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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 | 11President Trump talks a good game
about helping American workers but
has pursued arguably the most anti-
labor agenda of any modern president.
Now he has doubled down by choosing
for secretary of labor a corporate lawyer
who has spent his career battling work-
ers.
This is a bit like nominating Typhoid
Mary to be health secretary.
The official mission of the Labor
Department emphasizes the promotion
of “the welfare of the wage earners,” but
Trump’s mission has been to promote
the exploitation of wage earners.
So Eugene Scalia is a perfect fit.
Scalia, a son of the late Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia who has fought
unions on behalf of Walmart and other
companies, is a talented and experi-
enced litigator who upon assuming
office will be in a position to disembowel
labor.
There’s a larger issue: The relentless
assault on labor has gained ground
partly because, over the last half-cen-
tury, many Americans — me included —
became too disdainful of unions. It was
common to scorn union leaders as
corrupt Luddites who used ridiculous
work rules to block modernization and
undermine America’s economic com-
petitiveness.
There’s something to those critiques.
Yet it’s now clear that the collapse of
unions — the share of employees be-
longing to unions has plunged to 10
percent in 2018 from 35 percent in the
mid-1950s — has been accompanied by
a rise of unchecked corporate power, a
surge in income inequality and a decline
in the well-being of working Americans.
For all their shortcomings, unions
midwifed the birth of the middle class in
the United States. The period of greatest
union strength from the late 1940s
through the 1950s was the time when
economic growth was particularly
robust and broadly shared. Most studies
find that at least one-fifth of the rise in
income inequality in the United States is
attributable to the decline of labor un-
ions.Unions were also a formidable politi-
cal force, and it’s perhaps not a surprise
that their enfeebling has been accompa-
nied by a rise in far-right policies that
subsidize the wealthy, punish the work-
ing poor and exacerbate the income
gap.
“Labor unions, and their ability to
create a powerful collective voice for
workers, played a huge role in building
the world’s largest, richest middle
class,” notes Steven Greenhouse in his
superb, important and eminently read-
able new book about the labor move-
ment, “Beaten Down, Worked Up.”
“Unions also played a crucial role,”
Greenhouse adds, “in achieving many
things that most Americans now take
for granted: the eight-hour workday,
employer-backed health coverage, paid
vacations, paid sick days, safe work-
places. Indeed, unions were the major
force in ending sweatshops, making
coal mines safer, and eliminating many
of the worst, most dangerous working
conditions in the United States.”
Greenhouse, who covered labor for 19
years for The Times, acknowledges all
the ways in which labor unions were
maddening and
retrograde. But he
notes that corpora-
tions run amok
when no one is
minding them.
Union feather-
bedding and rigid
work rules have
been real problems.
Yet without unions
to check them,
C.E.O.s engage in
their own greedy
featherbedding and underinvest in
worker training, thus undermining
America’s economic competitiveness.
Sure, it’s frustrating that teachers’
unions use political capital to defend
incompetent teachers. In New York City,
the union hailed its defense of a teacher
who passed out in class, her breath
reeking of alcohol, with even the princi-
pal unable to rouse her.
It’s also true that states with strong
teachers’ unions, like Pennsylvania and
Vermont, have far better student out-
comes than states with feeble unions,
like South Carolina and Mississippi.
Teachers’ unions have also been heroic
advocates for early childhood educa-
tion, and Red for Ed strikers forced
states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and
Arizona to improve their school sys-
tems.
Remember, too, that manufacturingworkers in Germany are unionized and
earn $10 more an hour than their Ameri-
can counterparts. Mercedes-Benz
autoworkers earn $67 an hour in wages
and benefits, and German workers are
guaranteed a presence on corporate
boards. Unions don’t detract from Ger-
many’s economic system and competi-
tiveness but are a pillar of it.
The bigger picture is that America’s
working class is in desperate shape.
Average hourly wages are actually
lower today, after inflation, than they
were in 1973, and the bottom 90 percent
of Americans have seen incomes grow
more slowly than the overall economy
over the last four decades. The reasons
are complex, but one is the decline of
unions — for unions benefit not only
their own members but also raise wage
levels for workers generally.
So I’ve come to believe that we need
stronger private-sector unions — yet
the Trump administration continues to
fight them. Greenhouse notes that
nearly 20 percent of rank-and-file union
activists are fired during organizing
drives, because the penalties for doing
so are so weak: A corporation may
eventually be fined $5,000 or $10,000 for
such a wrongful dismissal, but that is a
negligible cost of doing business if it
averts unionization.
That’s why we need a secretary of
labor who cares about laborers. Trump
campaigned in 2016 as a voice for forgot-
ten workers, but he consistently sides
with large corporations against work-
ers, and his nomination of Scalia would
amplify the sad and damaging war on
unions.A president’s war on workers
Nicholas Kristof
America’s
working class
is in desperate
shape, and its
longtime
protectors —
unions —
have lost much
of their power.Unionized construction workers pro-
testing in New York last year.ERIK MCGREGOR/PACIFIC PRESS — LIGHTROCKET, VIA GETTY IMAGESIn 2013, at the age of 41, I decided to
make a career change and become a
nurse practitioner. At the time, an ad-
vanced case of reactive arthritis often
left me unable to walk. The entire time
that I was taking prerequisite classes, I
was in a mobility scooter, a 35-pound
dragonfly of a three-wheeler made by a
company called TravelScoot. I also
needed a large surgical boot on my foot
to help me walk.
I rode that mobility scooter in the sun
and through the snow, on the bike path
by the Hudson River, from my home in
the West Village to the Borough of Man-
hattan Community College downtown. I
rode it through the intestinal maze of the
New York City subway system, through
tunnels that trapped the heat and cold of
the previous day’s weather, up and
down elevators that trapped the odor of
urine, to New York City College of Tech-
nology in Brooklyn. I rode it and rode it
and rode it, and wondered if I’d ever
walk again.
This isn’t the real me, I wanted to tell
the world. This time doesn’t count. When
I walk again, that’s when I’ll be real.
Amid the misery, I let myself hope. A
physician assistant at my primary-care
doctor’s office told me about one of her
fellow students, a man with cerebral
palsy, who had completed the program
and graduated while using a wheelchair.
In 2016, I was accepted into a communi-
ty college nursing program, but then
told to come back when I didn’t need a
boot, which might mean never.
I continued to ride my scooter and to
believe that some school, somewhere,
would make a place for me. I didn’t see
my future self briskly striding through
hospital corridors. I just needed to get
through school so that one day I could
sit behind a desk at a health center or
work in an outpatient clinic. There was
plenty of nursing work that could be
done just as well in a surgical boot as in ashoe. I could write a prescription, give a
vaccine, insert an IUD. I could look a
patient in the eye and listen.
In July 2017, I was out of the boot and
walking again for the first time in years.
My spouse and I were thinking about
moving to Australia, so I applied to
programs there and was admitted to
nursing school at the University of
Melbourne. After completing my first
semester, I decamped to Sydney for a
month. There, I lived in an apartment
overlooking Bondi Beach, perhaps the
most beloved urban surfing destination
in the world.
Day after day, I watched the surfers. I
daydreamed about taking a surfing
lesson, but my hold on walking felt so
recent and unlikely, I didn’t chance it.
And in other ways, it
already felt like I was
surfing. I was surfing
on the arthritis medi-
cation I had starting
taking in spring 2016.
I was surfing on the
steroid shot I’d gotten
in April of 2017. I was
surfing on the im-
muno-modulating
probiotics with which
I was experimenting. Just as if I were a
surfer, any little thing could knock me
off my board and back into arthritic
misery, back into the boot and scooter I
had come to know and loathe.
Watching the surfers, I noticed that
the time they spent standing on their
boards, riding waves — doing what
nonsurfers would call surfing — was
minimal compared with the time they
spent bobbing around in the water next
to the board, generally going nowhere.
Even the really good surfers spend far
more time off the board than on it.
If you added up the seconds that a
good surfer actually spent riding the
waves, it would amount to only the
smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet
surfers are surfers all the time. They are
surfers while they are working their
crap jobs, daydreaming about surfing.
They are surfers when they wake up at 4in the morning. They are surfers when
they walk the board down the hill to
Bondi Beach. They are surfers when
they drink their predawn espressos.
They are surfers when they paddle out
on their boards. They are surfers when
they wait and wait for the right wave.
They are surfers when they wipe out,
thrashing around blindly in the waves,
praying the board doesn’t crack their
skulls. They are surfers when they sit by
their trucks with their friends after
surfing, silently eating their grain-bowl
meals.
And the thing about surfers? They
don’t seem to regret all that time they
don’t spend standing on boards and
riding waves. Not only are they surfers
all the time, they are, it seems to me,
happy all the time.
Could I do that? Could I be happy
even when I didn’t know whether I’d be
able to walk the next day, or whether I’d
be alive a year from now? Could the
time I might spend in the humiliating,
tedious boot and scooter somehow
count as mine? Instead of waiting to be
well so I could be myself again, could I
be me while sick, too? Could I declare
myself a surfer all the time, and seize
that happiness?
I thought back to my time in New
York, when I was rising at dawn to take
courses and intern in doctors’ offices,
and struggling both to get around and
to relocate the real me: I had seen a
new light in the faces of my fellow
students and patients, in our shared
endeavor to live. The dark mystery of
bodily suffering had offered itself to me
as a new way to love New York City,
and life, all over again. I had accepted
it, with joy. Watching the surfers at
Bondi Beach, I vowed to do so again
when I returned home in the fall, no
matter what.ELLIS AVERYwas the author of two nov-
els, a memoir and a book of poetry. She
taught fiction writing at Columbia
University and the University of Califor-
nia, Berkeley. She died of cancer in
February 2019.Ellis Avery
AIDAN KOCHThe surfer’s secret to joy
They don’t
seem to
regret all that
time they
don’t spend
actually
riding waves.opinion
weapons and high-capacity magazines
were banned, there were fewer mass
shootings — fewer deaths, fewer fam-
ilies needlessly destroyed.
There’s overwhelming data that
shootings committed with assault weap-
ons kill more people than shootings with
other types of guns. And that’s the point.
Shooters looking to inflict mass car-
nage choose assault weapons with
high-capacity magazines capable of
holding more than 10 rounds. They
choose them because they want to kill
as many people as possible without
having to stop and reload.
In Dayton, where the police re-
sponded immediately and neutralized
the shooter within about 30 seconds, he
was still able to massacre nine people
and injure more than two dozen others
because he carried an AR-style weapon
with a magazine capable of holding 100
rounds. We have to get these weapons of
war off our streets.
Nearly 70 percent of the American
public support a ban on assault weapons
— including 54 percent of Republicans.
When you have that kind of broad
public support for legislation that will
make everyone safer, and it still can’t
get through the Senate — the problem is
with weak-willed leaders who care more
about their campaign coffers than
children in coffins.
The 1994 assault weapons and high-
capacity magazines bans worked.
And if I am elected president, we’re
going to pass them again — and this
time, we’ll make them even stronger.
We’re going to stop gun manufacturers
from circumventing the law by making
minor modifications to their products —
modifications that leave them just as
deadly. And this time, we’re going to
pair it with a buyback program to get as
many assault weapons off our streets aspossible as quickly as possible.
I won’t stop there. I’ll get universal
background checks passed, building on
the Brady Bill, which establishing the
background check system and which I
helped push through Congress in 1993.
I’ll accelerate the development and
deployment of smart-gun technology —
something gun manufacturers have
opposed — so that guns are keyed to the
individual biometrics of authorized
owners.
There is so much we can do — practi-
cal, sensible steps that draw broad
support among the American people.
But we will see only
more and deadlier
shootings if we con-
tinue to dodge the
core issue of unregu-
lated assault weap-
ons and high-capaci-
ty magazines in our
communities.
If we cannot rise to meet this moment,
it won’t just be a political failure. It will
be a moral one. It will mean that we
accept the next inevitable tragedy. That
we are desensitized to children running
from schools and bodies littering park-
ing lots, that our outpouring of thoughts
and prayers will grow increasingly
hollow.
It’s unacceptable that children learn
to fear mass shooters alongside their
ABCs, that people feel unsafe on their
weekly grocery run, and that families
everywhere experience increasing
anxiety that they are simply not safe
anywhere in the United States.
I, for one, won’t stand for that. And the
American people are with me.Ban assault weapons
B IDEN, FROM PAGE 1We have
to get these
weapons
of war off
our streets.JOE BIDEN, a former senator from Dela-
ware and vice president under Presi-
dent Barack Obama, is a Democratic
candidate for president.online, I was so susceptible to fantasy.
In a matter of minutes I would map out
a new life for myself, one that fit the
mold of whatever man I was messag-
ing. Luke and I would chop firewood
and breed St. Bernard puppies! Juan
and I would move to Uruguay and raise
his teenage daughters!
But I soon noticed that the flip side to
the disappointment of each mismatch
or aborted romance was a mounting
sense of strength and self-sufficiency, a
hardening of character, a greater un-
derstanding of the woman I am when
I’m intact. There’s little like ghosting to
delineate where we as human beings
begin and end; and little like ghosting,
too, to lay bare our own infinite re-
serves.
James the boat builder drove me
home that February morning, skidding
a few times on the black ice of the high-
way. I kissed him goodbye on the
doorstep, fairly certain I would not be
seeing him again. For weeks I had been
holed up in my family’s empty summer-
house, writing, and I worked all that
day, caught up in a kind of luxuriant
self-consciousness that has since be-
come familiar — that acute sense of self
and solitude that binding oneself to an
outsider can at times unleash.
Every so often I looked out the win-
dow at the river, where strange white
tendrils were rising and whipping in
sheets across the surface. Sea smoke, I
later learned, occurring when bitter air
sweeps over warmer waters, and it
held me spellbound, for I had never
seen such a thing before.Why I praise
online dating
S MYTH, FROM PAGE 9KATHARINE SMYTHis the author of “All
the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Sol-
ace in Virginia Woolf.”Order the International Edition today at
nytimes.com/discover
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