Editor’s note: Amy Dean is a career activist with the several labor unions. She is co-author with David Reynolds of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement, out now from Cornell University Press. Listen to the audio version of this interview here.
PA: What inspired your involvement in this book project, “A New New Deal”?
Amy Dean: On the question of what inspired me, you know, I’m not an author, I’m an activist, but one of the things that I observed over my 20 years in labor and community organizing is how infrequently activists write about their experiences and, conversely, how frequently business leaders write about theirs. The latter allows for the proliferation of best practices, and I think the organizing world and the social justice world have much to learn from that practice in the business community. When the business community is successful at creating a new way or a better way of accomplishing its goals, it has an entire infrastructure that can advance the narrative around how best to do it. There are literally dozens and dozens of business magazines and business schools, and the whole approach business schools use about learning about any particular aspect of business is through case studies. But I have always felt that our side of the aisle does not take the question of institutional evolution as seriously as our opponents do. So the writing of the book was simply a way to accomplish two things: 1) To hopefully share the experiences of successful efforts with other activists around the country, in the hope that they will be inspired to take a look at this particular model we discuss in our book for organizing in their own region, and 2) to put out information for groups who are trying to figure out a way to do their work better.
PA: What does the term “institutional evolution” mean?
Amy Dean: It means that in order for social change to be successful, it has to happen in the context of institutions. I don’t believe that we can contest for real power in this country through loose-knit coalitions or loose-knit grassroots organizations, but that, instead, if we want to be successful in advancing an agenda that is more fair, more compassionate, and more just for people in this country, we have to be able to build our efforts through the creation of institutions – labor organizations and community organizations, groups that are on the ground and are effective at managing staff, at strategic planning, at being able to merge together the tactics of both thinking and acting, both advocacy and policy and research. In other words, if we are not building strong institutions, then we cannot be successful going up against the business community, which has very strong and very powerful institutions and doesn’t create a new campaign each time it has a new set of interests.
PA: To what extent does the recent economic crisis impact your thinking?
Amy Dean: The current economic crisis impacts my thinking dramatically in the following ways. One is that it makes – crystal clear – that the social safety net that at one point was in place in America has completely been eliminated. The safety net we knit together over the course of decades from World War II up until the 1970s was intended to catch people during the inevitable ebbs and flows of economy – to catch them so they wouldn’t hit the rock bottom and could bounce back economically when the economy turned. One of the things that we have seen from the last several rounds of recessionary times in this country is that when people hit the bottom, they aren’t able to spring back. When they hit the bottom – when they are severed from employment, instead of being able to pick themselves back up and be protected or insulated by America’s social safety net – because there really isn’t one. So when they do hit the bottom, it is not as likely that they will come back and be viable economically. That is one very crystal clear thing we see taking place today, that people are hit much harder when the economy ebbs and flows, which is an inevitability.
The second thing that is so clear about the current economic downturn is that it’s not just the lack of jobs that people are hurt by, it’s also the fact that the quality of employment today has been so reduced that it’s not just a conversation about jobs – there has to be a conversation about what kinds of jobs. Really the institution of the social safety net and the institution of collective bargaining have been so whittled away and so dismantled, that even in the case when people have gainful employment, their ability to improve the conditions of their employment, to increase wages, to increase the kinds of access to health insurance, and the other kinds of social supports we once were able to receive from our employment but are no longer there. So we have a diminished social safety net, we have the erosion of the institution of collective bargaining, and downward pressure on the quality of employment. All these things make us that much more vulnerable when the economy turns down in the business cycle, and when we come out of it, in the last several decades of recessions, we don’t come out and ever replace what we've lost. There is a downward spiral happening in this country, and I would argue that there are three forces in the economy that contribute to the downward spiral – the completely unfair rules around global trade (which is not to say that global trade in and of itself is unfair), but the ways in which we conduct our involvement and integrate ourselves into the world economy ... are massively unfair. The second is the fact that we don’t have mechanisms to catch people when they are disconnected from employment. So when they hit bottom they can’t bounce back up. And third, the institution of collective bargaining, which at one time allowed people to work and receive from their employment a decent standard of living, has also eroded. Those three things I would say, and obviously there are many more things – if you’re an economist you can argue about all the different things that are happening around monetary policy and the financial markets, and all these other things, but to the extent that the main important institutions in our country really no longer work for working people, that is something that deserves much more attention and much more militancy around from people who are concerned about the quality of life and human dignity in this country.
PA: The title of your book, A New New Deal, is an obvious reference to the Roosevelt Administration and its response to the Great Depression. We tend to the think of that time period as a time when the government took matters in hand and passed a bunch of laws that put in place the safety net that you are describing as having now been diminished. Even the collective bargaining laws that created somewhat of a level playing field were first enacted under FDR. But your work really describes the New New Deal as more than a set of laws. Could you talk about that in some detail?
Amy Dean: I think the title of the book, and why we chose to reference the New Deal, but yet call it a New New Deal relates to three main ideas. One is that we need a set of accommodations again in this country between employers and employees, and we need to return back to the days when the three major sectors of the economy shared more or less equally the burdens that result from the inevitable ebbs and flows of the economy. In other words, there will always be risks associated with a market-based economy, and the way we chose to respond to that in this country was, under the old New Deal, to ensure at least that workers, employers and the government all shouldered that risk to some extent. The biggest difference between the New Deal economy and that set of accommodations and today's economy, is that slowly the inevitable risks associated with the business cycle have come to be borne almost exclusively by the individual. And so the need to reconstruct a set of accommodations that share equally the risks of the economy is something we must return to, and that requires much more than piecemeal legislation. That’s one point.
The second point is that in the old New Deal people experimented with innovation at the state level before the national set of accommodations were put in place. In other words, it really did come from the bottom up, even though when we think about America’s old New Deal we think about a set of federal policies. But the federal government was not the first to act – the federal government was the last to act. My co-author, David Reynolds, and I would argue that if we today look to the federal government to solve our problems as progressives, we will continue to be disappointed over and over. Instead we need to look at regions and states as the playing field for experimentation in creating a new set of rules that can help us shoulder the risks and burdens of the market-based economy.
The third point in A New New Deal is that it is unlikely, given the massive transformations in today’s economy, that we can achieve restating and rebuilding the same public policies. One thing that remains constant are the values of America’s old New Deal, but today’s version will look very different. What do I mean by that? If we look at the twin pillars of America’s old New Deal, the social safety net and collective bargaining, we know that to recreate those institutions again will look very different because the economy looks very different. Our notions of social justice have changed and are also very different. What does that mean concretely? It means that it is unlikely that we will have collective bargaining, and it is unlikely that an industrial model of collective bargaining would meet our needs, even if tomorrow we were to recreate it. It is unlikely that the kinds of social policies that formed America’s old social safety net would be necessary today. For example, we have a different economy today, where we are no longer insulated by national borders, where people work part time or on a short-term basis and move from job to job, and they identify more with their occupation than they do with their place of employment. So the next generation of trade unions has too look very much like the way in which capital has reorganized itself today – decentralized, occupationally-based, and moving from job to job, given that there is a volatility and flexibility in today’s economy. To recreate collective bargaining in the way it once was is not relevant. Instead of a social safety net that simply looks at unemployment policy, we need to look at things like rent supports, or other kinds of temporary infusion of support for people when they are not working, based on the fact that they probably will not be employed full-time, but that rather there will be periods of unemployment more frequent than under the old New Deal. We argue in A New New Deal, that the values remain the same, but the way we look at rebuilding the two institutions of collective bargaining and the social safety net will probably look a lot different. Basically those are the three big ideas behind the title, and that’s how we tried to make the case about the distinctions between the two New Deals.
PA: Your book outlines what you call a three-legged, power-building plan that involves the creation of coalitions and institutions as you described earlier, but it also includes regional power-building and political action as the other legs of that plan. What is regional power-building?
Amy Dean: We refer to regions, and the subtitle of the book is “How Regional Activism will Reshape the American Labor Movement.” What we mean by a region is an economic unit, because there really is no political unit as yet; but there is an economic unit that is smaller than a state and bigger than a city. The way in which industry organizes itself today is in a much more decentralized way, and companies have tried to externalize any costs of doing business that are not core to the function of the firm. So you have client companies, groupings of contractors, and other business relationships that tend to be more horizontal and spread out over the space of a region. The idea that we are only interested in our neighborhood or our community is not effective. And to simply look at the state level without the building blocks of regional power could turn into the same kind of Beltway politics that we have in Washington. The idea behind a region is not our original idea. There is much literature on the subject of regions, but they are increasingly economic units. As a consequence of that, you see public policies whose outcomes are very important to working people organized around regional boundaries. In other words, the federal government passes money down for lots of different things, for example, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ($30 billion including construction). The federal government creates a loose-knit set of goals with that money, and then it comes down from the states into the communities. Transportation dollars are allocated in the same way. The federal government allocates billions of dollars for transportation funding, it comes down to the states, and then regions request and plan for how that money will be used. Oftentimes housing policy, affordable housing, will be determined across multiple cities, because we know we just can’t plan little box by little box. In order for working families, people living in communities, to be successful, we need to activists to begin to think about these kinds of policies well beyond simply the particular interests of their neighborhoods. Why these polices are so important is because the only public funding that comes down these days is for very specific goals. There is no such thing as money that just comes down unspecified. That’s long gone. So the need is for activists to be able to shape how those dollars are spent and toward what end, and what kinds of jobs are created as a result of those public dollars is very important. Because it can mean the difference between community well being or not.
But let me back up a little. We chose under a Democratic administration, in the Clinton years, to wash our hands of paying a social wage by eliminating the role of welfare. That now means that any spending that the public sector does has to be looked at through a social welfare lens. In other words, even if we were to reinstate collective bargaining in America for service sector jobs, unions would still have to be very interested in how transportation funding is spent, how affordable housing monies are spent, and how land use policy is developed, because these things can mean the difference between economic viability or not for working people. For instance, it is extremely important that the transportation money that gets spent in my area is used to move the people who are most dependent upon public transportation from their homes to their jobs, versus often industry’s interest in moving knowledge workers from their communities to their places of employment.
The idea of a region is that increasingly industries are organized around regional economic boundaries, so activists have to think beyond simply a city and sometimes have to look at organizing across multiple counties, because funding comes down that way, and the kind of funding that comes down is really important for whether or not working people will live in a community and that is viable or not. We talk about the region as an important political unit for organizing, and then we say that in order to be successful in making sure that land use policy creates good jobs and that it enhances our tax base, making sure that affordable housing really is affordable for those at the bottom of the hourglass, making sure that transportation funding is spent for those who are really most heavily dependent upon public transportation, means that we have to be able to have institutions that are able to guide that funding. We need progressive institutions, as I said when we began the interview, because the funding is complex, because the public policies we need to advance are complex, and because we can’t simply have loose-knit coalitions and expect to impact how the monies are spent.
In the Nation I recently wrote a piece called “Doing Green Jobs Right.” It talks about a case study that took place after the New New Deal was published, where labor and community organizations have been organizing and building capacity for some time now called Community Labor United, in Boston, a labor-community think/act tank, which has been working very hard to build their own institutional capacity to impact public policy in their community. Recently they had a very successful victory that grew out of their organizing, where they scored sort of a "triple bottom line" around green jobs. Lots of money is coming down from the federal government to “green the economy” and reduce carbon emissions in our communities, and every state has to put together a plan for how they are going to reduce carbon emissions in their areas. Oftentimes, for instance, there are programs to weatherize homes, but they are not affordable to low income people or people don’t even know that those programs exist. Well-off families with homes in higher-income communities tend to benefit more from these weatherization programs.
The Community Labor United group has a Green Justice Coalition that has been working together for some time, and they intervened in the state’s policy. The first thing they said was you have a plan that is not resulting in a net reduction of carbon emissions. Now in order to be able to determine that the coalition had to have some kind of policy and research capacity to identify it. If we are going to have bigger victories, we better have the policy chops to win them. It doesn’t mean that we are simply developing think tanks, but think tanks that can connect to action. Number one, this group was able to identify to bureaucrats at the state level that their programs were not achieving a reduction in carbon emissions. That was the first thing. The second thing they were able to discover was that the jobs that were being created to go out and weatherize these homes were not high-road, high-paying jobs, in challenging the federal government by pointing out that if we really do want a green economy that results in good-paying jobs, we have to be able to measure whether or not public policies are achieving that. The third thing that they were able to discover, again by their public policy and research capacity, is that low-income communities weren’t even taking advantage of this program, because even in the event that they did know about the program, they couldn’t afford to weatherize their homes. Older homes have much bigger problems than new construction, and people who have a higher income can afford to put money out for weatherization, versus what most of us can do, which is to put bubble wrap around our windows when it gets cold. They discovered these things by having a pretty sophisticated capacity to do policy and research, and this grew out of a coalition of interests between labor and environmentalists, that had already been working together well in advance of any kind of campaign.
Again, we see the notion of building institutions as opposed to bringing together loose-knit coalitions to try to challenge power. As a result of their coalition building and merger of interests of groups, Community Labor United were able to take those interests and begin to analyze what was going on in the state program, and then begin to act in the same way activists have acted for years, which is by challenging power. The difference, though, is in also advancing a set of ideas for how to make it different. What they ultimately put forward is what won a victory with a triple bottom line. It is no longer acceptable to say, if we want to advance the interests of low-income communities, we have to trade off the wages of union workers. It is no longer effective or acceptable to say that in order to pay for those communities to be successful, then we have to take it out of labor costs. When you merge groups together from the beginning and you begin to expand your vision for what is possible, enabled by policy-research chops, the victories are far greater. What did they win? Not the sky, but the beginning of a shift in public policy at the state level with a set of escalating demands. They won a financing mechanism for low income communities to be able to take advantage of the weatherization program, so that there is public financing of weatherization and investment in low income peoples’ homes, which is very important and would not have happened without their technical capacity. They were able to say we can lump these jobs together by going door-to-door to identify the homes that need these weatherization benefits the most, and lump these needs together so they could go to bigger contractors to perform the work. But the contractors, all with union contracts, didn’t have the work force to do this kind of work, because many in the skilled trades are already busy working where their skilled crafts are needed. So the building trades were able to get the work and then reach out to the immigrant community and to people who weren’t already in the building trades and say we’ve got all these jobs now and we’d like you to train for them. Lastly they won not just the right to lump these jobs together so that you could get prevailing contracts with union labor, but they were also able to write themselves into the execution of the program by becoming a sort of state work force that went door-to-door and mobilized the community to apply to benefit from the weatherization program.
All of which is to stay, when you look at the regional power-building model and the three legs to the stool – policy and research married with organizing and advocacy to connect into political action. You know we elect these folks all the time to do good work for us, but if we don’t have creative things that we need from them, like going to all these meetings where bureaucrats were debating how to best execute the weatherization program, we cannot achieve our goals. When you can link all these things together and you have creative things to you expect from elected leaders, as opposed to uncreative things, or you don’t define what you want from them, then the victories are small, if at all. We have to think differently today as progressives, as activists, leftists or whatever we call ourselves. Those of us who can imagine a more just, fair and compassionate world, have to build organizations that are far more tactical and far more sophisticated than organizations of the past. What we argue for in the book is a combination of thinking and acting under one roof that we call regional power building – the three legs to the stool – executed through think/act tank organizations different from what we were used to in the past. For so many years we have been used to research groups in Washington doing the heavy thinking. Their reports come flying off their shelves and they hope that activists catch them and run with them and implement the ideas, and we know that that doesn’t work. Building regional organizations that can house these capacities together is what we argue is the winning combination for institution building, so that we can win bigger victories.
PA: Could you give an example from the book of where you think this three-legged model really works the best on a regional level?
Amy Dean: In all the case studies, we think those are the best practices, and the question is why we don’t have more of it going on. That is what I would rather address. In our case studies, we say that model grows out of California, then it spreads to other parts of the country. We thought it was important to write about this because we wanted to hold up California as the model, and we also wanted to demonstrate that this is not just California exceptionalism, because it’s liberal there or progressive there, but that rather this model can be created in other parts of the country when there are already models on the ground. This is an important reason why we wrote this book. When you have a model on the ground that takes 15 years to build, and yet programs now are in place and the knowledge of how to do things is in place, you can pick it up in Denver and learn how to do it in half the time, or pick it up in Atlanta and learn how to do it in half the time, or in the case of Boston, which was not an original, first generation organization, but went to the working partnership in San Jose and learned from it. Because activists in Denver, Boston and Atlanta came and learned from the California model, they could build these groups faster. There is no short cut to doing the hard work, but it doesn’t take the same amount of time, as if you were cutting trail from the beginning. The question is why we have so little of it. If this is the right model and this is effective, if this is the right thing to do, we argue, why don’t we have more of that?
I think the explanation for it is that, number one, we are still, as a progressive movement, as Democrats and progressives, and those who want to change America, still focused on the idea that the government at the federal level is the solution. And we tend to put all of our resources and all our attention into change at the federal level. Almost all the foundation funding in America on the progressive side of the aisle, which is limited compared to the Right, and most of the labor funding, which are the two big institutions that fund progressive work, really focus nationally. They say that we care about communities and states, but we’re going to give the money directly to the national groups to decide how to figure it out and divide it up. The groups that are funded at the national level are then told to go out and build something in different communities, and we know that funding national intermediaries to build groups on the ground has not been terribly effective. We also know that there is still a disproportionate amount of funding around research and policy at the national level. So there is still this bias about how we apply and spend our resources, looking nationally, and looking at the regional level as just too small a unit.
The second thing is we tend, as progressives, to have short-term memories, and to go from election cycle to election cycle. So we move on an 18-month calendar, and we get somebody elected, and 18 months later we’re in the middle of getting them re-elected again. Because we aren’t building our political machinery in the context of institutions but building it in the context of temporary, part-time electoral organizations, we don’t have a lot of institutional memory and history. For example, we’re all bemoaning the fact that we’re going into this election cycle and we’re going to get crushed, but how different is 2010 from 1994? We spent the first 18 months of the Clinton administration being disappointed. Our President had amnesia about the kinds of things he promised on the campaign trail, namely to have labor and environmental side-agreements in trade. Eighteen months into his administration, six months out from the 1994 elections, we were all bemoaning the fact that we had a NAFTA agreement that had no side-agreements for labor and the environment that were legitimate. Then we had to rev the troops up, after we had been bemoaning how bad the President had been for the first 18 months, rev them up and get them excited, when we up until that point we had expressed/been expressing our disappointment.
Well, it’s not that much different in 2010 from what it was in 1994 as we approach the midterm elections. Why don’t we learn from those experiences? Why is it so hard to remember, so that we continue to recreate the same mistakes over and over? I would argue that when community groups make the same mistakes over and over, it’s because we lack an institutional memory. Institutional memories can only be housed and learned from in the context of permanent organizations. So now there is a) the bias that if we spend our money federally, it’s the best way to correct our problems, b) we lack permanent political organizations, so we tend to forget from cycle to cycle, therefore recreating the same scenario over and over again, and c) I would argue that, at least when it comes to the labor movement, we need to have a healthy debate about the extent to which national versus regional organizations, and investment in that level of organization, can turn around our fortunes.
There are probably many more reasons why building regionally has been slow and less successful in terms of their number, but I would say that those are the three big ones we have to come to terms with if we are really going to get our arms around changing this country, and stop the bleating every time we elect somebody and we put our hopes in that person and then we feel disappointed. It’s not the person; it’s our expectations, and our lack of realizing that we have to be able to build on the ground. We talk about accountability. You don’t hold people accountable in a beltway. You hold people accountable in a community, and the only way to hold people accountable in a community is to have strong, lasting, durable organizations. The business community understands this and we need to understand it too.
