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Progressive movements cannot succeed without organized labor. Every progressive who knows anything knows this simple fact. Historically, worldwide, no progressive political platform has gone anywhere without a vibrant labor movement. Progressives clearly need to support and foster a strong labor movement. But recently, the opposite has too often been true. As I noted here back in August, even the most progressive of employers often has very anti-worker and anti-union behavior.

Journalist and activist Greg Bloom wrote a piece for In These Times about the union busting activities at one of the most important and largest progressive institutions in the country - The L.A. Fund. The Fund hires teams of grassroots canvassers to knock on doors and make phone calls to raise awareness and funding for action on plethora of progressive issues from the environment to ending the war in Iraq. And as Bloom showed, they also have engaged in remarkably ugly anti-union tactics the likes of which made Wal-Mart infamous. Management, even when it's as forward-thinking as the managers at The Fund, can still stick it to labor, it seems.

Now, over at MyDD, Bloom is continuing his story on The Fund, with a new installment every day this week. Today's chapter is shocking. Bloom interviews Fund employees who describe the scene after managers apparently fired nearly every member of the union at their office, a blatant act of illegal retaliation.

"The minute after the firings[...] the supervisors turned on music in their office and cranked the volume up ... they invited in their friends and opened a box of chocolates to share among them. One of them was bouncing up and down on a yoga ball--this was while we were supposed to be working--and another came in and stuck her tongue out at one of the people who had just been fired[...]." "They thought they just killed the union."

Even after Congresswoman Hilda Solis (D-CA) got involved on the side of the workers, The Fund still managed to bust the union. Read Bloom's full account for all the details, which are truly shocking.

This story is so shocking not only because The Fund apparently broke the law, but also it speaks to a major difficulty we face in trying to achieve the goal of most of us on the Left have - the creation of a durable, powerful Progressive Infrastructure. That infrastructure will only be built by people who have experience like the canvassers at The Fund. They've knocked on doors, spoken to real people about real issues, and have the battle experience to make progressive issues and candidates work in America.

But the conditions of work for progressive activists have been so exploitative that the vast majority of them get so burned out that they leave progressive activism altogether. Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at Columbia, has noticed this as well. Rather than providing valuable experience that goes toward a career in politics on the progressive left, work as a progressive canvasser most often leads to burnout and a job in the private sector.

Compare this to the conditions of work for young conservative activists in the United States. They generally receive all kinds of support and encouragement. And they find well-established channels to go from on-the-ground activism on conservative issues directly into working for the Republican Party. That's infrastructure, and the right has for a long time built up their base in this way.

Progressives used to have this kind of infrastructure - it was provided by the strong labor movement. Fewer workers in the US are members of unions now, and the decline of leftist politics has gone hand-in-hand with that decline. Now, If things are as bad as Bloom describes for workers at progressive employers like The Fund, imagine how difficult it is at a department store or a clothing factory or a corn field. As workers toil to organize, their struggle is the struggle to create a progressive infrastructure.

As Greg Bloom eloquently puts it: "if the blogosphere is the intelligentsia of the nascent progressive movement, these fundraisers are its toiling proletariat."

Labels: From The Courage Campaign, Politics