From our Swindon Correspondent:
So, if you want to know what this plan is really about, start with the subtitle at the very
top:-
The Biden-Harris plan to create union jobs by tackling the climate crisis
Some American unions have given a lot of money to get Biden elected, and here’s where Biden pays them back. Create lots of unionised jobs, which means more union members paying union fees.
The details:-
Infrastructure: Create millions of good, union jobs rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure – from roads and bridges to green spaces and water systems to electricity grids and universal broadband – to lay a new foundation for sustainable growth, compete in the global economy, withstand the impacts of climate change, and improve public health, including access to clean air and clean water.
Why, if you care about climate change, would you want to build better roads? Why would you start a program of universal broadband when Elon Musk’s Starlink is going to deliver rural broadband to America, and already has an area of Washington state online? Again, this is about paying back the debt to unions.
Auto Industry: Create 1 million new jobs in the American auto industry, domestic auto supply chains, and auto infrastructure, from parts to materials to electric vehicle charging stations, positioning American auto workers and manufacturers to win the 21st century; and invest in U.S. auto workers to ensure their jobs are good jobs with a choice to join a union.
No-one serious about the environment would have a policy to create more auto industry jobs. That’s not an anti-car position, just that interfering to create more car jobs is bad. But I guess the UAW were large donors.
Transit: Provide every American city with 100,000 or more residents with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options through flexible federal investments with strong labor protections that create good, union jobs and meet the needs of these cities — ranging from light rail networks to improving existing transit and bus lines to installing infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists. Light rail networks are much loved by these sorts of people because they are, intrinsically, monopolies, and that means you need unions. There’s no benefits of light rail/trams over buses, which is why we got rid of the trams in the 1920s in the UK.
Power Sector: Move ambitiously to generate clean, American-made electricity to achieve a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035. This will enable us to meet the existential threat of climate change while creating millions of jobs with a choice to join a union.
You could just add a carbon tax and let the market sort things out, but the unions wouldn’t get a benefit.
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Yes, this platform creates COSTS with no measurement of whether there are benefits, compared to how we do things now, apart from solving an "existential crisis." The only thing missing is that a portion of the union dues is "recycled" - to the Democratic Party.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though; no US state has certified its vote. In the handful where the outcome is in doubt, state officials are investigating; the Michigan legislature held hearings this weekend. Electors are awarded "as the [state] legislature...may direct" and, if Republican legislatures found actual vote manufacture sufficient to change the outcome, they could dictate their state's result, as Florida could have done in 2000. The stampede to declare Biden the President-elect is proceeding just as the stampede to declare Covid an "existential crisis." About which, by the way, I read that 500 scientists "voted" that extreme burdens on individuals were no longer necessary.
I doubt this will be reversed. There's certainly voter fraud in some places, but I'm expecting Biden to be president. It would be amusing as hell if it gets overturned, though.
Ah, they have gotten to you too! Nothing has happened yet to be "reversed."
There is always voter fraud and voters convinced that their votes, not readable by the machine and segregated for manual processing, are being taken to the shredder. But I await a study of systemic problems, such as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rewriting election law in ways that the legislature had considered and declined to do, and the machine politics taking place in Detroit.
well, the lead, the expected result, won't be reversed. I seriously doubt after all the process has been exhausted that Trump will be the winner.
There’s many a slip twixt ballot and Electoral College - ask Al Gore.
There will be a runoff election for 2 Senate seats in Ga. If the Rs win one they will have control of the Senate & nothing this massive has a prayer.
If the Ds win both they'll likely still be incapable of anything this grand. When they were trying to pass obamacare the Ds had huge majorities in both houses of Congress. The problem was that all the D Representatives & some Senators had to face the voters in 2 years. No pressure the Ds could apply outweighed getting voted out of office in 2 years, hence, they ended up cobbling together some half-baked healthcare legislation that they barely got out of Congress & past the Courts to save face.
Even if the Dems won the runoff to make it 50-50, some say nearly-conservative Manchin is looking more out of place than ever as a Democrat in increasingly Republican West Virginia, and could be induced to flip (if he states his terms before it is certain that Republicans don't need his vote). Jeffords of Vermont pulled this, in the other direction, in 2001.
And even if Republicans hold the Senate, their surrender faction is as strong as ever.
Demented. Truly demented.
Well, as Obama discovered with his fantastical shovel ready jobs, it takes years to get an infrastructure project from concept to construction.
I hadn’t considered it, but Biden may apply pressure to foreign automakers to unionize their southern plants. The left are infuriated every time one of these southern workforces vote against unionizing. Overriding their desires would, of course, be in their bests interests.
With more downtown workers working from home, and blue collar workers often not working downtown but rather in outlying plants or perhaps from job site to job site, more light rail is just what we need. The Dems love trains. Hell, I enjoy a train ride. But a trip to Europe and a Eurail pass doesn’t mean we need these all over the US. Rail is going strong in the US for freight.
A lot will be stymied by a Republican Senate, and then there’ll be another crack at the vote in 2022 and 2024.
This election appears to have shown that people wearied of Trump, and he is wearying, but that there is still a huge pretty conservative constituency out there. Add the Libertarians to that and it’s probably around half the population. If the cracks in the Dems’ hold on blacks widens a bit further, who knows what happens in a few years.
One has only to think of the difficulty Trump faced in trying to build such a simple easy thing as his wall.
"The left are infuriated every time one of these southern workforces vote against unionizing"
People don't unionise so much in the private sector now because of mobility. When it was hard to change job, because you didn't have a car, you had to make the best of it. Once people got cars, people just quit and went elsewhere.
It's why unions are dead against privatisation. if hospitals were all competing with each other on salaries and being nicer places to work, poaching staff from shit hospitals to work at good ones, what would be the value of paying to be in a union?
Only about 6% of the US private sector workforce are in a union. Their decline in the private sector has come about substantially because their old union employers moved or automated or perhaps went bust. About a third of the public sector workforce is in a union, so it averages out to about 11%
Another reason unionism is down is because, at those companies they switch to, they vote down a union. They might sign the card authorizing a union election (because the workplace goons are looking over their shoulders), but will cast a secret ballot against it.
The Democrats' remedy here is the "Workplace Democracy Act," holding that if a majority of employees sign the card, you don't actually have to hold the election. You got your vote, though it wasn't secret.
That's happening now, but until say, the 1970s, lots of people were in unions out of self-interest.
People didn't change jobs much back then. That was mostly about mobility. You moved near the plant or office and you didn't want to travel far. First programming job I had in the mid-80s, nearly everyone lived within 3 miles of the office. But also about mobility to see family, to contact people, to manage your bank account.
What people tried to do because of this lack of mobility was to work harder at making life better within the company. If they didn't like their situation they'd work at trying to improve it internally, where today, they might just quit. I paid my union dues because any trouble, I'd go to the union (and our union was a staff union, not part of the TUC, very non-militant). Large companies were more like families. They expected and valued loyalty more, and the rewards were in return, like if you were no longer required in your job, you might well be retrained somewhere else.
The reason I became a freelancer was the end of all of that. If there's no really loyalty or protection, why not just be a whore?
I think we may have a UK vs US difference in our points of view. Americans have always been mobile, westering as Steinbeck once put it. Covered wagons, dust bowl migrations, post WW2 migrations, etc. For decades people have been moving from northern to southern and western states, which has had a marked effect on congressional and electoral vote allocations.
Spike. Yes. If a union can’t keep your employer from moving away or going bust, and might even be perceived as a catalyst for such, then voting against them makes sense. As a young man I was in a union for a short period - I thought the union bosses were more than a bit thuggish. Heh, you could say the Dems feel very strongly that the working class would be better off under the dominion of thugs, taking part of their checks, and giving it to the Dems. Tough sell, but they keep trying.
Yes, greater mobility is a fact, driven not just by gasoline and technology but by weaker families.
Loyalty to the employees, though, is still relevant - more so as it becomes easier for employees to quit. I know of a company that recently announced a 3% "layoff." This is absurd, small enough to be handled through attrition. Indeed the fine print says anyone actually laid off could apply for internal transfer. Better to retain people than to start over with new ones.