Union Membership Quotes

The line between the Rebel and Union element in Georgetown was so marked that it led to divisions even in the churches. There were churches in that part of Ohio where treason was preached regularly, and where, to secure membership, hostility to the government, to the war and to the liberation of the slaves, was far more essential than a belief in the authenticity or credibility of the Bible. There were men in Georgetown who filled all the requirements for membership in these churches.

The Constitution says: "We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The meaning of this is simply We, the people of the United States, acting freely and voluntarily as individuals, consent and agree that we will cooperate with each other in sustaining such a government as is provided for in this Constitution. The necessity for the consent of "the people" is implied in this declaration. The whole authority of the Constitution rests upon it. If they did not consent, it was of no validity. Of course it had no validity, except as between those who actually consented. No one's consent could be presumed against him, without his actual consent being given, any more than in the case of any other contract to pay money, or render service. And to make it binding upon any one, his signature, or other positive evidence of consent, was as necessary as in the case of any other-contract. If the instrument meant to say that any of "the people of the United States" would be bound by it, who did not consent, it was a usurpation and a lie. The most that can be inferred from the form, "We, the people," is, that the instrument offered membership to all "the people of the United States;" leaving it for them to accept or refuse it, at their pleasure.

And on the other side of the ledger, unions like the Teamsters often employed their own muscle, their own reigns of terror, including bombings, arsons, beatings, and murders. The warfare and violence were not just between labor and management. It was often between rival unions vying for the same membership. Sadly, it was often violence directed at rank-and-file union members who urged democratic reform of their unions. The

The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The

The Danes’ fondness for clubs and associations is shared by their Nordic neighbors. The Swedes have an even greater trade-union membership and in their spare time are particularly keen on voluntary work: they call this instinct for diligent self-improvement organisationssverige, or “organization Sweden.” The Finns are famed for their after-work classes, particularly their amateur classical musicianship and fondness for joining orchestras, while the Norwegians’ love of communal outdoor pursuits, most famously cross-country skiing, is one of their defining characteristics.

The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.

The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow’s bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. Kiev’s membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family; but perhaps no price is too great to pay to for being part of glorious Europe and the West!

The Empire would love to rip Ukraine from Moscow’s bosom, evict the Russian Black Sea Fleet, and establish a US military and/or NATO presence on Russia’s border. Kiev’s membership of the European Union would then not be far off; after which the country could embrace the joys of neoconservatism, receiving the benefits of the standard privatization-deregulation-austerity package and join Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain as an impoverished orphan of the family;

Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.

But there is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.

Today each nation flies its own flag, a symbolic embodiment of its territorial status. But patriotism is not enough. The ancient tribal hunter lurking inside each citizen finds himself unsatisfied by membership of such a vast conglomeration of individuals, most of whom are totally unknown to him personally. He does his best to feel that he shares a common territorial defence with them all, but the scale of the operation has become inhuman. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging with a tribe of fifty million or more. His answer is to form sub-groups, nearer to his ancient pattern, smaller and more personally known to him - the local club, the teenage gang, the union, the specialist society, the sports association, the political party, the college fraternity, the social clique, the protest group, and the rest. Rare indeed is the individual who does not belong to at least one of these splinter groups, and take from it a sense of tribal allegiance and brotherhood. Typical of all these groups is the development of Territorial Signals - badges, costumes, headquarters, banners, slogans, and all the other displays of group identity. This is where the action is, in terms of tribal territorialism, and only when a major war breaks out does the emphasis shift upwards to the higher group level of the nation.

I arrived at this conclusion partly because, like most people who have latterly concluded that membership of the European Union provided the United Kingdom with rather more benefits than problems, I didn’t have particularly strong convictions about the issue until after the decision to leave it had been taken. The more I read and researched as part of the preparation for my show, the more I realised how sketchy my previous understanding had been. And when ‘no deal’ began to seem possible, speaking to people in the transport and haulage industries who understood precisely how catastrophic it would be left me as embarrassed as I was shocked.

Labor unions can and often do provide useful services for their members—negotiating the terms of their employment, representing them with respect to grievances, giving them a feeling of belonging and participating in a group activity, among others. As believers in freedom, we favor the fullest opportunity for voluntary organization of labor unions to perform whatever services their members wish, and are willing to pay for, provided they respect the rights of others and refrain from using force. However, unions and comparable groups such as the professional associations have not relied on strictly voluntary activities and membership with respect to their major proclaimed objective—improving the wages of their members. They have succeeded in getting government to grant them special privileges and immunities, which have enabled them to benefit some of their members and officials at the expense of other workers and all consumers. In the main, the persons benefited have had decidedly higher incomes than the persons harmed.

Maastricht had three significant side-effects. One of them was the unforeseen boost it gave to NATO. Under the restrictive terms of the Treaty it was clear (as the French at least had intended) that the newly liberated countries of eastern Europe could not possibly join the European Union in the immediate future—neither their fragile legal and financial institutions nor their convalescent economies were remotely capable of operating under the strict fiscal and other regulations the Union’s members had now imposed upon all present and future signatories. Instead, it was suggested in the corridors of Brussels that Poland, Hungary and their neighbours might be offered early membership of NATO as a sort of compensation: an interim prize. The symbolic value of extending NATO in this way was obviously considerable, which is why it was immediately welcomed in the new candidate member-states. The practical benefits were less obvious (unlike the damage to relations with Moscow which was real and immediate). But because Washington had reasons of its own for favouring the expansion of the North Atlantic Defense community, a first group of central European nations was duly admitted to NATO a few years later.

In 1932 Pravda published a short story by Ilf and Petrov, titled 'How Robinson Was Created,' about a magazine editor who commissions a Soviet Robinson Crusoe from a writer named Moldavantsev. The writer submits a manuscript about a Soviet young man triumphing over nature on a desert island. The editor likes the story, but says that a Soviet Robinson would be unthinkable without a trade union committee consisting of a chairman, two permanent members, and a female activist to collect membership dues. The committee, in its turn, would be unthinkable without a safe deposit box, a chairman's bell, a pitcher of water, and a tablecloth ('red or green, it doesn't matter; I don't want to limit your artistic imagination'), and broad masses of working people. The author objects by saying that so many people could not possible be washed ashore by a single ocean wave: 'Why a wave?' asked the editor, suddenly surprised. 'How else would the masses end up on the island? It is a a desert island, after all!' 'Who said it was a desert island? You're getting me confused. Okay, so there's an island, or, even better, a peninsula. It's safer that way. And that's where a series of amusing, original, and interesting adventures will take place. There'll be some trade union work going on, but not enough. The female activist will expose certain deficiencies - in the area of due collection, for example. She'll be supported by the broad masses. And then there be the repentant chairman. At the end you could have a general meeting. That would be quite effective artistically. I guess that's about it.' 'But - what about Robinson?' stammered Moldavantsev. 'Oh yeah ..., thank for reminding me. I'm not wild about Robinson. Just drop him. He's a silly, whiny, totally unnecessary character.

In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent. Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs. More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members. From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment. Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater. This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms. When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed. To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.

There's a misconception that because teachers unions are against certain reforms, then teachers must be against those reforms. That’s anything but true. In D.C., while the national teachers union opposed the changes we wanted to make in the union contract, 80 percent of the membership ended up voting for it.

Republicans’ cultural and racial appeals. Union membership, once a bulwark for Democrats in states like West Virginia, declined. Being part of a union is an important part of someone’s personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that’s gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers—and voting accordingly—and start identifying and voting more as white, male, rural, or all of the above. Just look at Don Blankenship, the coal boss who joined the protest against me on his way to prison. In recent years, even as the coal industry has struggled and workers have been laid off, top executives like him have pocketed huge pay increases, with compensation rising 60 percent between 2004 and 2016. Blankenship endangered his workers, undermined their union, and polluted their rivers and streams, all while making big profits and contributing millions to Republican candidates. He should have been the least popular man in West Virginia even before he was convicted in the wake of the death of twenty-nine miners. Instead, he was welcomed by the pro-Trump protesters in Williamson. One of them told a reporter that he’d vote for Blankenship for President if he ran. Meanwhile, I pledged to strengthen the laws to protect workers and hold bosses like Blankenship accountable—the fact that he received a jail sentence of just one year was appalling—yet I was the one being protested.

The end of the war marked the end of the bands. Glenn Miller had been lost over the English Channel in 1944. Artie Shaw had disbanded and regrouped and disbanded again. Though name leaders like Goodman and Basie and Harry James would always find work, the financial base eroded and the labor troubles lingered. When Petrillo called a second strike in 1948, the die was cast. Perhaps, as Barnouw said, the cause was just and the problem serious, but in the end the strikes hurt no one more than the union’s own membership. As Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.

(If businesses had a genuine interest in their employees’ happiness, perhaps the single biggest thing they could do would be to encourage them to unionize. Wide-scale research shows that union membership is a large and significant predictor of happiness, with union members consistently reporting far greater well-being than their nonunion peers, independent of income.)8 Indeed

Yet the interests of the international statesman may not always align with the ‘national interest’, particularly if the statesman is now also a member of some international organization that provides him with a whole bunch of new incentives.21 At that point, the statesman’s role is in danger of becoming disturbingly ambiguous. Does the new international club provide a convenient scapegoat for the delivery of unpopular measures at home, as happened with the imposition of austerity measures in Southern European countries during the Eurozone crisis that began in 2010? Does the homogeneity of view associated with club membership – for example, adherence to the Washington Consensus or acceptance of inflation-targeting conventions – undermine otherwise legitimate protests at home? Does the new club limit the powers of domestic government through the growth of, for example, a supranational legal authority? And what happens if the views of the international statesman – and the new club he has now joined – are rejected by the nation he is supposed to represent? None of these issues is new. The scale of the problem is, however, bigger than ever before. Even as markets – in trade, capital and labour – have become ever more globalized, the institutions able to govern those markets have become ever more fragmented. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, there were 51 member nations. In 2011, the year in which South Sudan joined, there were 193. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a binary choice between what might loosely be described as US-style free-market capitalism and Moscow-inspired communism.

Traditional structures of social and economic support slowly weakened; no longer was it possible for a man to follow his father and grandfather into a manufacturing job, or to join the union and start on the union ladder of wages. Marriage was no longer the only socially acceptable way to form intimate partnerships, or to rear children. People moved away from the security of legacy religions or the churches of their parents and grandparents, toward churches that emphasized seeking an identity, or replaced membership with the search for connection or economic success (Wuthnow, 1988). These changes left people with less structure when they came to choose their careers, their religion, and the nature of their family lives. When such choices succeed, they are liberating; when they fail, the individual can only hold himself or herself responsible. In the worst cases of failure, this is a Durkheim-like recipe for suicide. We can see this as a failure to meet early expectations or, more fundamentally, as a loss of the structures that give life a meaning.10 Durkheim,

The strike had been a major national event. It was a tumultuous period in my life and in the history of the union. It would be a long time before the membership had the stomach for another national strike. If anyone had told me in 1971 that when that time came I would have the responsibility for settling it, I’d have thought they’d taken leave of their senses.

68 The Knights’ vision of an encompassing union across gender, race, and skill level quickly gave way to the craft union model of the building trades and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), based on limited membership among those who possessed specific craft skills.

assumed a new role as a consequence of British membership in the European Union—changing fundamentally the traditional constitution—

What we have lost to a very great degree is the possibility of resistance, confrontation or reform of taking the struggle for freedom back into the workplace. Many of the private sector jobs worst hit by long hours and rising stress have a low rate of trade union membership. The number of workplaces with high union density and well-established collective bargaining fell from 47 per cent in 1980 to only 17 per cent in 1998.26 Two-thirds of all workplaces have no union presence at all.

businesses had a genuine interest in their employees’ happiness, perhaps the single biggest thing they could do would be to encourage them to unionize. Wide-scale research shows that union membership is a large and significant predictor of happiness, with union members consistently reporting far greater well-being than their nonunion peers, independent of income.)

Every globalist has the same plan for a global “great reset.” That includes those involved with the World Economic Forum (membership includes the leaders of many nations), the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the European Union, and central bankers. Another catchphrase for “global reset” is “build back better.” You might hear it referred to as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” A quarter century ago, this was called the “new world order.

According to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2012 (see the Introduction) Germany is today the only member of the EU in which most people, 59 per cent, think their country has been helped by European integration. Majorities or near majorities in most countries surveyed now believe that the economic integration of Europe has actually weakened their economies. This is the opinion in Greece (70 per cent), France (63 per cent), Britain (61 per cent), Italy (61 per cent), the Czech Republic (59 per cent), and Spain (50 per cent). The survey data also show that the crisis of the euro has triggered a full-blown crisis of public confidence: in the economy, in the future, in the benefits of European economic integration, in membership in the EU, in the euro and in the free-market system. Again, Europeans largely oppose further fiscal austerity to deal with the crisis; they are divided on bailing out indebted nations; and oppose Brussels’ oversight of national budgets. In short, the European project is a major casualty of the ongoing sovereign-debt crisis: we are witnessing the failure of the attempt to integrate Europe through a ‘positive’ law that has neither produced the promised benefits for the people, nor has it been enacted by the people itself.

The core theme that spans much of Springsteen’s working-class studies is the disconnection—real and feared—of working people from the things that ground them: job, family, home, and community. “I live now only with strangers,” he sings in “Streets of Fire,” “I talk to only strangers / I walk with angels that have no place.” As Springsteen explained, “I think what happened during the seventies was that, first of all, the hustle became legitimized”—and he did not mean the disco dance. By the time of his follow up The River (1980), when his character receives his “union card and a wedding coat” for his nineteenth birthday, that union card was a symbol of a failure to get out, a source of entrapment. What was a source of material liberation in the 1930s, membership in a trade union, had become a symbol of those not chosen, those left behind.49

The twentieth century was not the finest epoch in Southern Baptist history with respect to ecclesiological practice. As urban churches increased in numbers of members, stress was placed on church efficiency. In the admission of members, there was less care and greater laxity, while corrective church discipline was abandoned and the use of church covenants became less frequent. Numerous members were inactive and/or nonresident, but their names were kept on church rolls. In larger urban churches, full-time ministers with specialized tasks assisted the pastors so that the “church staff” came to be. Certain other Baptist conventions and unions chose to identify with conciliar ecumenism and its goal of more visible transdenominational union, but the SBC declined to do so—eliciting the unfavorable epithet “problem child of American Protestantism”—and the conciliar movement faded in significance. Later in the century numerous megachurches developed, usually with multiple worship services and multiple sites and with the demise of congregational polity. In the final decades of the century, as Southern Baptists found more affinity with American evangelicals, they found that ecclesiology was a weakness, not a strength of evangelicals. Increasingly moral failure, both in the membership and in the leadership, became common in Southern Baptist churches, with church members having the same percentage of failures as nonmembers.

Humans have natural rights in the state of nature but they do not have civil rights. Civil rights are derived from membership in a society. The Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress after the Civil War knew this. They also knew that, before conferring civil rights, they had to once and for all abolish slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. Republican support for the amendment: 100 percent. Democratic support: 23 percent. Even after the Civil War, only a tiny percentage of Democrats were willing to sign up to permanently end slavery. Most Democrats wanted it to continue. In the following year, on June 13, 1866, the Republican Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision and granting full citizenship and equal rights under the law to blacks. This amendment prohibited states from abridging the “privileges and immunities” of all citizens, from depriving them of “due process of law” or denying them “equal protection of the law.” The Fourteenth Amendment passed the House and Senate with exclusive Republican support. Not a single Democrat either in the House or the Senate voted for it. Two years later, in 1868, Congress with the support of newly-elected Republican president Ulysses Grant passed the Fifteenth Amendment granting suffrage to blacks. The right to vote, it said, cannot be “denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In the Senate, the Fifteenth Amendment passed by a vote of 39 to 13. Every one of the 39 “yes” votes came from Republicans. (Some Republicans like Charles Sumner abstained because they wanted the measure to go even further than it did.) All the 13 “no” votes came from Democrats. In the House, every “yes” vote came from a Republican and every Democrat voted “no.” It is surely a matter of the greatest significance that the constitutional provisions that made possible the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill only entered the Constitution thanks to the Republican Party. Beyond this, the GOP put forward a series of Civil Rights laws to further reinforce black people’s rights to freedom, equality, and social justice. When Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866—guaranteeing to blacks the rights to make contracts and to have the criminal laws apply equally to whites and blacks—the Democrats struck back. They didn’t have the votes in Congress, but they had a powerful ally in President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed the legislation. Now this may seem like an odd act for Lincoln’s vice president, but it actually wasn’t. Many people don’t realize that Johnson wasn’t a Republican; he was a Democrat. Historian Kenneth Stampp calls him “the last Jacksonian.”8 Lincoln put him on the ticket because he was a pro-union Democrat and Lincoln was looking for ways to win the votes of Democrats opposed to secession. Johnson, however, was both a southern partisan and a Democratic partisan. Once the Civil War ended, he attempted to lead weak-kneed Republicans into a new Democratic coalition based on racism and white privilege. Johnson championed the Democratic mantra of white supremacy, declaring, “This is a country for white men and, by God, as long as I am president, it shall be a government of white men.” In his 1867 annual message to Congress, Johnson declared that blacks possess “less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a consistent tendency to relapse into barbarism.”9 These are perhaps the most racist words uttered by an American president, and no surprise, they were uttered by a Democrat.

I fell one time,” Hamill says. “But I was able to tuck and roll like I was taught. I was later made a member of the British Stunt Union—not just a belt buckle, but a full membership.

Last year’s Boeing contract in Washington State saw members of the International Association of Machinists vote down a contract that would transfer their pensions to a 401k plan and increase their healthcare costs with minimal raises over eight years. “Because of the massive takeaways,” Local 751 President Thomas Wroblewski told his members, “the union is adamantly recommending members reject this offer.” After the members voted down the contract by 67 percent, Washington State found $8.5 billion in tax breaks for the company and International President Thomas Buffenbarger stepped in to carry this corporate sweetheart deal through the last mile. With Boeing threatening to move the assembly of the new 777X passenger jet to another state, the International demanded a re-vote and the intimidated membership agreed to the same deal they previously rejected. The collusion of a multinational corporation and the state in transferring billions of dollars of wealth from working-class people into the hands of the rich could hardly have been possible in this case without the assistance of the International leadership. Boeing workers got to keep their jobs—but the fight that they may have been prepared to have with their employer was swiftly shut down.

At Disney World, membership in a union does not guarantee discernible perks. Employees who don’t pay dues are entitled to the same pay and benefits as those who do, since Florida is a “right-to-work” state—or “right-to-freeload,” as union members charge.

In U.S. manufacturing, union membership declined from 19 percent of the workforce in 1921 to 10 percent by 1929.

For two days, Welch outlined the danger at hand. Communist Party membership in the United States had expanded eightfold in the past two decades. (That was unlikely.) The Reds had a secret plan to devalue the dollar to cause economic collapse and societal chaos. The communists were sneaky bastards, he noted. They tended not to use force. They subverted their targets, creeping into political parties, churches, schools, labor unions, other institutions, and governments and

[If] we were to make “recognition of the dictatorship [of the proletariat]” a condition of trade union membership, we should be committing a folly, we should be damaging our influence over the masses, we should be helping the Mensheviks. For the whole task of the Communists is to be able to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them…

In America, particularly in non-unionized workplaces, this sort of chronic understaffing acquires a logic all its own. If you can stand to lose employee weight, you should; if you don’t, you’re leaving profits on the table. Appropriately staffing isn’t a way to create a better work environment; it’s “bloat.” Workplaces attempt to counter the negative effects of understaffing with professional development, bonuses, perks, snacks, therapy dogs, subsidized gym memberships, swag, happy hours, access to meditation apps; the list is truly endless. One HR person told us that she was always amazed that employees complained about stress and overwork but then never took advantage of the perks. It makes sense, though. They don’t have the time. What would really make their lives better isn’t a meditation app, but adding a few more employees without also adding the expectation of more work.

Traditional structures of social and economic support slowly weakened; no longer was it possible for a man to follow his father and grandfather into a manufacturing job, or to join the union and start on the union ladder of wages. Marriage was no longer the only socially acceptable way to form intimate partnerships, or to rear children. People moved away from the security of legacy religions or the churches of their parents and grandparents, toward churches that emphasized seeking an identity, or replaced membership with the search for connection or economic success (Wuthnow, 1988). These changes left people with less structure when they came to choose their careers, their religion, and the nature of their family lives. When such choices succeed, they are liberating; when they fail, the individual can only hold himself or herself responsible. In the worst cases of failure, this is a Durkheim-like recipe for suicide. We can see this as a failure to meet early expectations or, more fundamentally, as a loss of the structures that give life a meaning.10 Durkheim, in his book On Suicide, wrote: It is sometimes said that, by virtue of his psychological make-up, man cannot live unless he attaches himself to an object that is greater than himself and outlives him, and this necessity has been attributed to a supposedly common need not to perish entirely. Life, they say, is only tolerable if one can see some purpose in it, if it has a goal and one that is worth pursuing. But the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end for himself. He is too small a thing. Not only is he confined in space, he is also narrowly limited in time.

Jobs that used to come with some guarantees, even union membership, have been transformed into gigs. Temp workers are not just found driving Ubers; they are in hospitals and universities and insurance companies. The manufacturing sector—still widely mistaken as the fount of good, sturdy, hard-hat jobs—now employs more than a million temp workers. Long-term employment has declined steadily in the private sector, particularly for men, and temp jobs are expected to grow faster than all others over the next several years. Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow or shrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970. For scores of American workers, wages are now wobbly, fluctuating wildly not only year to year but month to month, even week to week.

Héctor Figueroa, 32BJ’s president, was essentially no different from any politician. He knew who voted in union elections, who made noise, who caused trouble. If he was willing to engage with businesses in new ways, all that’d bring him was risk. (In fact, Andy Stern lost his role at SEIU for trying to reach agreements on big issues with businesses, alienating the left flank of his membership in the process.) Working with Handy meant clarifying New York’s independent contractor laws. That’d mean potentially weakening labor’s grip over defining who was and wasn’t a full-time employee.

The “Chinese question” found its answer at the national level, in the debate over a California-led plan for Chinese exclusion. In reconstructing the United States, California was emerging as the regional swing vote, just as the state’s enfranchised settlers became single-issue voters. The transcontinental railroad solidified the state’s membership in the Union, which was far from a given considering how often the territory had changed hands in the previous few decades as well as its continual political instability and foreign interference in Mexico, not to mention the temporary sundering of the United States itself. California’s Unionist majority helped repair that split, cutting off the Confederacy’s western tendency. But Unionist didn’t necessarily mean faithfully devoted to principles of abolition democracy and the spirit of the slave revolution. The race-based exclusion of Chinese from the country flew in the face of Reconstruction and the black-led attempt to create a pluralist, racially equal nation. But that seeming contradiction was no contradiction at all for California’s white Jacksonians, because they maintained a consistent position in favor of free white labor and free white labor only. As for the regionally aligned party duopoly, California’s vote swung against the South during the war, but it could swing back. Federal civil rights legislation meant to force the ex-Confederate states to integrate also applied to settler California’s relations with the Chinese, which left the southern and western delegations looking for a solution to their linked nonwhite labor problems. If former slaves and their children were able to escape not just their commodity status but also their working role in the regional economy, southern planters threatened to bring in Chinese laborers to replace them, just as planters had in the West Indies. That would blow the exclusion plan out of the water, which gave California an incentive to compromise with the South. These two racist blocs came to an agreement that permanently set the direction of the modern American project: They agreed to cede the South to the Confederate redeemers and exclude the Chinese.

The line between the Rebel and Union element in Georgetown was so marked that it led to divisions even in the churches. There were churches in that part of Ohio where treason was preached regularly, and where, to secure membership, hostility to the government, to the war and to the liberation of the slaves, was far more essential than a belief in the authenticity or credibility of the Bible. There were men in Georgetown who filled all the requirements for membership in these churches. Yet this far-off western village, with a population, including old and young, male and female, of about one thousand—about enough for the organization of a single regiment if all had been men capable of bearing arms—furnished the Union army four general officers and one colonel, West Point graduates, and nine generals and field officers of Volunteers, that I can think of. Of the graduates from West Point, all had citizenship elsewhere at the breaking out of the rebellion, except possibly General A. V. Kautz, who had remained in the army from his graduation. Two of the colonels also entered the service from other localities. The other seven, General McGroierty, Colonels White, Fyffe, Loudon and Marshall, Majors King and Bailey, were all residents of Georgetown when the war broke out, and all of them, who were alive at the close, returned there. Major Bailey was the cadet who had preceded me at West Point. He was killed in West Virginia, in his first engagement. As far as I know, every boy who has entered West Point from that village since my time has been graduated.

The result was the common agricultural policy, with prices of the main products supported at levels decided by the Council of Ministers, through variable levies on imports from outside the Community and purchase of surplus production into storage at the support level. Farmers’ incomes were bolstered by high prices paid by the consumer, together with subsidies from the Community’s taxpayers to finance the surpluses that resulted from the high prices. While this was tenable in the EEC’s early years, once the UK became a member new tensions arose. The British model of free trade had meant that prices had been much lower, so membership of the CAP meant a triple blow of: higher prices for food; high levels of British contributions to the budget because of import levies on foodstuffs; and low receipts from the budget because of the small size of its agricultural sector.

Nor will there be freedom of movement without border checks throughout the EU while Britain, Denmark, and Ireland retain their controls. Brexit might resolve the British exception, and possibly the Irish one too, although this will depend on the post-membership arrangements for free movement on the island of Ireland. However, the Danish referendum in 2015 that confirmed its opt-out status makes it very unlikely that this will change, especially given the (increasingly protracted) ‘temporary’ suspensions of Schengen provisions by various states in the wake of the refugee crisis since 2016.

As far as the Balkans were concerned, the result of the EU’s initial failure was a return to the drawing board and the production of a Stability Pact for South-Eastern Europe. This overarching set of policies, designed to strengthen democracy, human rights, and economic reform, was later followed by Stability and Association Agreements between the EU and each of the West Balkan states. This is backed by the EU’s Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, which provides the West Balkans with some €500 million per year. With the slow stabilization of the region, the EU has been able to offer membership to Croatia; full candidate status to Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia; and a provisional status to the others with Stability and Association Agreements, thus providing a strong incentive for local politicians to follow the example of the other Central and Eastern Europeans.

The three Baltic republics of the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, declined to join Russia in the successor Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and became EU members in 2004. Among the states that stayed with the CIS, six could claim to be European: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia itself. They could therefore, if they came to fulfil the conditions of stable democracy and competitive market economy, apply for membership of the EU.

As the EU has expanded to the borders of Russia and Ukraine, the question of inclusion of the CIS states has been raised. The size and hostility of Russia, however, combined with its much greater economic and political disparities with the EU than those found in Central and Eastern Europe, stand in the way. The policy has therefore been to develop closer bilateral and multilateral relations rather than to envisage membership.

Erdogan has focused on building up Turkey’s profile as a pivot state in its region, coupled with a reaffirmation of moderate Islamist views that have become much less favourable to EU membership. While he was willing to reach an agreement in 2016 with the EU on supporting refugees from Syria and on enforcing stronger border controls on movement towards the EU, this was driven by the access to funds that it provided, rather than any desire to use it as a basis to advance the stalled membership negotiations.

As such, Turkey’s membership remains unresolved. In many member states, Turkish membership is deeply problematic, both for publics and elites. However, the question has to be asked of whether excluding Turkey is desirable or not. The EU already has over fifteen million Muslim citizens, so religion is not the barrier that some imagine. Likewise, admitting Turkey could help consolidate the EU’s status as a global power, both through the admission of a state that bridges into the Middle East and through its extensive military capability. While the matter might stand in abeyance at present it is not fully a dead letter and it will have serious implications for the EU and its future development. Chapter 10 The EU in the world Having shown how ‘federal institutions can unite highly developed states’, the

In particular, the Germans, who had willingly accepted for many years their role as the largest net contributor, did so because they recognized that the benefits of membership could not be measured simply by a bank balance: the country gained not only in deeply desired international acceptance and security, but also, more prosaically, in giving German exporters access to large new markets.

The simplest case was the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as the Soviet-controlled part of Germany had called itself. The GDR became part of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990; and the EC made the necessary technical adjustments at speed so that the enlarged Germany could assume German membership without delay. For

However, the EU also agreed for the first time to expand on the provisions of the treaty and laid out what became known as ‘the Copenhagen criteria’: stable democracy, human rights and protection of minorities, the rule of law, a competitive market economy, and the ‘ability to take on the obligations of membership including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union’. While political union meant different things in different member states, the significance of ‘the obligations of membership’ was clear enough, including the huge task of applying not far short of 100,000 pages of legislation, mostly concerning the single market. To allay fears that widening would result in weakening, there was also the condition that the EU should have ‘the capacity to absorb new members while maintaining the momentum of integration’.

The road to the European Union is paved with good intentions. .

The initial step to realize this idea was to create the European Coal and Steel Community, consisting of France, West Germany, and Italy, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg (often referred to as the Benelux countries). This pact fully integrated the coal and steel industries of these countries so as to make their economies mutually dependent. This marked the beginning of the European project, one that over the following decades would evolve into the European Community (EC) and later still the European Union, which over time came to broaden its membership and enhance the authority of its institutions of collective governance to extend to economic and foreign policy.

The labor movement did not dwindle because more Americans were now middle class and no longer felt they needed unions, as some accounts claimed. That contention became increasingly preposterous as more and more workers fell out of the middle class. Polls regularly show that about half of nonsupervisory workers report that they would like to join a union. Fear prevents that. Union activists in non-union workplaces regularly get fired, with management impunity. Unions lost membership because of relentless attacks by corporations, the outsourcing of jobs heavily concentrated in unionized sectors, deregulation and privatization, and the shift in the federal government’s role from benign neutrality under Roosevelt and Truman to full-scale assault under Reagan and the Bushes.

Scotland's potential independent membership of the EEC may be important here. The tightening of our links with the Common Market could broaden our intellectual horizons to include Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, as well as Oxford and London (this would, of course, be a reforging of intellectual ties between Scotland and Continental Europe). In discovering these other traditions, we may be stimulated to rediscover our own, buried intellectualism. But without this European dimension, it may well be, Scotland will remain culturally chained to England, even if politically sovereign.

the National Industrial Recovery Act gave workers the right to organize without interference from employers, triggering a resurgence in union membership.91

One hundred thousand workers protesting food shortages had marched to Manchester’s town hall in January. British trade union membership was rising, and 1918 saw more than 5.8 million workdays lost to industrial disputes,

But DeMille’s tenure came to an abrupt end in January 1945, in a political dispute with the American Federation of Radio Artists, the actors’ union. At issue was Proposition 12, a ballot proposal popularly known as the “right to work” law. This would allow anyone to work in radio without union membership. AFRA decided to build a war chest to fight it, levying a one-dollar fee against each union member for this purpose. DeMille refused to pay it, or to allow it to be paid on his behalf. He claimed to sympathize with union ideals, but in fact he distrusted AFRA power. It was an issue of freedom, he insisted, and on that there could be no compromise. The argument dragged through late 1944, with AFRA setting and then extending several arbitrary deadlines. DeMille refused to budge, and on Jan. 22 the man who “wouldn’t take a million” for his Lux job gave it up over a dollar, hosted his final show, and never returned. In the fall, William Keighley was given the job on a permanent basis.

BUT OTHER COUNTRIES have also faced globalization and automation and still maintained high rates of unionization. So, why did Americans allow their government and corporations to collude on attacking unions and depleting union membership?

[1916] The IWW’s involvement in the [Minnesota] Iron Range’s labor unrest led mine company owners to take extreme actions and, just as in other conflict locations, they mobilized the businesses and municipal offices under their ownership. All mail and telegrams to and from Virginia were halted and reviewed. In other locations, including Biwabik, Aurora, and Eveleth, general stores turned away miners and their famlies. When the strikers formed their own cooperative for supplies and groceries, Oliver Iron Mining Company pressured wholesalers to serve notice that all credit would be curtailed pending the strike, and that payments for supplies must be made weekly. Meanwhile Sheriff Meining publicly announced new jail sentences for other agitators and miners for simply saying, “Hello Fellow Worker,” carrying a red IWW membership card, or discussing industrial unionism on public streets.