Beaten down worked up, p.47
Beaten Down, Worked Up, page 47
“They’re really not advocating”: Eidelson, “Koch Brothers–Linked Group Declares New War on Unions.”
FOURTEEN Big Labor Gets Less Big in Politics
After celebrating into the early hours: “AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee Hold a News Conference on the Election Results,” Political Transcript Wire, Nov. 5, 2008.
One study found that 52 percent: Kate Bronfenbrenner, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” Economic Policy Institute, May 2009. (Based on a survey of NLRB elections from 1999 to 2003.)
“This will be Armageddon”: Steven Greenhouse, “After Push for Obama, Unions Seek New Rules,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008, A33.
“a political nightmare”: Steven Greenhouse, “Bill Easing Unionizing Is Under Heavy Attack,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 2009, A12.
Antiunion groups ran $1 million: The House, which normally would have taken up the bill first, decided against voting on it until the Senate acted. House leaders wanted to protect some centrist, business-friendly Democrats from having to stick their necks out in case the Senate didn’t pass the bill.
In retrospect, 2009 was labor’s: Some labor leaders complained that Obama didn’t fight hard enough for the Employee Free Choice Act, while others acknowledged that the sixty votes were never going to be there when business opposition was so fierce.
“For too long,” Branstad said: Dave Dreeszen, “Unions Outraged as GOP Fast-Tracks ‘Tweaks’ to Iowa Labor Law,” Sioux City Journal, Feb. 7, 2017.
“We call for legislation”: Ed Tibbetts, “Iowa Collective Bargaining Battle Is Joined,” Quad-City Times, Feb. 8, 2017, A1.
“A paradox of American politics”: Thomas B. Edsall, “Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions,” New York Times, Nov. 18, 2014.
“a $7 billion slush fund”: Ibid.
Antiunion laws have taken: The Missouri legislature enacted a right-to-work law in 2017, but Missouri voters overwhelmingly voted to repeal it in a referendum in August 2018. To further drain union treasuries, Republicans in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa also enacted legislation prohibiting any state or local government agency from collecting government workers’ dues and forwarding that money to unions in a practice known as a dues checkoff.
“Trump is making a last bet”: Karen Tumulty and Dan Balz, “Battleground Fight Intensifies,” Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2016, A1.
“an unstoppable champion for working families”: John Harris, “AFL-CIO Announces Support for Clinton, Slams Trump as an ‘Unstable Charlatan,’ ” Washington Post, June 16, 2016.
In Ohio, Clinton lost to Trump: Ted Hesson and Marianne Levine, “Unions Investigate Their Poor Showing for Clinton,” Politico, Nov. 11, 2016.
A recent academic study suggested: James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson, “From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box: Political Effects of Right to Work Laws,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Jan. 20, 2018.
“We can’t continue to allow”: Nick Gass, “Trump: ‘We Can’t Continue to Allow China to Rape Our Country,’ ” Politico, May 2, 2016.
“not a threat to their own”: Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds,” New York Times, April 24, 2018.
“The shift toward an antitrade stance”: Ibid.
“Trade opposition captures Americans’ fear”: Tom Jacobs, “Research Finds That Racism, Sexism, and Status Fears Drove Trump Voters,” Pacific Standard, April 24, 2018.
“racialized economics”: John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 175.
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s findings: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016).
“taking our jobs”: Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis, 176.
“We can’t tap dance around the fact”: Don Gonyea, “Union Leader Confronts Race Issue in Campaign,” NPR, Oct. 10, 2008.
“Many voters feel that the Democratic Party”: Steven Greenhouse, “Trump’s Rust Belt Allure,” New York Times, July 3, 2016, SR6.
Many of them thought the Democrats: Joan C. Williams, “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 20, 2016.
“The Democrats allowed themselves”: Robert Griffin, John Halpin, and Ruy Teixeira, “Democrats Need to Be the Party of and for Working People—of All Races,” American Prospect, June 1, 2017.
“Left parties the world over”: Thomas Frank, “Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump. Here’s Why,” Guardian, March 7, 2016.
“The Democrats don’t have”: Stanley Greenberg, “The Democrats’ ‘Working-Class Problem,’ ” American Prospect, June 1, 2017.
“It is imperative for”: Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York, April 14, 1969.
“Never before has the trade union movement”: Quoted in Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 83.
“an angry cry from the guts”: Ibid., 100.
“Make yourself the candidate”: Ibid., 116.
“The necessity to turn”: Ibid., 90.
“What kind of delegation is this?”: Ibid., 105. Another labor leader complained, “There is too much hair and not enough cigars at this convention.”
“If the issues were prices”: Ibid., 124.
“merged the themes of race”: Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin, Labor in America: A History, 9th ed. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 350.
“an effete core of impudent snobs”: “President ‘Proud’ to Have Agnew in Administration,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1969, 1.
“In the 1960s and the 1970s”: Stanley B. Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1996), 26.
“blue-collar worker will be progressive”: Quoted in Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 80.
FIFTEEN The Sharing—the Scraps—Economy
“Why work if you can turk?”: Trebor Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2017), 13, 57.
“less microentrepreneurs than microearners”: Natasha Singer, “Check App. Accept Job. Repeat,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 2014, BU1.
“share the scraps” economy: Robert Reich, “In New Economy, Workers Get Stuck with the Scraps,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 28, 2015, C8.
(She was living 190 miles): Carolyn Said, “Driving Long Distances Just to Drive Some More: Long-Distance Uber, Lyft Drivers’ Crazy Commute, Marathon Days, Big Paychecks,” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 19, 2017, A1.
A McKinsey study found: James Manyika et al., “Independent Work: Choice, Necessity, and the Gig Economy,” McKinsey Global Institute, Oct. 2016.
“I’m not getting rich”: Emily Le Coz, “Uber Says Proposal a Killer. If Rules Pass as Written, Ride-Sharing Service Will Leave Sarasota,” Sarasota Herald Tribune, Sept. 6, 2015, B1.
“I have a degree in accounting”: Posting of Maynard420, Reply to $3 for 30 Minute Transcription Job, to Turker Nation, quoted in Alek Felstiner, “Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 32, no. 1 (2011): 166.
“opportunities to people who never”: Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,” Nation, Feb. 5, 2014.
Workers who do work through: Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995–2015” (NBER working paper No. 22667, Sept. 2016); Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Amaar Hamoudi, “The Online Platform Economy in 2018: Drivers, Workers, Sellers and Lessors,” JPMorgan Chase Institute, Sept. 2018.
the ILO study found: Janine Berg, Marianne Furrer, Ellie Harmon, Uma Rani, M Six Silberman, “Digital Labour Platforms and the Future of Work” (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2016), 50. The study found that the average (mean) pay for Turkers in the United States was $6.54 per hour, and in India, $2.53.
while the Pew Research Center: Paul Hitlin, “Research in the Crowdsourcing Age, a Case Study,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2016.
With many Americans desperate: Singer, “Check App. Accept Job. Repeat.”
Many corporations turn to crowdsourcing: Rachel Emma Silverman, “Big Firms Try Crowdsourcing,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 17, 2012.
For example, to translate a twenty-two-minute: “Online Labour Exchanges: The Workforce in the Cloud,” Economist, June 1, 2013. The World Bank estimates that such online freelancing—indeed, the online outsourcing industry worldwide—will generate more than $15 billion a year in revenues by 2020. Siou Chew Kuek et al., “The Global Opportunity in Online Outsourcing,” World Bank, June 2015, 3.
“We end up paying people”: Steven Hill, Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 11–12.
“Before the Internet,” Biewald said: Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine.”
A Pew study found: Hitlin, “Research in the Crowdsourcing Age.” The ILO study found that 10 percent of Turkers average $10 or more an hour. Janice Berg, “Income Security in the On-Demand Economy: Findings and Policy Lessons from a Survey of Crowdworkers” (Geneva: International Labor Organization, 2018), 11.
Five hundred thousand workers: Berg, “Income Security,” 3; “Online Crowdsourcing for Psychology Ain’t Without Pitfalls,” Mashable, March 17, 2017.
“not involved in the transaction”: Steven Greenhouse, “On Demand and Demanding Their Rights,” American Prospect (Summer 2016): 41.
“Our first goal was to give”: Ibid.
An ILO study found: Berg, “Income Security,” 5.
Fifty-three percent say: Hitlin, “Research in the Crowdsourcing Age.” Thirty-two percent of U.S. Turkers have a bachelor’s degree, while 49 percent have some college, with a substantial portion of them pursuing a bachelor’s degree.
Then things soured badly: Danielle Furfaro, “Uber Slashes Prices 15%; Taxi War Fare as Uber Drops Prices,” New York Post, Jan. 29, 2016, 1. Fares dropped to $1.75 per mile from $2.15 and the minimum fare to $7 from $8.
it had an eye-popping valuation: Michael J. de la Merced and Kate Conger, “Uber IPO Seen Hitting $100 Billion,” New York Times, April 12, 2019, B1.
After the 2016 cuts: Ivan Pereira, “Wallets on Empty: Uber Drivers Rally Against Recent Fare Reductions,” Newsday, Feb. 2, 2016, 26.
Parmar was earning far below: Jonathan V. Hall and Alan Krueger, “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners” (NBER working paper No. 22843, Jan. 22, 2015), 18.
(Uber agreed to pay $20 million): Sara Ashley O’Brien, “Uber to Pay $20 Million for Misleading Drivers,” CNN Wire, Jan. 19, 2017.
According to Krueger and Hall’s: Hall and Krueger, “Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners,” 18.
This was before Uber cut: Mike Isaac, “Uber Cuts Fares in 48 Cities, Raising Some Concern Among Drivers,” Bits (blog), New York Times, Jan. 9, 2015.
A 2016 study done by BuzzFeed: Caroline O’Donovan and Jeremy Singer-Vine, “How Much Uber Drivers Actually Make per Hour,” BuzzFeed News, June 22, 2016.
And in 2018, the economist Lawrence Mishel: Alison Griswold, “Uber Drivers Make About as Much Money as Minimum Wage Workers,” Quartz, May 16, 2018.
But Uber insists that most drivers: Carlos Oliva, an Uber driver in Los Angeles, said, “Even if Uber wanted to make me an employee, I wouldn’t want to be one. I would quit before I would accept an offer to be an Uber employee. I value my freedom as an independent contractor too much, and I don’t want Uber to tell me when or where I have to drive.” Steven Greenhouse, “The Uber Challenge,” American Prospect (Winter 2016): 30.
there is a pronounced power asymmetry: Scholz, Uberworked and Underpaid, 15, paraphrasing David Graeber, anthropology professor at the London School of Economics.
“Mechanical Turk may have created”: Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine.”
Janice Bellace, a Wharton Business School: Greenhouse, “On Demand and Demanding Their Rights,” quoting Bellace, director of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at Wharton.
“It’s easy to come together”: Tom Abate, “Stanford Engineers Collaborate on Research to Help Online Groups Organize Themselves,” Stanford Report, March 23, 2015.
More than 200,000 Care.com: Palak Shah, the National Domestic Workers Alliance official in charge of promoting the Fair Care Pledge, told me, “I was worried that there were a lot of people out there in the gig economy speaking for workers who were not from worker organizations.” Her group, she explained, “wanted to offer a road map” to people who were eager to attract a steady, quality workforce—which, no secret here, often means paying and treating your workers well.”
“create a basis for a trusting”: “Eight German Labor Platforms Sign ‘Crowdsourcing Code of Conduct 2.0,’ ” Fair Crowd Work, March 17, 2017, faircrowd.work.
Soon after, several labor unions: “Frankfurt Paper on Platform-Based Work,” Dec. 6, 2016.
“Labor is not a commodity”: The coalition called for revamping “laws that prohibit platform-based workers classified as independent contractors from organizing and negotiating collective agreements with platform operators.” The coalition included the Service Employees International Union, a large Teamsters local in Seattle, and Germany’s largest union, IG Metall.
“The drivers need help”: Noam Scheiber, “Uber Has a Union of Sorts, but Faces Doubt on Its Autonomy,” New York Times, May 12, 2017, BU1. David Plouffe, Uber’s strategic adviser, said that the guild—in ways an experiment—could help Uber communicate better with drivers. “Communication is important,” Plouffe said. Jing Cao and Eric Newcomer, “Uber and Union Agree to Form Drivers Guild in New York City,” Bloomberg Technology, May 10, 2016.
Lyft complained that the law: Phuong Le, “Seattle’s Uber Unionization Measure a New Economy Test Case,” Associated Press, Dec. 15, 2015.
That court ruled, however: Gene Johnson, “Appeals Court Reinstates Challenge to Seattle Rideshare Law,” Associated Press, May 11, 2018.
SIXTEEN The Fight for $15
“We were trying to figure out”: Courtney resigned from his position as executive vice president and organizing director of the SEIU in October 2017 amid an investigation into “sexual misconduct.” SEIU officials said Courtney had, in violation of union rules, failed to report to his superiors that he had been dating subordinates. Josh Eidelson, “Labor Leaders Confront Harassment in Ranks,” Boston Globe, Nov. 8, 2017, B12.
There, a grassroots group: New York Communities for Change is a successor group to Acorn, doing community organizing that focuses on the poor and low-wage workers.
“When we got into that room”: Fells resigned from his position as the Fight for $15 organizing director in November 2017, after SEIU officials said Fells had failed to report Fight for $15 employees’ abusive behavior “toward staff, predominantly female staff.” Fells declined to comment. Eidelson, “Labor Leaders Confront Harassment in Ranks.”
“In this job, having a union”: Steven Greenhouse, “With Day of Protests, Fast-Food Workers Seek More Pay,” New York Times, Nov. 30, 2012, A29.
“the biggest wave of job actions”: Ibid.
“I have two kids under six”: Ibid.
“The public doesn’t know”: Kari Lydersen, “ ‘I’m Not on the Menu’: McDonald’s Workers Strike over ‘Rampant’ Sexual Harassment,” Guardian, Sept. 18, 2018.
Montgomery’s boss relented: Lore Croghan, “Workers Flip Out: Wendy’s Employees Rally to Save Fired Colleague,” New York Daily News, Dec. 4, 2012, 47.
“I have seen a lot of people”: Michael A. Fletcher, “Low-Wage Workers Plan Walkout,” Washington Post, Aug. 20, 2013, 10.
In a one-two punch: Emily Jane Fox, “NY Attorney General Investigating Fast Food Wage Theft,” CNN Money, May 16, 2013.
In a study partly financed: Susan Berfield, “Fast-Food Wages Come with a $7 Billion Side of Public Assistance,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 16, 2013; Sylvia A. Allegretto et al., “Fast Food, Poverty Wages: The Public Cost of Low-Wage Jobs in the Fast-Food Industry,” University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, Oct. 15, 2013.
When Salgado called the company’s: Alexander Abad-Santos, “Instead of Raises, McDonald’s Tells Workers to Sign Up for Food Stamps,” Atlantic, Oct. 24, 2013.
Its recommendations included: Josh Eidelson, “McDonald’s Tells Workers to ‘Sing Away Stress,’ ‘Chew Away Cares,’ and Go to Church,” Salon, Nov. 19, 2013.
The National Retail Federation dismissed: Karen McVeigh, “US Fast-Food Workers Stage Nationwide Strike in Protest at Low Wages,” Guardian, Aug. 29, 2013.
“made-for-TV media moments”: Steven Greenhouse, “A Day’s Strike Seeks to Raise Fast-Food Pay,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 2013, A1.
“events have not been ‘strikes’ ”: Steven Greenhouse, “A Broader Strategy on Wages,” New York Times, March 31, 2015, B1.
When McDonald’s held its 2015: Alejandra Cancino and Jessica Wohl, “Protesters Swarm McD’s; Crowd Asks for Increase in Wages at Chain’s HQ,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2015, C1.
