July 11, 2005
Liberals and Labor
I've been trying (here and there) to keep up with the new House of Labor blog started over at TPMCafe. I have a hunch that posts like this are really on to something:
I've been writing a blog for over three years dealing heavily with labor issues-- and been a labor organizer, researcher, and lawyer for twenty years -- and continue to be shocked that so many progressives see union issues as a worthy but vaguely uninteresting area of policy. Unions are thanked for the support at election time, but other than that, they're seen as slightly embarassing dinosaurs at the modern liberal table.Which is why the GOP dominates national politics.
The writer is Nathan Newman, and he's got a point. The consensus at House of Labor seems to be that the labor movement went into serious decline roughly 30 years ago, around 1975. The country's gradual shift to the right on economic issues, even as we've moved slowly left on social ones, maps pretty closely onto that timeline.
I really need to read up on this subject.
Posted by ben at July 11, 2005 06:45 PM