Joe Kenehan Center

Stepping Up the Grocery Strike/Lockout in Cali

Now that we’re in the crucial Thanksgiving shopping week, Southern California grocery workers are getting two important pieces of support:

* Teamster drivers are symbolically joining the strike, stopping deliveries to the stores where employees are on strike or locked out.
* The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor is mobilizing its formidable grassroots political organizing operation to knock on doors in L.A. neighborhoods to urge shoppers not to spend dollars in the stores.

(All of us can add our support by contributing to the employees’ strike fund.)

Want to know why you should? Take a look at this screeching attack on the grocery workers by Donald Luskin, best known as a self-proclaimed archenemy of Paul Krugman.

Luskin, while venting at a New York Times editorial that mildly supported the grocery workers’ fight for affordable health insurance, declares that’s it’s wrong to even admit that there really any people who work for more than about six months or so in a service industry job:

The Times implicitly posits that there is a permanent class of people who are "grocery workers" just as there is a permanent class of bees called "drones" and a permanent class of ants called "soldiers." By establishing the existence of the "grocery worker" class and then defending its members, the editorialists at the Times drape themselves in seeming generosity -- but, in truth, they establish their own class superiority by the very gesture (and then, I have no doubt, instruct their servants to shop at Wal-Mart to save a couple bucks without so much as a second thought).

This isn’t analysis—it’s the intellectual equivilant of jamming one’s fingers in one’s ears and yelling LALALALALA as loudly as possible. In Luskin’s fantasy economy, all the people who work in a grocery store or a restaurant are “young people at the beginnings of their careers” (putting aside for a moment that many of those careers of the future don’t look so secure anymore) who simply don’t deserve secure access to medical care.

More than anything, Luskin’s bluster reveals a breathtaking disconnection from everyday life. Is he really so obliviously obtuse that he’s never gotten to recognize the names and faces of people at his local grocery store? At a deli? A bar? A video store? A copy store?

Take a look around, Don: you might notice that more than a few of the people who provide services in your life hold the same job for years. They work hard, they aren’t invisible, and they shouldn't have to worry whether they can afford to get get sick or hurt.

The GOP's Favorite Flag

What exactly were the Dartmouth conservatives trying to say by carrying Confederate flags to Howard Dean’s speech on higher education?

Is this really a topic that the Republican Party wants to delve into?

After all, now that the party of Lincoln is led by Jefferson Davis’ ideological descendants, the Confederate flag is an revered symbol for many Republicans.

Georgia Republican Sonny Purdue made restoring the Stars and Bars emblem to the state flag a key theme of his 2002 campaign to become governor.

The Republicans in South Carolina have fought a similar battle around the battle emblem on their state flag. Don’t forget that candidate Bush pandered to the pro-Reb flag sentiment during his savage attack on John McCain in the South Carolina primary, meekly refusing to offer a personal opinion on the flag, saying only that the decision should be left up to South Carolina. (Do the Dartmouth righties want Bush to clarify that now?)

McCain, to his regret, kept quiet about the obvious offensiveness of making non-white citizens live under a racist symbol.

And it’s not just a Southern thing.

Last year in Washington State, a Democratic lawmaker stumbled across an old highway marker proclaiming that State Route 99, the main North-South highway before I-5 was built, is the “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway.”

He did some research and discovered that it in fact the highway is still technically named in honor of the only president of the CSA.

The Democrats figured it would be an appropriate symbolic gesture to rename the highway after one of Washington’s early African-American pioneers. That is, someone who actually contributed to the state.

Non-controversial? No. Washington Republicans fought tooth and nail to keep the highway’s pro-Confederate name, even though Washington wasn’t a state during the Civil War and certainly has no Confederate heritage to preserve.

Sadly, they won.

More SEIU/AFSCME and Dean

* The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza says Dean and SEIU share a willingness to challenge “the Establishment” in the Democratic Party and the larger labor movement, respectively, with Dean challenging the Clintons' dominance of the party’s leadership and SEIU asking questions about how unions can win in the future.

* Also in The New Republic, union insiders David Kusnet and Jim Grossfeld discuss the unions and the candidates. Kusnet wonders if Dean’s popularity among suburban voters—who increasingly face long-term economic anxiety over access to affordable health care and job security—could help trigger a new movement of organizing in the office parks.

* Slate’s William Saletan gives a somewhat sneering analysis of Dean’s union support. Given Saletan’s penchant for getting things spectacularly wrong (“Bush Is Toast” September 14, 2000), his opinions need to be sprinkled with several grains of salt. Saletan seems to think that Dean’s comfortable upbringing makes it impossible for him to win support from union members. Yet FDR, the most popular president among union members there ever was, lived in comfort from cradle to grave. And it’s not uncommon to walk into a union hall in a small town and see a yellowing portrait of JFK, who also benefited from the privilege of wealth. Somehow union members were able to figure out that who was on there side.

* UPDATE: Harold Meyerson adds his two cents.

SEIU/AFSCME and Dean

Interesting comments on what's next from The New Republic's &C and a longer analysis on Daily KOS (including astute comments from "Debs.")

On (And Across) The Picket Line

* Borders Books and Music employees at the flagship store in Ann Arbor, Michigan are on strike.

* The LA Weekly’s Robert Greene compares the ongoing bus mechanic strike in Los Angeles with the janitors strike in L.A. back in 2000.

* The Los Angeles Times’ Ronald White tells how he worked for two days as a scab against the Southern California grocery strike:

Other customers left me feeling equally uncomfortable. They thought the union workers had it too good, and showed no sympathy for the union's effort to shield members from rising health insurance costs.

"This is unskilled work," one woman said. "They ought to be happy they have jobs and insurance."

As I came back from lunch one afternoon, another customer spoke up outside the store.

"I really wanted to break the picket lines at Vons," said the well-dressed woman, with a huge diamond wedding ring. "But Vons never has what I want anyway. Good for you for going to work like they should."

God Forbid Taxpayers Know . . .

how many of their tax dollars are being shoveled to corporations.

Bush's successor as Texas governor is suing to stop Texans from finding out what subsidies and tax breaks he is offering on their behalf to lure Boeing to the state.

For clear-eyed research on the benefits (and lack therof) of these kinds of "economic development" schemes, go to Good Jobs First.

Grocery Workers: Good News in Southern California?

The fires are finally dying down, but the grocery workers' fight for affordable health care continues.

Their campaign got some good news when customers poured into Ralph’s stores after the union made a strategic decision to remove pickets from that chain.

This seems to indicate that consumers are backing the employees by staying away from picketed stores.

The grocery workers are even getting support from L.A.-based Weekly Standard columnist Larry Miller. Given the source, this piece is a shockingly well thought out essay on why he decided to walk the picket line to support the people who work at his neighborhood Ralph’s.

You can show your support by making a contribution to the grocery workers’ strike fund.

SEIU (Sort of) Endorses Dean

SEIU’s endorsement of Howard Dean for president appears imminent, even if it hasn’t been officially announced now that AFSCME has asked for a delay, apparently so it can endorse Dean on the same day next week.

In another push for SEIU support, Dean did a series of events with SEIU rank and file members in California, New Hampshire, and up here in Washington.

Your editor attended a forum on long-term care headlined by Dean at a Seattle community center on October 30, hosted by the long-term care workers of SEIU Local 775.

To these eyes, what is appealing about Dean is his ability to “speak American” on issues that matter to working people.

Unlike other candidates, who woodenly mention their interest to strengthening workers’ freedom to form unions only after being obviously prompted, Dean spontaneously brings up the issue while talking about how the average family is working harder just to tread water economically, linking their future to their ability to have an real voice through a union. It's an important difference between him and some of his counterparts.

* AP labor reporter Leigh Strope on SEIU, AFSCME, and Dean.
* Strope on other campaigns’ efforts to block the endorsement.
* Baltimore Sun political sage Jules Witcover on Dean and SEIU.

Below: Dean listens to a question from an SEIU member.

Banish Him to Showtime!

Conservative foreign policy hardliner and former Reagan advisor Richard Pipes on the Gipper:

Departing from current Reaganolatry, Pipes depicts a man of strong conviction but shallow intellect, crestfallen when a gathering of Soviet dissidents was already familiar with his full repertoire of Communist jokes and often "stumped" by policy discussions."

I was surprised to see how little deference [Deputy Chief of Staff Michael] Deaver and [Chief of Staff James] Baker showed Reagan," Pipes writes. "They seemed to treat him rather like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take very seriously."