kobe

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/nothing-gold-can-stay-shining-legacy-kobe-bryant/"></div>For the last few days I‘ve been trying to process why Kobe Bryant’s death has brought me to the verge of tears multiple times. Like many people, I heard the news through text on Sunday, just after 11:45 a.m. and before any major news outlets had confirmed it. At that moment it seemed as if the entire city of Los Angeles, my current home, collectively gasped, and since then I have been struggling to find words to describe why both NBA basketball and Kobe Bryant’s place in it mean so much to me.
How does one begin to describe a journey that started when a shy, awkward seven-year-old kid from Pakistan, new to America, sees a Muslim name on the back of the jersey of the starting center for the Lakers? I may have become a Lakers fan because of Kareem — who will always be my favorite player — but Kobe has defined the Lakers for most of my adult life. During that life, and especially at its lowest points, I’ve always been able to count on basketball — the Lakers and Kobe — to give me a few hours of distraction from the mundane and profound pressures of life.
It was during the lowest point in my life, when I was deeply depressed and isolated, that I went to my favorite sports bar in Brooklyn to watch Kobe’s last game. I went alone. Not because I was avoiding my friends, but because, like countless times before, I knew that I would have no trouble striking up conversations with complete strangers. Half Court, now closed because of gentrification, counted on Sundays packed for NFL games to make rent. NBA was always an undercard. I mostly went on weeknights to watch basketball. Many of those nights my only company was a whiskey soda and the bartender who poured my drink. However, if the stakes were high enough, the bar would attract diehard and casual basketball fans alike. On those nights I could usually count on bellying up to the bar and making light conversation with whomever was sitting next to me.
The bar was full that night. The Warriors, playing at the same time as the Lakers, were on the verge of winning their 73rd game and surpassing the single season win record held by the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. Kobe’s last game was a meaningless one: no playoff implications, no facing off against some hated rival, no historic streak on the line. Just a man ending his career.
I don’t remember who I talked to or what I talked about that night but I do remember that by the fourth quarter no one was watching the Warriors game. And with a little over 30 seconds left, as Kobe put an exclamation point on another historic scoring performance by <a href="https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/720482501479821313?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E720482501479821313&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbleacherreport.com%2Farticles%2F2632755-kobe-bryants-stats-highlights-and-reaction-from-final-nba-game">hitting the go-ahead field goal</a>, the entire bar was chanting Kobe’s name in unison. I can only recall one other time, in all my experiences at Half Court, when all the patrons were unified in rooting for the same cause. It was the US men&#8217;s hockey team beating Canada in a must win group match during the 2010 Winter Olympics. The stars of very few celebrities, let alone athletes, burn so bright as to demand the attention of an entire nation. Kobe Bryant, without the benefit of nationalism, accomplished that in his final game and he did it again a few days ago with his untimely and tragic death.
Much has been <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/dan-wolken/2020/01/26/kobe-bryant-one-kind-even-retirement/4582605002/">written</a> over the last few days about how much happier Kobe seemed in retirement. For a man infamous for caring only about winning on the basketball court, the happy post-retirement Kobe can be viewed as a conundrum. Kobe’s prodigious skills were not as great as LeBron’s nor his athletic ability quite the match of Jordan’s. Hence, no player was as self-conscious in projecting the image of a demigod as Kobe. His on-court hubris was clearly calculated to buttress his claim to the title of the greatest of all time. Kobe, self-aware and intelligent, must have known his public persona was as much performance as it was real. His career — as great as it was — fell short of the greatest of all time and is already surpassed by LeBron, even if it won’t be by many others. Robbed of his last productive years by a devastating injury, I’m sure Kobe unburdened himself of that ambition and applied his dogged work ethic to his post-retirement endeavors. Sadly, this raises the very real, dark and distressing possibility that the hubris that served Kobe so well on the basketball court tragically caught up to him on an extremely foggy winter morning in Los Angeles. A morning when even the LAPD, the most prolific partisans of helicopters, grounded their fleet.
Even under the most forgiving light, <a href="https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2347988-12-ways-sports-make-a-positiveimpact">the promise</a> of professional sports is a quixotic project. The contradictions of capitalism have littered the landscape of professional sports with false claims of unity, economic development and good jobs. Nor is it a very profound insight to point out that sports are as impacted by patriarchy, sexism, anti-queerness, and racism as much as, if not more than, the rest of society. The clearest crystallization of how oppression operates in our society can be seen through the prism of sports. Invariably the legacy of any athlete — and Kobe Bryant is no exception — will be complicated by these forces. As someone who has dedicated my life to fighting injustice, it is particularly painful to concede that I grieve more for the death of an <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/the-legacy-of-the-kobe-bryant-rape-case-6a42f159be7b/">admitted</a> adulterer and accused rapist than I felt empathy for his victim, but these are the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/wrestling-in-with-kobe-bryants-forgotten-apology/">contradictions</a> we are forced to navigate under patriarchal capitalism.
The analytical side of my brain, which is also the social justice side of my brain, has always viewed basketball — and sports in general — through such a cool and measured light. But leaving my relationship to basketball at that would be a dishonest assessment. My connection to basketball, the Lakers, and Kobe runs much deeper. Built on the foundation of recognizing a name on a Lakers jersey, the arc of my life is dotted with moments connected to my love of basketball that are both profound and mundane.
Until I moved to New York City after college, I lived what I consider an itinerant life. Partly because of my shy disposition but mostly because of my history of migration, I have always felt liminal and a little alienated no matter where I am living. However, two deeply held passions, outside of my family, have given me a sense of rootedness whether I am in Karachi or Los Angeles — my work in leftist politics and my love of basketball.
I was born in Karachi but I spent my formative years in Austin, Texas, where my mother raised me and my brother while getting her PhD. I became a Lakers fan during my time in Austin when the Showtime Lakers won back to back championships in 1987 and 1988 and since then my affections for the Lakers has never wavered. As a child in Austin, I was painfully shy and self-conscious, especially in school, but I would also spend hours pretending to be Kareem outside the laundromat while shooting into at an imaginary hoop at the top of the stairs that led to the front door of the laundromat. After the seventh grade, I moved back to Karachi and lived there until I graduated from high school where I played on the basketball team for many years. Nobody on those teams, including me, was particularly good or athletic. Our only talent was that we were mostly expatriates and thus had played organized basketball before.
In the 1990s, there were only a few basketball courts in Karachi but I knew where all of them were and I played pick-up games on many of them. Running layup drills with my late mentally-ill father on these courts are some of my happiest memories of him. In fact, I had just returned from a pick-up game when I learned of his suicide in 1996. The purest form of basketball is played on a pick-up court. It doesn’t matter where you live, you can always find a court and find people willing to spend a few hours shooting hoops with a stranger. This is as true in America as it is around the world. Unlike the other American sports baseball and football, the grammar of basketball is global, one in which it is possible for children in even the working-class neighborhoods of Karachi to practice no-look, behind-the-back passes wearing flip flops. That is why, despite my failing joints, I continue to ignore my doctor’s orders and take my weekly communion on a basketball court.
After high school I moved back to America for good, right in time to witness the star of Kobe Bryant rising. Kobe is 13 days younger than me. This is not particularly noteworthy, except that it means that Kobe started playing for the Lakers just when I started college and the majority of my Lakers fandom since has been spent rooting and defending Kobe as a basketball player. While my politics did not mature until after I graduated from college, my love of basketball and the Lakers always connect me back to my childhood and it runs through many friendships that crisscross the globe.
Through inside jokes and dumb arguments, many of them about Kobe, in the living rooms and bars where I have watched basketball, and through the many pick-up games I’ve played over the years, I, a shy Muslim immigrant, have found pockets of acceptance in an otherwise hostile country. For the past 24 years, for better or worse, Kobe Bryant has been synonymous with that world. One day this world will revolve around other players, but right now every time I try to imagine this world without Kobe I have to hold back tears.
As I sit on a plane, on my way to Iowa for one last push to add union rights to the agenda of the Iowa caucuses, I glance at snippets of Kobe’s playing career on the tiny TV screen showing Sports Center. My mind wanders through the many memories and arguments that have been spurred by Kobe Bryant and the Lakers. I think of that morning in June of 2000, getting up at 4 a.m. in Karachi to watch the Lakers play the Portland Trailblazers in game seven of the Western Conference finals and waking up my entire family when a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jELrZ32qrMI">Kobe-to-Shaq alley-oop</a> iced the Trailblazers in one of the greater comebacks in sports history. A dunk literally heard halfway around the world. I remember being torn when Shaq was traded during Shaq and Kobe’s acrimonious divorce and the countless times I have been called a Kobe stan by friends lecturing me on the importance of advanced stats even though I am the one with a graduate degree in math. But I keep returning to the night of April 13, 2016, sitting with a few dozen patrons in a sports bar in Brooklyn, chanting Kobe’s name for no other reason than the joy we felt at watching a self-made demigod impose his will on a silly basketball game one last time and for a few hours I was once again provided an escape from my own despair in communion with strangers.
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Nothing Gold Can Stay: Reflecting on the Legacy of Kobe Bryant

utla

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/utla-strike-exposes-heart-californias-inequality-problem/"></div>Up until now the teachers strikes that have garnered the most coverage have taken place in the least likely places — deeply conservative states. But now, the #RedForEd movement has come to Los Angeles, thirty years after the city’s last teachers strike. A cursory analysis might suggest that beyond the general lack of funding that K-12 education faces, there’s little that connects the wildcat strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Arizona to the current UTLA strike.
A deeper understanding of the spirit animating the UTLA strike reveals two important things that connect UTLA&#8217;s actions to the last year’s #RedForEd strikes and California’s own complicity in public education’s current crisis. Most readily, teachers in LA are using the same strategies as strikers in red states, where teachers have aligned their interests with the common good to make demands that go beyond wages and hours, the permissible topics of bargaining. It was back in 2012, that the Chicago Teachers Union developed the bargaining for the common good framework for teachers when the union published “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve.” The CTU document made a clear case for the need for smaller class sizes and host of other issues that have since become standard demands for teachers’ unions across the country. The bargaining for the common good framework is a recognition by labor that fighting for quality public services under neoliberal austerity requires mobilizing beyond the worksite.
Given this context, the UTLA strike is not just the latest teacher revolt in the fight for quality public education that started in Chicago in 2012, but possibly the most consequential, because it is the sleepy suburbs of the San Fernando Valley where the beating heart of the white homeowner tax revolt lies. It is a revolt that over the last four decades has spread across the country, provided the political cover and justification for the neoliberal restructuring of the economy, and consequently, has made necessary the wildcat actions initiated by workers in the #RedForEd movement.
The watershed moment of the taxpayer revolt was the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978; a year before Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain and two years before Reagan would ride the revolt to national power. Its passage signaled a profound change in the direction of the country, and one that other states were keen to follow. The authors of Prop 13, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, sought to roll back taxation on property, allegedly to protect homeowners from ever increasing taxes. Jarvis even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080720034219/http:/www.sfaa.org/0406forbes.html">encouraged renters to get on board</a>, arguing that landlords would pass on their savings to tenants, which, of course never happened. Hidden behind the requisite individual choice and anti-State sloganeering was the consolidation of white homeowner power in the California suburbs that had increased under the auspices of white flight and redlining, <a href="https://la.curbed.com/2018/12/3/18114611/city-of-segregation-book-los-angeles-housing-discrimation">a de facto city pastime in LA</a>.
To achieve this, Jarvis and Gann proposed pegging property assessments to 1976 values and restricting tax increases to 1% per year. To prevent its rollback, Prop 13 included a supermajority requirement on all state tax increases, not just those related to property value. This revolt quickly expanded beyond the state borders. Two years later, Massachusetts voters passed a similar law, the same year Reagan was elected president, and commenced the dismantling of the postwar welfare state.
While property owners may have benefited greatly from Prop 13, public education was gutted. Grade school public education funding in the United States relies primarily on local taxes, specifically property taxes, and California is no different. When Prop 13 passed, the state’s most important funding stream for public education was cut off, and <a href="https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/californias-support-k-12-education-improving-still-lags-nation/">by some estimates</a> California currently ranks 41st in the nation for spending per student. In the short-run, this meant a deterioration in physical plants, overburdened teachers, and the wanton destruction of a what had been, arguably, one of the crowning achievements of California, its public education. In the long-term, this meant a clear opportunity for charters and their wealthy backers to move in and siphon off what little funding public schools do get, which is one of the most contested issues of the current actions in Los Angeles.
However, until 1996, there were still ways for local municipalities to get around some of the restrictions on raising revenue introduced by Prop 13. And so, a decade after Jarvis’s death, Californians voted to expand the power of Prop 13 to hideous proportions with Prop 218, or the “Right to Vote on Taxes Act.” Prop 218 closed loopholes in Prop 13, expanded the supermajority requirements to questions of municipal taxation, and eased signature requirements to get anti-tax legislation on ballots. Today, <a href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/fiscal-policy/supermajority-vote-requirements-to-pass-the-budget635542510.aspx">15 states</a>, including California, now require legislative supermajorities for all imposed or increased taxes, the most recent addition, Florida, where voters chose in November to impose such restrictions on its legislature.
Prop 218 can be seen as the full-throated victory of the California anti-tax regime, and one that, through the expansion of supermajority requirements for local tax initiatives, kneecapped municipalities’ ability to raise revenue on their own. Recent examples of this supermajority requirement in action are the failure of 2018’s Proposition A in Alameda county, which would have raised $140 million for early childhood education and the failure of Los Angeles County’s 2012 transportation initiative Measure J. Both measures received over 66% percent of the vote but failed because the needed 66.67% to pass. Ironically, Prop 13 itself only passed with 62.6% of the vote.
What started with the taxpayer revolt has resulted in severe restrictions country-wide in how local citizenry and governments can fund everything from transportation to education. The anti-democratic consequences can be seen clearly in the contours of the UTLA strike. As both sides argue over the fiscal responsibility of the teachers demands, the simplest solution — let citizens vote for a new tax revenue — can be held hostage by the forces of reaction; an entirely predictable consequence of Proposition 13. The fever dream of the free markets is little more than a sleight of hand trick to take autonomy from localities and place it in the stewardship of tiny minorities of voters or legislators, an irony that should be obvious.
Over the summer the Los Angeles Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-property-taxes-elites-201808-htmlstory.html">reported on the gross abuse of the Prop 13 regime</a>, highlighting <a href="https://slate.com/business/2018/08/californias-proposition-58-has-created-a-whole-lot-of-second-homes-and-rental-properties.html">how feudal California</a> has become. Thanks to the taxpayer revolt, property owners are able to bequeath assessments to children, such as the case of the poet Dorothy Bridges, wife of the actor Lloyd Bridges, who willed her tony Malibu beach property to sons, Jeff and Beau, and daughter Lucinda. The siblings were able to avoid an extra $300k a year in taxes because of the current system. Ostensibly, this was designed to prevent children of the deceased to be saddled with massive bills. However, the Times reported that “In Los Angeles County, as many as 63% of homes inherited under the system were used as second residences or rental properties last year” and that comparable situations existed in many of the most desirable locations in California, such as Sonoma and Santa Cruz. We take some hope, however, from the fact that voters rejected the 2018 attempt by fiscal hawks to extend the reach of Prop 13 via Prop 5, which would have allowed homeowners 55 years or older to transfer their assessments to new home purchases, enabling them to carry literally their title of nobility wherever they move.
Clearly, this system is untenable, and its effects reach well beyond public education. As Mike Davis points out in Ecology of Fear, “savage budget cuts, meanwhile, in the wake of California’s 1978 tax reduction revolution (Proposition 13), shrunk the [Los Angeles] fire department by 15 percent at a time when demand for its services had increased by more than 50 percent.” This led to understaffed stations and an inability for fire marshals and other officials from ensuring the safety of the most vulnerable of the city’s residents, with massive conflagrations consuming whole tenements in the Westlake District, which alone killed 43 people between 1982 and 1993. Davis also argues that what little services the fire department could provide went overwhelmingly to wealthy property owners in Bel Air and Encino.
If there was ever a time that historical circumstances were so well in alignment, this is it. California’s uneven development has reached a critical juncture, and as teachers go out on strike demanding higher wages and better working conditions, we must ask, why were they forced into this in the first place? The answer is simple, but the remedies will be difficult. At this moment, we must not lose sight of why LAUSD workers are on the picket line. The voters put them there by believing, some 40 years ago, that the boom mentality that drapes over the state like a Tule Fog could last forever, even if only in their minds.
Like drawing an infection closer to the surface, the LA strikes have the chance to expose a contradiction that is at the heart of California’s, and the nation’s inequality. But this can only be done if we take a wide view of the situation. The rank and file teachers and school workers already realize that their plight is one they share with fire fighters, nurses, and the myriad other workers who have chosen to work for the common good and the communities they serve. What is needed is to make explicit that the fate of public sector workers are bound up with the consequences of Prop 13 and that the regime of austerity unleashed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation needs to be dismantled.
Rolling back the consequences of Prop 13 will take more effort than just  qualifying a ballot measure because the influence of Prop 13 extends well beyond funding for public services. As Peter Schrag argues in Paradise Lost, Prop 13 influences “how California communities are planned and shaped, and on the sense of the community — or lack of it — in which they exist.” We will need to do the hard work of  rebuilding communities that privileges common purpose over individual gain. To do so will require labor moving beyond transactional coalitions and embracing all the struggles their members face. It will take more experiments in bargaining for the common good and more strikes that center the concerns of all stakeholders. Toppling Prop 13 will also take renters and tenants unions doing work on the ground to connect the gutting of public services to the plight of renters across the state who daily face the prospect of being priced out or evicted for another Airbnb experience or spectacle for the bi-coastal rich to enjoy on their winter sojourns.
The very public and very long-term attack on public sector workers and unions in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma has its origins in the white suburbs of LA now snarled with UTLA picket lines. What stalks the edges of the LAUSD strike, and what has been haunting California and the nation for 40 years, is the specter of Prop 13 coming home to roost, and any fight for the common good must confront this legacy.
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UTLA Strike Exposes the Heart of California’s Inequality Problem

janus

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/face-behind-case-janus-v-afscme-dark-money-future-labor/"></div>In February, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/janus-v-american-federation-state-county-municipal-employees-council-31/">Janus v. American Federation of State, Municipal, and County Employees</a>, a case which will have far-reaching consequences for the labor movement. The case centers on the question of whether unions can compel non-members to pay a fee, usually referred to as an agency fee, which covers the expenses of representing the non-members. Under current law, states get to decide whether or not unions can compel non-members to pay these agency fees. Agency fees have been banned in 28 states, colloquially called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law">right-to-work</a>” states — a branding coup for the right-wing in this country that any Madison Avenue agency would be proud of. If the court rules in favor of the petitioner, Mark Janus, as most people expect, then the public sector in every state will be “right-to-work” and public sector unions will not be able to charge agency fees.
The public sector is still a pillar of strength for the labor movement in an otherwise dismal landscape. Nearly four in 10 workers in the public sector are covered by a union contract, compared to less than <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/union-membership-rate-10-point-7-percent-in-2016.htm">seven percent</a> in the private sector. Moreover, public sector union density has remained relatively stable since 1970 despite 40-plus years of relentless <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-000-striking-air-traffic-controllers-aug-5-1981-241252">attacks</a> by right-wing forces. A decision against unions would be the crippling blow to labor’s political strength. Such an outcome should concern every progressive because unions are the only institutions that can realistically push the interests of the working class and fight back against right-wing hegemony.
If one just takes a cursory look at the facts in the Janus case, it is easily believable that a result in favor of Mark Janus is fair and democratic. Why should anyone be compelled to pay fees to an organization that they do not want to join? The answer is that unions have a legal obligation to represent every worker covered by a union contract regardless of membership status. From the labor movement’s perspective, agency fees are just a means to recoup the costs associated with a service that unions are legally obligated to provide.
The Supreme Court has agreed with unions on this since at least 1977, when in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abood_v._Detroit_Board_of_Education">Abood v. Detroit Board of Education</a>, they ruled that public sector unions could charge a fee to recoup the costs of negotiating a contract and representing all workers regardless of their membership status because it would address the real moral hazard of free riders (workers who benefit from a union contract but don’t pay dues). Furthermore, the Supreme Court reasoned, agency fees were constitutional because they were essential <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/20/is-an-upcoming-supreme-court-case-a-strike-for-individual-rights-or-a-deceptive-attack-on-teachers-unions/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.e6db69a21344">element</a> in maintaining labor peace. Janus argues that the Supreme Court erred in the Abood ruling because public sector employment is fundamentally different from private sector employment. Agency fees in the private sector are perfectly constitutional, and would remain so if the Court finds in favor of Janus. Unlike the private sector, however, negotiating a contract with the government is closer to lobbying. In the public sector salaries, pensions, and benefits for public employees touch upon too many policy issues and thus, contract negotiations, Janus argues, are inherently political. Therefore, agency fees in the public sector should be considered a violation of the First Amendment rights of non-members.
The Abood ruling was settled law for over 40 years. This all changed in 2012, when in the court’s opinion for <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/harris-v-quinn-symposium-the-coming-conflict-in-public-employee-speech-law-and-the-immediate-risks-to-people-with-disabilities/">Knox v. SEIU</a> Justice Samuel Alito signaled that the right-wing faction of the Supreme Court was prepared to take on public sector agency fees. Alito wrote that decisions like Abood “approach, if they do not cross, the limit of what the First Amendment can tolerate.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, <a href="https://www.freedomfoundation.com/">right-wing</a> <a href="https://nrtwc.org/">anti-labor</a> forces sprung to action and started lining up plaintiffs for the express purpose of getting an agency fee case in <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/08/symposium-the-friedrichs-petition-should-be-dismissed/">front</a> of the Supreme Court.
The Janus case is the third such case argued before the Supreme Court since 2013. In the first case, Harris v. Quinn, the court’s opinion deemed agency fees for home care workers unconstitutional but stopped short of overturning Abood. Justice Alito, in writing the majority opinion, <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/06/harris-v-quinn-symposium-the-coming-conflict-in-public-employee-speech-law-and-the-immediate-risks-to-people-with-disabilities/">signaled</a> once again that the court was ready to overturn Abood if the right case came up. That case was supposed to be Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which was argued in 2015. The labor movement, however, got an unlikely reprieve — call it a “dues” ex machina — when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/us/politics/friedrichs-v-california-teachers-association-union-fees-supreme-court-ruling.html">Antonin Scalia died suddenly</a>.
For those of us in the labor movement, the claims made in Janus are not novel. They are the same ones the right has deployed for years as part of a well-orchestrated campaign to destroy the political clout of unions. All you have to do is follow the money and you will see that the National Right to Work Committee, which is bankrolling the Janus case, has deep <a href="https://www.prwatch.org/news/2014/06/12498/who-behind-national-right-work-committee-and-its-anti-union-crusade">connections</a> to a network of right-wing organizations funded by the Koch Brothers and other aspiring corporate oligarchs. This network of right-wing non-profit organizations, which include the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council and State Policy Network, has been dedicated to legally and legislatively stymieing the political work of labor unions for years.
Over the past decade, starting with passage of Wisconsin’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10">Act 10</a> in 2011, this “dark money” network has scored many major state legislative victories. Act 10, which ended collective bargaining for all public sector employees except firefighter and law enforcement officials, has led to <a href="http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/years-after-act-union-membership-clout-has-suffered/article_2abae2a5-17a1-53f0-9d6d-8b837be0506d.html">plummeting</a> union membership and revenue; an entirely predictable outcome. Building on this momentum, these same organizations have managed to pass “right-to-work” legislation in five more states, including the historically pro-labor states of Michigan and West Virginia. In 2018 the total number of “right-to-work” states in the United States is 28.
If the professed goal, as it is the stated in the Janus case, was to remedy the infringement of the individual rights of workers, then one would expect the assault on labor to stop at passing “right-to-work” legislation. But in “right-to-work” states the Koch’s octopus continues to find new and creative ways to eliminate labor as a political roadblock. The aim of one of the bills moving though many state chambers at the moment is to force public sector unions to <a href="http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/florida-teacher-union-busting-bill-passed-thanks-to-democrat-10146758">recertify</a> annually if their membership drops below 50 percent. Such legislation not only reduces a union’s ability to act politically, it will bring many unions to the brink of extinction. It is telling, however, that <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/florida-bill-harmful-to-unions-db211d1d8b73/">law enforcement unions</a> are always exempted, a hint that political power, not principle, is the ultimate driver behind these efforts.
It is also not surprising that the political success of anti-union forces from 2011 onward has occurred entirely in the aftermath of another monumental Supreme Court <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/01/21/how-citizens-united-changed-politics-in-6-charts/?noredirect=on&amp;utm_term=.f7a54084ee0b">decision</a>. The floodgates of unlimited dark money released into our political system by the Citizens United decision has been a boon to conservative forces. In 2012 alone, organizations associated just with the Koch brothers spent over <a href="https://www.republicreport.org/2014/unions-koch/">$400 million</a> on politics, twice as much as the political spending of the top 10 unions combined.
The Citizens United decision and the series of Supreme Court cases on agency fees are a coordinated one-two punch by the forces of reaction: the first unleashed corporate money, the second is designed to handcuff the only institutions capable of keeping up with corporate political spending. The Fight for $15 and a Union movement is just one of the many examples of the ways the labor movement, despite diminished ranks, continues to fight for the interest of workers and against corporate profits. It may be impolitic to say but the Fight for $15 movement could not exist on this scale without the resources provided by the workers in the public sector. If the public sector went “right-to-work” it would greatly diminish the labor movements’ ability to engage in efforts like the Fight for $15, whose benefits to the working class do not depend on union membership.
Despite so many anti-labor victories and the precipitous decline in private sector union density, labor remains an essential counterweight to <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/15/kochs-brothers-labor_n_4966883.html">corporate dominance</a> over our political system. It is not hyperbole to suggest that this is the result of the astounding stability of union density in the public sector, which has hovered around <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/union-membership-rate-10-point-7-percent-in-2016.htm">35 percent</a> since 1970. Much of this density in the public sector can be explained by organizing successes in deep blue states such as Illinois, New York, and California, where a path to win “right-to-work” legislation is politically constrained due to labor’s numerical strength in the electorate. The only viable way for the right to reduce labor’s power in these blue states and as a national political counterweight to corporate money is by asking the Supreme Court to ignore conservatives’ cherished principle of federalism and impose a right-to work-regime on the public sector in every state.
Given this context it is unsurprising that the initial plaintiff in the case was <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/02/view-courtroom-dog-didnt-bark/">Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner</a>, a former private-equity executive who has <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-met-bruce-rauner-health-insurance-20180216-story.html">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/illinois-budget-shutdown-states-rauner.html">clashed</a> with organized labor in his state, particularly public sector unions. Governor Rauner was ultimately found to lack standing but by this time the Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Committee managed to recruit Mark Janus and two other state employees to intervene in the case, which brings us to the present.
Many have argued that unions can <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/12/symposium-evidence-shows-unions-will-survive-without-agency-fees/">survive</a> a “right-to-work” public sector. After all, there are 28 states that are already “right-to-work” and even in states such as North Carolina where collective bargaining in the public sector is illegal, public sector unions have managed to survive. As a veteran of the labor movement, I know that the Janus decision will probably not be the end of all unions. I also know that the ability of unions to be a political counterweight is heavily curtailed in a “right-to-work” environment. To understand why, you have to understand union finances.
Even the most aggressively organizing-oriented unions spend over <a href="https://olms.dol-esa.gov/query/getOrgQry.do">80%</a> of their resources on current member needs, leaving less than 20% to spend on new organizing and politics. However, in a “right-to-work” environment this percentage of resources dedicated to current member needs can be almost 100%. This is because overall revenue is drastically reduced, due to a reduction in total membership. The obvious driver of reduced membership are free riders, workers who opt out of membership but are still covered by the contract.
A second, and just as important factor, is turnover. Without agency fees new employees have to opt-in to membership and many times the union will not know that a new employee has been hired. In order to survive and cover the costs of negotiating and servicing collective bargaining agreements in a “right-to-work” environment, unions are forced to devote significant resources to recruiting members. This would be true even if the union did not also a have to fight a well-funded right-wing anti-union <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/10/union-killers-freedom-foundation">propaganda</a> machine that spends millions to convince workers to drop their union membership. It is the aforementioned example that is the hope and desire of the right-wing force behind behind the Janus case. A right-to-work public sector will mean almost no resistance to the political agenda of capital.
To end the story here, however, would be a disservice to history because the conflict between capital and labor is not caused by existence of unions. In fact, the arrow of causality is in the opposite direction, and the legal framework of our labor laws are a historical consequence of this conflict. The Supreme Court, in the Abood decision <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/11/20/is-an-upcoming-supreme-court-case-a-strike-for-individual-rights-or-a-deceptive-attack-on-teachers-unions/?utm_term=.1f45e0b3ef8a">admitted</a> as much when the Court wrote that agency fees were constitutional not only because they dealt with the problem of free riders but also because the Court recognized that agency fees were important in maintaining labor peace. Put another way, the Abood decision not only considered constitutional jurisprudence but also recognized the agency fees represented a <a href="http://labornotes.org/2014/06/inspiration-look-history-public-worker-strikes">compromise</a> that was beneficial to both labor and capital. Much to the chagrin of my many leftist friends, the labor movement continues to work within this legal framework, which practically criminalizes labor’s greatest tool – worker militancy, because it was earned through struggle.
The Janus decision will eliminate the final remnants of this historical compromise, a compromise that has been chipped away by right-wing forces for nearly half a century. Ironically, by permanently tipping the scales in favor of capital, the Janus decision will leave the labor movement with nothing left to preserve. We are already seeing signs that the political results of the dominance of corporate money, austerity, and income inequality have become untenable for <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2018/05/teacher-strikes-labor-movement-education">workers</a>, even in the reddest states. It would be fitting if a Supreme Court case named after the Roman God Janus manages to unfetter a cowed labor movement and unleashes a militant tsunami consisting of 15 million union members. In that case, the teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma, all “right-to-work” states, may very well portend the final outcome of the Janus decision.
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The Face Behind the Case: Janus v. AFSCME, Dark Money, and the Future of Labor

The Face Behind the Case: Janus v. AFSCME, Dark Money, and the Future of Labor

Mansoor Khan has been an organizer and activist for over 20 years.&nbsp;He has a graduate degree in theoretical math but has never used his math training in real life. He is based in Los Angeles.