A day late but here is a great example of this in Berkeley, CA. TLDR:
- Berkeley city council passed a law requiring expensive health care and apprentice training for new building
- CA state passed a law saying you can skip local regs (like the Berkeley one) if you have 20% affordable units
- all the new proposed projects are picking 20% affordable option and getting out of the labor requirements
- labor unions are BIG MAD
In essence, we have a two-way fight over the surplus profit in a new housing. It can go to labor unions or can go to subsidizing poor people’s rent but it can’t go to both.
“Your costs are my income” is the key point, Matt. Isn’t the elephant in this particular room housing? Lower home prices are good for folks who don’t own their home, and bad for the folks that do, and the latter group vote more.
Of course all the union members suffer from poor affordability as well. I think it's ok at least for a while that people make up their own minds about what affordability means to them.
I live in Chicago and suffer from lots of stationary bandits but primarily the public employee unions and even more so the Teachers Union. Mayor Johnson was elected by teachers and keeps trying to raise taxes so he doesn't have to fire any. In the meantime, the student population continues to shrink and many of our schools are less than 50% occupied.
On thought I have is to drop residency requirements for the bunch of them Let them live outside the city. I find the bromides about how they need to live in Chi to understand Chi utter BS. Most live in their own self-constructed communities like Mount Greenwood.
I'm interested in opinion and especially those that don't invoke the bromides.
The masses are always happy to scape-goat each other be it immigrants, unions or social security disability claimants while technology systematically excludes more and more of them from the ownership society all of them hope to join. Everyone is a small-time rent-seeker from everyone else's perspective. That is not the root of the affordability crisis.
The masses? Who's that? I'm tired of paying high property taxes, sales taxes and so on for services in decline - Chicago's public schools. Your comment is just the same old cant.
'The masses' is an idiotic category devoid of nothing but a gesture toward polemic. Yeah, actually the stationary bandits play a big role in the affordability of cities.
Calling people struggling to cling on their middle class living standards stationary bandits is more idiotic polemics than anything I said. Unions have supermajority approval among the American public because unlike the sillies at SB, the American people innately understand that everyone eking out a living is someone else's stationary bandit and the problem with society is not that fewer people than dictated by the market are destitute. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx
I am just having trouble relating to how the party that endorses union rent seeking*, government employee rent seeking*, government building half million dollar houses for mentally disturbed substance abusers, higher taxes, larger income transfers, higher welfare, complementary medical coverage for undocumented immigrants, prohibitions on cheap fossil fuels, prohibitions against nuclear, more regulations on building and business, and higher carbon taxes is going to be able to position itself as pro-affordability.
Are you suggesting Democrats lie? Or change positions? If neither, then how do they make this work? I am being serious. How do these two paths mesh together?
*defined as acquiring above market (supply/demand) wages.
Great post and agreed, at some point you have to care more about results than just empty rhetoric and gestures. Further how we deliver on those results also matters imo. I really hope some of the people that need to hear this message read this post.
The answer to why some workers are unable to afford things is always that some other group of workers is making a little over the median wage.
If you are a worker and not living directly off your capital gains and you agree with Matty's worldview then I am sorry to say that you are a sucker from a self-preservation perspective.
Yeah here this a choice between raising incomes or lowering costs. Government has more tools for the former and less for the latter. But as we learned during Biden voters really hate higher costs more than they want raising wages. Unfortunately, that means to have lower costs you're going to have lower wages and somewhat lower GDP in some areas. Voters want both higher wages and lower costs. Most politicians have emphasized the former but I think the latter wins out but that does mean you have to go after not just unions, but homeowners and large parts of the economy that are fundamentally rent-seeking endeavors and the political cost almost always ends up outweighing any long-term solution. At the end of the day though, voters will still be unhappy until costs go down and that means all other considerations are less important. If a politician can make the costs go down, that upside outweighs any other trade-offs. Not all trade-offs are created equal.
Investors think it would be profitable to build a 2,500 mile electrical transmission line UNDERWATER to move wind and solar electricity from Morocco to England. For context, 2,500 miles is about the distance between southern Arizona and Boston.
It really is astonishing how many of our problems are basically solved by technology but persist because of government that is fragmented or highly responsive to small numbers of oppositional people.
"the Japanese cities that do this are all currently investing in technology to allow one-person or zero-person operation."
Sure, and when was the last time someone was set on fire in the subway in Japan? I'm not saying the recent law is great, but we do have considerations that they don't.
Not necessarily. The top comment on last week's NY Times article about it is instructive:
"I was witness to the shooting at Hoyt - Schermerhorn March of 2023. The train conductor hit the horn repeatedly before it stopped at the station, aware there was a conflict on his train and to alert the passenger who were about to enter the train.
The shooting happened when the two in conflict stepped off of the train. Next to me on the platform, where I was waiting to enter the car. After the gun once and then 4 times in total, many of the passengers, myself and the others waiting on the platform ran to a car at the back of the train to take cover. At this point the train conductor began to direct us over the speaker. Get down, stay on the train, things like this, while police looked for the shooter. We then piled high on the floor in a group at the back of the last train car. Although he didn't close the train doors (I am sure for a reason), which we urged him to by yelling, in fear that the shooter would enter our car, I personally felt safer that he was directing us. And that he laid on the horn to alert us when he initially arrived at the station. In reflection, I was so very glad there was a conductor. A human at the helm."
That sounds like a case where it would have been more helpful to have a security person who wasn’t also trying to drive the train, and could intervene more directly than by honking.
It sounds like there were police on the scene. But it is also helpful to have people who can control the doors and drive the train in dynamic response to what is happening.
I'm sure there are situations where a train operator can be useful for security purposes. I just suspect that a police officer is probably better on net at making the train secure. A police officer can rove through the train, they have training on dealing with crime, they have tools like a taser & handcuffs, and they can arrest or cite people.
How did unions evolve this way? I had a sense that at one time, they were about representing worker concerns, ensuring safe working conditions, fair treatment, protection against arbitrary firing, responsible retirement planning, adequate benefits, and organizing training for new members. It feels these days that many of them are focused on featherbedding, opposing firings even when merited, carving out government setasides, and opposing automation in all cases.
Was there ever a time when the more socially beneficial goals were more dominant? There are still reasons for a mass of workers to be able to band together to collectively bargain. I know good people who are in unions who are embarrassed that their union prioritizes not firing people for poor performance over those who could better advance with more flexible policies. Why can't they obtain more of a voice?
To be fair(?), that's pretty much been true of unions back to the days of Medieval guilds, as far as I'm aware. If unions don't oppose automation, it's typically only because management cuts a deal where the automation will be phased in over a prolonged period of time or be used at a brand-new facility or something like that where it has no effect on presently employed workers.
There are a lot of weirdnesses to the construction industry specifically that have caused its craft unions to be... let's say... unusually parochial in their view of the interests of labor. The NLRA encourages top-down organizing in that sector in a way that it does not in other sectors-- for some valid historical reasons, granted, but that model comes with significant tradeoffs.
But the account you provide in this paragraph is wildly wrong as a description of actually existing unions in the United States as a whole. The vast majority of their efforts are indeed spent on "representing worker concerns, ensuring safe working conditions, fair treatment, protection against arbitrary firing, responsible retirement planning, adequate benefits, and organizing training for new members." Most unions frankly have neither the time nor the resources to oppose clearly merited firings, and indeed a regular stock-in-trade of younger NLRB agents is investigating unfair labor practice charges filed by employees disgruntled by the fact that their union told them they have no case.
That's useful to hear. The public discussion about unions makes it sound like it is the more unsavory goals that are the focus, with teachers, longshoreman's, teamster, and public sector unions held up as examples for preventing any move to fire people or automate as the primary purpose of those unions.
The Teamsters have plenty of issues, but overwrought grievance-processing mechanisms isn't one of them. If anything, their system is remarkable in how efficiently (so to speak) it disposes of weak employee claims, often by joint labor-management boards that don't even resort to arbitration unless they are deadlocked, which happens in a small minority of cases.
Automation is a different kettle of fish entirely, of course; they view self-driving vehicles as an existential threat. That's an issue where Dems are just going to have to tell them to get stuffed, and I'm afraid there's no way around it; it's one of those tech issues where the effect on employment genuinely is so large and so negative that no union can or should ever be expected to support it.
"But even leaving that aside, plenty of farmworkers are here illegally, and who is supposed to do that work if we deport them or scare them off? Some people say they’re here doing the jobs “Americans won’t do.” Others might respond that if you raised wages, some American would do the job. But then the job that person was previously doing will be empty."
It's funny, the dominance of immigrant labor in industries like construction, fast food, agriculture and landscaping, in a time of low unemployment, means...
People who are born here all HAVE BETTER JOBS THAN THAT!
No it doesn't. It means that citizens doing those jobs have their wages depressed. I'm in construction/landscaping fwiw.
Illegal labor hasn't granted me a magical 'better job', but it's meant that I've cleaned up after fly by night PO-Box-and-a-disconnected-cell-number companies who employ illegal labor and don't finish the job properly or pay for their CD to be carried off.
Thankfully our clientele wants a company with a long documented book of work to do the work we do, but then they hire roofers who don't even flash the chimney and never come back since the check was cut before anyone noticed.
The alternative to citizens doing the work isn't "they get a better job", because illegal labor doesn't give people more skills or opportunities. It's not the case that citizens left those jobs and immigrants filled the vacuum, it's the other way around.
I'm amazed that I appear to be the first person to point this out (and my apologies if I overlooked an earlier reply concerning this issue), but I must protest the caption on the top photo in the post: "A shopper contemplates rising grocery prices at checkout." That woman is clearly standing in a regular grocery store aisle, not in the checkout line!
I immediately thought about that too! And then if you click the link to the whole series, you see that she seems to be having a pretty good time overall.
"When Josh Shapiro proposed a state-level version of this kind of idea — he called it the Lightning Plan — environmental groups opposed it."
Democrats need to remember - and I think Shapiro actually appears to do this better than almost anyone else in our party -
Environmental groups attacking you is GOOD FOR YOUR POPULARITY! Openly fight them! If it's not going to lose you a primary, "punch" every "hippie" in sight. ("Hippie punching" is their own stupid self-valorizing description of what a more moderate Democrat might call "Sista Soulja-ing".) We're trying to win elections here, god dammit.
Shapiro can kick off his 2028 campaign by arriving at the opening press conference in a monster truck "rolling coal," hopping out wearing a full-length mink coat and alligator skin boots, as AI-generated fanfare music plays, and declares, "I welcome the environmental groups' hatred!"
I am starting to get very frustrated with union politics. Obviously Matt is too, and a lot of my frustration is his views rubbing off on me (or, you could say, Matt writing persuasively), but I've had some bugaboos for quite some time. There is a real "magic bullet"/"underpants gnome" aspect to the idea of unions on the left, where they are allegedly the key to improving the standard of living, but nobody knows how to go about doing that at all.
Unionization is not a solution for raising wages across the board. And the union dynamic for the last 30-50 years has mostly been labor protectionism for a narrow band of industries. (And the nature of that protectionism has often run counter to "equity"-type goals - plenty of discrimination and old-boy networks.)
And now, the unions cause us all these policy problems, and while we enjoy their cash their memberships don't even vote for us. Unions were essential at the time they formed, and fantastic vehicles for spreading wealth, and in many cases still are - for their members. But on a macro level it's a crumbling system of labor regulation that can't be brought back. Unionizing Starbucks isn't going to do shit - a similar impact, perhaps, to the two cents a gallon that drill, baby drilling the hell out of the ANWR would've gotten us in 2008. If unionization rates fell from 35% to under 10%, is getting them back up to 15% going to somehow reverse the trends associated with that fall? Especially if the jobs being unionized are low-wage jobs that people tend to do for just a few years in their 20s-30s?
The way to increase wages for jobs like that is to tighten the labor market. Now, as it happens, tightening the labor market is ALSO inflationary (and was a large part of the reason for post-Covid inflation). Voters might want to get their heads out of their asses and realize that "affordability" = "low wage growth."
Then again, the 80s were a time of falling inflation and stagnant or falling wages and everybody thought it was the bee's knees, apparently, so maybe that is what people want?
Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole. The notion that unions are somehow dispensable for Democrats to win elections is ludicrous. They are the circulatory system of left-wing politics-- the mechanism by which left ideas are actually transmitted to the working class. Being a union member is causally linked to having more left-wing political views than you otherwise would, all else being equal-- even though plenty of union members are right-wing.
In some sense, then, paying unions to do political organizing would be a valuable tool for Democrats even if they had no impact whatsoever on wage rates in society at large-- but of course they do; union workers consistently earn higher wages than nonunion ones, so it's hardly necessary to resort to that kind of logic to understand why unions are good.
"Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole."
This is very much driven by public sector unions, though, no? Public sector unions are a pretty different thing from private sector unions, I don't think they are a major current source of union expansion. Public employees are pretty much already all unionized in any jurisdiction that would consider for half a second allowing them to be.
I dunno. How long am I supposed to sit around and wait for unions to fix anything about the labor market and wage distribution? They've made zero progress in my entire life. At some point there has to be accountability for the movement. I'm fine with giving them support legislatively and rhetorically, and I loved Biden joining a picket line. It's worth trying to keep the erosion of union influence as gradual as it can be, and in terms of framing left wing economic ideas for a mass audience you can't do better. But they should be moved a few spots back in priority when we are making the kind of tradeoffs Matt is talking about.
No. Private sector union members are consistently more left-wing than identically situated private sector employees who are not union members. There's all kinds of political-science research on this topic.
I don't know what else to say on this topic. Trying to do left-wing politics without unions is trying to make bricks without straw.
Thanks for the info about private sector union leanings. I am probably too caught up in the “hard hat” paradigm that people associate with unions more than they should. If you have a link to any of those studies I’d appreciate it - no pressure though, obviously I can look them up myself.
Like I said, not kicking anyone out of the coalition. And I don’t think unions are going to go running to the party that openly wants to destroy them. I just think the long term vision for shared prosperity does not center around them and may not even include them as a key feature. The inextricable link between labor and basic survival is something we want to erode, in my opinion - unions do nothing for people who can’t work, so at the very least, it’s not enough.
This is a matter of adjusting a bearing on a ship by a couple of degrees to put us in different place 100 miles from here, not jerking the wheel. And what that adjustment looks like is what Matt describes - remaining generally supportive, but telling them “no” if their demands are undermining the entire point of a popular policy.
You may be illustrating why Matt’s model for the party isn’t viable. Everybody will want somebody ELSE to make the tradeoffs; their priorities are sacrosanct.
A day late but here is a great example of this in Berkeley, CA. TLDR:
- Berkeley city council passed a law requiring expensive health care and apprentice training for new building
- CA state passed a law saying you can skip local regs (like the Berkeley one) if you have 20% affordable units
- all the new proposed projects are picking 20% affordable option and getting out of the labor requirements
- labor unions are BIG MAD
In essence, we have a two-way fight over the surplus profit in a new housing. It can go to labor unions or can go to subsidizing poor people’s rent but it can’t go to both.
Link: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/11/18/berkeley-housing-developers-hard-hats-2029-university-2425-durant
“Your costs are my income” is the key point, Matt. Isn’t the elephant in this particular room housing? Lower home prices are good for folks who don’t own their home, and bad for the folks that do, and the latter group vote more.
Of course all the union members suffer from poor affordability as well. I think it's ok at least for a while that people make up their own minds about what affordability means to them.
I live in Chicago and suffer from lots of stationary bandits but primarily the public employee unions and even more so the Teachers Union. Mayor Johnson was elected by teachers and keeps trying to raise taxes so he doesn't have to fire any. In the meantime, the student population continues to shrink and many of our schools are less than 50% occupied.
On thought I have is to drop residency requirements for the bunch of them Let them live outside the city. I find the bromides about how they need to live in Chi to understand Chi utter BS. Most live in their own self-constructed communities like Mount Greenwood.
I'm interested in opinion and especially those that don't invoke the bromides.
The masses are always happy to scape-goat each other be it immigrants, unions or social security disability claimants while technology systematically excludes more and more of them from the ownership society all of them hope to join. Everyone is a small-time rent-seeker from everyone else's perspective. That is not the root of the affordability crisis.
The masses? Who's that? I'm tired of paying high property taxes, sales taxes and so on for services in decline - Chicago's public schools. Your comment is just the same old cant.
Property taxes are the best type of taxes. Unless you have a personal bunker in New Zealand, you are the masses, you just don't realized it yet.
'The masses' is an idiotic category devoid of nothing but a gesture toward polemic. Yeah, actually the stationary bandits play a big role in the affordability of cities.
Calling people struggling to cling on their middle class living standards stationary bandits is more idiotic polemics than anything I said. Unions have supermajority approval among the American public because unlike the sillies at SB, the American people innately understand that everyone eking out a living is someone else's stationary bandit and the problem with society is not that fewer people than dictated by the market are destitute. https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx
I am just having trouble relating to how the party that endorses union rent seeking*, government employee rent seeking*, government building half million dollar houses for mentally disturbed substance abusers, higher taxes, larger income transfers, higher welfare, complementary medical coverage for undocumented immigrants, prohibitions on cheap fossil fuels, prohibitions against nuclear, more regulations on building and business, and higher carbon taxes is going to be able to position itself as pro-affordability.
Are you suggesting Democrats lie? Or change positions? If neither, then how do they make this work? I am being serious. How do these two paths mesh together?
*defined as acquiring above market (supply/demand) wages.
Great post and agreed, at some point you have to care more about results than just empty rhetoric and gestures. Further how we deliver on those results also matters imo. I really hope some of the people that need to hear this message read this post.
The answer to why some workers are unable to afford things is always that some other group of workers is making a little over the median wage.
If you are a worker and not living directly off your capital gains and you agree with Matty's worldview then I am sorry to say that you are a sucker from a self-preservation perspective.
Yeah here this a choice between raising incomes or lowering costs. Government has more tools for the former and less for the latter. But as we learned during Biden voters really hate higher costs more than they want raising wages. Unfortunately, that means to have lower costs you're going to have lower wages and somewhat lower GDP in some areas. Voters want both higher wages and lower costs. Most politicians have emphasized the former but I think the latter wins out but that does mean you have to go after not just unions, but homeowners and large parts of the economy that are fundamentally rent-seeking endeavors and the political cost almost always ends up outweighing any long-term solution. At the end of the day though, voters will still be unhappy until costs go down and that means all other considerations are less important. If a politician can make the costs go down, that upside outweighs any other trade-offs. Not all trade-offs are created equal.
Learning about the Morocco-UK Power Project is somewhat radicalizing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project
Investors think it would be profitable to build a 2,500 mile electrical transmission line UNDERWATER to move wind and solar electricity from Morocco to England. For context, 2,500 miles is about the distance between southern Arizona and Boston.
It really is astonishing how many of our problems are basically solved by technology but persist because of government that is fragmented or highly responsive to small numbers of oppositional people.
"the Japanese cities that do this are all currently investing in technology to allow one-person or zero-person operation."
Sure, and when was the last time someone was set on fire in the subway in Japan? I'm not saying the recent law is great, but we do have considerations that they don't.
If we need to add people to trains for security purposes, they should probably be some kind of police officers rather than train operators.
Not necessarily. The top comment on last week's NY Times article about it is instructive:
"I was witness to the shooting at Hoyt - Schermerhorn March of 2023. The train conductor hit the horn repeatedly before it stopped at the station, aware there was a conflict on his train and to alert the passenger who were about to enter the train.
The shooting happened when the two in conflict stepped off of the train. Next to me on the platform, where I was waiting to enter the car. After the gun once and then 4 times in total, many of the passengers, myself and the others waiting on the platform ran to a car at the back of the train to take cover. At this point the train conductor began to direct us over the speaker. Get down, stay on the train, things like this, while police looked for the shooter. We then piled high on the floor in a group at the back of the last train car. Although he didn't close the train doors (I am sure for a reason), which we urged him to by yelling, in fear that the shooter would enter our car, I personally felt safer that he was directing us. And that he laid on the horn to alert us when he initially arrived at the station. In reflection, I was so very glad there was a conductor. A human at the helm."
That sounds like a case where it would have been more helpful to have a security person who wasn’t also trying to drive the train, and could intervene more directly than by honking.
It sounds like there were police on the scene. But it is also helpful to have people who can control the doors and drive the train in dynamic response to what is happening.
I'm sure there are situations where a train operator can be useful for security purposes. I just suspect that a police officer is probably better on net at making the train secure. A police officer can rove through the train, they have training on dealing with crime, they have tools like a taser & handcuffs, and they can arrest or cite people.
Not your fault, but that misuse of "conductor" makes me want to shoot someone.
I think The Groups and the Party generally is still in hock to the managerialism of the Obama Era. We can solve affordability by managing the government more effectively, not by making tradeoffs. Good piece out today on the Niskanen Substack about this. https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/democrats-wile-e-coyote-problem?utm_campaign=post&showWelcomeOnShare=false
This is a more satisfying line of analysis than arguing from polls.
For example unions are very popular and support is at levels last seen during the great depression: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-relatively-steady.aspx
But that is not a reason to pander (or not pander!) to union interests.
How did unions evolve this way? I had a sense that at one time, they were about representing worker concerns, ensuring safe working conditions, fair treatment, protection against arbitrary firing, responsible retirement planning, adequate benefits, and organizing training for new members. It feels these days that many of them are focused on featherbedding, opposing firings even when merited, carving out government setasides, and opposing automation in all cases.
Was there ever a time when the more socially beneficial goals were more dominant? There are still reasons for a mass of workers to be able to band together to collectively bargain. I know good people who are in unions who are embarrassed that their union prioritizes not firing people for poor performance over those who could better advance with more flexible policies. Why can't they obtain more of a voice?
"opposing automation in all cases"
To be fair(?), that's pretty much been true of unions back to the days of Medieval guilds, as far as I'm aware. If unions don't oppose automation, it's typically only because management cuts a deal where the automation will be phased in over a prolonged period of time or be used at a brand-new facility or something like that where it has no effect on presently employed workers.
There are a lot of weirdnesses to the construction industry specifically that have caused its craft unions to be... let's say... unusually parochial in their view of the interests of labor. The NLRA encourages top-down organizing in that sector in a way that it does not in other sectors-- for some valid historical reasons, granted, but that model comes with significant tradeoffs.
But the account you provide in this paragraph is wildly wrong as a description of actually existing unions in the United States as a whole. The vast majority of their efforts are indeed spent on "representing worker concerns, ensuring safe working conditions, fair treatment, protection against arbitrary firing, responsible retirement planning, adequate benefits, and organizing training for new members." Most unions frankly have neither the time nor the resources to oppose clearly merited firings, and indeed a regular stock-in-trade of younger NLRB agents is investigating unfair labor practice charges filed by employees disgruntled by the fact that their union told them they have no case.
That's useful to hear. The public discussion about unions makes it sound like it is the more unsavory goals that are the focus, with teachers, longshoreman's, teamster, and public sector unions held up as examples for preventing any move to fire people or automate as the primary purpose of those unions.
The Teamsters have plenty of issues, but overwrought grievance-processing mechanisms isn't one of them. If anything, their system is remarkable in how efficiently (so to speak) it disposes of weak employee claims, often by joint labor-management boards that don't even resort to arbitration unless they are deadlocked, which happens in a small minority of cases.
Automation is a different kettle of fish entirely, of course; they view self-driving vehicles as an existential threat. That's an issue where Dems are just going to have to tell them to get stuffed, and I'm afraid there's no way around it; it's one of those tech issues where the effect on employment genuinely is so large and so negative that no union can or should ever be expected to support it.
"But even leaving that aside, plenty of farmworkers are here illegally, and who is supposed to do that work if we deport them or scare them off? Some people say they’re here doing the jobs “Americans won’t do.” Others might respond that if you raised wages, some American would do the job. But then the job that person was previously doing will be empty."
It's funny, the dominance of immigrant labor in industries like construction, fast food, agriculture and landscaping, in a time of low unemployment, means...
People who are born here all HAVE BETTER JOBS THAN THAT!
Isn't that, like... what we were going for????
No it doesn't. It means that citizens doing those jobs have their wages depressed. I'm in construction/landscaping fwiw.
Illegal labor hasn't granted me a magical 'better job', but it's meant that I've cleaned up after fly by night PO-Box-and-a-disconnected-cell-number companies who employ illegal labor and don't finish the job properly or pay for their CD to be carried off.
Thankfully our clientele wants a company with a long documented book of work to do the work we do, but then they hire roofers who don't even flash the chimney and never come back since the check was cut before anyone noticed.
The alternative to citizens doing the work isn't "they get a better job", because illegal labor doesn't give people more skills or opportunities. It's not the case that citizens left those jobs and immigrants filled the vacuum, it's the other way around.
I'm amazed that I appear to be the first person to point this out (and my apologies if I overlooked an earlier reply concerning this issue), but I must protest the caption on the top photo in the post: "A shopper contemplates rising grocery prices at checkout." That woman is clearly standing in a regular grocery store aisle, not in the checkout line!
I immediately thought about that too! And then if you click the link to the whole series, you see that she seems to be having a pretty good time overall.
she is contemplating the experience of rising prices at checkout, while pushing her cart through an aisle.
Fair interpretation!
"When Josh Shapiro proposed a state-level version of this kind of idea — he called it the Lightning Plan — environmental groups opposed it."
Democrats need to remember - and I think Shapiro actually appears to do this better than almost anyone else in our party -
Environmental groups attacking you is GOOD FOR YOUR POPULARITY! Openly fight them! If it's not going to lose you a primary, "punch" every "hippie" in sight. ("Hippie punching" is their own stupid self-valorizing description of what a more moderate Democrat might call "Sista Soulja-ing".) We're trying to win elections here, god dammit.
Shapiro can kick off his 2028 campaign by arriving at the opening press conference in a monster truck "rolling coal," hopping out wearing a full-length mink coat and alligator skin boots, as AI-generated fanfare music plays, and declares, "I welcome the environmental groups' hatred!"
That might be a little excessive.
Extremism in defense of moderation is no vice!
I am starting to get very frustrated with union politics. Obviously Matt is too, and a lot of my frustration is his views rubbing off on me (or, you could say, Matt writing persuasively), but I've had some bugaboos for quite some time. There is a real "magic bullet"/"underpants gnome" aspect to the idea of unions on the left, where they are allegedly the key to improving the standard of living, but nobody knows how to go about doing that at all.
Unionization is not a solution for raising wages across the board. And the union dynamic for the last 30-50 years has mostly been labor protectionism for a narrow band of industries. (And the nature of that protectionism has often run counter to "equity"-type goals - plenty of discrimination and old-boy networks.)
And now, the unions cause us all these policy problems, and while we enjoy their cash their memberships don't even vote for us. Unions were essential at the time they formed, and fantastic vehicles for spreading wealth, and in many cases still are - for their members. But on a macro level it's a crumbling system of labor regulation that can't be brought back. Unionizing Starbucks isn't going to do shit - a similar impact, perhaps, to the two cents a gallon that drill, baby drilling the hell out of the ANWR would've gotten us in 2008. If unionization rates fell from 35% to under 10%, is getting them back up to 15% going to somehow reverse the trends associated with that fall? Especially if the jobs being unionized are low-wage jobs that people tend to do for just a few years in their 20s-30s?
The way to increase wages for jobs like that is to tighten the labor market. Now, as it happens, tightening the labor market is ALSO inflationary (and was a large part of the reason for post-Covid inflation). Voters might want to get their heads out of their asses and realize that "affordability" = "low wage growth."
Then again, the 80s were a time of falling inflation and stagnant or falling wages and everybody thought it was the bee's knees, apparently, so maybe that is what people want?
Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole. The notion that unions are somehow dispensable for Democrats to win elections is ludicrous. They are the circulatory system of left-wing politics-- the mechanism by which left ideas are actually transmitted to the working class. Being a union member is causally linked to having more left-wing political views than you otherwise would, all else being equal-- even though plenty of union members are right-wing.
In some sense, then, paying unions to do political organizing would be a valuable tool for Democrats even if they had no impact whatsoever on wage rates in society at large-- but of course they do; union workers consistently earn higher wages than nonunion ones, so it's hardly necessary to resort to that kind of logic to understand why unions are good.
"Union membership was one of the few groups that actually moved left from 2020 to 2024; if you look at the trend rather than the absolute swing, they were WAAAAY to the left of the country as a whole."
This is very much driven by public sector unions, though, no? Public sector unions are a pretty different thing from private sector unions, I don't think they are a major current source of union expansion. Public employees are pretty much already all unionized in any jurisdiction that would consider for half a second allowing them to be.
I dunno. How long am I supposed to sit around and wait for unions to fix anything about the labor market and wage distribution? They've made zero progress in my entire life. At some point there has to be accountability for the movement. I'm fine with giving them support legislatively and rhetorically, and I loved Biden joining a picket line. It's worth trying to keep the erosion of union influence as gradual as it can be, and in terms of framing left wing economic ideas for a mass audience you can't do better. But they should be moved a few spots back in priority when we are making the kind of tradeoffs Matt is talking about.
No. Private sector union members are consistently more left-wing than identically situated private sector employees who are not union members. There's all kinds of political-science research on this topic.
I don't know what else to say on this topic. Trying to do left-wing politics without unions is trying to make bricks without straw.
Thanks for the info about private sector union leanings. I am probably too caught up in the “hard hat” paradigm that people associate with unions more than they should. If you have a link to any of those studies I’d appreciate it - no pressure though, obviously I can look them up myself.
Like I said, not kicking anyone out of the coalition. And I don’t think unions are going to go running to the party that openly wants to destroy them. I just think the long term vision for shared prosperity does not center around them and may not even include them as a key feature. The inextricable link between labor and basic survival is something we want to erode, in my opinion - unions do nothing for people who can’t work, so at the very least, it’s not enough.
This is a matter of adjusting a bearing on a ship by a couple of degrees to put us in different place 100 miles from here, not jerking the wheel. And what that adjustment looks like is what Matt describes - remaining generally supportive, but telling them “no” if their demands are undermining the entire point of a popular policy.
You may be illustrating why Matt’s model for the party isn’t viable. Everybody will want somebody ELSE to make the tradeoffs; their priorities are sacrosanct.