San Diego Labor Democratic Club to Host Harold Meyerson Talk
“Labor Post Bessemer: The Way Forward” on Sunday, May 16th at 2:00
Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96336732631
By Jim Miller
What is the fate of exploited American workers in the wake of the failed campaign to launch a union at the Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama? In a recent American Prospect piece, “Labor After Bessemer”renowned journalist Harold Meyerson outlines labor’s “seemingly endless losing streak” in big union drives as “the decks are so stacked in the employers’ favor that hardly any group of workers who believe themselves to be easily replaceable has won recognition in decades.”
Meyerson goes on to note that, “unions aren’t going to gain members again absent the enactment of the kind of major reforms to labor law that are part of the PRO Act, a bill that has already passed the House and awaits an uncertain fate, at best, in the Senate.” The sweeping PRO Act, which would impose penalties on union busting employers, ban right-to-work laws, and more, according to Meyerson, “still doesn’t go far enough to redress the inequalities that result from more than half a century of union decline.”
Whether the PRO Act passes or not, there are still things that the Biden Administration can do to help union organizing, but the task is huge yet vitally important. As Meyerson outlines:
For the nation at large, though, a whole host of changes are needed to enable Americans to regain the workplace power that once made our economy the envy of the world. Forbidding employers to threaten workers as they decide whether to form unions, raising wages legislatively so that workers needn’t fear having to take a lower-paying job, using the tax code to diminish corporate offshoring; leveling the playing field for workers will require any number of fundamental changes to our economy. But if there’s anything our economy, and our workers’ ability to build power, needs, it’s fundamental change.
When one considers that we are beginning to emerge from a devastating pandemic and subsequent economic downturn during which millions of American working people lost jobs, healthcare, and homes while the number of billionaires increased as their wealth exploded, the question of how to increase worker power becomes even more essential.
Indeed, the question of how to decrease our historic level of economic inequality and make American democracy work for everyone is directly tied to the health of the labor movement in the United States which has always been the only real mechanism workers have had to collectively promote their interests.
If you want to hear more from Harold Meyerson on how labor might rise to this daunting challenge, join the San Diego Labor Democratic Club this coming Sunday, May 16th at 2:00 where he will speak on “Labor Post Bessemer: The Way Forward.”
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect and writes about California politics in the Los Angeles Times. His articles on labor and politics have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and New Statesman. In 2009 The Atlantic Monthly named him one of "the most influential commentators in the nation" as part of their list "The Atlantic 50." Meyerson will be joined by the recently elected leader of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, Brigette Browning and current head of the United Domestic Workers and Labor Council President, Doug Moore.
This event is FREE. Here is the Zoom link: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96336732631