Progressive intellectuals have been
acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood
swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!”
sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy
Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault”
snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
It
must be confusing and a bit daunting for those deep inside the labor
movement, all these progressive mood swings. At the beginning of this
month, New York Times’ columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about having
a “V-8 Moment” over
the abandonment of labor unions, an abandonment that was so thorough
and so complete that establishment liberals like Nocera forgot they’d
ever abandoned labor in the first place!
The
intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards
labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this
abandonment of labor has manifested itself. While progressives and labor
are arguing, sometimes viciously, over labor’s current sorry state, one
thing progressives haven’t done is serious self-examination on how and
where this abandonment of labor manifests itself, how it affects the
very genetic makeup of liberal assumptions and major premises.
So
I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest
names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights
Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find
that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic
or issue that it covers.
No comments:
Post a Comment