Union Maid

What Was Missing At YearlyKos

By Christopher Hayes

The panel on “Labor and Power” drew a meager crowd of 40 people, tops. Next door, the “blogosphere expert” panel was packed. UNITE HERE’s political director Chris Chafe seemed dismayed. “If we don’t have this room filled to capacity at the next YearlyKos convention then we’re all going to lose,” he said.

In a post on DailyKos after the convention, labor expert Nathan Newman wrote, “The labor movement actually took YearlyKos very seriously, contributing money to help subsidize costs and sending top leaders to attend the sessions. … I know that the labor leaders were a bit frustrated that their interest in the blogosphere was not reciprocated.”

Generalizations about the netroots are a fool’s game, though one the pundits can’t help themselves from playing. And indeed, within the comments of Newman’s post, many Kossacks spoke up to offer their support for unions and the labor movement. But it was clear at the conference that the issues attracting the most attention—the Valerie Plame affair, bias in the mainstream media, electoral reform—tend toward the process-oriented and obscure. It’s a blessing there are thorough and talented bloggers to track these stories, but they aren’t the issues that most people wake up thinking about, or, for that matter, vote on.

YearlyKos made it clear that the netroots is a vanguard—a smart, savvy, compassionate and courageous vanguard, but a vanguard nonetheless. There’s nothing wrong with vanguards, but they do not a majority make.

This is one of my biggest gripes about the left blogosphere. With the exception of Nathan, Max Sawicky and myself, the big lefty bloggers are utterly oblivious to labor issues. The fact that the labor movement has been so marginalized in the last 30 years has implications for every working person in this country: every benefit you take for granted in the workplace, from vacation time to health insurance, was normalized by the labor movement first. As in the story below, now we have unions giving benefits back, so there is very little that stands between the non-unionized worker and the loss of benefits.