General Politics XII World • Page 305

its not just a messaging thing, its a policy thing, and its an actually doing the policy thing while you're in power.

 

Not a PSA fan, but man the libs are mad at them for this one, but they are pretty correct.

The Biden campaign internal polling showing Trump would win by 400 points at the same time his staff was telling the press that he had it in the bag is especially damning.

The Pod Jons seem genuinely hate the Biden staff.

 

I gotta admit maybe i was naive because i am cis, but the liberals immediately throwing trans people under the bus stuff in this loss was something I did not see coming and it's kind of horrifying.

 

yeah Walz is young enough he could've been a great VP for someone in 2028. At least MN get to keep him now.

 

Saw it coming from a mile away if I’m being honest with you

 

liberalism from its inception has always been based a standard of equality at the exclusion of others who don't fit that concept of humanness. Keep that in mind and you'll never be surprised.

 

Walz > Harris @ top of ticket tbh

 

This is wild and also true, the whole coming out of it stronger idea is getting at what I was saying is that their messaging was never tested.

 

didn't Nancy Pelosi have a say in this though?

 

This will likely be the ultimate “I’m happy for you, or sorry that happened” post, but I’m sharing it because I think it highlights where the Democratic Party is incapable of squaring social justice issues with economic ones. I apologize in advance because it will read as smug and self-congratulatory and indulgent, but things like this are why I feel the way I do about politics. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, but I think it highlights similar dynamics:

I’m the Union rep for a large highway maintenance bargaining unit that’s very diverse racially and age-wise (but also almost all men), and very blue collar. Around 450 members. The group is about 275 laborers, 70 mechanics, and the remainder are “specialty shop” workers, IE lighting engineers, sign maker/hangers, mechanical-electrical engineers, messengers, etc.

When I first started working with them, each of these three groups was convinced they’d been historically fucked over. The mechanics and specialty shop groups said they were always out-voted and out-numbered by the laborers, who only looked out for themselves; the laborers felt that the mechanics and specialty shop groups took money out of the pot by getting decent incentives based on having certifications; specialty shop felt like they were an after thought compared to laborers and mechanics because they weren’t as centralized as those groups and hadn’t historically had their own stewards or personnel at the table. Each group felt like they shouldn’t be in a Union with the other, that they each should be under their own separate contracts.

Historically, this unit would get four year contracts where they would accumulate base rate increases of, like, 8-12 percent over the life of each deal. The employer accomplished ratification on these shitty deals by basically dividing the groups against each other. This group would get a higher percent than that group; these workers would get a bonus, etc. There was also a geographic divide where the workers closer to Chicago felt like the workers further out west were more likely to roll over and accept bad deals because cost of living was lower out there. These factors had always worked in the employer’s favor. The result was that they lagged very far behind several other “comparable” entities, namely the road maintainers in the city of Chicago and the County’s highway maintainers. People left this unit all the time to go to those other entities, leading to bad staffing, people being stuck on midnight shifts for years with no ability to get off because of said poor staffing, etc.

I started working with this group in 2020. As I heard more about the dynamics at play, the only thing we’d be able to do to reverse them was to get people pulling in the same direction. They could have the same petty gripes about each other, but for the purposes of fighting for a better contract, everyone needed to have the same baseline understanding of what solidarity and unity could achieve for them.

The way me and the stewards began to explain is was this: to get the most out of the employer, the employer needed to be worried that you could create a crisis for them that they could not handle. The vast majority of members understood this - a strike (or the credible threat of one) would lead to a catastrophe that the State could not abide. If the three groups were not on the same page however, or if they weren’t fighting together under the same contract, they would each undermine their ability to create that crisis - the laborers are the largest group, but if the mechanics and specialty shop workers were not striking at the same time then those employees would be made scabs for the laborers and cripple their effectiveness. If the mechanics or specialty shop workers wanted to strike, but didn’t have the laborers support, then they did not have the numbers to shut down operations on their own.

So, once we’d educated members on this basic principle, we had to come up with proposals that spoke to each of these individual groups’ interests and give them each something to fight for. These took the form of various economic proposals based on prevailing wage rates, but mostly on the basis that our members in this unit should be the highest paid people in their job titles working for the State. The laborers would not vote for a contact that did not help the mechanics get to that status, and visa versa, and same went for the specialty shop groups.

It meant that everyone knew the numbers we had to hit in terms of hourly rates of pay for each group, and was committed to voting down any contract that didn’t check all three boxes. To put pressure on the employer, during the first 10 months of negotiations we did a kind of temperature-raising series of actions against them. The first was a basic petition - “we deserve better, we are United in our demands, take this serious” yadda yadda. The message wasn’t the words on the petition, it was that 450ish people - 100% of the unit - was willing to sign it; to act together. When Management still wouldn’t go to the number we wanted to get to, we started to crash their board meetings and speak during public comment. Again, the purpose wasn’t specifically the content of the members’ speeches (although that was powerful in rallying each other), but rather to show the Employer that we would continue to escalate and get in their faces. When Management still didn’t make the progress we demanded, we held a picket outside of their headquarters and invited press to attend, now changing the message to “we are ready to do whatever it takes” to have our demands met.

The purpose of these actions was multi-faceted: 1) so that members themselves could feel their Union flexing muscle by showing strength in numbers and building unity; 2) so that we could internally gauge member willingness to take action (because if you don’t sign a petition I’ll never trust that you’ll go on strike); and 3) to show the employer that they needed to meet our demands to avoid further escalation.

Around the one-year mark of negotiations, about 7 months after the predecessor contract had expired, we got an offer from the Employer that they said they were “certain” our members would vote for, even though it was still on average $2-3 per hour short of the goal we’d set for each group. We called their bluff and said we’d take it to our members for a vote, who then voted it down 91%-9% - the first contract they’d ever voted down (an incredibly stronger one than any contract they’d had previously, for what it’s worth too). My favorite phone call I’ve ever made was to tell the State’s attorney we’d voted it down lol i heard this motherfucker literally start choking and saying he’d call me right back. When he did, his first question was had we authorized a strike. I told him we had not, that we wanted to give Management the chance to meet our demands, but that if they fucked around at the table and low-balled us again, that 90%+ no vote could turn into a 90%+ strike authorization vote.

When we got back to the table, my job was super easy! I didn’t have to point to cost of living or the fact that our members worked through the pandemic or that people get seriously injured on the job, or show a bunch of graphs to make comparisons to other bargaining units. I could just tell them each time they made an offer “that will get voted down and lead to a strike; hit our numbers and you will get a deal done.” On that note, this was by far the most empowered I’ve ever felt lol I could say anything to them and there was nothing they could do about it because we were that well-organized and had that much solidarity that we were firmly in control of the situation. They kept inching their way up $0.50/hr at a time and asking us to meet them halfway, and we kept saying “nope. Hit our numbers and we’re good; fail to and we are ready to walk.”

Eventually, at like 11pm, they came back and said they were “accepting the Union’s offer.” We took it back to our members, and 87% of the members voted to accept it. This means our group was so well-organized they voted almost completely 1:1 no on the first deal:yes on the second.

This was not because I’m a super special skilled negotiator, or our Stewards have great relationships with their bosses. It’s because our unit was so mobilized and ready to fight for a program that would improve all of their situations that they really just couldn’t be stopped. A lot of members said nice stuff to me about what a great job we did, but I always tell them that if we don’t have several hundred people ready to punch the boss in the mouth, I’m just some asshole who sends emails. As a group, they had gotten to a place where they understood that it was better to fight for not only themselves, but the people they worked with, even on proposals that didn’t benefit them personally - not in a rah rah cheerleader way, but because that’s actually just the only winning strategy.

I know this is talking about bringing people together over economic issues and not the cross between social and economic issues, but I believe the dynamics are similar enough, in that it is an instance in how you square the interests of multiple constituencies of different sizes without throwing one under the bus: by giving them all something to work towards and educating them to understand that they’ll be better equipped to secure those gains if they work in lockstep with one another. I say all this to compare it to the whole “she cares about social issues like trans rights more than middle class Americans” polling results - Harris failed to give people something to rally behind that benefited their material reality. She was the politician version of the Union rep who tells discontented members “be happy with what you’ve got.” If you divorce social justice from economic justice in this instance, you leave an opening for the Trump’s of the world to sow division and pit groups against each other. My large CDL driver kinda-toxic dude members have more in common with your average working class trans person than they do with, say, Elon Musk. The way you get them into alignment with that trans individual is by offering them all something that will make their lives better.

The Democrats cannot do this in a meaningful or lasting way because at the end of the day they represent a class that is built on exploiting working people, whatever their gender, race, or any other factors relating to identity.

 

As new Green Party member I just joined r/GreenParty, I saw a thread about reforming the party into a mass movement party that welcomes in any leftist/progressive tired of the Dems, and they were talking about possibly reaching out and merging with the other small left third parties, and working with the DSA and unions and I thought "this is great! Exactly what I was looking for!"

Then I saw someone reply "we need to merge with the libertarian party too and end this fake left/right divide!" Ohboy, rebuilding the Greens is gonna take some work.

 

It’s really funny to me when liberals act like every green vote would’ve been democrat because the party and base is full of reactionaries and eco fascists and anarcho capitalists and such

 

it seems like whenever elections come up they make overtures towards doing this, and vomit out platitudes about doing this, and send out fundraising emails that make it seem like they will do this and asking people to send money so they can do this, and then they pull the football away like Lucy every single time

only they didn't even really pretend all that much this time really if we're being honest

they called Liz Cheney instead

 

Well I hoping that changes or I can be part of that change, and we kick those people out because I see so much potential here of what this could be.

 

I don't know anyone who was confident Trump would lose.

Many, however, were confident he should lose. I was one of them and still am.

 

think the green party has a lot of baggage for my generation

 

Fuck, beat me to it

 

any time someone says that Biden is the most progressive president in however many years, it is so much more of an indictment of the Democratic party than it is some sort of vindication of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

 

Then imagine running to the right of that.....wait I don't have to imagine its what happened.

 

not to be dismissive or a downer, because I think at this point it's not clear which is the best and most effective choice of reforming greens vs burning down the DNC vs some other options for electoral success, but this is almost the same energy that the DSA had after 2016.

The DNC has done everything post-Squad election to beat down other similar national candidates since. Since RCV has been shot down almost everywhere it was on the ballot this week, I just see Dems and Reps teaming up to start making election qualification rules more stringent or rat fucking ballot access as much as possible in states over the next few years. I just don't know.