true for all employee\/employer relationships, but it is true for a lot of them. And the employees who are otherwise privileged are likelier to have more leverage; the people who are have less savings, education and connection have less leverage here, too. Inequality, breeding inequality.\n
Now, one of the things that employees can do in these negotiations is seek for more leverage outside the basic employer\/employee relationship. Collective bargaining is one. A publicity campaign is one way, particularly for unsafe working conditions. And government regulation is one.\n
I get the sense, from the comments that I see, that many people who call themselves Conservative, find it completely illegitimate for worker to seek to improve their working conditions in these ways. They seem to think that the employment contract is in some way only legitimate if it is individual. It’s wrong, in their view, for employees of Church-affiliated universities to ask the government to regulate provisions of their insurance; the employer has its conscience and the employee can seek work elsewhere if she doesn’t like it. It’s wrong for unions of public employees to work to elect people sympathetic to their concerns, they say. It’s wrong for various do-gooder organizations to run campaigns against Apple or GE or Wal-Mart.\n
I completely disagree with this, of course. I think it’s great when we elect people who are willing to get involved in the workplace. I think it’s fantastic that the administration is laying down the proverbial on the Pill being a part of health care. But then, I think that the factory-closings are a fundamental political issue. I don’t want the government in my bedroom or my synagogue, but I sure as hell want them in my workplace. Not everyone will agree with us on that. Mitt Romney, for instance, and his management consultancy buddies, want to increase the leverage for management by taking away leverage for workers, and heck, hiring management consultants is one of the levers that management rightly uses. But it surprises me, always, when people don’t see this as a political battle, to be fought in large part by electing as many people as possible who agree with whichever side of the issue you are on.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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