Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Secretary Hagel?


Dec. 22, 2012:


So, I am given to understand that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B‘nai B‘rith, which more or less boils down to its national director Abe Foxman’s personal view of the planet from his Manhattan bubble, is not thrilled with the prospective (not even real yet) nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. According to Foxman, Hagel is not pro-Israel or anti-Iran enough for the job. Foxman has accused Hagel of invoking stereotypes that suggest not just anti-Israel attitudes but even anti-Semitism. He used the record of an interview Hagel gave to Aaron David Miller a few years back (more about that anon) when he was writing The Much Too Promised Land (2008) to support his accusation.
It’s sort of ironic that an organization with the phrase “anti-defamation” in its own name should resort to defaming others. Well, maybe “ironic” isn’t quite the right word; a few others also come to mind. But defamation it is, because the idea that Chuck Hagel is either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic is risible. It seems pretty clear that Mr. Foxman doesn’t understand how much damage he does by tossing around such innuendo. It’s even clearer that he doesn’t want my advice. (I met him years ago within the confines of a closed meeting, but that’s another story.) The damage done, and how it is done, is not clear to everybody, however—hence this note.
As it happens, Senator Hagel is in very good company as one of Mr. Foxman’s targets. Another of those targets has been none other than Harry Truman.
It came to light in 2003 that Harry S. Truman’s private diary contained what Abe Foxman referred to as “anti-Semitic canards.” Foxman declaimed in a statement that, “sadly, President Truman was a man of his times, and much less a man because of it.” A few days later Foxman published a short essay in the Forward in which he accused Truman of “attributing classic stereotypes about Jews.” He quoted Truman’s diary as follows: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. When they have power, physical financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment of the underdog.” Citing his childhood as a Holocaust survivor and a displaced person, who believed in 1950 that Harry Truman had personally enabled him to become an American, Foxman wrote: “It personally saddens me to learn that he too was flawed.”
Foxman’s comments were unfortunate, to say the least. In the first place, it did not take until 2003 for anyone to learn that Truman had made disparaging remarks about Jews. One example, from Truman’s memoirs published many years earlier, concerns the President’s anger and resentment in the autumn of 1947 against what he calls some “extreme Zionist leaders”:
. . . not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by a political motive and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me. (Truman Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 158)
The President noted at the time in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, “I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.” (Quoted in Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, p. 420)
Was Truman really guilty of anti-Semitic thoughts–and thoughts are all they could possibly have been, since we are talking here about a private diary, not any public statement. Let’s look at the whole diary entry, for July 21, 1947, six p.m., not just the part Foxman chose to quote:
Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He’d no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs.
Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward—and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the D[isplaced] P[ersons] program.
The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.
Is Truman irritated at his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau? Yes, and he is irritated in part because something he did, Truman believes, had negative political consequences for him and the Democratic Party. Probably it did, too. Did Truman not understand the dire plight of the ship Secretary Morgenthau must have been talking about, given the date: the later-to-be-very-famous Haganah ship Exodus? Probably he didn’t. Was Morgenthau justified in trying to get the President’s attention, despite the risks of irking him? Yes, he was.
Let’s now look carefully at the key passages. Is Truman making a statement about Jews, or is he making a statement about what power seems to do to all people? Well, some of both. Grating that his comparison with Hitler and even Stalin was pretty over the top, Truman first says that Jews have no sense of proportion or judgment on world affairs. This might well have been true under the circumstances in July 1947: What sentient adult Jew at the time did not feel at least a little bit unbalanced, with the blood and ashes of European Jewry not yet settled and a deeply frightening war brewing in Palestine? But Truman is not talking about what sets Jews apart from others—a key aspect of anti-Semitism—but rather what makes them the same as all others. Truman is merely asserting that, in this respect anyway, Jews are just like everyone else. Truman made a perfectly non-Jewcentric remark, ample evidence for which resides throughout much of Jewish history. But Foxman saw the reverse: anti-Semitism. And unlike a private diary, he shouted it out loud in an institutional statement and then in a newspaper.
This makes Foxman the kind of Professional Jew that pisses off Presidents (George H.W. Bush, for example), Secretaries of State (James Baker, for example), and other usually well-meaning high-placed people—even friends. This sort of thing may play well to the ADL professional crowd, but it is broadly counterproductive to American Jewry and to Israel. Look at the reality back in 1947: Truman sympathized with the Jews, with Zionism and with what would soon become Israel, and he acted boldly on those sympathies. But some Jews managed to irritate him all the same.
The obvious point is that it is possible to push a friendship so far as to jeopardize it. Today’s “extreme Zionists” have made an art out of it, particularly those who seem unaware that the standard crass, abrasive and cocky demeanor common among New Yorkers is not the national norm. The quickest and most reliable way to turn a harmless, more or less neutral observer into an anti-Israel zealot is to accuse him of bias where there is none. And the quickest way to make a hero out of someone like Patrick Buchanan is to shove the equivalent of nouveau riche political power into the faces of powerful people.
*****
Why do Abe Foxman and leaders of some other secular Jewish advocacy organizations do counterproductive things like this? To answer this question we need to take a small step back to set the context.
The reasons that major Jewish-American organizations exist today are several, and the distinctions among organizations and their rationales are important to get straight. Some organizations, like the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Hebrew Immigration and Aid Society (HIAS), Friends of Hadassah and others exist to do good works in the United States and worldwide. It is not unreasonable for Jews to want to maximize specifically Jewish philanthropy. Such service groups embody the rabbinic principle that all Jews are responsible for each other, wherever they may be: “Kol yisrael areyvim zeh ba-zeh” (Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot, 39a). So deeply embedded is this principle that the only country in the world today that ranks higher than the United States in per capita charitable giving is Israel.
Jewish-American service groups differ, however, from those, like the ADL, that advocate on high-profile political issues such as separation of church and state, abortion and a host of foreign policy issues. The reasons why these groups still exist today are more complex and have rather little to do with Talmudic principles.
American Jews used to feel they needed special help to attain the first-class citizenship that was their legal due. America was a far more hospital place for Jews, even in the 19th century, than most other places, but there was still plenty of social ostracism and some outright bigotry to boot. When B‘nai B‘rith and later the ADL came into existence, there really was anti-Semitism in America and good reason to lobby against it. There was about as much sense in what the ADL did in its founding era as there was in what the NAACP did. Until fairly recently Jews have not felt they had a level playing field on which to compete in the United States. “Recently” in this case has a specific definition: 1964–65.
Everyone “knows” that the Civil Rights Act was not about Jews but about Negroes, as the term used at the time read. And that’s true. But what everyone does not know is that the change in the law, and how the courts interpreted the law, had a vast impact on Jewish social status and achievement in America. Old restrictions against Jews, whether at Ivy League universities or in professional associations, became illegal. They were literally actionable in court. Decades-old constraints fell rapidly, and Jews advanced rapidly as they did. The supposedly old joke—“What’s the difference between a Jewish peddler and a Jewish nuclear physicist? One generation.”—isn’t really so old: It has been fully true in America for only the past forty-some years.
It is an open question how much envy or resentment there is of Jewish success in America. Not much, probably. Jewish success is far more admired than resented in a society that values success as an emblem of virtue as much as of luck. Those who do resent it either reside at the lower echelons of American society, where denizens resent not just Jewish success but everyone else’s as well; or among the déclassé, the classic carriers of resentments large and small. But resentment of Jewish success, to the modest extent it exists, isn’t the same as genuine anti-Semitism, which is very scarce in the United States today. The ADL, however, does not agree. In 1992, for example, the ADL claimed, on the basis of what it called a nationwide survey, that nearly forty million Americans—one in five adults—expressed strong anti-Semitic views (See Sue Fishkoff, “Survey Finds One in Five Americans holds ‘Strongly Antisemitic Opinions’”, Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, November 17, 1992). This was and remains utter nonsense.
Even more bizarre, Foxman claimed in his 2003 book Never Again? that high rates of Jewish assimilation were being caused by anti-Semitic discrimination, not by the faux-Judaism that substitutes the State of Israel for God and Holocaust memorials for the siddur (i.e., the traditional Jewish prayer book). If ADL leaders really believe this stuff, they are paranoid. If they don’t believe it, but find it useful to say anyway, they are dishonest. No other construction for such views is possible.
Of course, no organization, Jewish or otherwise, wants to close up shop even if its raison d’être has disappeared. That’s as true of the World Bank as it is of the ADL. What the ADL was originally set up to do no longer requires doing; the ADL, however, does it anyway. It often fundraises for what has been recently an annual $50 million budget through what can only be described as anti-Semitism scaremongering. It finds anti-Semitism where it does not exist because it needs to. As an organization it is an anti-anti-Semitic hammer, and so it sees, or chooses to see, only anti-Semitic nails.
Any American Jew who is honest about the community’s problems knows that anti-Semitism is not the number one issue; extraordinary and accelerating rates of assimilation are. The reasons for those rates have nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but plenty to do with the dwindling of religious education and observance in American Jewish families and the substitution of a kind of Jewish ideology based on the Holocaust and an ideal, dreamlike image of Israel for Judaism. That ideology is simply not transmissible generation to generation in the same way that genuine Judaism has been, particularly insofar as it focuses on tragedy, mass murder and presumptions of widespread anti-Jewish hatred. What healthy kid would embrace such a nightmarish vision?
But the ADL and other, similarly oriented organizations, feel something between uncomfortable and ambivalent trying to raise money on behalf of Jewish education, say, despite the fact that American Jewish fundraising for Israel has long since become kind of ridiculous. Just as Israel became more important for American Jews as a symbol of their identity—and here were talking about the period from the late 1960s and forward—the objective importance of American Jewish help for Israel declined. Israel today is far more important to American Jewry than American Jewry is to Israel. Hence the shock to the system of secular Jewish-Americans working on behalf of Israel when, twenty years after the Six-Day War, some prominent Israelis—Yossi Beilin among them—told them to keep their money at home and use it instead to educate their own children.
And it fell in part to Hirsh Goodman, then editor of The Jerusalem Report, to explain to American Jews how paltry their UJA contributions were in the context of Israel’s thriving economy. When American Jews buy Israeli bonds, he explained, they cost Israel in bureaucratic expenses more than the investment is worth. Goodman quoted a senior official of the Israeli Treasury Ministry, “If these people really love Israel, they should know that probably the last thing they should do is buy Israeli bonds.” When Goodman tried to suggest that American Jewish organizations raise money instead for Jewish education to stem the tide of assimilation and intermarriage, here is what he was told: “Do you really think we could raise a dime for Jewish education? . . . Go tell Haim Shmerl that you want a pledge for Jewish continuity and you’ll see the money go to the local golf course. We need Israel, even if Israel does not need us” (Hirsh Goodman, “The Real Threat”, Jerusalem Report, September 23, 1993).
Alas, there’s another reason, too. Dealing with assimilation means being forthright about its causes, but many of the elite within secular Jewish advocacy organizations are themselves implicated in those causes. It’s awkward for those who have not done what is necessary to educate and be good Jewish role models for their children to lecture or try to raise money from others on those grounds. Such people heaved private sighs of relief over the supposed recrudescence of anti-Semitism because that, anyway, is a problem they know something about, and a problem that doesn’t roil their kishkes (a Slavic-origin Yiddish word meaning “guts”, for those in need of a translation).
*****
I wonder if Chuck Hagel understands all this, really grasps the dense, dank and convoluted backstory behind Abe Foxman’s most recent fulmination. It would be extraordinary if he did. In my few personal encounters with the Senator, he has seemed to be a reasonably normal fellow from Nebraska, hence not someone you would expect to be expert or even much interested in the historical neuroses of a certain long-wandering Near Eastern tribe.
Aaron David Miller understands it, however. When I saw Aaron’s name taken in vain the other day over the Hagel business, I pointed it out to him. He seemed mildly irritated, which may account for the way yesterday’s New York Times read, with Aaron quoted about those old interviews, explaining that he has no beef whatsoever with Senator Hagel’s understanding of Israel and the Middle East.
Do I? Well, I don’t share Senator Hagel’s views on certain subjects, but that’s not the point. The point is actually twofold.
First, the President deserves to have in his service whatever advisers he prefers. If the President is wrongheaded about strategy or policy, he deserves to have advisers who are similarly wrongheaded. The reason could hardly be simpler: It’s the President’s policy because he is the senior ranking one of only two members of the entire Executive Branch who are elected. Everyone else serves at his pleasure. That’s the democratic system we have, and that’s how it needs to work.
Second, Chuck Hagel’s views on how to deal with Iran or Arab-Israeli conflicts would not be especially relevant were he to become Secretary of Defense. Any Secretary of Defense necessarily has his hands full managing American military assets––their creation, their husbanding, their management, and above all their use. Cabinet Secretaries do not make, or certainly should not be making, policy all by themselves. If the President decides when all is said and done that U.S. military force should be used to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout, Chuck Hagel’s former (necessarily unevolved) statements on the matter won’t stop him.
Insofar as Senator Hagel has said things in the past relevant to defense, he did say that he thought that the Defense Department was bloated from many successive years of large budget hikes. Amazingly, some people took umbrage at that remark, but anyone who thinks it’s not true can’t possibly have his or her head screwed on straight. Spending on defense and intelligence has about doubled in real terms in the past decade. No organization can spend that much onrushing money wisely.
Obviously, there are intelligent and not-so-intelligent ways to deal with the bloat, and a massive and sudden $500 billion sequestration is definitely the wrong way to go about this sort of thing. We must get stronger even as we get leaner, and we can do that with strong leadership that knows to head off parochial bureaucratic selfishness among the uniformed services. Here, too, Hagel is not alone. When I talked with Brent Scowcroft a few years ago about the coming age of austerity for foreign and defense policy, he said more or less the same thing. Were he a few years younger, does anybody think that General Scowcroft couldn’t be an effective Secretary of Defense, just because he once said that the Defense Department needs to learn to do more with less?
Is Chuck Hagel the best choice to run the Pentagon? Maybe, maybe not. He has successful business experience, and he served in uniform in Vietnam. But he has no experience running an organization as massive as Defense. Nor has he served in any other senior capacity in the department (as has, for example, Ashton Carter), an experience that at least would have given him a valuable intuitive sense of how the place works. But there is usually no perfect candidate for this job.
Again, all of this is somewhat beside the point. If the President nominates him, the Senate should confirm him. If his nomination hearings were to become contentious on the basis of Senator Hagel’s policy views that have little to do with his prospective responsibilities, it would be a Jewcentric shame. We’re already in a situation ripe with harm. If the President now declines to nominate Senator Hagel, it will appear to many that his nomination was derailed by the so-called Jewish Lobby, a euphemism for what is construed to be a more or less monolithic Jewish view—this despite the fact that the American Jewish community in no way elected or endorsed the leadership of any secular Jewish advocacy organization. That will only embolden the tactics we’ve seen again in recent days, as, perhaps, the derailment of Chas Freeman’s nomination to head the National Intelligence Council back in March 2009 may have encouraged the current anti-Hagel effort.
Worse, whether contentious hearings derail or fail to derail Chuck Hagel’s route to the Pentagon, it would add to an unfortunate pattern that, one day, could backfire on both American Jewry and Israel. As Ben Shahn once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” It is one thing to state a case, offer a point of view, deign to speak truth to power; doing so is both commendable and a right in a free society. (I’m availing myself of that right now.) But coordinated campaigns of verbal intimidation breed resentment, and resentment accumulated within men can break forth as spite in forms of payback that are by no means limited to the merely verbal.

What's the Matter with Michigan?

December 14, 2012:


It seems that no matter what I do, I can’t beat my colleague here at TAI, Walter Russell Mead, into print on any significant news story. Walter does it fast and, almost invariably, does it very well. He did it again yesterday, early in the day too, on the news that the Michigan state legislature had passed two so-called right-to-work laws.
Like Walter, my sense is that this is a big deal—a turning point in our national odyssey.  Like Walter, too, I see the basic facts in the same way. But unlike Walter, my sensibilities about this are bit different, possibly owing to the fact that he is the son of an Episcopalian clergyman, and I am the son of a rare Jewish member of the Teamsters union. Walter does say that, “Labor needs representation and many of the values that drew millions of working Americans into the labor movement endure.” I would go a bit further than that: Collective bargaining is all that keeps large numbers of Americans at least clingingly in the middle class at a time when globalization and automation are undermining a hard-achieved, broadly egalitarian U.S. social structure. What Republicans in Michigan have done is to attack the viability of collective bargaining. If companies can hire as many non-union laborers as they like, it is obvious that union bargaining power will essentially collapse.
Were that to happen, and were it to spread from Michigan to the rest of the nation, it might help some American businesses to keep their costs down and so better compete worldwide. That, arguably, might produce more jobs—if not necessarily more decently paying jobs. But at the same time, whether that happens or not, it will certainly produce more inequality and the social frictions that ultimately go with it, exacerbating a trend at least a quarter-century now in the making.
When I read the news from Lansing, I immediately began to think of another key turning point in the history of the American labor movement. Since few Americans today know much about that history, let me tell you a little something about it. No doubt you will see many parallels with current circumstances even before I have the opportunity to point them out.
Back around the turn of the last century, you’ll probably be surprised to learn, Paterson, New Jersey, was one of the fastest-growing and economically thriving towns in the United States. It was so because of the Totowa Falls, which supplied almost limitless power to a large number of mills specializing in making silk. By the 1890s, something like 30 percent of all the silk made in America came from Paterson. The mills attracted large numbers of immigrants––Irish, Italian, Jews, Poles and many others. Working conditions were not so good. Days were long, pay was modest, and health issues abounded, whether from the effects of the dyes or of lint dust getting into workers’ lungs.
Some of the immigrant workers were socialists, carrying within their bosoms still the hopes of the failed revolutions of 1848. Way back in 1828 the first industrial strike in American history occurred in Paterson, but in the late 19th century and again in 1902 there were more strikes as labor unrest grew. These strikes never got anywhere, however, because they were not general enough. They targeted particular mills, but since there were so many other mills, the targeted owners could not give in to striker demands or they would go broke for being at a competitive disadvantage.
But then, in February 1913, the mother of all strikes hit Paterson’s 350 silk mills. One of the reasons was a technological change, something rather reminiscent of automation. At the turn of the century, the basic ratio of loom to worker was one to one. But as the machines became more sophisticated, the owners turned to a ratio of one worker to two machines. By early 1913 rumors had begun to spread among the workers that the two to one ratio might soon become a four to one ratio. As the workers, some 25,000 strong, saw it, they were working harder than ever for the same pay while the owners made twice, and prospectively four times, the profits. They wanted an eight-hour day, not the 12–14 hour days they were working. They wanted a ban on child labor, defined as anyone younger than 14. And they wanted more money.
The owners said no. And with that there descended upon Paterson, New Jersey, in all of their force and color, the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies. Big Bill Haywood himself came to town. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came, too, both at the invitation of the small and tottering IWW Local #152. Later on John Reed even showed up, though he of the pure “red” did not necessarily see eye to eye with the blacker syndicalist/anarchist Wobbly creed. The strike was effective in that it was general, aimed at all the hundreds of silk factories in town. Picket lines were set up, relief societies for striking workers were establishes, and lots and lots and lots of speeches were made. Most important, the mills were forced to shut down.
The owners declared a lockout. They also detested the radical rhetoric that set them up as capitalists opposed to the workers, because the truth was that a great number of the owners had started out as the lowest of the low laborers in the same mills. They did not think of themselves as capitalists; they thought of themselves as hard-working successes.  They tried to hire scabs to do the labor, but they were only moderately successful at that. They were eventually far more successful, however, at sending work to mills in southeastern Pennsylvania, to places like Easton and Allentown, where refugees from the anthracite coal mines were willing to work for even less than the silk workers of Paterson. In other words, the owners outsourced. A waiting game of chicken ensued, until finally the strike collapsed. Workers went back to their jobs without winning a single concession from the owners. The Wobblies were finished.
Again in 1924, about 20,000 silk workers tried to stop the four-loom system, which by then had become technically feasible. They failed again, but their disruption persuaded a number of Paterson’s silk manufacturers to leave town. By 1935, there were only about 4,000 workers in the silk industry left, and with the advent of synthetic fabrics the industry subsequently diminished to the point of near nothingness. Patterson did make a comeback as a fabric dyeing industry town, but those operations, too, eventually moved elsewhere to both domestic and foreign production platforms offering lower-wage costs.
What’s the moral of this story? There’s not just one.
First, changes in technology drive changes in the relationship between capital and labor. They always have, and they always will. If it hadn’t been for advancing technology that made the looms more efficient, the labor disruptions in Paterson might not even have occurred. Technology also accounted later on for the problems owners faced when silk was largely displaced by synthetics. Some owners managed to make the transition, and they were far better placed to adjust than workers. But technology challenged everyone in due course, capitalists and workers alike. It is still doing so, whether we notice or not.
Second, union power depends on a variety of circumstances. One of those circumstances is the relative immobility and absence of porosity in labor markets. If the owners couldn’t send work to eastern Pennsylvania, the strike might have ended differently. At the same time, competition is real; workers get no ultimate benefit from driving their employers into bankruptcy. Owners recognize and deal fairly with unions only under two conditions: when the circumstances of competition make that economically viable, and when they acknowledge the dignity and humanity of their labor force. This latter is a very important point, often neglected in narrowly economic analyses—which I will return to in just a moment.
American industrial and trade unions today (and I deliberately exclude from this discussion public service unions because, as I have written before, they are of a qualitatively different nature) face both rapid technological change and the availability of lower-wage platforms that ownership can seek out and employ. It is no wonder, therefore, that the clout of labor unions has so dramatically diminished over the past three decades. It is true, as Walter said, that the leadership of American unions has not been particularly sagacious or effective in recent years. Indeed, union bosses have consistently done stupid, counterproductive things that have harmed everyone, including ultimately themselves. But I’m not sure it would have mattered very much. The ground simply disappeared from beneath the feet of American trade and industrial unions, and it is still doing so today.
What can be done about this? Logically, there are only two ways to restore the power of labor and protect the leverage afforded by collective bargaining. One way is to close down the economy with a wall of protectionism. The country would be poorer as a whole, just as the theory of comparative advantage holds, but we would be more equal among ourselves.
That is a tradeoff some would make and some would reject. Personally, am I willing to pay more for a good or a service if I know that doing so helps a fellow American to get and keep a decent job and helps stabilize entire deteriorating communities? Damn right I am. To me, that is part and parcel of what being a patriot means, and so I “buy American” when I can. Aren’t I concerned at all about the foreigners whose low-paying but still critical jobs would be eliminated as a result if lots of people did what I do? Yes, but I care more about the well-being of other Americans than I do about foreigners. I know that view is not fashionable among the anti-nationalist Left, but I am not a member of the anti-nationalist Left.
The other way is to transform a race to the bottom into a race to the top by exporting, so to speak, trade unionism to other countries. If labor in other countries were more powerful, and wages therefore higher, the competitive disadvantage of American labor would diminish. This is what the international division of the AFL-CIO used to do back in the Cold War, when Lane Kirkland was around. We have not seen his like for many years. I believe that industrial and trade unionism is the best pedagogue for a budding democracy. I would take an effort to create a genuine union abroad over a marquee election any day. Unfortunately, our government doesn’t see things this way anymore, and that includes Democratic administrations as well as Republican ones. Over at the State Department there is a Bureau called DRL for short. The acronym stands for democracy, human rights and labor. Again unfortunately, no one seems to remember anything about the “L.”
Let me not leave you in any doubt: Neither one of these alternatives is remotely practical these days. We are not going to close down our economy behind a protectionist wall, and we are not going to be successful in seeding vast numbers of new labor unions in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Niger, Bosnia, and so on.
The only hope, therefore, is that American corporations will gain comparative advantage through the scientific and technological innovations we have always been so good at, and that they in turn will have the competitive elbow room to recognize their labor forces with the proper sense of dignity workers deserve. Collective bargaining expresses basic fairness; companies by their very nature as partnerships concert their negotiating assets, so labor should be able to do the same. (Some fool once tried to persuade me that unions never had any moral purpose or standing, but were just ethnic gangs organized to keep outsiders from certain job categories…how pathetic.) Collective bargaining is also good for corporations, and intelligent corporate leadership looking out for the long-term success of their enterprises knows that. Corporations should want workers with high morale and loyalty, because that boosts productivity more than any other factor. So-called right-to-work laws that undermine unions will produce precisely the opposite.
Let me close with reference to the Bible. (“Say what?” I hear you ask. Please, bear with me a moment.)
The Hebrew Bible evinces a particular attitude toward this general question. Most people reading the text of the Torah in English may be excused for thinking that slavery is okay according to the law. But this misreads the text. Remember that the text of the early parts of the Hebrew Bible at least, the Torah, is predicated on a tribal division of the land in an agricultural and animal husbandry context (later books and later laws, including a few retrojected into earlier texts, reflect a far more specialized economic environment). In those days, tribes leading down to clans leading down to extended families owned agricultural and pasture land. People worked together in family groups, with elders usually calling the shots. The notion that a person would work in a subordinate role for wages for someone to whom he was not related was strange, something akin to an unnatural act.
Nevertheless, such things happened, and provision for them is made (I won’t go through the specific verses; you can find them for yourself if you’re interested). But these relationships did not describe a condition of slavery. They describe a condition of what we would call at most indentured servitude—and temporarily so at that, given the laws related to jubilee years. There are different laws pertaining to war captives, whose situation more closely resembles that of a slave. But the idea that one Israelite would literally enslave another is quite foreign to the sense of the text.
It is easy for modern readers to miss this distinction, promoted by clumsy translations, since so many of us work for other people to whom we are not related. What in biblical times was thought very unnatural we take to be utterly natural. If we work for others as trade or industrial workers, we are involved in what Marx once called wage slavery. Obviously, in civilized countries what goes on nowadays does not deserve such a brutal descriptor. Nevertheless, we would be wise to ponder the fact that the structure of modern industrial economies is based on inherently unequal relationships between those who have capital and those who work for those who have capital. The reason this matters ultimately is that it contradicts the egalitarian democratic mythos we live by. We say, and to our credit we mostly believe, that all men are created equal; but for all practical purposes the very structure of our economy says otherwise.
Barring some very improbable mass return to a more egalitarian and self-sufficient pastoral life, or a leap forward to a comparable situation where people in much greater numbers work for themselves, there is nothing to be done about this. It just is what it is. (Attempts to eradicate the problem by having the state play the role of capitalists, whether in “soft” Left socialist or “hard” Left communist terms, haven’t worked out so well, and indeed they didn’t even solve the basic problem.) A work contract within any for-profit enterprise, even in America today, is still essentially a form of indentured servitude, though for the vast majority of us it is so very mild a form that the term doesn’t feel right: We can quit and seek work elsewhere on pretty short notice or no notice, we can get severance pay, we have certain rights of redress, we can get government unemployment benefits if one party or the other breaks the contract, and so on and so forth. All the same, no one who does not work for himself or within an integral family unit is truly free and “at liberty” the same way that someone who does work for himself is.
This is so simple and obvious a point that it is rarely made explicit or recognized at all these days. But it is important precisely because in the absence of the radical liberty afforded by self-employment the only thing that makes this condition morally tolerable is the extension by an employer to an employee of the unambiguous acknowledgment of workers’ inalienable dignity. Yes, the very act of employing someone instrumentalizes that person; the employer cares more about what a person can do than who a person is. That is natural, and the larger the enterprise and workforce, the more natural it is. But that is not a sufficient basis for a stable and mutually beneficial relationship. What that means, among other things, is that understanding capital-labor relationships, and understanding the role of unions as well, requires more than economics.
And that, finally, is what is really disturbing about what the Republicans in the Michigan state legislature have done. Whatever their thinking or their actual motives—and I’m not thereby giving them the benefit of the doubt—they are instrumentalizing people. They are in effect enabling the withdrawal or the diminishment of the acknowledgment of workers’ dignity. They are encouraging the breaking of a bond far more important and precious to a society than a mere labor contract. They have done something that is both wrong and ultimately foolish.