Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Huffington Post, and American Prospect. From 1984-92 he served as senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. He is chair of the Horizon Institute, an LA-based think tank. He also serves on the boards of several organizations, including the LA Alliance for a New Economy , the Liberty Hill Foundation, the National Housing Institute, and the Southern CA Assn for Nonprofit Housing.

Ethix Merch: To follow up on your article in The Nation about the dispute between Workers United and UNITE HERE... what have you learned about the state of garment-factory organizing? Since the merger, UNITE-HERE seemed to have stopped organizing garment factories, but now that Workers United has broken off, they’ve organized workers from the old Eagle Factory in New Bedford, MA.

Do you believe that there is a future for the garment industry in the United States, and are you excited about Workers United organizing more garment factories here?

Peter Dreier:

The garment industry’s heyday was in the middle and early part of the twentieth century in the United States. Beginning in the fifties and sixties and accelerating in the seventies, our industry began to move first to the anti-union south and then overseas, in part because it’s such a labor intensive industry…And so we’ve seen a dramatic, overwhelming decline in the number of garment and textile workers in the United States, and I don’t see any sign that that’s going to reverse itself.

The nature of the garment industry in the United States is that the factories and sewing shops are relatively small, with a few exceptions like American Apparel in Los Angeles. Most are subcontractors that employ ten or a hundred people, often undocumented immigrants. The truth is that enforcement of labor and hour laws means that the subcontractors close up shop and move somewhere else under a different name.

Although there may be pockets of union success in the next decade or so, I don’t think that’s where Workers United will see its growth. Its growth will be in industrial laundries and other sectors.

Ethix Merch:  In June, you wrote an article for The Huffington Post about the large-scale effort to boycott the Russell Corporation. In the article you mentioned the possibility of NBA players getting involved in the dispute over the ethical implications of their uniforms. Has any progress been made on this front since your article? How is the USAS campaign going?

Peter Dreier: 

I wrote an article in The Nation called “Where are the Jocks for Justice?” It’s extremely disappointing that athletes, whether they come from poor areas or middle class families, are in a bubble world where it’s hard for them to break out and get involved in social activism. Every once-in-a-while you hear about people like Carlos Delgado and Adonal Foyle, but they are rare exceptions. There’s a wonderful sportswriter named David Zirin, who writes for The Nation about the link between sports and politics. He occasionally writes about examples of pro and amateur athletes taking stands on controversial social and political issues.

Unless you can get high profile athletes or the players union involved, it’s not going to happen. A few years back I was trying to get the baseball players union to take a stand on sweatshops -- for example, their baseballs are made in a sweatshop in Costa Rica, and some of their uniforms are made in sweatshops. But the players union wasn't interested. Most of the players are like spoiled brats. There are exceptions, but those players don’t control the union.

Ethix Merch: Boycotts are one of the most important tools available to workers and their allies.. Do you think that the movement uses boycotts effectively?

Peter Dreier: 

There are two dilemmas with boycotting. First, you risk taking business away from the workers you’re trying to help. Second, if the boycott isn’t well publicized, the management can intimidate workers and tell them the union is trying to take away their jobs. The only time a boycott works is if the workers themselves understand the risk and encourage their allies and consumers to do it when they think they’re at a point of their organizing campaign where a boycott or a threat of a boycott can make a difference. Cesar Chavez understood that and Marshall Ganz’s book about the United Farm Workers union ("Why David Sometimes Wins") talks about that. The boycott against the major agricultural growers in California was successful because it was a coordinated action with the union and consumers. It has to be a part of a larger strategy, and sometimes it can work.

Ethix Merch: Recently, you gave a speech about the state of the California budget. Budget deficits aren’t unique to California, of course, and low-income folks are suffering from resulting cuts in services. Increasing taxes on the wealthy to raise government revenue and protect the public safety net seems to be politically very difficult if not impossible. What do you think needs to happen to ensure that, in tough economic times like these, critical social service programs are protected?

Peter Dreier: 

The biggest obstacle to raising taxes on the rich is the political clout of rich individuals and businesses. That is always the case whenever you’re trying to do something progressive, and progressive taxation is a part of that. All politics is about organized money against organized people. (Sometimes you can have both. The NRA has both. Labor unions sometimes have both.)

The second obstacle is the mythology about what we mean by a “healthy business climate.” Whenever you say you’re going to raise taxes on the rich, big business and rich people say they’re going to move, they’ll destroy the tax base and the upper middle class will leave the city, the state, or even the country. 75 to 80 percent of the time they’re crying wolf, but sometimes they’re not. Political leaders, even Barack Obama, sometimes don’t know when they’re bluffing. If you regulate the pharmaceutical industry and reduce their profits, will they stop doing innovative research? No. But if you repeat a lie often enough people start to believe it.

A third obstacle is that when you talk about taxing the rich, middle class people think you’re talking about them. Progressive taxation and government in general has to recover from thirty years of Reaganism. We haven’t yet recovered. Obama’s victory and his ability to communicate has helped to do that, but he’s fighting an uphill fight to restore the legitimacy of government as part of the solution. For example, Obama wants to raise taxes on families earning over $350,000 to pay for his health care plan. That's less than 2% of the population. You'd think that would be a no-brainer. But even some Democrats in Congress oppose this kind of progressive taxation. Either they think (wrongly) that this will hurt the business climate, or they are just in the pockets of the rich who give them campaign contributions -- or a bit of both.

The role of progressives is to change the political climate to make it easier for Obama to be successful. Obama is doing what he can to get his legislation passed. It’s not easy. Some leftists think that Obama doesn’t have enough backbone. That’s B.S.. Basically it’s a strategic question, how do you calculate the opposition and what do you need to do to overcome it. Obama warned people, during the campaign, that it’s not going to be easy to pass health care reform, labor law reform, climate change legislation, and other bold reforms, because there are a lot of powerful forces lined up against it. Our job is to make it easier for Obama to do his job, by changing the political climate.