This week’s guest on “Liberty and Justice for All” is Richard Lipsitz recently retired as a business agent with Teamsters Local 264 in Buffalo, New York, and as the president of the Western New York Area Federation.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is available here.
We tape the shows two weeks before they air, so our conversation took place before Tuesday’s election and its decisive repudiation of the Republican Party’s leadership failures. But the theme of politics was central to the subjects we duscussed and I want to say a bit more about it here.
Near the end of the hour, Richard observed that he was “hopeful about the midterms” and “also hopeful about political developments that could come out of a strong rebuff of MAGA.” He was looking forward to “an overwhelming rejection of Donald Trump and everything he stands for. Then we can figure out where we are strategically after that.”
Richard got his wish and the question now is, “Where do we go from here?” Of course, we want to do away with all the excesses and cruelties of Trumpism as soon as we can, which is itself a tall order as long as the cult controls the White House.
The first thing to do, obviously, is to minimize the damage, however possible, and to lay the groundwork for decency both to win the presidency and maintain control of Congress in 2028. Many other people are already talking about what is required for this to happen and I leave the immediate tactics and inside electoral baseball to the operatives and pundits.
Consistent with the focus of “Liberty and Justice for All,” I will focus instead on what I see as the longer-term issue. Unless we change the conditions that gave rise to the MAGA movement in the first place, we will live to see its return, in all probability with even greater destructive force and consequences.
What were those conditions? Affordability is not just the issue of the day. It has been the issue for the last 50 years at least. It has come up in every conversation I have ever had with trade unionists and other wage earners since 1975 about what’s wrong with the US economy.
If we are going to prevent a resurgence of Trumpism on steroids, we can’t return to the economy the way it was. Instead, we need to move forward to the economy that can be.
What might that look like? The basic problem with the economy we have is that it treats investment as the primary concern and leaves shared prosperity to “trickle down.” This is precisely backwards: Shared prosperity should be our primary concern and we should trust investment to “bubble up.”
There will never be a shortage of rich people with money who are interested in earning an extra dime on the dollar by investing in a promising project. But if we don’t make sure that working people have secure jobs that pay enough to provide their families with a decent standard of life, there will continue to be a shortage of people who believe the system we have works for all of us and not just for a corrupt few.
An economy focused on making sure that everyone who wants to work has a decent job at a living wage is a central concern of this program and I don’t have room to develop its many facets in any detail right now. But, I promise, we will keep coming back to it in the weeks ahead.
We also will not lose sight of the importance of ensuring that investors can make a respectable return on their investments. But those returns cannot come at the expense of other people, especially those who have no say in what’s happening, everything to lose and nothing to gain.
There is a better way. Our conversation this week focused on the role of the union movement as “the primary defense organization for the working class on the economic front” in securing a decent standard of life for all. In Richard’s words, unions are “the core self-defense mechanism that the working class has to defend is living standards and working conditions. And the better organized we are, the better the living standards and working conditions will be.”
I agreed. But American workers need a primary defense organization on the political front as well. Without an independent organization of working people to hold elected officials accountable to their promises to fix the things that aren’t working, there is no way to ensure that they will work to deliver a better standard of living for all.
Collective bargaining in the workplace is not enough. Especially when the right to bargain is as restricted as it is in the US, and has been since at least the mid-1960s, if not before. If American workers and their families are going to enjoy their fair share of prosperity, they must bargain and enforce collective agreements on both the political and the economic fronts.
In short, the labor movement needs to focus as much of its attention and resources on organizing a movement that engages in political collective bargaining as it does on the unions that engage in workplace bargaining.
Organized workers are rightly suspicious of company promises to treat everyone fairly and make sure they earn their “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” It is time we were equally suspicious of the promises of politicians that they will support policies that will ensure shared prosperity for all and do everything we can to make sure they follow through.
There are promising signs that this is happening. The Labor Candidate Program of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO is a step in the right direction, as is the AFL-CIO’s Working America project and The Working Class Project of the Democratic Party.
But for now, these are just dots on the page. We need to connect them up. The labor movement has to be as much about HTPA (holding the politicians accountable) as it is about GOTV (get out the vote). Politics does not end when the votes a counted. That is when it begins in earnest.