When I came to D.C. in 2003, I would have characterized the party as split between a labor-liberal faction and a DLC faction. I was working at The American Prospect (TAP), a labor-liberal publication, and while I was a bit to the right of the publication as a whole I definitely fit in there better than I would have at the more DLC-aligned magazine The New Republic (TNR). Today my old editor at TAP is the editor of TNR, while TAP under its new leadership continues to be more left-wing. In terms of the specific disputes between labor liberals and the DLC, I continue to think the labor faction was mostly right.
This is how Matthew Yglesias described himself in a 2022 Slow Boring blog. Yet, for someone who self-characterizes as coming out of the labor-liberal tradition, Yglesias’ analysis—as well as his actions—often seem to indicate otherwise.
It’s Good Economics For Bangladesh Sweatshop Workers To Die.
On April 24, 2013, an eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed due to a structural failure, after months of safety warnings went ignored by management. By the final count, 1,134 workers had died. It was the deadliest garment-industry disaster in world history, and the deadliest industrial accident, period, in Bangladesh history.
The same day as the tragedy, Yglesias wrote a blog titled “Different Places Have Different Safety Rules, And That’s OK.” Yglesias wrote:
Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard to Americans. That’s true whether you’re talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh.
To Yglesias, poor people’s lives are, quite literally, worth less. If his piece wasn’t clear enough, Yglesias distilled his argument even further in a (now-deleted) post saying “Foreign factories should be more dangerous than American factories.”
Since he rushed to justify the mangled bodies and grieving families within hours of the accident, Yglesias apparently assumed that the Rana Plaza workers were willing to accept this life-threatening danger as Rational Profit-Maximizers In An Efficient Market™. Slight problem: the structural weaknesses of Rana Plaza were more reflective of corporate malfeasance than a disregard for human life supposedly inherent to Bangladeshi society. And workers in the building were vocal about their unwillingness to accept unnecessary precarity. Again, multiple safety warnings from Bangladesh authorities went ignored before the tragedy. The idea that people working in a poor country found worse conditions acceptable is absurd and dehumanizing.
My Salary Is Too High To Clean My Own Dishes.
Over three years ago—in response to a now-deleted, as often is the case, post by Yglesias—former Vox Media employee Sarah Kogod described him refusing to wash his own dishes at work, because his high salary made it “more economical for our company” to have an assistant wash his dishes instead.
Assuming good faith, Yglesias was conflating his presumably salary-based pay (a fixed sum, regardless of hours worked and tasks completed) with hourly pay (which varies between pay periods based on hours worked), or even the profit-per-transaction model of a sole business owner. The only way it would be “more economical” to have someone else to clean up after him would be if he was actually generating enormous value for the firm every moment he wasn’t doing menial tasks at the office, but that’s not how anyone works in the first place, and certainly isn’t a credible inference from a highly monthly salary. One can imagine a salaried worker who spends all month browsing Reddit, but then does one extremely useful task right before payday, for instance.
Of course, this assumes Yglesias genuinely believed that economic philosophy justified his refusal to grab a sponge. The likelier thought process is this: Yglesias didn’t want to do a menial task, felt he was too personally important to be troubled with basic office etiquette, and then constructed a pseudo-intellectual rationalization for pawning off his grown-up responsibilities to someone poorer than him.
Which Is Worse: The Pandemic, Or Protecting Workers From It?
When the cutoff date for pandemic-era unemployment benefits arrived in September 2021, some Biden aides expressed fear to The Washington Post. The cutoff would force millions into an awful, unnecessary Sophie’s Choice: either risk Covid infection for a substandard wage, or risk the poverty of no wage at all. To Yglesias, though, this didn’t seem to be a slippery slope—there were jobs going unfilled, after all. That meant it was the government’s responsibility to discipline fearful workers into doing what potential employers wanted, at whatever rate employers wanted it.
Continuing to provide Americans “more money than they could earn by working” would not be “a sustainable way to run an economy,” Yglesias warned:
Whether the loss of benefits spurs those out of work to take the jobs on offer remains to be seen. But the opportunities are out there. And the question of whether jobless benefits are preventing people from working is separate from the question of whether their expiration will induce material hardship […]
There is another policy option if one is disturbed by people earning more from unemployment benefits than wage-labor: raise the minimum wage. Moreover, pushing individuals back to work mere weeks before the onset of the Omicron wave wasn’t a good way to run the economy either. It exposed millions of people to illness, disability, and death unnecessarily.
“Okay, but Yglesias didn’t know that another wave of mass disease spread was on the horizon,” you might say. Well, he did in January 2022. Yet, that didn’t stop him from trying to handwave away the concerns of teachers.
“Before vaccines were widely available, it made perfect sense to sympathize with teachers,” Yglesias wrote. But now, “it’s clear that there’s not going to be a ‘Victory Day’ when the pandemic suddenly ‘ends.’ America (and the world) is simply going to have to learn to live with elevated risk of respiratory viruses for the indefinite future, and can’t put schooling on hold indefinitely.”
Yglesias’ offense at “the recalcitrance of teachers” (read: reasonable demands for mitigation measures that actually aren’t all that difficult to implement effectively) was purportedly on behalf of students. And while online classes may not foster the most robust learning environment, neither does chronic absenteeism induced by repeated exposure to disease. (At least a more cautious approach avoids a scenario where schools are forced to close because staff are too sick to work.)
Your Job Is A Necessary Casualty To Progress.
In arguing against the notion that guest work programs could be a sufficient substitute for comprehensive immigration reform, Matthew Yglesias wrote the following:
A guest worker is, in a straightforward sense, not as well off as a regular immigrant. He has, perhaps, a higher-paying job than what was available in his home country. But, with his right to live in the United States tied to a specific employer, he has no meaningful recourse in case of maltreatment but to return to the land of his birth. He can’t bargain and can’t search for other employment opportunities. With the duration of his stay in the United States sharply limited, it will be impossible for him to join or form a union.
I bring this quote up not to refute the argument—he’s right—but to show that Yglesias knew all the way back in 2007 that workers are harmed by their inability to collectively bargain and/or form a union.
Which makes this quote from a late-April Slow Boring blog post on self-driving cars all the more confusing:
An unfortunate aspect of the American labor paradigm is that if specific unionized workplaces lose jobs, that’s bad for the union, even if the technological shift creates jobs and raises wages on average. As a result, union leaders are essentially duty-bound to oppose productivity-enhancing innovation, regardless of the merits.
So if I’m following this line of thought, unions are good because they are vehicles by which workers can better advocate for their interests, but bad because those interests aren’t actually in workers’ best interest?
That’s in line with Yglesias’ conclusion earlier this year that union victories undercut workers. As I wrote for Hackwatch, this fits into a broader theme in Yglesias’ labor analysis: that the needs of the working class are always, definitionally, less important than hypothetical gains to economic efficiency from business cutting costs. He dresses this up variously as a national security concern, a scientific trade policy, or a call to speed up infrastructure development. But the basic point is the same—what matters is getting stuff to consume as fast as possible, not the people and conditions under which it is made.
Which Side Are You On?
If Yglesias’ consistent antagonism towards both worker health individually and worker power collectively isn’t enough to call into question his supposed labor-liberal political orientation, his running cover for big business should.
He’s defended Google from monopoly charges, insisted that Amazon doesn’t put downward pressure on wages, and claimed that corporate landlords “colluding to keep units off the market in order to drive up rents” is a “conspiracy.”
None of these assertions are true of course—Google is a monopoly, Amazon gigs do pay less than other warehouse jobs, and corporate landlords have been colluding to rent gouge.
But I guess it’s much easier for Yglesias to conceive of unions categorically favoring monopoly than it is to correctly identify when a lack of competition harms workers and consumers alike.
But Wait, There’s More!
Equally as damning as what Yglesias says about unions is what he doesn’t say. For all his supposed interest in the well-being of labor, Yglesias has dedicated very little time towards evaluating actual labor policy. (Except for his repeated swipes at the Davis-Bacon Act, of course.)
A term search through the Slow Boring archive for “National Labor Relations Board” and “NLRB” yields one singular mention in a post, while a search for “Wagner Act” yields zero results at all. Searching for the term “sectoral bargaining” yields singular mentions in four different posts, half of which simply point out that labor policy in Europe allows the practice.
Contrast that with Yglesias’ recent piece for Bloomberg, which spends nearly 1000 words criticizing Biden for not using his presidential authority to break the recent dock worker’s strike; the subheading of which reads:
There are certainly situations in which union interests align with the pursuit of prosperity. But there are other situations — the dispute about port automation among them — where it’s just the opposite.
A “situation in which union interests align with the pursuit of prosperity” remains hypothetical for Yglesias, and the inclusion of lines like these are purely decoration. He has proven himself no friend of labor and shouldn’t be treated as such.
