Joe Kenehan Center

Why populism is working (see post below)

Here’s a perfect example of why economic populism is resonating with so many voters.

If ordinary people pool some money together and want to run an advertisement about a public issue, a major TV network deems it “too controversial.”

But if Halliburton or Wal-Mart decide to run TV ads to beat down some simmering bad publicity, the major media is all too eager to hand them a megaphone:

* Halliburton counters bad publicity with US ads

*Wal-Mart's Damage Control: Longtime Price Message Takes a Back Seat To Blitz Designed to Mend Reputation

The REAL frontrunner: populism

Regardless of what happens to Howard Dean in the next few weeks, it’s clear that there is one clear victor so far: populism. It’s not even close. Every candidate is talking about concerns of anxious working class families in an uncertain economy: health care, education, and jobs. As Michael Tomasky puts it:

"The fact that all four remaining serious candidates, three of whom have no organizational backing to speak of, are talking populism means that, this year, that message matters to regular voters."

Also, if Kerry continues to gain strength, this Harold Meyerson Washington Post/American Prospect column from the summer of last year is starting to look awfully prescient:

" . . . of all the Democrats, Kerry is probably the best able to win support from all quadrants of the party. In message and manner, Kerry often still fails to connect with his listeners. But if he can put his own house in order, he's the candidate best positioned to unite a party that's not been this angry at itself since 1968."

Learning the Lesson of LA

As the Southern California workers continue their fight to protect access to affordable health care, LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik analyses how the campaign has gone so far.

Hiltzik supports the grocery workers but is critical of the union movement’s strategy in this fight. Unfortunately, some of his points are valid.

Hiltzik points out that in general the union movement hasn’t adjusted to how the economy now works. In Southern California, regional and local unions are fighting against an industry that is now dominated by national corporations like Safeway and Kroger:

“[A] group of regional bargaining units are overmatched by three nationwide chains, which can continue raking in profits around the country while their Southern California locations are bereft of shoppers. [Union leaders] Icaza and Conger say they're surprised at the absence of the collegial we-can-work-it-out atmosphere that prevailed at negotiations in past contract cycles. Yet that's what happens when labor policy is made not by executives who live in the same communities where they've provoked a labor war, but by corporate bureaucrats ensconced thousands of miles away.”

Most unions are structured to put most of their resources into localized campaigns. Back when industries were dominated by local and regional businesses, this worked reasonably well.

But across the economy, more and more industries—including retail, banking, restaurants, tourism, journalism, health care, and even funeral services—are controlled by national (and multinational) corporations.

These more powerful companies have used their strength to push down standards for wages and benefits, shifting the risk and cost of retirement, health care, and other needs onto working people. For evidence of this, here’s another important LA Times story on an Economic Policy Institute study that documents how the jobs that are being created in the Bush economy are mostly in lower-paid, sketchy benefit categories.

Many people within the union movement are putting forward new ideas about updating our outmoded organizations to give working people a better chance to fight back—to not just defend a dwindling base of quality union jobs but create new good jobs in industries where decent wages and benefits simply don’t exist.

These ideas are controversial within the movement, although too much of this criticism is tendentious carping rather than real discussion.

At any rate, the hard fight that the Southern California grocery workers have been forced into is an example of the kind of battle unions need to learn how to win. We need to remake our movement to make sure we can.

AFL-CIO Takes Command of Southern California Grocery Strike

The national labor federation is stepping in to back the grocery strikers in California.

Because the key issue of the strike—affordable health benefits—is such a major concern for working people across the country, everyone loses if the grocery industry succeeds in lowering standards for these folks in California.

Richard Trumka, the former Mineworkers president, and Ron Judd, a respected organizer who helped lead the unions’ participation in the Seattle WTO demonstrations, will lead a larger campaign to support the grocery workers.

The workers have shown astounding courage in fighting back during this strike/lockout, and it's having an effect on the stores. The National Enquirer and other tabloids say their sales are way down as shoppers stay away from the stores.

State of 21 Jump Street

In my 10th grade Health/PE class, our teacher got in the habit of burning extra class time with repeated viewings of an old “21 Jump Street” episode that centered on the horrors of steroid use.

Sure, it was a pleasant enough diversion. But watching Dom Deluise’s son crack the case (several times) was also one of those irritating high school moments when everyone in the room knew that we were wasting time on something that didn’t matter then and never would.

There is exactly one guy from my class who ended up playing professional sports. Maybe he’s had to come to grips with the harrowing temptation of performance enhancing drugs, but for the rest of us it’s never been much of an issue.

So it was a bit jarring to hear the President of the United States drag the entire country into one of those colossal waste-of-time moments, making it a point during the state of the union address to rail against steroids.

In a speech where he nearly ignored real problems like the lack of good jobs and ran through tired ideas that won’t work to bring down the skyrocketing cost of health care, the steroids bit was a bizarre moment when Bush seemed genuinely passionate.

Maybe it was an opportunity for Bush to audition to become baseball commissioner. Maybe it was a cynical move to ensure that Bush got on “Sportscenter” as well as “Nightline.”

Either way, it was embarrassing and a frustrating a waste of time, like sitting in a class where the teacher doesn’t even pretend to care.

For some more useful thinking on how we improve the state of the union, these two pieces are helpful.

* Jacob Hacker on the problem that is a much larger concern for average families than juiced athletes: “an increasing shift of economic risk from government and corporations onto workers and their families.”

* And maybe there’s another reason the president doesn’t want to talk much about jobs: “The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity.”

Borders Workers Book A Victory

Congratulations to Borders workers.

Employees at Borders Books' flagship store in Ann Arbor have ended their strike and ratified their first union contract. Staff at another store in Minneapolis are still negotiating.

(Worth reading: a good profile of one of the rank and file leaders from the Minnesota store.)

Why Is Airbus Ahead of Boeing?

For the first time, Airbus has moved ahead of Boeing in terms of total airplanes delivered.

According to conventional American wisdom about business and competitiveness, this simply isn’t possible, of course, because Airbus is mired in the backwards, statist Europe and doomed to irrelevancy.

Sadly, for a lot of laid off Boeing workers in Washington State, it hasn’t turned out that way.

While Boeing was wasting time with its bizarre and ultimately pointless decision to move its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, Airbus was creating more innovative airplanes. And instead of meeting the challenge, Boeing has resorted to grasping at dubious schemes like its corrupt tanker deal with the Air Force.

How did Boeing stumble? At its heart, Boeing's slip can be blamed on a complacent leadership that was content to coast on past success and blame any problems on the usual suspects: government and unions. (Nevermind that Washington State taxpayers alone are giving Boeing $3.2 billion in tax breaks to bribe the company to build its next plane here. And somehow Airbus is succeeding while working with much stronger unions in Europe.)

It's more than worth noting that Boeing’s disgraced ex-CEO Phil Condit, who resigned in the aftermath of revelations of corruption in the tanker deal, gave himself in a charter membership in the cult of the CEO. Condit—unlike previous Boeing executives who maintained a fairly modest lifestyle—inflated his own pay and did his part to stimulate the luxury goods sector.

According to a devastating BusinessWeek profile, Condit, who masterminded the idea to move his desk to Chicago, developed a "taste for lavish living. In the early '90s, he built a massive medieval-style mansion outside Seattle, replete with a custom miniature train that chugged from room to room, delivering drinks to guests. Condit hosted elaborate parties that often included poetry readings and evenings of Camelot themes, featuring characters from King Arthur.” He also upgraded his small corporate jet to a customized 737.

Don’t expect to read much about it in our homer business press, but Airbus’ pummeling of Boeing isn’t an isolated fluke. Overall, Germany has pulled ahead of the United States as the world’s leading exporter.

More Overtime Outrages

It’s bad enough that Bush is ignoring bi-partisan majorities in both the House and Senate and pushing through his plan to take away federal overtime rights for 8 million working people.

Bush’s pathetic explanation for this was vague nonsense about “modernizing” overtime laws and to change the subject to his plan to expand overtime rights to more low-paid working people.

This wasn’t much of an explanation, because everyone agrees that lower-wage workers should be made eligible for overtime.

But now Bush’s Labor Department is providing advice to employers about how to avoid paying overtime to the lower-wage workers he supposedly was trying to help in the first place.

One can only hope that this becomes an issue next fall.