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Robert Gabrielsky

User Profile Image Robert Gabrielsky
Member since : May-30-2009 (Verified)
6 Ideas, 20 Comments, 1693 Votes

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Ideas Posted

Obama said that he supports the Employee Free Choice Act, but since taking office he has done nothing to get this bill out of committee and onto his desk to be signed into law. Despite the fact that Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel has said that the EFCA is a back burner issue that is certainly not the case for the embattled labor unions who did so much to get Obama elected or the millions of unorganized workers who yearn to belong to a union were the opportunity made available to them.
Of course Congress should pass the Employee Free Choice Act, but beyond that the Obama Administration should get behind its original campaign promise and pressure Congress to pass the Act.

But that is only the beginning for real labor law reform. Next, all the provisions of the Taft Hartley Law still in force should be repealed.

That would include legalizing common situs picketing and legalizing all of the following types of strikes:

wildcat strikes
jurisdictional strikes
solidarity strikes
sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts
political strikes

Also, the so-called "right to work" provisions allowing some states to outlaw union shops should be repealed.

The right of the federal government to enjoin strikes should be repealed.

The right to unionize should be extended to supervisors, lower management personnel, agricultural workers, independent contractors such as cab drivers and all other workers not presently covered under the National Labor Relations Act.

The minimum wage law should be changed to a living wage law, guaranteeing all workers the right to a livable income pegged to the cost of living.

Free birth to grave medical care, including pharmaceuticals, eye care, psychiatric care, dental care and alternative treatments such as chiropractic should be made available to every resident of the United States. Everybody in, nobody out.

Free public education should be available to every resident of the United States from infancy through graduate school.
Tax dollars and federal and state governments should not pay for party primaries, which are, or at least ought to be, essentially private affairs wherein what ought to be a private organization (a political party) chooses its candidate(s). Likewise with political conventions.
Fusion is the right of a candidate for public office to appear on more than one ballot line or on more than one Party designation. The Fusion option is legal in very few states, notably New York. Where it exists the evidence suggests that it fosters diversity in the political process, particularly the growth and development of third parties and other independent political formations.
Abolish the Senate and the Presidency. Make the House of Representatives the sole federal legislative body and make congressional majorities responsible for administrative responsibilities now undertaken by the executive branch.
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Comments Posted

Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
On the other hand, from the point of view of democratic representation, proportional representation does make sense and would create an opening for minority views. However, this would require larger representative bodies at the local level and also ward-based, as opposed to at-large representation, which would create a greater opening for more points of vies. But again, none of this is at all meaningful in the absence of a well organized democratic mass movement. The nuts and bolts of organizing such a movement are neither easy nor especially interesting. On top of that, this is not the appropriate forum for such a discussion. My understanding is that this is for Obama to get ideas and the last thing he would want is a mass movement that he couldn't control.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
I tend to agree that IRV is no solution or panecea for the problem of getting genuinely democratic representation. It seems to me that nearly everyone on this entire website, from right to left and back again seems to be looking for get rich quick solutions to whatever it is that ails them or irks them, IRV being one of the more popular shiboliths. IMHO there is simply no short cut to building a real, and democratically organized mass movement for social change from below. That is the only basis for real and guaranteed change of any kind. Of course it takes hard and mostly mundane work to build such a movement, which is undoubtedly why most people avoid it, or even thinking about it for that matter.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
As a point of clarification, the EFCA would not negate the right to an election for union representation. What it would do is shift the demand for an election from the employer to the workers. That is, workers could either demand an election or demand that the union they are petitioning for be recognized on the basis of a majority of cards signed. As it stands now, the employer can demand an election and employers typically use the time between when petions are filed and an election held to intimidate workers and propagandize them and pressure them into voting against a union. This would take that whole process out of the hands of the employer and put it in the hands of the workers.

What really astonishes me about this sight is that there is fairly clear evidence that a solid majority of American workers would choose to be in a union had they the opportunity to do so. That being the case, I can only conclude that this entire site has been packed by extreme conservatives. This very unrepresentative considering the number of people who voted for Obama. BTW, I'm not one of them, being a Nader man myself.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
Why do you conflate the notions of progressivism, liberalism, Marxism, socialism and democracy when they are often at odds with each other, often to the point of physical conflict?
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
It is my understanding that this is a site set up by the Obama administration in order to ellicit ideas about the sort of legislation and Executive initiatives the public would like the administration to get behind.

If you want to know Obama's politics just check out his cabinet appointments. He's hardly a leftist. Only in America would someone like Nancy Pelosi be considered a person of the left. Nearly everywhere else she'd be considered down right reactionary, which is an indication of just how depoliticized and conservative the popular American political discourse is.

Few politicians keep all of their campaign promises. On the other hand it is also not reasonable to expect a winning candidate to reverse all his positions and turn his back on the people who elected him, so naturally the site is going to be skewed toward the positions of the people who initiated the site, perhaps pushing given positions slightly in one direction or another. What I find surprising is how little that is the case in this instance.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
My understanding of this site is that people are to vote on particular ideas, and not post the same idea over and over again. Doing so only clogs up the site and make it more difficult for people who seriously want to participate to do so. Those people who see Obama's birth certificate of primary importance would have made their point by posting the issue once and seeing how many people voted on it pro or contra.

Posting the same idea over and over seems more like disruptive kibbitzing than a serious attempt to get a particular idea discussed.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
This does not seem to be an entirely appropriate discussion for this forum.

I thought it was organized by the Obama Administration in order to give ideas to the Administration regarding the sorts of legislation and Executive initiative that the public would most want the administration to get behind.

Whether one wants it or not, voting procedures (like marriage) are largely a state issue, not something that a federal administration would really have much to do with.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
The way to take on American corporatism is not to expect the American corporatist state to do anything about it but rather to organize a serious and coordinated anticorporatist opposition such as a mass labor party.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
Most people really don't like their jobs. This is true even of professionals who claim to. Why else would everyone so look forward to retirement? Who doesn't retire? Supreme Court judges. Actors. Musicians. Artists. Now it can truely be said that those are good jobs. Those are people who would never consider retiring. They are having far too much fun earning a living doing what they are doing. As Duke Ellington said, "Retire to what?"

Given the wealth that our culture is capable of producing, it seems reasonable that that is the sort of society that we can aspire to. One in which no one would think of retiring because they were having far too much fun doing what they were doing.

Obviously as society that has 19 million empty homes and 4 million homeless isn't particularly well organized in terms of the wealth that it is clearly able to produce.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
"Any progressive gain accomplished by organization alone, and not SYSTEMATIC change, is temporary at best. A well funded corporate interest will always be ready to work behind the scenes to undo their work the minute the "organized" force is dispersed or has moved on to the next issue."

Progressive sentiment is extremely widespread in the United States and for the most part always has been. Majority opinion stands pretty staunchly against current American military policy. According to most polls 60% of the unorganized workers in the nation would join a union if the opportunity were available to them. More than 60% of the population are for single payer health care. A substantial number are for living wage legislation. One could go on and on.

Yet public policy and even public policy discussions don't refect any of this. Why? We despite such widespread progressive sentiment, it remains inchoate and largely unorganized. The most obvious example is that the United States remains the only industrialized democracy in the world where the labor movement doesn't have its own political party. Only 10% of the work force is organized in contrast to 60 or 70% of the work force in other industrialized democracies. Those progressive institutions which are organized, such as Progressive Democrats of America, remain weak and ineffectual. Of course, systemic change is essential, but such systemic change will never come about without effective and comprehensive organization at the base. What is more, in the absence of such and organized base to hold politicians and public institutions accountable even such systemic reforms easily unravel and/or turn into their opposite.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
It was my understanding that this list was set up by the Obama Administration in order to get some feedback about the sort of legislation or executive actions people were most concerned with.

From that point of view it doesn't seem to be working very well.

The general response doesn't seem to be all that great. This could be a shortcoming of the Administration or it could be intentional. As from the beginning of his campaign Obama made very few uncorrected or uncorrectable mistakes, I suspect it is the latter.

The site seems to have generated few responses and a lot of kibbitzing. All the posts regarding the President's birth certificate are an example of the latter. If the posters on that issue were serious they would have made one posting and tried to get as many people to sign onto it pro or contra as possible. Instead they deluge the site with hundreds of posts making it extremely difficult for people who want to seriously participate to do so.

Regarding this particular posting, according to most reliable statistics about 60% of the unorganized workers in the nation say that they would join a union if they had the opportunity to do so. So the fact that this particular contribution is so far in the negative is very suspicious. Either the polling was in error, which seems unlikely as these polls were conducted by bonafide polling outfits, some of them quite hostile to unions. It would seem more likely that the sample responding to this suggestion is not especially scientific.

But regarding the substance....The hostility to unionism does seem rather peculiar given Obama's own stated views. Let's face it. He won. That being the case one would hardly expect him to thumb his nose at his own base, which including virtually the entire American labor movement.

As I said above, I thought the point of this site was to give Obama suggestions. Unless those suggestions showed some overwhelming support one would hardly expect them to be fundamentally contrary to Obama's own views. After all, again, he won.

Had McCain won and set up a similar site, I'd probably try to find some issues on which I agreed with McCain, urge him to follow through on his campaign promises and follow through on the logic of his positions as to where it might most likely lead next.

That is exactly the spirit in which I originally posed this suggestion. The central theme of the Obama campaign was change. While he was often vague about exactly what that meant, one could infer certain things from previous positions he had taken. He said he was opposed to the war in Iraq. He was on record in favor of universal health care. He was on record in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. It is reasonable to expect him to either follow through on these campaign promises or offer some public explanation as to why he is choosing not to do so.

Frankly, he most certainly seems to be back peddling on the question of the Employee Free Choice Act. Most probably, if it reached his desk, he would sign it. But he isn't doing anything to shepherd it through Congress. This apprently is not so much to placate Republicans as it is to placate the conservative Congressional wing of the Democratic Party and certain business interests who were among his major campaign contributors.

In urging him to get behind this legislation, I am simply asking Obama to be Obama, and to continue to support legislation that he actively supported when he was in the legislative branch.

I did suggest that he might go further within the logic of that position. That would include recinding the remaining provisions of the Taft Hartley Law as well as enacting living wage legislation and enacting other provisions which would increase the social wage such as tuition free public higher education. This would all be of a piece with the Employee Free Choice Act, which Obama nominally says he supports.

As to the points raised above, I hesitate to respond to them, not because I want to avoid a debate, but frankly because they seem inconsistent with Obama's own world view, not a perspective that he buys into.

That said, it should be pointed out that the Employee Free Choice Act does not prevent employees from voting in or out a union. What it does is take that provision out of the hands of employers where it currently rests, and puts it in the hands of employees.

Regarding the rights of employees who oppose belonging to the union, certainly I am for minority rights. But minority rights do not include depriving the majority of its rights. And all the statistical evidence shows that unionized workers are paid better and have better working conditions than do nonunionized workers. Certainly it is reasonable to expect all the workers who benefit from unionization to pay for that benefit, even if they are skeptical about it.

After all, we all pay taxes and nearly everyone is opposed to some aspect of what our taxes pay for. Some people want a lower defense budget. Some people want cuts in various aspects of domestic spending. But we live in a democracy. We accept the fact that in a nation of over 200 million people nearly everyone is going to be opposed to this or that aspect of government spending.

On a much smaller scale the same is true of unionized workers. Undoubtedly nearly every union member would take issue with some way or other that his or her dues money is spent. But that's the nature of democracy. Of course there should be minority rights, but such minority rights ought not extend so far as to negate majority rule.

With regard to issues such as free tuition or free medical care, of course they have to be paid for and the way such social benefits are typically paid is through taxes. But there are all kinds of government sponsored social benefits that are paid for through taxes that nobody complains about and are looked upon as basic rights. Once upon a time all education was private. As a consequence the poor and working people were kept in ignorance and often illiterate. But it was found that providing education for the whole society through taxes had enormous social benefits. I'm simply arguing that it would benefit the society as a whole to extend such benefits through college and graduate school.

I hear very few complaints from anywhere on the political spectrum regarding the federal highway system yet this was a tremendous social benefit, not only to individuals, but in particular to the trucking industry and was probably the single greatest factor in the trucking industry eclipsing the railroads. But in the 19th century the railroads themselves never would have gotten off the ground without huge federal subsidies, including especially massive land grants. This was wealth essentially taken from the American people and given to the railroads, just as the taxes for the federal highway system were a gift to the trucking industry.

I would most certainly agree that the TARP is unjust and immoral, but socialism it is not. It does nothing to help the middle class or working people, much less the poor, though it is a great gift to the major financial corporations and as such it is hardly socialism.

The strength of any democracy can be measured by the strength of its institutions in civil society, especially religion and the labor movement. It is a corporate myth that American unions are particularly powerful. In fact the United States has one of the weakest labor movements of any industrialized democracy in the world. The United States is the only industrialized democracy in the world that does not have a mass labor party. Today only about 10% of the work force is organized while in the other industrialized democracies it is more typical that 60 or 70% of the work force belongs to unions.

Of course we live in a democracy. That being the case, much of the weakness of American unions can be laid at the door of American unions themselves. It is not the job of government to organize unions for working people. But government can make it easier or harder for working people to organize themselves. I'm simply arguing that government make it easier, which is consistent with Obama's stated position, though not particularly consistent with is actions.

Regarding the issue of labor goons, I've been in the work force nearly 50 years. In that time I've been in a number of different unions. I certainly don't consider myself a tough guy. In fact, I suspect most people would consider me something of a milque toast. In all that time, very seldom have I been confronted by what I would consider union goons, though I have frequently felt intimidated by employers. I'm not suggesting that corruption and even gangsterism is nonexistent in the American labor movement, only that it is a very marginal tendency seldom encountered buy most workers.

Union democracy is another matter and most unions leave much to be desired in terms of democratic practice, though in comparison to most institutions in American society they are paragons of democracy.

I find it curious that for all the ranting in the previous messages, virtually none of them have anything to say about my suggestions regarding recinding those provisions of the Taft Hartley law still in force, which was the main part of my message.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
The best and easiest way to democratize the military (in addition to making the draft universal, not selective, for all sexes) is to extend collective bargaining rights to enlisted personnel. Unionize the military!
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
Centralization may not always be compatible with democracy, but on the other hand decentralization is no guarantee of democracy either as 100 years of states rights in the Jim Crow South or the machines of the urban north demonstrated. Ultimately, democracy has little to do with centralization or decentralization. It's another thing altogether.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
In terms of general elections, I completely agree with you. However, my comments are reserved completely and specifically for Party functions per se. Historically speaking and theoretically at least, up to the present, parties are private institutions, like the Rotary or a labor union.

If I am not a member of that organization I might have an opinion as to who might be the best leader of that group, but I have no right to participate in the choosing of its leaders, nor to I have any obligation as a private citizen to pay for their choosing or how they are chosen.

Of course, today, American political parties are not membership organizations and they function as quasi pubic bodies, but thus was not always the case, nor do I think the public weal is well served by putting what are more properly private bodies essentially under government control. This was one of the most disaterous and antidemocratic "reforms" of the progressive era and it ought to be undone.

Any group of citizens (or residents for that matter) has a perfect right to organize themselves any way they see fit and put forward qualified candidates whose views they share for public office. Democracy would be much better served by such an approach.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
Well, the old IWW organizer Big Bill Haywood said that the treasury of the revolution was in the pockets of the working class.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
This is a good idea, but we don't need President Obama's permission to do it, so I don't see the point of addressing this to the Executive Branch. Same goes for many of the other proposals on this site.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
I find it really odd that anti-corporate progressives (and I'm one of them) would trust a government (which they acknowledge is dominated by big corporations) to fairly fund elections. This is yet another short cut or get rich scheme or back door to real democracy which avoids the essential and necessary issue that it is up to us to organize. We can't expect a corporate dominated government to do it for us or any fairness from it.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
Not only felons, EVERYBODY. That is there should be no age or citizenship barriers to voting rights. Everyone who is a resident has a stake in the society, after all. Whether a person wants to vote should be their own decision. Of course they would have to prove residency to vote in the appropriate place, but that's easy enough to establish. People do it all the time when they get a driver's license.
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
These proposals are not nearly generous enough, especially given the state of our economy, which clearly is a crisis of overproduction. For example there are about 4 million homeless people in America and 19 million empty homes. We clearly don't need more homes or more homes built. We need to put the homeless in the homes that are already there and empty.

The maximum hours law should be pegged to unemployment. If unemployment goes up a certain amount then the maximum hours should come down to compensate for it.

The minimum wage standard should be changed to a living wage standard, which today, on average is about $20
Robert Gabrielsky 9 months ago
This proposal is way too generous to the rich and greedy. I think you have to start at the bottom. Change the minimum wage law to a living wage law and peg it to the cost of living to be reviewed every 90 days. Then have a maximum income law that would be no more than 10 times the living wage (personally I'd by much more comfortable with a factor of 3, but 150 is much too generous). Just think of all the wealth that would make available at both ends of the spectrum.