Twin Cities Daily Planet (https://www.tcdailyplanet.net/author/rachleff/page/2/)
Thursday’s march in Saint Paul commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington expressed the historic interconnections of the labor movement and the civil rights struggle. While Continue Reading
Clybourne Park is a significant play. It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and, in 2012, was awarded the Tony Award for best Broadway drama. A cursory glance over the schedules for regional theater in the past two years suggests that it is the most widely produced play in the country. The Guthrie has made a major investment in the play, from hiring a top notch production team and cast to building an enormous, complex set, and booking the play for a lengthy run of eight weeks. On the night I attended, most of the apparently full house (around 700) at the McGuire Proscenium Stage—almost all of whom were, like me, white—loved the play. Continue Reading
Music-loving and hockey-loving Minnesotans find themselves holding tickets to non-events these days. The management of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, along with the management of the National Hockey League, have joined the management of the American Crystal Sugar Company in Moorhead in locking out their employees. What in the world is going on? We Minnesotans suddenly have front row seats to the unfolding drama of 21st century labor-management relations.
For nearly four full decades, workers and unions in the United States have been experiencing a steadily downward slide. Since the mid-1970s, the percentage of workers organized has plummeted, the power of unions has shriveled, and workers’ compensation and economic security has declined.Most of us work harder and longer, earn less, and worry more about our futures. This has been a consequence of the redirection of our political economy away from the Keynesian policies and practices (which relied on demand by workers and the government as the means to generate growth) that had been dominant since WWII to the neoliberal policies and practices (cut the costs of doing business, reduce taxes, cut labor costs, cut government, improve profitability for business) which became standard during the Reagan years—and since.This new way of organizing government and business crashed in 2007, dropping us into the Great Recession. With this collapse has come the irony that many political decision-makers continue to preach the policies that got us into trouble in the first place.Way back in 1984, when running for President, Jesse Jackson said: “Let those who had the party pay for it.” After another dozen-plus years of a party in which the rich have gotten richer while workers have lost wages, pensions, jobs, homes, and the ability to educate their children, we hear loud political voices—with little pushback from the media—continue to advocate shrinking government, cutting taxes, and, above all, reducing the remaining power of unions. And they have been disturbingly effective.Conservative and Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterm elections led to a new round of challenges to the long-beleaguered labor movement. Continue Reading
With the Koch Brothers footing his campaign, Scott Walker assumed the governorship of Wisconsin on January 7, 2011. Walker’s first action as Governor was obeisance to the corporate class that that put him in office: he gave $140 million in tax breaks to businesses, including WalMart, and then screamed “budget crisis!” This move allowed him to introduce his “Budget Repair Bill,” which would require state workers to pay $5,000 – $7,000 a year towards their health insurance benefits and pensions. Uninformed, public sector-bashing Walker supporters see this as an overdue comedown in public sector workers’ unfair advantages. But the scope of Walker’s bill is much broader than public sector wages, benefits and unions.It is a salvo in the broader Republican war against working people and all unions, proposing radical positions in the Right’s plan to create a permanent under-class of non-unionized workers: 1) reduce public employee collective bargaining strictly to wages; 2) prohibit all public employee strikes (the National Guard is on stand-by in Madison); 3) eliminate automatic deductions for union dues; 4) limit collective bargaining contracts to one year; and finally, 5) require union members to vote each year to “re-certify” bargaining units. Continue Reading
For more than a century and half, the East Side has been a center for working class and immigrant politics. Now, facing the challenges posed by the Great Recession and the growth of anti-immigrant politics in Minnesota, it is important that we learn our history and consider its lessons.
What follows is Peter Rachleff’s letter to José Arturo Ibarra, a San Francisco-based Northwest flight attendant who successfully led the fight to reject the contract that demanded “a 30 and 40 percent cut in pay and benefits” and givebacks on everything from health insurance to work rules. — Ed.
Dear José:
I have been meaning to write to you — and to your sister and brother NWA flight attendants — ever since I learned of your vote rejecting the contract proposal. As a labor historian and activist based in the Twin Cities, I have long closely followed the labor situation at Northwest Airlines.