Labor: August 2009 Archives

While at least one New York politician is wriggling away from accusations of playing the race card, New York City Councilmember John Liu—a rare Asian American elected official and candidate for city controller—is scrambling to clear the record on his immigrant roots.

Liu's war of words with the New York Daily News began with a campaign ad highlighting Liu's working-class immigrant background. According to the ad's narration, Taiwan-born Liu toiled with his mother in a sweatshop—part of a then-thriving garment industry known for Dickensian working conditions. Flashing an image of female garment workers slaving away, the ad touted Liu's rags-to-riches ascent from Queens to corporate America and then public office: "Working in finance taught Liu how to account for every penny, but working in that sweatshop as a kid taught him why we need to."

The Daily News was quick to test Liu's street cred. The paper discovered, through interviews with Liu's family, that young John hadn't really worked at a factory, per se, but merely helped out at home spinning yarn. Liu's father described his son's earnings (25 cents per ball of yarn) simply as “allowance."

American Prospect executive editor Mark Schmitt has a thought-provoking piece about organized labor's diminishing role in the Democcratic party, as evidenced by resistance to the Employee Free Choice Act on both sides of the aisle. On the party that won with Obama:

The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the "emerging Democratic majority" that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is a coalition that can win without a majority of white working-class voters, whether union members or not. (Those who were union members were always solid Democrats.) In many ways, that's good because it helps to bring an end to the culture wars that limited the party's ability to speak clearly about matters of fundamental rights and justice.

But it's also dangerous. A political coalition that doesn't need Joe the -- fake -- Plumber (John McCain's mascot of the white working class) can also afford to ignore the real Joes, Josés, and Josephines of the working middle class, the ones who earn $16 an hour, not $250,000 a year. It can afford to be unconcerned about the collapse of manufacturing jobs, casually reassuring us that more education is the answer to all economic woes. A party of professionals and young voters risks becoming a party that overlooks the core economic crisis--not the recession but the 40-year crisis--that is wiping out the American dream for millions of workers and communities that are never going to become meccas for foodies and Web designers.

By positioning EFCA as a harbinger, rather than the heart, of the Left's problems, Schmitt raises some interesting points about who's really getting ignored in our government. The recession has hit people of color longer and harder than anyone else — and suggestions like 'education' and 'job training' don't help constituents who are already working three jobs to make ends meet, or who don't have the language skills to take classes.