http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575182293387764542.htmlAPRIL 14, 2010
Conservatives and the Market for Alienation
The GOP claims to speak for the working man.
By THOMAS FRANK
Labor battles are often moments of shocking economic clarity, when bland corporate optimism gives way to ugly reality. I first learned this 15 years ago, when workers at the A.E. Staley corn-processing plant in Decatur, Ill., were locked out by management. I lived in Chicago at the time and, along with a colleague, wrote an essay on the Decatur "war zone" for the Chicago Reader.
All the details of that old story all came back to me last week, when Steven Ashby and C.J. Hawking, authors of "Staley," a recent book on the struggle, spoke at a bookstore in Washington, where I live today. At the time of the conflict, Mr. Ashby and Ms. Hawking, who are a professor and a pastor respectively, ran a solidarity committee supporting the workers, and their book on the lockout makes little effort to understand Staley management; their concern is with the unionists, whose experiences they document in amazing detail.
Sympathizing with the workers was an easy thing to do in those days, as their small but spunky union squared off against the multinational goliath that owned Staley. What divided the two sides, among other things, was a management demand that workers give up eight-hour days for 12-hour rotating shifts, a scheme that workers believed would remove them from the life of their town.
What makes the workers' story fascinating, as Mr. Ashby and Ms. Hawking remind us, is their strategy of maximizing rank-and-file participation. They held countless meetings, arguing over and voting on everything. They chose to increase their own dues and instead of striking they resolved on a strategy in which union members "worked to rule," meaning they followed company manuals to the letter. In 1993 Staley management locked them out and the battle began in earnest.
In the summer of 1994 came a moment of awful enlightenment, when workers who were blocking a plant entrance were pepper-sprayed by Decatur police. The Staley unionists were not anarchists or professional protesters—they were flag-waving, middle-class citizens, the kind of people politicians used to salute in Labor Day speeches. Many of them were Vietnam vets; some were Reagan Democrats; and now, here they were on the "new economy's" receiving end.
In October of 1994 I was on hand to watch a parade of union sympathizers march through Decatur. The crowd wasn't large by Washington, D.C., standards, but in the context of that small city it seemed overwhelming. I thought of it as a sort of Frank Capra moment, a scene that gave life to the cliché: Here were the people confronting the power.
Populist rhetoric was everywhere in those days. For the Staley workers it led to confrontation with their bosses and on to defeat, but in the rest of the country it carried people in exactly the opposite direction.
A month after that rally in Decatur, the Republican Revolution swept in the Gingrich Congress. The next year, Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the new House majority leader, published a manifesto in which he griped, "The people who do the working and paying and creating and producing find themselves answering to the commands of people who 'plan,' 'consult,' 'analyze,' and campaign for a living, but who produce and create exactly nothing."
Taken by itself, Mr. Armey's complaint might have come from a protestor's megaphone that summer in Decatur. But what Mr. Armey seems actually to have meant by "people who do the working" were business owners. Standing up for working people meant beating OSHA down, cutting taxes and regulations, and then, presumably, skipping off to a lobbying job on K Street.
I have never thought much of Mr. Armey's ideas, but what strikes me now as I look back over the past 15 years is how comfortable conservatives are as they turn the most full-throated workerist formulas to their own purposes. They seem perfectly at home with protest, with discontent, even with their own peculiar version of class war.
Most Democrats, on the other hand, tread gingerly when they encounter divisive situations like the war in Decatur. They are nominally the party of the weak and the dispossessed, but many of them don't know how to play that tune anymore. When it comes to union priorities like the Employee Free Choice Act they have trouble remembering why it's a good idea. What they stand for instead is bipartisan civility and postindustrial contentment.
For blue-collar workers, times are even worse now than they were in 1995. But a funny thing happened in the intervening years: Conservatives have virtually cornered the market on outrage and alienation. If you've got a grievance; if you're angry at elites; if you think the system is corrupt; and even if you're upset about the power of Wall Street, they've got a tea party for you.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303695604575182293387764542.html
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