Diatribes of Jay: Digital Unions

Killing the Dems’ Second-Tranche Debates: Four Predictions
It’s nice to be able to make predictions that are almost slam-dunks. So here, some three hours before the debates begin, are four dismal but probably accurate predictions: 1. During the first half-hour, the conflict-crazed commercial-media moderators will ask the Dems to respond to Trump’s recent racist jabs at Elijah Cummings and “The Squad.” In so doing, they will foment division among the Dems and allow Trump, who is not even there, effectively to control the substance of the part of the debate that most viewers will watch. 2. The moderators will bring up impeachment early in the debate, thereby encouraging conflict between the Dems running for president and the Dems running the House. 3. Both of these discussions will distract the candidates and their audience from what the Dems ought to be debating and effectively ruin the debate as an “informercial” for the Dems. 4. Even after a second debacle of this sort, the Dems, hobbled by tradition, inertia and lack of imagination, will continue to arrange debates run by commercial pundits, foregoing the chance to put on their own show on the issues on which they can win. All we can hope for is that Boeing and the FAA don’t do something similar with the 737 Max.

For suggestions how to fix, not trash, America by adjusting corporate law, click here. For what we can learn from the strong third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, who died recently, click here. For brief analysis of the House’s censure of the President, click here. For reasons not to watch Trump’s empty shows, click here. For an analysis of reparations for the descendants of slaves, click here.

America’s decline in the last three generations roughly mirrors the decline of its labor unions. After we passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, union membership rapidly rose from 13.2% to its all-time peak of 35.5% in 1945. Then it fell, more slowly but roughly continuously, to 11.3% in 2012. By 2018 it stood at 10.5%, a post-Depression low. This is a big reason why we now have the most unequal economy since the First Gilded Age a century ago.

The most rapidly rising cohort of workers is so-called “gig” workers. They get their work over the Internet, on an ad-hoc basis, from firms like Uber, Lyft or DoorDash. They have trouble organizing because they are dispersed, their work is occasional, and some have other jobs.

The law gives gig workers little or no protection. Why? The firms that employ them maintain the fiction that all are “independent contractors,” not “employees,” even though many make a living at their gigs. So far, the law courts have mostly let employers maintain that fiction, although this may be changing.

The decline of unions is not just a problem for workers. It’s a problem of all of us. When workers have no power to bargain collectively, business inevitably exploits them. Bosses and pols make excuses for their exploitation. Often those excuses are so sophistic as to approach the ridiculous, as in the case of DoorDash’s recently reversed tip theft.

Customers of companies that exploit their workers go along because, they are told, exploiting workers brings them lower prices. But here’s the rub: there are a lot more workers than managers. There always will be. When workers as customers go along with exploiting workers to get lower prices, they are, in effect, endorsing their own exploitation as a class. Because workers are the majority, and probably always will be, a system like that morphs into one of general exploitation.

As gig workers work longer hours for less, they have less money to spend on products and services. So the economy slows, giving business more reason (a lower volume of sales) to raise prices and slow commerce further. The result is a race to the bottom and a rush of unemployed and underemployed workers toward the safety net.

Such a system produces the opposite effect of Henry Ford’s unilateral 1914 raise in workers’ wages, to the then-unheard-of sum of $5 a day. That raise let Ford’s workers afford to buy the cars they made. It led directly to our American consumer society, the first in human history. Now the decline of unions has let that consumer society decline, too, by permitting a decline in wages and working conditions and the current “race to the bottom” in our digital economy.

The sad effects are not just economic. They are moral as well. As consumers, workers are told to demand low prices, even at the cost of exploiting other workers. All this is said to promote economic “efficiency,” just like the sale of jobs and our factories to China. The resulting vicious circle downward is a moral and human perversion of the first order. That and massive student debt are two reasons why many college students now have to depend on food stamps or food banks to eat.

The price we all pay is not just loss of our industrial base to China. It’s a loss of social cohesion and public spirit. We no longer look out for each other as fellow Americans and fellow human beings. We no longer have a sense of common purpose, or the same sensitivity to fairness and social justice that has characterized Anglo-American society since Magna Carta. Instead, we think it right to seek every possible advantage, including sneaky and unfair ones, because, we are told, doing so is “efficient.”

Selfishness, we are told, is not just a vice to be avoided, but right and proper. No wonder we are splitting into warring tribes, incited by our most divisive president ever!

How can we reverse this vicious cycle, this “race to the bottom” as workers (in their capacity as consumers) exploit other workers or themselves, leading to lower wages, more miserable working conditions, and greater so-called “efficiency”?

One way might be strengthening the safety net, for example, by increasing welfare payments or reducing eligibility requirements, or by raising the minimum wage. But in a society in which we condition dog to eat dog, it’s hard to get public support for any of that. And corporate largesse, like Amazon’s recent unilateral wage increase, is sporadic and unreliable. It does nothing to cure the moral sickness of preaching exploitation as “efficiency” and therefore an economic good.

So what else can we do? Enter the “digital union.”

Suppose our workers organize digitally, over the Internet. Suppose we encourage them to do so. We might do so because Americans respect self-reliance and self-help above all. When workers organize and so improve their own wages and conditions of work, they deserve, and might receive, the respect that labor seeks, as well as an adequate living.

That was the way it was at the height of American industry, some two generations ago. Then the big auto workers’ unions, negotiating with the “Big Three” auto makers, set the tone for worker-management relations throughout the economy.

Sadly, that era is gone. We killed it by offshoring manufacturing and taking a sharp turn toward the right. We let Fox and other propaganda organs convince workers to vote against their own economic interests. Now, gig-economy firms, which rose from nothing to great wealth and power in less than a decade, seem to be putting the final nail in the coffin of American organized labor.

But wait a minute! Didn’t the gig-economy unicorns win big by organizing “independent contractors” (often a euphemism for “employees”) to work in dispersed locations, at irregular hours, at will over the Internet? Then why can’t labor organizers do the same thing? Why can’t labor unions go digital?

The dirty little secret of anti-labor legislation over the last two generations is that it bloodied traditional unions but has not—and cannot—kill the basic idea of organizing labor. True, the law now prevents unions from forcing nonmembers to pay dues, even if they get the benefit of union organizing and bargaining. That rule weakens unions as traditionally organized.

But our First Amendment precludes government from gagging free speech or limiting the free association of citizens. And our Supreme Court, having equated money with speech when corporations spend it, would be hard pressed to justify applying a different rule to labor unions. So any law restricting labor unions’ rights to organize and collect dues over the Internet would be subject to legal challenge and likely to fail.

Crowd-funding Websites already have shown the way. They have supported everything from small business ventures to paying for an individual’s education and compensating individuals for perceived injustices. Hordes of small, easily-affordable contributions have put pols like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren among the leaders in well-financed campaigns. Why not support collective bargaining similarly?

Digital unions for gig workers would be easy to set up. Those workers get their jobs over the Internet, so they are already online. All they need is a place to go. They need a site in cyberspace where they can share their stories and their beefs, organize, and begin to bargain collectively with their digital bosses, who, up to now, have had every advantage, not just in cash, but in communication too.

From gig workers, digital unions could spread to others. There would be no need to organize plant by plant, as in the last century’s tedious and dilatory process. Online, digital unions could begin to organize nationally, or even internationally, from the outset. As membership rose in numbers, so would dues. And a national or international presence would attract attention and news coverage, allowing growth of unions to “go viral.”

The social-media model of many-to-many communications is ideal for digital unions. Under that model, workers could organize organically, by plant, by trade, by field, by region, by city or by district, as they chose. They could even organize by Website. Facebook’s or Amazon’s employees and contractors could put telling pressure on those giant monopolists—a pressure that so far has eluded both government and our civil courts.

Likely it would take no more than a million dollars to set up a first-class digital-union website on the social media model. With the history of Facebook’s privacy and other blunders in mind, that site could be independent of Facebook and ultimately a competitor, with a far better and more intuitive interface. Its success would help curtail Facebook’s monopoly power and vastly improve the community image of social media.

Where could the start-up money come from? It might come from progressive organizations seeking to save our labor force from modern digital serfdom. It might come from existing labor organizations. It might come from individual donors like Tom Steyer, who recognize that no free nation can long survive with a labor force of serfs. Or it could be crowded-funded by workers themselves, who recognize that collective bargaining is a healthy and time-tested means by which labor achieves fairness, justice and a decent living.

If management has learned to exploit the Internet and the gig economy to get part-time serfs to do its work, can labor unions formed and run over the Internet be far behind? By saving our workers from digital serfdom, they might save our democracy, too.

Footnote: These figures are for all labor, including workers in the “public sector,” i.e., federal, state and local government. The figures for private-sector labor are even more dismal. For example, the rate of unionization of private-sector workers in 2012 was only 6.6%, just more than half the rate for labor as a whole.

Endnote: the Wal Mart fallacy. I call this the “Wal Mart fallacy.” The oligarchs argue that everyone is better off if China makes the goods sold at Wal Mart because they will be cheaper. But as the prices go down, so do the profits (at the same percentage of price) and therefore the wages that Wal Mart can pay. As domestic factories move to China, and Americans work at Wal Mart at lower wages, fewer and fewer workers can afford even the lower-priced Chinese products sold there. So the notion that all this makes everyone better off is, in Mark Twain’s words, “greatly exaggerated.”

Henry Ford knew how to make a virtuous circle, rather than this vicious one: by paying workers more so they can afford to buy the things they make, even “big ticket” items like cars. In the absence of many more enlightened business leaders like Ford and Bezos, Web-enhanced collective bargaining can achieve much the same thing.

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Diatribes of Jay

29 July 2019

Digital Unions

Killing the Dems’ Second-Tranche Debates: Four Predictions

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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