The Disruption Series, Part 2: Corporations Aren't People...So Why Does Everybody Act Like They Are?

 

 

In 1919 the Boston police union voted almost unanimously to go on strike. More than four-fifths of the force walked out. Chaos erupted on the streets of Boston. The Mayor summoned the National Guard to restore order.

After the Mayor overrode the Police Commissioner’s authority, newly elected Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge overrode him and dispatched the entire state’s national guard. When AFL-CIO president Samuel Gompers urged that the striking policemen be allowed to return to work, Coolidge ignored him. The Commissioner of the Boston police fired nineteen union leaders and most of the striking policemen were released from duty.

Calvin Coolidge then  wrote one of the most famous statements in American history: “There is no right to strike against the public safety, by anybody, anytime, anywhere.”

The nations reaction was automatic –  they rallied behind Calvin Coolidge. A Coolidge for President boom began that year. Coolidge would be named the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1920 and after Warren Harding died would become President himself.

For more than a hundred years organized labor has argued that their power comes as working as a body and being willing to go out on strike. During that same period, they have tried desperately to ignore just what happens when a public figure takes a stand against them. I will be coming back repeatedly to the reverberations of this particular statement in separate articles. In this one, I want to deal with one of the  economic realities of these decisions.

The police strike in Boston led to such disastrous results that within twenty-four hours  the union realized that they had lost not only local but national support. It is one thing to strike for your rights in your union, but one tends to forget that their can be far larger repercussions than this, both locally and nationwide.

Ronald Reagan, who admired Coolidge, knew this when he decided to fire all members of the striking air traffic controllers early in Presidency. This decision was lambasted by organized labor but lionized by the general public. Reagan understood very well that as much as the public might in theory believe in the cause in theory, that would be overridden when the air transit business would come to a standstill. I have little doubt that particular statement by Coolidge was ringing through his head at the time.

Now admittedly in both cases that had to do more with the public safety than any other larger factor and might have less to do with so many of the battles going on today. But it speaks to a larger problem that so many people tend to have when it comes to deal with the corporate battles that are going on today in regard to so many of the culture wars that grip every aspect of our society. In particular, it shows the blindness of everybody when it comes to corporations in this battle – and the hypocrisy of so many progressives when they claim to be on the side of the union.

When Mitt Romney was in the middle of his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2012, he once made one of the biggest blunders when he said: “Corporations are people.” I remember how much mockery he got from the left and late night comedians, particularly Jon Stewart. So I found it particularly stunning when I read a headline from The New York Times saying: “In The Fight For Equality, Corporations Have to Pick A Side.”

This shows a particularly glaring case of magical thinking. Did the writer of this op-ed truly believe that a Mr. Target was the person who needed to make the decision to celebrate Gay Pride? And yet on both sides of the ideological spectrum, that is apparently how corporations are now being viewed when it comes to the fight for equality.

When it comes to the left, I don’t know why I am shocked by this. According to their binary sense of thinking, anyone who lives in a red state must by default be irredeemable, the Fox News viewer unworthy of being talked with and recently, anyone who votes for Trump should be considered an enemy of the state. Still for a party that claims to be on the side of unionization and believes in being on the side of a good economy for workers, you would think that a company undergoing massive layoffs would be the kind of thing would give them pause. Yet I remember how joyously so many progressive delighted in the massive layoffs that took place on Twitter over the past several months. I realize that they have many particular reasons to loathe this particular company but I find it hard to believe that every single one of the first 100,000 people laid off was a Fox News watching, MAGA supporting, conservative. But apparently the janitor who works at Twitter is apparently as evil and irredeemable as Elon Musk, just as the salesman for My Pillow is as much a conservative as Mike Lindell or the deliveryman for Amazon as out of touch as Jeff Bezos. (Except of course for everyone who voted to unionize; the rest of them are the scum of the earth.) And really this is even less of surprise because all corporations are de facto evil because they gave campaign contributions to Republicans for tax breaks. (I’ve actually satirically written about the idiocy of this before, so I’ll let that one go.)

What has become infinitely more troubling in my mind is how in the war for equality or ‘woke’ to use a term that neither side can define, corporations have essentially become proxies for this between them, with all of their workers acceptable collateral damage. I’ve already mentioned the radio silence by the left when death threats and bomb threats came to Bud Light distributors in recent months. Now Anheuser Busch has announced that is beginning to make layoffs. Does either side give a damn for the tens of thousands of American workers who did not have any say in the decision for the ad involving Dylan Mulvaney? Of course not. To the right, Anheuser Busch made the decision to go woke, so it deserves to go broke. To the left, the only victim of this misplaced ad is Dylan Mulvaney and you should keep boycotting Budweiser for not standing behind her in the first place.

The same thing can be said for Disney which Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been using as a proxy for his battle against woke ideology. The right chortles whenever Disney’s stock goes down; the left rejoices when Disney moves jobs from Florida to California where a blue state governor is waiting. Does either side give a damn about the people in Florida who are losing jobs as a result? Certainly not the left, who never misses a chance to slam DeSantis for hurting Florida economically. You’d think that they at least want to try not to hit Florida that hard considering that is a state that is importantly electorally. But when you have a chance to slam a Republican governor, the left will never consider the collateral damage.

In that sense one looks at the left’s support for the Actors and writer’s strike with a certain amount of skepticism. To be clear, it’s not just the corporate bosses or the guild members who are being affected adversely by this strike. It’s everybody who works on any TV series or film. We all know that any one show employs hundreds, if not thousands of people per episode. (Of course, we tend to skip over the end credits when they air so the public pretty much ignores their contributions.)  Many of them rarely get the credit for the work they do, and many of them are paid nearly as badly as so many of the writers and actors that are on strike right now. They too will be suffering from a financial pinch and indeed many of them do not have the benefit of belong to a union that does not support them.

Then there are countless other people who were at far more menial jobs at these studio and corporations. Many of them were being laid-off before this due to so many corporate mergers over the years before. Now the bosses will have an excuse to let more of them go, using the strike as a cover. They might have more ability to find work that the technical people that are suffering, but they might not be inclined to look kindly as the strike as it continues.

And all of this, as I have mentioned numerous times before, is being done before a country where many people loath the industry as a general principle and the rest only care about it when it isn’t provide the movies and TV they watch. The waitress working for tips at a diner or a messenger who spends his days making deliveries will never see the struggle the actors and writers are going through as one they do. They will only care when the fall season begins and they can’t see Ghosts or Abbott Elementary.

For more than a century organized labor thinks that its power comes in its threat to withhold its labor to bosses. That’s also their greatest weakness. No one really cared when the Boston Police Department was doing its job in 1919, but when it stopped doing it, both the city and the country turned against it. The results were more sudden and obvious than they are in the strike in Hollywood today, but in both cases it is inevitable that the general public will turn against it.

And both sides will use this battle as a larger proxy in their ongoing wars. The right will just say it is a battle of privileged millionaires and elitists who represent a woke ideology. The left will say it is an example of the power of organized labor, not caring about the thousands of other workers that are being affected as they speak. When it inevitably ends, there will be countless people who have lost their livelihoods and may have had to leave their homes. Both sides will move on to another corporation that represent what they both find wrong with America and within a few weeks the public will have forgotten the struggle and go back to watching their movies and programs without a second thought. They might never understand why the disruption happened. All they care about is that it’s over.