Sticking To The Union

As an institutional force, the labor movement has failed. Union headquarters in Manhattan might be across the way from Goldman Sachs. Yet there is no parity between labor and finance in the money game, or labor and management in the organizing game. The movement’s 2011 recall campaign against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker came to naught, as did its attempt to enshrine collective bargaining rights in Michigan’s state constitution. Last year, only 11.3 percent of the workforce belonged to a union. The movement is locked in a negative-feedback cycle. After each defeat at the ballot box, conservatives and corporate types smell blood in the water, and grow bolder in their drive for right-to-work laws and other curbs on labor. Union membership drops. The process repeats.

For the most part, labor is not to blame for its shortcomings, mainly the product of countervailing historical forces. In 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which granted private-sector workers the right to form unions, collectively bargain, and strike. Growing in number, unions eventually counted one-third of the American workforce in their memberships.

Bye Bye Bloomy

I grew up with Michael Bloomberg as my grandparents grew up with Franklin Roosevelt. He took office when I was seven years old, a few months after 9/11. And like FDR, he stayed on for an extra term. His name was ubiquitous—the signature on a proclamation, a line on the top of a school announcement, a synonym for power and wealth, an imprecation. To be raised in Bloomberg’s New York meant to define yourself in terms of the man, and reminiscence is inescapable as he prepares to leave office at the end of the year.

I hated him, and most people in Rockaway, Queens felt the same. We lived on the edge of the outer boroughs, 40 minutes into Lower Manhattan by car and an hour-and-a-half away by subway. Bloomberg was always booed at the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. My father thought the mayor only cared about people who lived in “the city.” My mother remarked that municipal services had been better under Rudy Giuliani. Bloomberg was no Giuliani, and nothing like Ed Koch, that irascible, ideal-type Jew Yorker who had endeared himself to white ethnics with straight talk and a hard line on riots.

Here, these are for you!

Queerness Considered

As the Supreme Court deliberated over same-sex marriage last year, Facebook News Feeds were flooded by equal signs. Less noticeable was the victory symbol, the two lines of the equal sign smushed together to form a “V.”

The sine qua non of the social media provocateur, the “V” represented an unsparing critique of today’s gay rights paradigm. Attacked from the left by self-styled “radical queers,” the model has been faulted for its emphasis on reform and integration. Latching onto the slogan “assimilation is not liberation” and hearkening to a glorious past, the queers have appointed themselves guardians of LGBT identity, insisting on retaining the early movement’s destabilizing mission.

They're the Top

Spending time with my grandparents this summer, I found myself taken with the show tunes and ballads of their youth. Written by men who captivated Broadway and Hollywood with their inventiveness—Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin—and interpreted by midcentury’s best entertainers—Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald—the numbers of the Great American Songbook have been immortalized on vinyl and film.

I thought at first there was little to admire in my grandparents’ musical ken. Porter’s lyrical witticisms, dated though they are, were cause for mirth. The Gershwins, with their synthesis of jazz and the French classical style, clearly merited respect. Berlin’s compositions had a ritmo allegro that lent themselves to occasional listening.