Southern Workers on the Rise + Causes of the Crisis of Democracy + and Many Delights
In this issue, we feature reporting on the launch of the United Southern Service Workers, a new union bringing together low-wage workers across sectors; an insightful analysis with a provocative thesis about the causes of the crisis of democracy; many delights — movies, articles, podcasts, and music — and a few provocations.
First, a couple of announcements:
Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice has extended the deadline for applications for its mid-career fellowships until December 1. The Movement Leaders Fellowship is for practitioners with 10-15 years of experience in social change work, and the Regional Organizers for Social Change is open to practitioners with 7-10 years of experience working in the South. Both programs bring together organizers, communicators, policy specialists, and others to strengthen their practice, get exposed to key concepts and tools about power and strategy, and build community with other leaders. You can learn more and apply here.
We mourn the loss and celebrate the life and work of Pablo Eisenberg, the legendary longtime leader of Community Change and critic of philanthropy who died at 90 in October. This week, the New York Times published a superb obituary by Sam Roberts that you can read here. An online memorial service will be held on Dec 12, 2022, at 11:30 a.m., hosted by Community Change, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and Georgetown’s Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership. To attend, you must register here.
United Southern Service Workers: A New Union is Born
Deepak was thrilled to be part of the founding meeting of the United Southern Service Workers in Columbia, South Carolina, from November 17th to 19th. The gathering brought together hundreds of low-wage workers, overwhelmingly workers of color, across sectors such as fast food, retail, homecare, and more. Worker leaders created the new union with the aim of building a mass-based workers’ organization in the region. The effort is the fruit of years of organizing by Raise Up, a branch of the Fight for 15 and a Union movement backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). And it is one of the most hopeful developments in America’s movement landscape today. Stephanie Luce wrote about the gathering in Labor Notes, emphasizing that the union is refusing to play by the broken rules of U.S. labor laws.
The USSW is forming itself as a union now—not waiting to be sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Signs posted around the meeting described a union as any group of “workers coming together to use our strength in numbers to get things done together we can’t get done on our own.”
Participants at the summit voted to form the USSW; they signed membership cards. They affirmed their plan to win by any means necessary, using four strategies: uniting across employers and sectors, direct action, community unionism, and anti-racism.
Lena Geller’s article in Indyweek captures the injustice and anger that is motivating the workers, and some of the extraordinary energy of the gathering.
Eric Winston spent the worst months of the pandemic at a Cracker Barrel in Durham, cooking up platters of country-fried steak and watching his coworkers die.
The deaths—three in total, all caused by COVID-19—could have been prevented, he says: when a worker initially tested positive for the virus, the restaurant’s management could have closed the dining room for a professional cleaning or allowed the worker to quarantine for 14 days, as mandated by the CDC, by offering sick leave.
Instead, management kept the restaurant open and refused to provide paid time off. The worker, unable to risk losing more than a few days of pay, returned to work too early. The virus spread amongst staff, and the three most vulnerable workers, all people of color, died in quick succession.
“I was risking my life, every day, for $13 an hour,” Winston says.
Winston, a veteran service worker, has dozens of stories like this. Some years back, he was working at a Chick-fil-A when his mother had the first of three strokes. When he asked his manager for time off—not paid time off, just a few days of unpaid leave so he could take care of his mom—he was fired.
In the state of North Carolina, most of the horrific practices that service workers endure are legal or largely unchecked, which is why Winston has spent the past nine years taking matters into his own hands.
Since 2014, when he joined Raise Up the South—the southern branch of the workers’ rights organization Fight for $15—Winston has organized workers at businesses including McDonald’s, Burger King, Waffle House, and Cracker Barrel, leading strikes to demand better safety policies, fair pay, consistent scheduling, and respect and dignity in the workplace.
His efforts, a number of which sparked near-immediate change from employers, have helped to lay the groundwork for something that—given state and federal legislative blocks, systemic exploitation, and the service industry’s high turnover model—has long seemed impossible in the South: last week, Winston and more than 100 other service workers established a union. . . .
The crowd moves as one—a sea of workers, most in crimson shirts, that swells and folds and ripples with raised fists.
This must be the red wave that everyone was talking about.
It’s Friday, November 18, and a massive group of service workers is ringing in the launch of the USSW at a conference center in Columbia, South Carolina, where they’ve coagulated for a three-day summit.
One hundred and twenty workers—40 of whom hail from Durham—spend the morning chanting, dancing, discussing their demands, and watching videos that detail the direct ties between racism and restrictive labor laws.
“For forever and a day, [corporations and legislators] have tried to prevent organizing by separating Black and white people,” says Mama Cookie. “The USSW is a ‘race build’ as well as a union. We got to build ourselves up as a family.”
This workers’ movement is deeply rooted in the rich tradition of worker and community struggle in the South. This amazing 7-minute video (we can’t stop watching) highlights the legacy these workers build on. Workers at the summit emphasized that changing the country depends on changing the South. They believe — and we agree — that it can and must be done.
Why is Democracy in Crisis Worldwide?
We are in a decade-long struggle to preserve and expand multi-racial democracy in the U.S. The election results in 2022 were better than many expected — thanks in large part to underreported and extraordinary organizing work by community, labor, and progressive groups and to the importance of reproductive choice and the defense of democracy to many motivated voters. But the margins in key races were thin. In red states, many election deniers won. And an authoritarian party controls one of the two houses of Congress. We have a long struggle ahead.
So why are we experiencing a crisis of democracy? Understanding the causes is crucial to identifying solutions. Among the reasons typically offered are backlash to the gains of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minority groups; demographic changes that threaten the status of dominant groups; the rise of social media and fractured communications ecologies; rapid social and economic change; and escalating economic inequality.
As we’ve argued elsewhere, climate change and climate migration are also being weaponized by authoritarians to fuel the growth of their movements (and progressives must offer better answers that work at the level of policy, narrative, and movement building).
Any satisfactory explanation of our democratic crisis will have to account for the fact that this phenomenon is not unique to the U.S. Authoritarian parties and movements are robust around the world — from Brazil to India to the Philippines to much of Europe.
In a compelling new Boston Review article, “The Deep Structure of Democratic Crisis,” Ruth Berins Collier and Jake Grumbach argue that one key piece of the puzzle is the shift from industrial to post-industrial economies and the decline of unions. Their argument digs several layers below the immediate causes of the rise of authoritarianism (e.g., individual demagogic politicians like Donald Trump) and the features of our political system that strengthen the hand of authoritarians (e.g., the electoral college and the structure of the Senate, which favor white and rural voters). They point to the crucial role of mass-based organizations in sustaining and expanding democracy.
We argue, in particular, that the economic transition from industrialism to post-industrialism may be less conducive to democracy, or at least provides an explanation for some important threats to democracy that we are witnessing today. Such a lens puts the analysis of the U.S. crisis in comparative perspective, allowing us to see some common threats across rich, historic democracies as well as the specific features that account for the extreme form it takes in our country. . .
Specifically, it is important to recognize how a country’s economic model can organize and disorganize political groups, empowering and disempowering them and shaping the coalitions they form. Industrialism, we argue, was fertile ground for the construction of a pro-democracy coalition, one supported by labor unions; post-industrialism, or at least the transition to post-industrialism, has fragmented such a coalition. The current problem is how to organize a pro-democracy coalition in the face of the Republican assault. . . .
We point, in particular, to two salient structural features of post-industrial political economy that constitute a challenge to democracy. First, to use a term of art from political science, the structure of mass politics shifted from a single dominant “cleavage”—a conflict between owners and workers organized by labor unions—to a pattern in which politics is organized around many different competing cleavages. Second, there was a shift in the balance of power between capital and the state, which reduced the capacity of the government to respond to social and economic upheaval. Both of these developments present a challenge to democracy, and technology has only accelerated each. . . .
In the advanced economies, the golden age of democracy coincided with the age of industrialism, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and the politics of economic cleavage to which it gave rise. Once labor unions were legalized, they made the decision to participate in democratic politics and became the most important lower-class interest organizations in the country. Our contention is that unions were critical in sustaining mass democracy by virtue of their role in organizing, mobilizing, and sustaining a politics that embraced a broad pro-democratic coalition, which they were able to do on the basis of materialist demands that went beyond the specific interests of their own membership. With the decline of unions and of an industrial workforce on which they were based in the second half of the twentieth century, no alternative organization has been able to articulate a unifying coalition with similar force. . . .
During the era of industrialism, the key role of unions was to prioritize materialist demands in the political arena along a dimension on which issues could be negotiated and compromises reached. Dominant factions of the labor movement championed democracy as a political vehicle, and the struggle along the materialist dimension was quite successful, with rising prosperity for all, culminating in a politics of class compromise of different versions across the industrial democracies of the Keynesian welfare state. . . .
This is not to say that unions have always been virtuous. We do not deny that in the United States and elsewhere, unions could be vehicles for racism and xenophobia. . . . At the same time, it is important to recognize how, in the twentieth century, U.S. labor unions played the important role of helping to foster a multiracial worker coalition that served as a bulwark for democracy. Beginning in the 1930s, unions, especially the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), began to construct ideological linkages between racial and economic democracy and organize Black and white workers, alike. By the 1960s the AFL-CIO was a major organizational proponent of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that ended Jim Crow in the South. Such union efforts in expanding democracy were born of strategic imperatives of unions in the industrial period, which saw the need to organize multiracial coalitions in a racially divided society. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in 1962, “the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.” As a consequence, the labor movement has played an important role not only in building broadly shared prosperity, reducing economic inequality overall, but also in doing so between racial groups. It has thus become increasingly clear that labor unions play an important role in safeguarding particularly, multiracial democracy.
In fact, by building political coalitions around materialist politics and preempting a politics of racial and cultural resentment, labor unions in the modern era continue to be critical to the maintenance of democracy in the United States. A recent study coauthored by one of us finds that labor unions reduced racial resentment among white workers between 2010 and 2016—helping to organize white workers around the material wages of shared prosperity rather than the psychological wage of hierarchical status described by Du Bois. . . .
[In the 1970s, with the rise of post-industrialism, u]nions were put on the defensive. Declines in density and power varied across the advanced democracies and was particularly sharp in the United States, where the rate of unionization dropped precipitously from its peak of over 35 percent to just 6.2 percent of the private-sector workforce in 2019. Not only did unions lose clout; they were not replaced by effective organizations representing the new, changed face of the working class.
Alongside these developments, there was a rise of competing “post-material” interests around important issues of rights and risks —such as race, gender, and sexuality rights and nuclear and environmental risks. These and other late twentieth-century social movements achieved momentously important gains, especially for the rights of people of color, women, and sexual minorities. But as labor power declined over this same period, expanded legal rights did not translate into very significant gains in material equality for marginalized identity groups. After declining precipitously since the late nineteenth century, for instance, the Black-white wealth gap in the United States remains above its level in the 1970s. To produce material equality, rights-based movements seem to require a strong labor power component. . .
Our argument is not a simple story of backlash to immigration and civil rights movements; rather, it points to three changes that underwrote mass support for democracy that came with the decline of unions. First, whereas unions organized politics and popular support around a single predominant dimension, contemporary political conflict is fragmented across many different issue dimensions. Second, unions, the most important mass organization on one side of that conflict, saw democracy as helpful in achieving its goal. Third, the weakening of worker demand-making around materialist issues made societies more vulnerable to mobilization of the passions of xenophobia and racism, especially by those whose economic interests are opposed to those of workers.
While these trends occurred across wealthy democracies, the United States was particularly vulnerable. The decline of unionization was particularly steep, in part because this “decline” had a component of outright destruction due to anti-labor policy at the state and federal levels. In addition to its especially precipitous de-unionization, the United States’s ongoing legacy of racial hierarchy is unique among advanced democracies, as is the weakness of its social safety net. Interacting with these features, the United States experienced an early and large influx of non-white immigrants from Latin America and Asia. The decline of unions in this context led to a displacement from materialist politics to a politics that included racial and cultural resentment among white workers. . . .
A feedback loop thus redounded to the advantage of the GOP: with the decline in unions, materialist interests were no longer organized with the same force, and the GOP could more successfully prime other issues and lines of cleavage. It used its electoral gains, in turn, to further weaken unions with state right-to-work laws. In key Rustbelt states, where labor unions were once the major mass political organization, as well as in other places, the remaining environment is populated by organizations that have helped to facilitate rightwing populism, including National Rifle Association chapters, megachurches, and local chapters of Americans for Prosperity. These organizations, rather than organizing working-class interests around a materialist cleavage, mobilize the passions of resentment and perceived threat in the face of social and economic change. . . .
As we try to meet the challenge [to American democracy], we must realize that all these factors are difficult to change and are unlikely to shift as a result of tweaks to parties’ campaign messaging or fact checks of online misinformation. But, with a recognition of their long-term structural origins, change may be possible. It may rely, in particular, on new tactics both from below and from above to promote pro-democratic mobilization and leadership in order to persuade politicians, the Justice Department, and even the courts to defend democracy—first against the proximate challenges, but also to create the socioeconomic conditions that support it in the longer run. . . .
The Biden administration’s more recent turn to a pro-union orientation is a step in the right direction in building a broad coalition for democracy (though Congress might end up stifling even the most incremental pieces of labor legislation). Regardless, the reality is that unions are unlikely to return to their historic role in a post-industrial era, in which anti-labor policy has been ratcheted up over decades and the structure of the workforce has so changed with the nature of the global economy. The challenge is to build an organizational basis for a mass pro-democracy coalition across many fragmented interests—a coalition that understands that democratic institutions are its best chance to achieve the good life, advancing equality in terms of both economic and racial outcomes. There is as of yet no clear path to this outcome, but the first step is to recognize it.
Collier and Grumbach’s analysis connects to the first article in this Platypus — the urgent need to find new ways to build mass-based people’s organizations. The forms such organizations take and the strategies they pursue will surely be different than in previous eras. But it’s imperative to put this question at the center of the discussion about how to preserve and expand multi-racial democracy.
Delights & Provocations
Deepak loved Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches: 1960-2006, edited by Ben Wilkins, which lifts up Braden’s key role as a white, anti-racist, Left activist in the South who was close to Ella Baker and other movement leaders. It opens a window into the southern radical tradition.
Thanks to our friend Christian Perez, we recently binge-watched the astonishing, four-hour documentary series On the Edge: Improvisation in Music (1992), which features beautiful and lovingly shot musical performances from India to Africa to Chicago. It's based on Derek Bailey's book Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music (first ed. 1980/1993), which Christian also raves about. The filmmaker Jeremy Marre, whose entire filmography we now intend to work through, died in 2020, and you can read the Guardian's account of his remarkable, globe-trotting life in search of great music here.
The American Prospect’s Jarod Facundo explains why rail workers may strike in early December. And two videos from More Perfect Union give rail workers a chance to speak for themselves: the latest highlights how rail workers, who get no paid sick days, “just want sick leave,” and a video from August profiles one freight rail engineer who has been away from home as much as 120 hours in a week and seen no raises in three years, while the industry has raked in record profits.
American rail workers might take inspiration from Britain’s Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport (RMT) union. In this video, Lynch debunks myths about union “barons” and makes a powerful case for the importance of organized labor.
And if Mick and the rail workers don’t convince you that we need a strong labor movement, the A-Team (yes, as in Mr. T) make the case in this most surreal bit of 1980s television.
Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters is, as Amal El-Mohtar puts in the New York Times, “an intricate sequence of moving, intimate character portraits before and after an event called the Fracture, when a pack of werewolves deliberately reveal themselves to the public. As other so-called monsters step out of the shadows, fronts emerge in a war fought between secret societies, witnessed by a mysterious narrator who slips from place to place and life to life in his sleep.” This novel has a queer, Black, Caribbean, and anarchist sensibility — and is totally engrossing!
Harry recommends A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which George Saunders offers a genial, profound, and often hilarious master class in the art of the short story, painstakingly, sometime page-by-page, analyzing great works, reprinted in full, by Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. Several of these stories critique the injustices of Russian society but do so slyly to evade state censorship — a fact Saunders himself acknowledges, even though at times he seems to miss a story’s political punch.
Glass Onion, the new movie by the director of Knives Out, is a brilliant caper, murder mystery, and satire of the billionaire class.
White Lotus season two is just as compelling as the original, and it too is a scathing critique of our hideously unequal society.
This episode of the podcast On Being, entitled “Living as an Improvisational Art,” features a learned and humane conversation with the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead.
Need to put things in perspective? On the Ideas podcast, astrophysicist Katie Mack explains various scientific theories of the fate of the universe in “The End of Everything” — and what that means for us.
The Invisibilia podcast has two fascinating shows about power. One features a stand-up comic who is unable to exercise power and choice in her life and finds help from a former dominatrix. The other tells how a union organizer builds power in the workplace (and features a discussion of research about whether or not you have to be an unethical sociopath to gain and hold power).
On their latest album, “We Will See,” the Spanish group Trio Gafas explores new sonic possibilities for bass, drums, and keyboard in a dozen tracks like the funky “Phrasal Verbs,” the frenetic “Anyway,” and the pensively groovy “50-50.”
Some other recent musical discoveries: Vikingur Olafasson playing Bach, Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, saxophonist Stacy Dillard (who gave an astonishing performance at Smalls recently), Black Pumas, Bartees Strange, Anderson Paak’s album Malibu, and Sven Liabeck’s Inner Space.
Are human emotions universal? Turns out, no. Psychologist Batja Mesquita explains the cultural specificity of emotions on Hidden Brain.
We’re both mid-way through Anand Giridharadas’s new book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds and Democracy — and LOVE IT.
The recently republished 1950 classic The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno and a team of other researchers was a landmark study that shaped thinking about the rise of fascism after WWII. It fell out of favor, but, as this this Ideas podcast explains, contemporary researchers are reviving some of its core ideas.
The Rings of Power series on Amazon? Way better than the Tolkien movies, not least for its inclusion of people of color and women in leading roles.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s review of Angela Davis’s autobiography (and a separate anthology of writing by Black communist women), “Hell, Yes We Are Subversive,” in the New York Review of Books, is a magnificent appraisal of the Black radical tradition. (We’re also excited for the launch of Hammer and Hope, a new magazine about Black politics and culture that Taylor and Jennifer Parker are launching next year). Among other gems, she writes,
There are two predominant ways of misapprehending the Black radical tradition. On one side, liberals have argued that the emergence of Black radicalism in the 1960s sparked white backlash and spoiled the goodwill earned by the more palatable civil rights movement. “If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that…there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way,” then president Barack Obama said in 2013, at an event marking the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington. “The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.” That, Obama explained, “is how progress stalled. That’s how hope was diverted. It’s how our country remained divided.”
In this view, the civil rights movement stands for “incremental progress” against the excesses of Black radical politics. But this dichotomy between the patient civil rights movement and the self-destruction of the Black liberation movement fails in the light of historical scrutiny. And it fails to see the relation between the two sides; the Black insurgency of the late 1960s was driven by people disillusioned with the slow pace of change, even after highly touted civil rights legislation had been passed. . . .
The other misapprehension of the 1960s usually comes from young people who search for inspiration from an earlier Black liberation movement. Today’s radicalizing activists can sometimes indulge in nostalgia for what is essentially an imagined unity, as if the 1960s were a period defined by organizational efficacy and political clarity. This sometimes makes it more difficult to remember both the ceaseless provocations directed at movement activists by police and federal agents and the political disagreements within the movement itself. As ever on the left, there was tension over what leadership roles women should have, whether the United States was fascist, and whether multiracial organizing was necessary or desirable. At times we neglect a more painful history of recrimination, sectarianism, and political and social intolerance among those who would otherwise be comrades. Those disagreements may explain why Davis—for all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer—has not always been taken as seriously as her peers from the era.