interviews
A Bifurcated Approach
by Paul Frymer
February 24, 2021
This interview with Paul Frymer, Professor of Politics at Princeton University and author, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Paul | The Wagner Act was built on the idea of making the workplace accountable to the workers, of getting better wages, and improving working conditions. It is a relic of a time when the government was involved in regulatory action. We just don't do that much anymore at least in the realm of labor politics.
One thing I write about in my book, Black and Blue, is that at the time of the New Deal, civil rights were really not a priority for most U.S. politicians. Though the vast majority of African-Americans had no voting rights and no protection against economic discrimination, these big pieces of legislation like the Wagner Act did not try to change that structure.
The New Deal was built around the idea of a white working class, and the Wagner Act is part of that.
What would it have looked like if it included civil rights?
Most straightforwardly, the NAACP wanted a provision in the Wagner Act that said that employers can’t discriminate on a basis of race. That was not in there.
The Democratic Party, which was reliant on Southern Democrats at the time, did not want that and it was not put in the bill. As such, the legislation allowed companies and unions to discriminate on the basis of race. There is a case in the 1950s that I mention in my book where an employer was accused of firing workers because they were union members. You can't do that according to the Wagner Act. So, he said he didn't fire them because they were union members, he fired them because they were black. That was fine under the law.
Workers in Hole, photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth56863/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hardin-Simmons University Library.
You write about how labor movements and civil rights movements often act independently of each other, rather than in conjunction. Why is there bifurcation?
It is a great and complicated question. W. E. B. Du Bois, the great civil rights intellectual and activist in the early 20th century, famously wrote about just how easy it is for employers to divide workers on the basis of racism.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, employers used to bring in African-Americans from the South or Chinese workers to break strikes and to create racial conflict. Though we are a long way from those kinds of extreme examples, today, we can still see the ways in which race and class have difficulty coalescing. We have lots of great examples of when they do when multi-racial or multi-ethnic coalitions form around class lines, but it’s very hard to do.
Specifically, in terms of the Wagner Act, the 1930s was the time of the labor movement and the labor movement, itself, was largely white. Later, in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement gets underway. The white labor movement publicly supports civil rights, but not always privately. Just as we have seen in the Trump era, there were conflicts among white workers who did not want greater diversity. Unions have continued to struggle with this.
Democrats have stepped back from workers. Trump towards them. Do you think his labor support is essentially just about race?
No, it was not just race. He gave them a sympathetic story to buy into. He said that he was going to give them their jobs back. He said that the United States and the Democratic and Republican Party had forgotten about the working class and that they don't care about the working class. They shipped your jobs out to other countries, he said. The sympathetic story is not that far off from the same one Bernie Sanders told. Jesse Jackson ran on that message in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a very powerful message that resonates.
The problem is, a lot of people out there, media and politicians, look for a scapegoat, and race is an easy scapegoat. Economic messages resonate a lot more when there are people who “don't look like us” that are perceived as threatening the white working class. So we point to things like building a wall.
[Workers on Platform], photograph, [1965-05-13..1965-05-24]; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1011027/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.
There's long been a debate within the Democratic Party about class and race, and how to emphasize both. One part of the party says it’s all about class and that race is an artificial construction that employers used to keep themselves in power, so we should emphasize economic distribution and racial inequality will be reduced in the process. That goes so far, but it doesn't go all the way. Race may be an artificial construct, in that we no longer attribute race with individual differences, but it still has taken an incredibly powerful meaning in our society as a result of longstanding prejudice and discrimination. Our solutions can’t just be about universal policies. We need to recognize that there is racism, discrimination, and prejudice in America and that it needs to be addressed on its own. It too cannot be dealt with in isolation from issues of class, but it needs its own stress and dedication. It's really complicated to have those conversations, obviously with Trump voters, but with progressives, suburbanites, and just about everyone else as well.
Backing up a little bit — in the 1930s, there were very few black members in unions. Over time it really moves up, but union participation more broadly declines. Why is that?
You are right. During the time in which African-Americans and Latinos have joined the labor movement, labor movement numbers declined dramatically.
Part of the reason for that is globalization. Part of the reason is that employers can reclassify workers so that they cannot be unionized--see the battles over Uber and Lyft and the gig economy more generally. And a big part of the reason is that employers are incredibly aggressive. Employers are very aggressively breaking the law and they can get away with it. What employers will do immediately is fire union organizers. That is against the law, but they know that they will just be slapped on the wrist, if anything. There is a lot of intimidation. Employers have all of these opportunities to make appeals to workers, to talk to them as a ‘captured audience’. The union does not have the right to access these workers, the way employers do.
You can see these aggressive tactics with the current Amazon fight. Amazon is about to have a union election in Alabama.
The union is fighting for the ability to vote by mail in light of COVID, and Amazon, just as the Republican party does, is fighting to make voting more difficult.
They don't want people to vote in the privacy of their homes because they know they will quite likely vote yes to the union.
What do you wish the media would note in their coverage of something union organizing?
The media has often made it seem like the union is the bully and the employer is the individual. They make it seem like people have the right to make as much money as they want, and whether individuals want to work for a certain company or not, is their individual problem. This whole idea of collective action is hard for a lot of Americans to understand.
It is also important to note that in a place like Alabama, where racism is deeply embedded in the history, culture, and still resonates in current politics, the employers use hiring practices to capitalize on this. They will bring in more immigrants to work. This racializes the workforce and the employers know what they are doing. In sweatshops and meatpacking plants, for example, they hire workers that speak all different languages so that they have difficulty communicating with each other.
So union organizing work is very, very hard and incredibly stressful. Especially going against Amazon, a massive corporation that is going to throw everything at you. Any worker who has been part of a union drive knows it is an incredibly stressful and often quite scary period of time. Employers will try to capitalize on this further by saying, vote against the union, and all this stress will go away.
Do you think support from local and national politicians is helpful or maybe even a requirement for successful labor union activism?
Totally. At the local level, we do have politicians to do that, and that is helpful. And Bernie will show up. And AOC will show up.
But what we need is the Democratic Party as a whole to stand by unions.
You see this dynamic right now going on with teachers and the nurse's unions and the question about whether the Biden administration will negotiate with teachers over COVID issues at school. The Democratic Party, generally, supports unions, but they frequently offer very little direct support to union campaigns. I mean the Democratic Party taking on Amazon is a big, big pill. Jeff Bezos gives a ton of money to the Democratic Party. He owns the Washington Post. Look at the conflict a few years ago when he pulled a potential Amazon plant from New York City in response to AOC’s opposition. It is not easy, and it often pits Democrats against Democrats.
Why do you think, politically, workers are sidelined for the swing voter? What do you think this obsession with the swing voter is, rather than the working class?
2020 is a good example of that. The African-American vote was the backbone of the Democratic victory. The African-American was critical to winning Georgia. The vote probably won Michigan, and on and on. President Trump obviously realized that because he was trying to make African American voting in Philadelphia and Detroit and in Atlanta much more difficult, or even throw large numbers of votes out.
But the strategists of the Democratic Party are overwhelmingly white.
Most of them are ambivalent on issues of race themselves. They look at the broader map and they say, "Well, who are voters that we need to win?" And frequently, they draw a big circle around white suburbanites. Election after election, the conventional wisdom is white suburbanites. We see that after what happened 2016. The focus immediately turns to those disgruntled white Trump voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio.
And there is some truth to that. The white suburban vote in Georgia was also critical. Not independently of the African-American vote, but the African-American vote is not a majority vote in this country or in any state. You do need a significant proportion of white voters. But the Democratic Party, I think, has overplayed that idea in the sense that they think that in order to win the white vote, you need to then downplay civil rights, and downplay things like Black Lives Matter. There's evidence that goes in both directions. A lot of political scientists are currently studying how much the Black Lives Matter protests helped or hurt the Democratic Party. This is an incredibly fraught issue.
[Two Construction Workers], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc499160/m1/1/?q=workers: accessed February 24, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
And when you talk about Black Lives Matter you do risk opposition from the white suburbs and other white workers. And that requires the Democratic Party, and our government more broadly, to have bigger conversations. They don't want to have those conversations, obviously. They don't want to explain to people why Black Lives Matter is singularly important for historical and systemic reasons, and how in certain ways, it is also for all of us. Those are hard conversations, and the Democratic party doesn't want to have them.
And you know, you see why any time anyone, whether it’s Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or AOC or Bernie Sanders, says anything of nuance or subtlety, it gets shredded, and frequently, they back away.
This is cynical, but the country is becoming less and less white, at some point the white suburbanite won’t be the majority.
If you look at California in the 1990s, the Republican Party made, in a way, the same big bet on white voters that Trump did. And over time, they have gotten crushed. California is a liberal Democratic state because of demographics and so forth. So, there is hope among progressives that California is a sign of the future of the United States and that the Republicans are going to be crushed in the coming years.
Some Republicans think that too because they are focusing on trying to stop people from voting. They're trying to stop immigrants from entering the United States they fear will become Democrats. They're trying to stop Washington DC from becoming a state.
The one footnote to this is that I find the demographic argument a little bit problematic in that populations are not static. Populations are changing over time. Some populations ‘become white’ over time. We've seen hints of this within the numbers of some Latino populations.
We've already seen it with Cubans, a large number who have been conservatives and Republicans from the first migrations in the 1960s. Puerto Ricans are largely Democrats but there are some openings there, with a strong Republican presence in Puerto Rico itself. You see movement with the third, fourth, fifth-generation Mexican populations in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico as well.
The other thing that you touched on is young people.
What happens with young people as they age? Is the take away from what is currently being said, "I believe black lives matter and I think we need a new era." Or is the takeaway, "I believe black lives matter until it comes to my town and my school and my police department and impacts my housing prices."
This is the moment for the progressive white middle-class to decide how much it embraces racial progress and actively promotes it going forward.
Yeah. How serious are you, I guess.
Oh, I don’t doubt people’s seriousness and sincerity of beliefs. But it is once these beliefs are confronted with different dynamics that you have to really struggle with and be willing to face and accept.
You see this in gentrifying neighborhoods, from Brooklyn to the Mission of San Francisco to Silverlake in LA. These are pockets of progressive white populations. How much are they willing to embrace diversity over the long term, and recognize what it actually means?
The gentrifiers are probably the most progressive politically. Housing in LA is expensive, but…
That is why I think the government is so important. Because you hear these stories you can sympathize or you can find a way to understand it. And I don’t think it's just rationalizing. Every individual story is importantly different. But, that's where the government, I think, needs to step in and say, “We are going to set these rules and everybody has to follow these rules.”
That takes the pressure off of the individuals, and puts the onus on the government to create these spaces that are diverse. That is what we should do as opposed to putting all the energy on the single worker who has to go on strike for a year.
We should put the onus on broader government structures and law so that we actually make it easier for everybody to have it.
interviews
Instead of Blaming the Poor
by Spencer Piston
February 5, 2021
This interview with Spencer Piston, assistant professor of Political Science at Boston University and author of Class Attitudes in America, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Spencer | When it comes to the rich, the dominant attitude of the American public is one of resentment. That has a cognitive component, which is the belief that the rich have more than they deserve, and it has an emotional component, which is anger. That attitude leads many people, though not all, to be against policies that benefit the rich and to support policies that would redistribute wealth downward.
frank | Right. In theory, but it doesn't always turn out that way.
As in so many cases, what the public wants is not what the public gets, even in a representative democracy. There are a lot of things that interrupt the connection between public opinion and policymaking.
One is the background of legislators themselves. When the public votes for president, they're not just pulling names out of a hat, they're choosing from the party nominees. These party nominees, the people running for Congress and the people who run for the presidency, tend to be rich, and rich people tend to oppose policies that would redistribute wealth more evenly.
Also, though in general, the public would like to see a downward redistribution of wealth, when it comes to specific policies, political elites, and organized interest groups who do a really good job of convincing the public that those policies are unpalatable.
What are some examples of that?
One example that I talked about a lot about in my book, Class Attitudes in America, is the federal estate tax. This is a tax that only affects large inheritances. Only multi-millionaires are affected by this federal estate tax. But, much of the public doesn't know that, and the reason the public doesn't know that is because political elites and interest groups go around saying that the estate tax affects small family farms. Or they call it a "death tax." Now instead of thinking that wealthy people are the ones affected, dead or dying people, for whom the public has much more sympathy, are the affected group.
Do you find the same thing more broadly?
Yes. Another example is mortgage interest tax deduction. Tax deduction primarily benefits wealthy people, because it is only wealthy people who are buying the giant houses that require the giant mortgages that they can then deduct from their taxes. But a lot of people don't think of it that way. They think of homeownership as a middle-class type of issue, but, based on Suzanne Mettler's work and my own, once they learn that the home mortgage interest tax deduction is benefiting rich people, then they become much less supportive of it.
So again, these are cases in which learning a lot about who benefits and who doesn't benefit from different policies really changes public opinion. It's in the interest of those who would build anti-poverty movements to get this information out there. Generally speaking, information is not a progressive panacea. More information does not mean that everyone is going to support progressive efforts. But these things are an exception.
What role does the media play in this?
Here's what one side said, here's what the other side said, and here’s who is going to benefit in the race to power. There's much less discussion about who a policy is going to benefit and who it is going to hurt. That's a huge problem. I think part of the reason the media works in that way, is that is what they are trained to do in journalism school. That's is the culture of news media. They also think, and rightly so, that they will sell more stories if they follow the horse-race narrative.
Certainly.
You started by laying out two main reasons why someone votes against their class interest. But to what extent do you think people simply put their racial interests over class interests?
There's never any guarantee that somebody is going to privilege one group membership over another.
I am not really excited about the focus on less wealthy whites in so much of our discourse right now. Whether it's poor whites, working-class whites, middle-class whites, or rich whites, all these groups are similarly involved in racism. I don't think it's working-class whites in particular. Working-class whites are just especially frustrating to some people on the left because they think they should be natural allies due to their class position. It doesn't work that way. You can't take someone's objective position and then assume that they're going to be your ally. You have to reach out to them and win them over. And for many white people, whether they're working class or not, they're not going to be on your side if you're racially progressive.
To what extent do you see both sides channeling rage in a way that focuses on cultural or symbolic wins over material ones?
In the defense of those who've been focusing on the cultural side, those wins have been a little easier to come by. But when wealth flows up year after year, we have to ask what's the theory and practice of broader material change? I don't want to downplay the importance of symbolic conflict because symbolic victories can lead to material victories, but there absolutely has to be some balance.
Is there a period in history that you can look to as merging those two interests?
I would say Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a contentious period of course, but it involved descriptive representation. Two of the six black senators in all of U.S. history were elected during Reconstruction. But it wasn't just descriptive representation. For example, The Freedmen's Bureau, as small as it was, and as attacked as it was from its inception, provided many important, material resources to newly freed slaves.
More broadly, I think the Occupy Wall Street movement put issues of economic redistribution from the top down on the policy agenda and in mainstream political discourse. There's potential now, with the Democrats’ unified control of the government, for them to make some big changes, and these changes were made possible in no small part by all of the important organizing work that was done during Occupy Wall Street.
Are you hopeful?
I do think there's an opportunity in this current moment. The left has some momentum right now. The question is whether the left is going to take that opportunity to do some movement building.
The first one is about making the world less contentious in the short term, but the second one is actually building power in service of what needs to be done to fix our country.
I have some hope, but it just depends on how much organizing and mobilizing will be done and how anti-poverty movements, in particular, take advantage of this moment. Biden is of course a moderate, but he's potentially moveable. If anti-poverty activists build the power to move him and other Democrats, then some great things can happen.
Instead of asking why the poor don’t vote to tax the rich, or vote in their supposed interest, what should people be asking?
To the middle or upper-class liberals who are asking, why aren't poor people on my side, we need to acknowledge that this question is actually a version of blaming the poor. It's the mirror image of conservatives who are blaming the poor for not getting ahead on their own.
I would challenge liberals to take ownership of what they can do instead of complaining about poor people. What group can you join that is working to build power? Engage in political organizing, which I mean in a broad sense. Political organizing is not just trying to get somebody elected to office, it is also trying to build a social movement. It's normal to read the news and complain about it to friends, but it's not normal to get engaged in the hard work of organizing on a daily or a weekly basis. So let’s make it normal.