Tag Archives: negotiation

by | January 6, 2021 · 10:19 pm

Justice Representatives Have Power and We Need Them to Use It

On January 3, 2021, the same day the 117th Congress was sworn into office, Nancy Pelosi won reelection as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Pelosi, who has led the House Democratic Caucus since 2003, won 216 votes from her fellow representatives to Republican Kevin McCarthy’s 209. The vote broke down almost entirely along party lines, with every Republican vote going to McCarthy and all but five Democratic votes going to Pelosi (one Democrat voted for Tammy Duckworth, one voted for Hakeem Jeffries, and three voted “present”). Each of these five defections was from the corporate wing of the Democratic Party; every member of the growing group of Justice Democrats-endorsed Representatives in the House (“Justice Representatives”) cast their vote for Pelosi.

Pelosi’s reelection is a serious problem for Justice Representatives and the social justice advocates who support them. Pelosi’s rejection of progressive priorities like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal is only the tip of the iceberg. She has locked progressive congresspeople out of committees and oversight roles, blacklisted consultants who work for progressive challengers, and campaigned for anti-reproductive choice, NRA-friendly Democratic incumbents (while trying to oust one of the most progressive Democrats in the Senate). Despite her performative opposition to the Trump presidency over the past four years, Pelosi has also routinely given Trump additional military and spying power, funded Trump’s inhumane border detention system, and deliberately steered the focus of Trump’s impeachment away from his blatant corruption. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Pelosi had considerable leverage over Republicans, she negotiated a massive corporate giveaway; even the Democratic messaging bill she advanced in May included millions upon millions of dollars for the rich.

The Justice Representatives who voted for Pelosi are well aware of the obstacle Pelosi presents. So why did they vote for her anyway?

The answer boils down to one word: power. And if social-justice-minded individuals, organizations, media, and congresspeople want to effectively advance policies that millions of people need in the coming years, we must start wielding it more effectively.

Let’s assume that the progressive vote for Pelosi was the outcome of a negotiation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most famous Justice Representative, implied as much in a December 16 interview with Jeremy Scahill, calling the speakership vote a “specific leverage point” and saying, “when it comes to using this leverage, I do think that there are things that we can do.” What sorts of things? In response to a tweet from Justin Jackson recommending that she demand a floor vote on Medicare for All, Ocasio-Cortez replied that she would be more inclined “to push for…a $15 min wage vote in the first 100 days [and] elevating longtime progressive champions to important positions of leadership.” In her interview with Scahill, Ocasio-Cortez offered another potential demand: repeal of “an obscure House rule that is extremely influential and significant known as PAYGO…which is saying that any expenditure that a bill has must have a tax increase or spending cut essentially accounted for in the legislation.” If “full repeal” wasn’t possible, Ocasio-Cortez said, she’d want “PAYGO waivers on Medicare for All, tuition-free public colleges, and more.”

The first of Ocasio-Cortez’s suggested goals, a $15 minimum wage vote in the first 100 days, is a little hard to understand. House Democrats passed a $15 minimum wage in 2019 and Joe Biden has already said he supports it, so it shouldn’t be something for which Justice Democrats should have to fight too much. Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed timeline may be the key part of this potential demand, and Justice Representatives may have been angling for a commitment from Senate Democrats to make a $15 minimum wage a priority, but we don’t have any evidence that they got one. Especially given the Democratic Party leadership’s approach to end-of-year government funding and coronavirus relief legislation (which Ocasio-Cortez called “hostage taking”) and party leadership’s recent refusal to fight for stimulus checks, it appears that progressives did not win any clear policy commitments in exchange for their speakership votes.

It also doesn’t look like Justice Representatives succeeded in “elevating longtime progressive champions to important positions of leadership.” They did get some committee appointments, including Cori Bush on Judiciary, Jamaal Bowman on Education and Labor, and Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib on Oversight and Reform, but we have not yet seen any committee chair or leadership appointments that represent progressive victories. In one of the most high-profile committee fights recently, in fact, Pelosi helped Kathleen Rice – a “Blue Dog” Democrat who voted against Pelosi for Speaker in 2018 – get a seat on Energy and Commerce over Ocasio-Cortez.

The victories that Justice Representatives have been touting are in the House rules package, which contains procedural reforms to PAYGO and limits Republicans’ ability to hold up legislation with a Motion to Recommit. Yet House Democrats did not win full repeal of PAYGO and did not even secure the specific exemptions for Medicare for All and free college that Ocasio-Cortez mentioned in her interview with Scahill. The exemptions they did get, for COVID-19 and climate change, are not inconsequential. However, it is important to remember that PAYGO exemptions do not guarantee that Pelosi and other Democrats in the House will allow bold legislation related to these topics to advance; the exemptions just remove one obstacle to such legislation. And the Motion to Recommit reform appears to be much more a win over Republicans than over Pelosi, as corporate Democrats stand to gain from it as well.

It is theoretically possible that Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues negotiated other wins that they have not revealed yet. But what we currently know – that Justice Representatives secured a couple rule changes while losing some big policy and committee battles – does not seem worth a vote for Pelosi.

This outcome is especially troubling when we consider that Justice Representatives should have had the numbers, as a bloc, to deny Pelosi the speakership. If Pelosi legitimately thought Justice Representatives might stand together and vote against her, it’s hard to imagine that social justice advocates and the working-class people they are fighting for would not have secured more significant victories.

Pelosi seemed to know the Justice Representatives were going to vote for her. As Politico described when Rice got the Energy and Commerce Committee seat over Ocasio-Cortez, Rice was “seen as a crucial vote for the speaker.” Ocasio-Cortez was not.

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez signaled during her interview with Scahill that, even though she agreed Pelosi needed to be replaced, she did not see an alternative to voting for Pelosi. If progressives were to oust Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez said, “there are so many nefarious forces at play [that Pelosi could be replaced with someone] even worse.” Ocasio-Cortez later justified her vote as a way to show unity “in a time when the Republican Party is attempting an electoral coup and trying to overturn the results of our election,” suggesting that she believed that opposition to Pelosi would at best result in an even more corporate Democrat as Speaker and at worst result in emboldening Republicans. That might explain why Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues did not seem to mount a challenge to Pelosi being nominated as party leader in mid-November.

If this explanation is correct, it is problematic. As Justice Democrats co-founder Kyle Kulinski noted after the vote, “there’s no excuse for the left not to have organized in the last few years to mount a challenge to Pelosi. You know she’s hostile to you and your goals and she has a 28% approval rating.” Justice Representatives already tried voting for Pelosi in 2018 and it didn’t work; they and other like-minded members of Congress should easily have been able to identify someone better from among their ranks to run against Pelosi in 2020. And while letting Kevin McCarthy win the speakership vote would have legitimately worrisome downsides, Justice Representatives could have blocked Pelosi without putting a McCarthy win on the table by voting for alternative candidates. There’s no reason to believe that strategy would have any bearing on the Republican Party’s anti-democratic behavior.

Furthermore, a potential McCarthy win due to progressive abstentions would actually have been the single greatest point of leverage over Pelosi that Justice Representatives had. Pelosi banked on fear of that outcome to ensure Justice Representatives fell into line, but Justice Representatives could have flipped this script and used fear of their abstentions to force Pelosi and the Democratic caucus to accede to more progressive demands.

This situation was a microcosm of one social justice advocates face all the time. We are presented with two bad choices – Nancy Pelosi or Kevin McCarthy, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, corporate giveaways coupled with meager relief or no help at all for people in need during a pandemic. We are reminded that one of those choices – McCarthy, Trump, no legislative help at all for people in need – is worse than the other option, and told we must therefore accept the classic “lesser of two evils.” Once we signal that we accept this constrained set of choices and will select the less-bad choice – Pelosi as Speaker, Joe Biden as President, a bad last-minute coronavirus relief bill – the corporate Democrats who manufactured this false dichotomy know they can once again grant just enough concessions to give us the feeling that we won something while rejecting the vast majority of our demands.

In each isolated instance, social justice advocates who take the “lesser of two evils” approach can rationalize it; their choice was better than the alternative on the table, after all. Something is better than nothing and less near-term harm is better than more near-term harm. But in the long run, repeated acceptance of two bad choices will continue to enable our enemies to block the real change people need.

The good news is that Justice Representatives can chart a different path during the next two years. In the 116th Congress, they weren’t organized enough. Different Justice Representatives took different stands at different times while others capitulated on issues ranging from coronavirus relief bills to immigration to the PATRIOT Act. They will have much more power in the 117th Congress, which features a slimmer Democratic majority, if they stick together and identify key points of leverage at which to credibly withhold their support in exchange for major concessions. Justice Representatives, in other words, must function more like labor unions dealing with intransigent employers, which leverage the threat to strike to force their bosses to take them seriously. As Jackson reminded Ocasio-Cortez with Frederick Douglass’s timeless words, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

While the speakership fight is over, opportunities to win important battles are most definitely not. The question is whether Justice Representatives will take advantage of them.

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by | November 6, 2016 · 1:45 am

Striking SEPTA Workers Deserve Public Support

On Friday, a judge denied an injunction request from Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) management, who wanted striking SEPTA workers, represented by Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 234, to be forced to go back to work.  The judge made the right decision.  At a follow-up hearing on Monday at 9:30 AM, the judge should stand firm, as TWU Local 234 has every right to strike and is justified in doing so.

The union, which represents a group of bus drivers, trolley operators, mechanics, and other transit workers whose base salaries seem to max out around $70,000 a year, has been trying to negotiate a new contract with SEPTA for months.  The union was unhappy with a potential increase in their health care premium contributions – from about $550 annually to a little less than $4,800 annually – that would have coincided with some increased co-pays.  They’ve also been bargaining to improve their pensions, which have long been less generous than both the typical public pension and the pensions SEPTA managers receive.

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Perhaps most importantly, the union has asked for scheduling changes that would improve safety for workers and customers alike.  Bus operators can currently be required to work 16 hours in a day or 30 hours in back-to-back days and may only get 15-minute lunch breaks.  They have inadequate opportunities to go to the bathroom and can’t sleep on-site in between their unpaid breaks, which creates a major problem for drivers with commutes.  SEPTA management has thus far insisted that their scheduling practices are necessary for “flexibility” purposes, despite the fact that research on sleep and crash statistics recommend against them.

So while SEPTA management may have reduced the magnitude of their proposed hike to health care premiums and offered some salary increases since the strike began, those who believe in worker rights, economic justice, and public safety should be firmly in the union’s camp when it comes to negotiations.

Some Democrats seem to have sided instead with SEPTA management, which has “argued the strike was keeping children from school, making travel around the city difficult for people with disabilities and those in need of medical treatment, and threatening to disenfranchise voters in Tuesday’s presidential election,” as reported by Philly.com.  Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, who appears particularly worried that the strike will depress voter turnout on Tuesday and be “a real plus for Donald Trump,” has even argued that the state legislature should take away SEPTA workers’ right to strike in the future.

The problem with this formulation, however, is that it ignores both the power differential between labor and management and which of those two entities is more likely to be on the public’s side.  Union members risk a lot when they go on strike – their jobs and their pay are on the line.  They don’t decide to strike lightly, and TWU Local 234 made this decision because, as their president Willie Brown has said, “It’s the only tool [they] have available to [them].”  Binding arbitration (when both parties to a negotiation submit their offers to a neutral third party who makes a final decision on which offer to go with) can be an effective alternative to strikes for public sector employees, but while Brown “said he would be willing to go to binding arbitration to avoid a strike[,] SEPTA officials said…that wasn’t an option they were willing to consider.”

Note also that, for all the hand-wringing about union members supposedly not caring about the election, many of its members plan to volunteer to help get out the vote on election day (for the record, TWU Local 234 has also endorsed Hillary Clinton).  SEPTA Board chairman Pasquale Deon, on the other hand, has contributed thousands of dollars to Republican Senator Pat Toomey, whose record includes strong support of the Pennsylvania voter ID law that was struck down as unconstitutional in 2014.  Deon also donated to two Republican presidential candidates – Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie – whose careers are characterized as much by defunding poor kids’ schools, denying people access to the medical care they need, and constructing obstacles to voting as they are by virulent anti-union crusades.

To summarize: Pasquale and the rest of SEPTA management chose not to engage in good-faith negotiations.  They chose not to go to binding arbitration.  And their rhetoric is belied by the other causes they support.  Yes, having public transportation up and running on election day would be ideal, but those worried about whether that will happen should be applying pressure to Pasquale and his friends, not complaining about bus drivers’ efforts to secure affordable health care, improvements in their retirement security, breaks long enough to catch some sleep in between shifts, and enough time to use the bathroom during the workday.

The outcome of Monday’s hearing is ultimately unlikely to matter much in Tuesday’s election.  Philadelphia policy “prioritizes spots [for polling places] within walking distance of people’s houses,” as The New Republic noted in 2008, and officials overseeing Philadelphia’s elections have pointed out that a 2009 strike did not depress turnout in that year’s local election.  Lyft and Uber are offering free rides to the polls that day, there are services connecting volunteer drivers to people who need rides, and the governor always has the option to extend voting hours if a lack of public transportation turns out to be a major voting obstacle.

What Monday’s hearing will impact, however, is TWU Local 234’s bargaining power.  More generally, people’s attitudes about the strike will impact the future of organized labor, an institution that raises wages for members and non-members alike, boosts opportunities for kids, and advocates broadly for the interests of low- and middle-income people.

The ethics are on the union’s side.  The public should be, too.

Update (11/7/16): SEPTA and TWU Local 234 reached a deal before the follow-up injunction hearing and the union will be back at work during the election.

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by | July 7, 2016 · 8:45 pm

Bernie Sanders Knows What He’s Doing and Is Doing It Quite Well

According to Politico, House Democrats booed Bernie Sanders during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, July 6.  They would like him to officially end his presidential campaign and were frustrated that, in response to calls to endorse Hillary Clinton, he stated that his goal “is to transform America,” not just “to win elections.”  This reaction was unsurprising; as Politico noted, “House Democrats overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary fight,” and the idea that winning elections might be a means rather than an end “plays better on the campaign trail than in front of a roomful of elected officials.”  Even one of Sanders’ few congressional supporters during the primary, Raul Grijalva, has argued that a Sanders endorsement of Clinton has “got to happen prior to the [Democratic] convention.”

What doesn’t make any sense at all, however, is the argument many of Sanders’ detractors have been advancing for quite some time about why they think he should drop out.  The idea that “he’s squandering the movement he built” by withholding his endorsement (advanced by a “senior Democrat, speaking on the condition of anonymity”) is obviously incorrect, but has been repeated over and over again by numerous journalists and pundits, including:

  • Gabriel Debenedetti and Sahil Kapur, who penned pieces entitled “Sanders loses convention leverage” (for Politico) and “Sanders’ Long Refusal to Endorse Clinton Hurts His Leverage” (for Bloomberg), respectively, on June 17;
  • Joan Walsh, who argued in The Nation on June 27 that “Sanders may…be setting himself up for less influence in Philadelphia, rather than more;”
  • Jamelle Bouie, who contended in Slate on June 28 that “the leverage [Sanders] held at the end of the primary just isn’t there anymore;”
  • Stuart Rothenberg, who wrote in The Washington Post on June 30 that “Sanders is not yet irrelevant[, but] he reached a point weeks ago when his stubbornness became counterproductive;” and
  • Joshua Green, who asserted in Bloomberg on July 7 that “Sanders increasingly looks like an afterthought who’s squandering an historic opportunity.”

Their arguments boil down to the following: The more Sanders waits to endorse Clinton, the more he alienates her team, encouraging them to ignore parts of his platform that they’d be otherwise inclined to support and to rely on other politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, for progressive credibility.  Sanders’ “first and most prominent supporters have jumped off the bandwagon, congratulating and in some cases endorsing Clinton,” Debenedetti notes, and Bouie adds that Sanders has lost his chance to “claim credit” for the “natural movement to Clinton among Democratic primary voters” that has already begun to take place.  Bouie believes Sanders could have taken “a starring role in the campaign against Trump,” opening “the doors to lasting influence,” but in the words of Rothenberg, “Clinton doesn’t need Sanders anymore.” If “Sanders delivers a late or halfhearted endorsement,” Walsh argues, Clinton may even turn to Republicans for votes.

Yet these claims are belied by recent events.  As Jeff Stein observed in Vox, the draft Democratic party platform, released in full on Friday, July 1, “shows Sanders winning on at least six signature issues that reflect long-held goals of his movement…on top of victories Sanders [had] already won over the platform.”  Bouie is right to point out that “Team Sanders…lost out” in platform discussions about “more contentious” issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and environmental regulation, and Green isn’t far off when he says the platform is “a purely symbolic document,” but it’s also undoubtedly the case, as Stein notes, that the party is still “moving [Sanders’] way on several key issues.”  Though Politico’s unnamed senior Democrat and Green ignored it, Clinton also just announced a new plan to make college free for families making under $125,000 a year, a proposal that isn’t quite as good as Sanders’ but represents a striking reversal from her earlier campaign rhetoric.

The reason for these concessions is simple: Clinton wants Sanders’ endorsement.  Yes, some Sanders supporters already seem poised to vote for Clinton, but even they often have negative perceptions of her and are unlikely to volunteer and/or donate in the same way they would have if Sanders was the nominee.  Clinton knows that generating the enthusiasm and votes necessary to beat Donald Trump in November would be easier with Sanders on board and the possibility that he won’t be is the best bargaining chip Sanders has got.

If winning more concessions from Clinton is a key objective for Sanders, he’d be crazy to give that chip up prematurely.  It’s hard to believe that Sanders would have secured the gains he already has if he had followed the pundits’ advice and tried to ingratiate himself to Clinton.

At the same time, winning concessions from Clinton is not Sanders’ – or Grijalva’s, or many other Sanders supporters’ – only or even primary goal.  Sanders has explicitly prioritized making “certain that Donald Trump is defeated and defeated badly,” as Bouie pointed out, and Sanders has both said that he will vote for Clinton in November and suggested that an endorsement may be imminent.  That position isn’t unreasonable; though the differences between Trump and Clinton are often overstated, Clinton is undoubtedly the lesser evil facing those who believe in power-balancing policy.  But it also deprives Sanders and his voters of a whole lot of bargaining power.

In fact, Clinton can court a growing list of Republicans not because of the delayed endorsement by Sanders that Walsh has feared, but for precisely the opposite reason: as one Republican strategist has explained, many Sanders supporters “have already shown, by and large, that they’ll fall in line and back” Clinton despite policy positions they dislike.  The loss of bargaining power that pledging to vote for Clinton entails is also apparent in pressure from Wall Street about Clinton’s choice of a running mate: “moderate Democrats in the financial services industry argue that Sanders voters will come on board anyway and that Clinton does not need to pick [Elizabeth] Warren to help her win.”  A commitment to lesser-of-evilsism is indisputably accompanied by a loss of leverage in situations in which you and the candidate you’re backing disagree.

Some Sanders supporters have already decided that a united front against Trump is more important than that leverage.  Others believe that fixing a Democratic party that is seriously broken is a more pressing concern and that the concessions Sanders has won, while not meaningless, are very different than binding commitments Clinton would be likely to adhere to if elected; we wish Sanders had maximized his leverage by seriously entertaining a third-party run.  Sanders, on the other hand, has been attempting to balance his attention to both goals, to influence the Democratic party platform as much as possible without materially affecting the Democrats’ chances in the fall.

It’s perfectly fine to disagree with his relative weighting of priorities.  But let’s stop pretending that he’s making a strategic blunder.  Sanders knows exactly what he’s doing, and despite assertions to the contrary from media and “top Democrats,” he has actually done it quite well.

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