Last Friday I was able to talk to Andy Stern for about twenty-five minutes. Over the past few months, I have talked over the phone with a lot of high-powered people, but I was never nervous until I talked to Stern. In the labor movement, there is quite a bit of mythology surrounding Stern, and this section of
Matt Bai's recent piece on him may help shed some light on my feelings for those who are unfamiliar:
In some respects, the S.E.I.U. now feels very much like a Fortune 500 company. In the lobby of its headquarters, a flat-screen TV plays an endless video of smiling members along with inspirational quotes from Stern, as if he were Jack Welch or Bill Gates. The union sold more than $1 million worth of purple merchandise through its gift catalog last year, including watches, sports bras, temporary tattoos and its very own line of jeans. (The catalog itself features poetry from members and their children paying tribute to the union, along with recipes like Andy Stern's Chocolate Cake With Peanut-Butter Frosting.)
Is a certain Living Color song playing in your head after reading this passage? It certainly is in mine. But there is something else going on in all this beyond the Cult of Stern that reminds me of blogs and the Dean campaign. Instead, of a cult of Stern, it is more like the nascent moment of a cult, or more accurately a culture, of SEIU:
In all of this, Stern's critics in other unions see a strange little cult of personality. Another way to look at it, though, is that Stern understands the psychology of a movement; workers in the union want to feel as if someone is looking out for them. When he and I walked into the S.E.I.U. campaign office in Miami shortly before the presidential election, the union's activists greeted him with hugs or shy smiles. Stern took a moment to chat with each member. ''I got to have my picture taken with you once before, you know,'' one man told him proudly. ''You mean I got have my picture taken with you,'' Stern replied with the timing of a politician.
Over the phone, the one thing that Stern told me which struck me the most ws that he felt much of the problem with the Democratic party stemmed from how its economic message did not connect with, and I am paraphrasing, "people who go to work everyday." Republicans, he said (to continue paraphrasing, can tell people that they will give them a raise through tax cuts, but what how does talk of balancing the budget speak to people? How does it impact their lives? What difference does it make to someone who gets up and goes to work everyday whether or not the budget is balanced? His point was that we needed to find ways to directly relate to people, and the way they live now.
I feel there is a clear connection between the booming SEIU culture and Stern's focus on finding a politics that directly relates to the way people live now. I believe that the SEIU member and activist culture of clothing, poetry and food that Bai describes in his piece can be best understood not as a cult of personality, but instead as just one part of a larger attempt by SEIU to be a meaningful and satisfying part of the lives of its membership. In addition to finding new organizing solutions so that workers can have a voice in their job and improved living conditions, Stern and SEIU seem to work to provide an important psychological element in the everyday lives of its membership. This not only allows the union to be an important service to its members, but that actually allows both its members and the union to become more human. In order to do this, it is always important to find new ways to speak and work to people that relate to the way they live now, rather than the way they lived in the past.
To me, it sounds like the search for a new, emerging solidarity. Then again, since when we find it that word will no longer be accurate, for now I will just call it the new emerging blank.
Solidarity is not a common word these days. Sure, I often use the closing "in solidarity," line to many of my emails, as do many people in the labor movement. However, I can also remember dozens of occasions at rallies and union meetings when, along with everyone else, I would drone out the most tone-deaf, lifeless version of "Solidarity Forever," that one could possibly imagine. For a long time I did not think this was important, and so I never put much thought into it. Over the past few days, however, I have come to the conclusion that my lack of interest in these brain-dead renditions of the labor anthem is emblematic of a greater problem. I always felt a sense of community when I was working in the labor movement, but still the word "solidarity" and our famous anthem meant nothing to me. It described neither what I felt, nor what I desired.
The problem I am trying to describe is that concepts like solidarity are part of the language of the past that is being used to describe a movement of the past that has lost much of its meaning today. Bai writes:
The economic policy of the Democratic Party, he says, ''is basically being opposed to Republicans and protecting the New Deal. It makes me realize how vibrant the Republicans are in creating 21st-century ideas, and how sad it is that we're defending 60-year-old ideas.'' Like big labor, Stern says, the party needs to challenge its orthodoxy -- and its interest groups -- if it wants to put forward a program that makes sense for new-economy workers. Could it be that the Social Security system devised in the 1930's isn't, in fact, the only good national retirement program for today's wage earner? Is it possible that competition is the best way to rescue an imperiled public-school system?
Stern, I do not believe, is honestly suggesting that we scrap Social Security in favor of privatizing accounts. The point isn't that he accepts conservative economic ideas, but that he believes Democrats and progressives
need to develop new ones:
This spring, Stern plans to convene an eclectic group of Democrats to begin outlining a new economic agenda. ''We don't want it to be the same old people,'' Stern told me. ''We want people who might say, for example, 'Maybe privatization isn't such a terrible thing for people,' even if that's not what the Democratic Party thinks. Or, for example, 'Wal-Mart isn't the worst thing for the economy after all.' '' He laughed heartily at that one. ''We need to shock people out of their comfort zone and make them think.''
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It might be a bit of an extreme analogy on my part, but surely if words and concepts like "solidarity" are no longer an accurate expression of the feelings and desires of those either in or outside of the labor movement, then it must be reasonable to suggest that New Deal and Affluent Society economic policies are also no longer an accurate expression of the economic needs and desires of those both inside and outside of the Democratic Party. This is not to say that conservatives or "New Democrats" are right about economics, but simply that we are unable to articulate our new ideas, or express our new solidarity. Conservatives know how to talk contemporary conservative, but we do not yet know how to talk contemporary liberal, contemporary labor, or contemporary progressive. Perhaps we cannot yet speak these languages because we have not yet developed the ideas, beliefs and emotions they would be used to describe. We drone out horrific butcherings of "Solidarity Forever" because the language of the past does not describe our contemporary experience, however communal it may in fact be.
In Jerome's excellent post this morning, he described growing group of partisan Democrats who, at least right now, are united simply in our opposition to the conservative agenda, but have not yet formed a new alternative. We cannot yet speak our new language or fully live our new experience, and this prevents us from finding a more direct way to connect with "people who go to work everyday." While I have complained in the past about the disconnect between labor and the netroots, both SEIU and the netroots seem actively involved in a desperate search for the ideas, words and experiences that will allow us to do so in the future. Much like how everything we seem to do on community blogs or what we did in the Dean campaign was very much about finding new means, words and ideas to connect with people and engage in politics, so to are many of Stern's actions. After all, the nascent SEIU culture described above can also be seen on blogs.
More from Bai:
The big conversation going on in Democratic Washington at the moment, at dinner parties and luncheons and think-tank symposia, revolves around how to save the party. The participants generally fall into two camps of unequal size. On one side, there is the majority of Democrats, who believe that the party's failure has primarily been one of communication and tactics. By this thinking, the Democratic agenda itself (no to tax cuts and school vouchers and Social Security privatization; yes to national health care and affirmative action) remains as relevant as ever to modern workers. The real problem, goes this line of thinking, is that the party has allowed ruthless Republicans to control the debate and has failed to sufficiently mobilize its voters. A much smaller group of prominent Democrats argues that the party's problems run deeper -- that it suffers, in fact, from a lack of imagination, and that its core ideas are more an echo of government as it was than government as it ought to be.
Virtually everyone in the upper echelons of organized labor belongs solidly to the first camp. Stern has his feet firmly planted in the second.
Personally, I am not sure if I accept this binary distinction, because as far as I can tell it will take a lot of imagination to get our message out and counter the Republican Noise Machine, and just as it will take quite a message machine to disseminate the products of our imagination once developed. Both message and imagination are needed, and like our many inventive ideas, Stern and SEIU are also in the process of exploration. For example, Stern has suggested moving entirely to ballot initiatives rather than working on behalf of candidates. He was talked of labor becoming a sort of left wing Club for growth that challenges a lot of Democrats as well as Republicans. In addition to the extensive overhaul of the AFL-CIO's structure that he is demanding, he is simultaneously making very real alliances with foreign unions. SEIU has done inventive things like run ads in French newspapers to take on a French multinational during an organizing campaign in New Jersey. It is all very forward looking, very pro-reform, very new.
If and when we do find our new solidarity, that will not be the word we use to describe it. When we eventually find our ten-word slogan or elevator pitch it will not sound very much like FDR, Kennedy, or Clinton. All of this will take some time, but we are now finding some words, like Fainthearted Faction, and we are finding new experiences like Meetup and citywide collective bargaining. Our new experiences and our new language are out there, and if there is one definition of reform Democrat or reform unionist that I find the most appealing, it is the overwhelming desire to continue the search for the new emerging blank.
