Last year, organized labor showed it’s coming alive

Bill Knight column for 1-28, 29 or 30, 2019

Returning to the fundamentals of organizing and the basic tool of withholding work, organized labor in 2018 showed signs of renewed energy, despite U.S. union membership stagnating at a bit more than 10 percent.

Amazon workers made progress in gaining recognition at the multi-national company, for example. After Amazon workers in Europe engaged in a three-day strike, Somali-immigrant workers at Amazon’s Minneapolis facilities confronted management about working conditions, and now the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) has stepped up organizing there and at Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary.

In organizing (despite a National Labor Relations system that over the last few decades has changed to operate against unions), union-recognition was achieved by bus drivers and nurses, service-sector workers in Silicon Valley. and more than 28,000 professionals, including adjunct professors and graduate/teaching assistants, journalists at the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and New Yorker plus workers at other media firms such as HuffPost, MTV News, Slate, Salon and Thrillist.

“We may now be at a tipping point where the American workforce isn’t willing to swallow that status quo any longer,” said Bryce Covert, a journalist who’s written for The Nation and the New York Times. “Workers who went on strike this year didn’t just secure better pay and working conditions for themselves. They may be paving the way for others to follow and to raise standards across the economy.”

Speaking of strikes, the work stoppage in 2018 was revived as a useful instrument – again, despite recent years’ trend. For instance, in 2017, the number of private-sector strikes involving at least 1,000 workers was seven. That compares to an average of 288 in the 1970s, and even in the 1980s (when President Reagan made acceptable the use of “permanent replacements”) there were 83.

In 2018, dozens of work sites were struck, as teachers fought for education funding as well as pay, participating in effective work stoppages in six mostly “red” states where they’re technically not legally permitted to strike. The job actions included more than 20,000 teachers and other school workers in West Virginia, another 20,000 in Oklahoma, about 40,000 in Arizona, and walkouts in Colorado, Kentucky and North Carolina. Also, the Chicago Teachers Union conducted the country’s first work stoppage at 15 charter schools there, winning wage increases, smaller class sizes and protections for undocumented kids (and education services nationwide added more than 100,000 members).

Hotel workers undertook the biggest series of hospitality-industry strikes in U.S. history as almost 8,000 workers struck 23 Marriott hotels in eight cities over two months, winning demands of the world’s largest hotel company. In Chicago, another 6,000 local hotel workers went on strike against dozens of hotels there.

“I thought it was important to restore the strike to the arsenal of the labor movement,” UNITE HERE president Donald “D” Taylor told The American Prospect. “If you’re in a fight against powerful forces, why are you taking tactics off the table?”

Fast-food workers, led by the Fight for 15 movement, expanded beyond wages and fast-food employers, to advocating for workers at airports and hospitals, for child-care providers and professors, and also canvassed for the midterm elections in Illinois and 10 other states. In one of the highest-profile actions, McDonald’s workers engaged in the first multi-state strike about sexual harassment. (Likewise, some 20,000 Google workers walked out in November over how the company handled sexual harassment accusations against management.)

Also, the Southeast United States saw tens of thousands of new union members, the Communications Workers of America struck Frontier Communications last spring, and hundreds of Microsoft workers last summer engaged in “concerted activity” by signing an open letter demanding the corporation drop its $19.4 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for processing data and artificial-intelligence capabilities.

“America’s labor unions are not out of the woods, but throughout American history, when unions have been under attack and supposedly down for the count, they have bounced back,” former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal wrote in The American Prospect. “This time appears to be no different.”

Labor is helped by the public, which according to Gallup reached a 15-year high in its approval.

“Fully 62 percent of Americans support unions, according to the Gallup poll,” Rosenthal said. “That number has increased 14 points over the past 10 years. And, among young adults (18-29 years old), 68 percent hold a favorable view of unions compared to 46 percent who feel the same about corporations. As corporate power has increased and union membership has decreased, millions of workers have come to understand that the only way to get ahead is through collective action.”

Editorial cartooning ‘took Wing’ with Illinoisan

Bill Knight column for 1-24, 25 or 26, 2019

An Elmwood, Ill., native remembered as a student prone to daydreaming and doodling went on to be a prominent newspaper cartoonist who also helped “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz get started.

Frank Wing, who died 63 years ago this week, attended local schools where “he was regarded as one of the most unpromising members of the class,” reported the late historian Bill Adams. Teachers “said he did nothing but draw pictures.”

Indeed, Wing couldn’t seem to stop. While a youth, he sang with a church choir, and surviving Congregational hymnals featured Wing’s drawings.

After attending Grinnell College in Iowa, Wing taught at a rural school, and then began contributing to Peoria’s two daily newspapers. At the age of 26, Wing was hired as a cartoonist at the Journal in Minneapolis, where he lived the rest of his life.

There, at various Twin Cities newspapers, Wing was a staff artist drawing nostalgic cartoons titled “Yesterdays” from 1911 to 1947, plus illustrations of news events, and feature art accompanying stories.

“Wing’s crude, powerful and off-time cruel slice-o’-life comic ‘Yesterdays’ originated in the Minneapolis Journal about 1910,” wrote illustrator John Adcock in “Yesterday’s Papers.”

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune remembered Wing fondly.

“Frequently, he took his sketchpad into courtrooms to record trials, to public places, conventions and dinner meetings to catch the faces and character of people in all kinds of moods and poses. Always he treated his subjects with kindly humor and insight.”

Wing also syndicated his illustrations nationwide through the Chicago Tribune and Des Moines Register & Tribune, and he authored several books. including “Fotygraft Album” (1915), “Old 40 Dollars” (1916),” “Amiable Libels” (1916), “The Fambly Album” (1917),  and an anthology of his “Yesterdays” feature also titled “Yesterdays” (named one of the 100 best books of 1932 by writer William Lyon Phelps).

“Fotygraft Album” sold more than 100,000 copies and was praised by the likes of legendary newspapermen William Allen White and H.L. Mencken.

“Frank Wing has made a joyous piece of humor out of the old family photograph album,” White wrote, “and [he] has done it with loving and tender hands, and with the glad heart that shows in a merry countenance.”

Mencken said Wing’s art was “one of the keenest and most penetrating pieces of humor ever. What stupendous power of caricature, what sure and delicate touches ... exact and infallible humor.”

Outside the newsroom, Wing during the Great Depression became an instructor at Minneapolis’ Federal School, a correspondence program. According to “Charles M. Schulz: Li’l Beginnings,” by Derrick Bang, St. Paul native Schulz in 1941 took courses from Wing (who gave Schulz a C-plus in “Drawing of Children”).

Schulz took other classes there, and then was drafted during World War II. After the war, Schulz also became a teacher there, too, and he and Wing became friends. As Schulz’s mentor, Wing in the late 1940s encouraged Schulz to develop his child characters (which led first to “Li’l Folks,” and then “Peanuts”).

Described by one editor as “the man with the photographic pen,” Wing also became the first person to create a picture from a transmission sent by wire. The occasion was heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney’s 1925 bout with Minneapolis’ native Tommy Gibbons, and after Tunney’s 12th-round knockout of the challenger, an image of vertical and horizontal lines was telegraphed to Wing, who from the crude original assembled an illustration. Newspaper readers were stunned that a Twin Cities paper could carry a photo of something that happened the night before in New York.

Described by the Minneapolis Morning Tribune as “one of the most beloved figures in local newspaper history,” Wing entertained generations of readers when he died at the age of 81.

“With much insight and affection, cartoonist Frank Wing poked gentle fun at yesterday’s follies as much as reminding readers of its virtues,” the Star-Tribune said. “Frank Wing was our link with a less harried, more contemplative, more settled, more self-satisfied past. Even a youngster could sense the mood and appreciate the humor of Frank Wing’s pictorial reminiscences.”

Wing and his wife Armina, who died in 1961, are buried in his hometown.

Is this what health care’s come to: ‘Beg or else’?

Bill Knight column for 1-21, 22 or 23, 2019

The sadly familiar collection cans at convenience-store or gas-station counters asking for help for medical bills has changed into “crowdfunding” campaigns that hope to use online appeals to get assistance.

Using sites like Fundly, GiveForward, YouCaring and others, crowdfunding for medical costs is touching, sometimes tragic, and certainly senseless in a modern industrialized society.

The implicit desperation in the phenomenon – shocking as an observer and shameful as an American – stem from unexpected emergencies requiring expensive tests and/or procedures; long treatments and recoveries from strokes, cancers, cardiac issues, etc.; or ongoing attention to those coping with chronic conditions such as Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy or ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). A longtime friend was recently diagnosed with ALS (personally heart-wrenching since I’d witnessed two others – both colleagues at a daily paper’s newsroom – deal with that for years). She’s had to turn to GoFundMe, and one in three fundraisers there are to help with medical bills, according to consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

Helping others is great but crowdsourcing in a consumer-oriented health-care system is far less reliable than mutual aid organized by government, as in Medicare, Medicaid and proposed reforms.

“We are a community and should support each other,” comments Dr. Pamella Gronemeyer, an Illinois physician and small-business owner. “Disease does not discriminate and only go after those who ‘deserve to be sick’ or have not followed a virtuous life path. Diseases can affect young and old.

“The country is only as well as the state of health of the sickest and weakest.”

We’re not well.

A result of the rise of medical crowdfunding is the way it shapes us to see health care as a personal good to be earned, rather than a universal human right, according to a 2017 study published in in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

“Relying on these sites changes how we perceive the problem,” said study co-author Nora Kenworthy, assistant professor of nursing and health studies at the University of Washington/ Bothell. “It masks a more open conversation we could be having about the inequities of our health system. There’s no space for a structural critique in your personal appeal.”

The increase in crowdfunding indicates that both insured and uninsured people are struggling with health-care expenses, and these needs aren’t just for hospitalization or medical care, but also insurance premiums, deductibles, co-payments and other expenditures like lost work, caregiving, and travel or lodging necessary to get care.

“Crowdfunding normalizes a means of health care financing that runs counter to a more rights-based system of values,” says study co-author Lauren S. Berliner, assistant professor at UW’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences. “People say ‘I wish I didn’t have to do this. I’m so embarrassed. They use disclaimers: ‘I wouldn’t do this unless I had nowhere else to turn’.”

The study found that success can depend on factors like socioeconomic networks, media literacy and the knack of expressing a clear and compelling narrative. Success also can hinge on the nature of the appeal, they write. For instance, people tend to respond less to requests for assistance with ongoing caregiving costs than for costs of a specific medical procedure.

So crowdfunding cannot be counted on. (My friend’s GoFundMe plea seeks $30,000 to help with treatment options, buy a scooter, and build a ramp for her home, where she remains despite the degenerative disease. She’s raised $17,000.)

            Meanwhile, the Journal of the American Medical Association this month reported that the health-care industry spends about $30 billion annually just on advertising, and there’s a rise in television commercials from hospitals trying to lure lucrative patients needing expensive procedures.

            “Last year, hospitals nationwide spent more than $450 million on advertising overall, according to figures from Kantar Media, a firm that monitors ad spending,” reported Shefali Luthra in Kaiser Health News.

Elsewhere, these patients/victims of the commercial health-care system are just some of the millions of Americans coping with medical debts, the leading cause of bankruptcy. Michael Karpman and Kyle J. Caswell of the Urban Institute last year showed that almost one-fourth of Americans age 18-64 have past-due medical bills: 23.8 percent (19.9 percent in Illinois – one in five of us).

“Many adults with insurance coverage remain unable to pay their medical bills on time,” they reported.

            So, increasingly Americans are forced to publicly seek handouts, and their understandable discomfort leads to resentment, and more and more, many Americans long for a future when greedy insurance corporations must hold walk-a-thon fund-raisers or bake sales to prop up their huge profit margins instead of exploiting the ill or injured.