Thought Portal

At no point in his career has Biden proven willing to take the slightest political risk on behalf of workers. His appearances in union halls occur when he needs something from labor. On the other hand, when Biden went to vacation in the Hamptons during the 2011 Verizon strike, workers in the area sought him out “just to possibly get a show of support, a thumb’s-up, a head nod, anything” – to no avail. That same year in Wisconsin, labor leaders specifically asked Biden to come to rally their resistance to the brutal, ultimately successful attack by Scott Walker; Biden declined.

Nor does Biden have a public policy record favorable to the working class. In 1977-1978, during unions’ big push for labor law reform, he vacillated for months and sabotaged the proposal with public criticism. He voted for Nafta and supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He authored the punishing 2005 bankruptcy bill, a reward to creditors and punishment to debtors. Worse still, he has been one of the main legislative architects of mass incarceration, a regime that has devastated the heavily policed and punished American working class.

When Biden cracked a joke several weeks ago about his habit of touching women without consent, he was speaking to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. While the IBEW today takes a strong public stand for workplace equality, both the union and the industry have deep histories of ignoring sexual harassment and racial discrimination. According to a 2013 study, only one-quarter of women in the building trades believe they are equally respected on the job. This context makes Biden’s joking about the accusation of a Latina before that particular crowd seem altogether more insidious. Harassment, after all, is nothing if not a workplace issue. You’d only joke about it to a union crowd if you didn’t think women were really workers.

This is all the worse in a moment that invites broad and radical vision. More workers went on strike in 2018 than in any year since 1986. Over 90% of those who did worked in either healthcare or education – sectors that were not included in the mid-century “basic bargain”.

What’s remarkable is that Biden’s proletarian minstrel act has worked for this long. When he dropped out of the 1988 presidential race, it was after getting caught plagiarizing a monologue by the British Labour party leader, Neil Kinnock, on his coalminer roots. Biden’s spokesperson explained that, while Biden had no immediate relations who were coalminers, the “people that his ancestors grew up with in the Scranton region, and in general the people of that region were coalminers.” In fact, Biden did have an ancestor in the coal industry, Patrick F Blewitt, who died in 1911. But he wasn’t a miner – he was a boss.

MoMA workers held public demonstrations and renegotiated their contracts over a period of four months—build solidarity between workers who are otherwise siloed in their respective departments. Meanwhile, because so many of the supervisors at MoMA worked their way up from lower positions, and thus were once themselves part of the union, they often react to employees participating in union actions with empathy rather antagonism. While the work they perform may differ in kind from that in more trade-oriented professions, their struggles are not so dissimilar. What the various participants in the Artforum interview apparently failed to grasp is that a union fight about wages is not just about wages; it’s also about dignity. The staff at MoMA and the New Museum, the young people turning in favor of unions—seem to understand this.

THE REASONS professional management of a profit-seeking corporation might oppose employee unionization are conspicuous and well-understood, whatever one may think of them. Unions exist to protect worker rights. Worker rights make it harder for managers to fire employees, adjust wages, or cut costs—protections that managers often understand to be at odds with their raison d’être: to maximize profits. But why organizations like museums, ostensibly driven by mission instead of money, sometimes stand opposed to unionization—and there are many examples of such organizations inside and outside the cultural sphere—is perhaps less self-evident.

“Nonprofits tend to argue that they have less money and that unionization will wreck them,” Maida Rosenstein, the president of Local 2110 told me. “You see this especially with social services, but elsewhere, too. A place like the New Museum might also argue that unions are crude outsiders who can’t understand their values.” As the New Museum spokesman stated, “part of our mission is to reconsider the role of museums, and we have done this regularly throughout our history. This requires flexibility and responsiveness to a changing world—qualities the museum takes pride in.” But when art institutions with large endowments and wealthy boards put forth these claims, institutions, that, to boot, routinely espouse progressive values in their exhibitions and other programming, they seem to be inviting accusations of hypocrisy. And hypocrisy, it turns out, can be a galvanizing force.

When workers organize it is because they care about the organization; they want to build long careers there and are putting into place the conditions to make it possible.

Add to that the complexity of women of color’s own relationship to work. Historically, we have always worked and mothered. Many have even grown up seeing their mother and grandmother work more than one job. This is all we know. So the notion of having time to mother feels unfamiliar. There is still the social stigma of taking time off to mother—something black and brown women have never felt free to do. Ever since our bodies and our babies lost economic value, we have struggled to reassert our value as mothers and our importance in raising our own children. As I often say, black women in this country are viewed as perfectly acceptable and desirable for taking care of other’s people children but somehow stereotyped as not being able to take care of their own.