Responding to my post today about comments from Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) on card check legislation for union organizing, a top Democratic political strategist noted that Lincoln "left herself some wiggle room" in the AP article. "She is in a tough state and is getting pounded on this issue and may well say things that make people like me uncomfortable, but it is wrong to suggest that she is a done deal on this," the strategist said.
Even though the labor movement is coming off of its most important political victory in decades, it has never encountered a more perilous confluence of circumstances. Fairly or not, labor's shouldering the blame for the collapse of the auto industry. Employers everywhere are firing workers and renegotiating contracts. The SEIU and Change to Win coalitions are caught up in the Blagojevich scandal (though there's no evidence they did anything wrong.) And card check, which would be the single biggest boon for union organizing in years, is teetering on the brink, the victim of a concerted and ongoing Republican campaign to brand the legislation as anti-choice and anti-privacy. Labor may not have the 60 Senate votes it needs to beat a filibuster, although some labor strategists are confident that, in private, the numbers are there. Last week, in arguing that the United Auto Workers' contracts were mostly responsible for the collapse of the auto industry in the U.S., anti-union forces essentially conceded that the high wages and good benefits paid to auto makers were at the crux of the industry's competitive failings. This argument matureed at precisely the right time politically. The focus last week was on what went wrong, not on the material situations, relative to the middle class, of its workers. It's fashionable now to blame the UAW for forcing the automakers into a weak competitive position even though the non-wage and benefit clauses in those contracts are more deserving of scrutiny.
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