The New York Times reports that China is prepared to strengthen labor unions. The regime solicited responses to the proposed legislation and received 190,000 comments. I can’t tell whether the law would make a real difference: it may be inadequate because “it does not provide for independent unions with leaders chosen by their members and the right to strike.” (pdf). The Times, however, claims that the law would “give labor unions real power for the first time.”

Unions could raise wages and working conditions in China, reduce wage pressure on workers in other countries, and enhance political pluralism inside the world’s largest dictatorship. However, the American Chamber of Commerce and various American companies are against the proposal, modest as it is. They argue that stronger unions would move China backward toward socialism. In fact, unions would be a huge move forward toward pluralistic democracy. (The Communists never tolerated independent unions.)

The American Chamber’s White Paper takes a relatively moderate tone:

The new draft Labor Contract Law, scheduled for enactment by the end of 2006, contains much that would affect the operations of multinationals. AmCham commends authorities for their recently announced decision to invite public comment. Concern over the draft legislation is high given a variety of its provisions. For example, under a recent draft, if an employee was hired under a thirty-six month contract and terminated for cause after six months, the firm would still need to compensate him for another thirty months of pay. AmCham acknowledges China?s need and desire to target unethical employers, for which provisions such as these may be targeted, but the impact of these and other equally onerous provisions on responsible FIEs serve to undermine the attractiveness of China?s labor market, one of the key factors that make China such an enticing place to do business.

I’m not sure if the 30-month provision is wise, but it may be a red herring. The Times and Global Labor Strategies assert that the American Chamber is working against the whole new labor law. The Chamber represents so many firms (e.g., Wal-Mart, Google, UPS, Microsoft, Nike, AT&T, and Intel) that it’s hard to envision a targeted response. If we could single out a few leaders in this effort, I would definitely boycott them. I can’t think of a clearer case in which the companies to which we give our money use it against our interests and against human rights. Alas, there are so many culprits that it’s extremely hard to boycott them.

(One of my articles in defense of unions was pubished in China, or at least I gave permission for it to be translated into Chinese.)

[Addendum: I’m beginning to think, based in part on a conversation with a Chinese activist I know, that the Times’s lead misled me. The proposed law would not in any way increase the independence of unions in the PRC. It would impose some new labor laws, but they might not be enforced fairly. Workers would have no voice in their enforcement. There would be no increase of pluralism or democracy.]

Kevin Drum (whose blog I like enough to check several times daily) wrote this a while ago:

If Democrats win in November, they’re still going to have a very limited amount of power to get things done. Policy-wise, they’re going to remain pretty constrained, and that means they can go in two basic directions: (a) acting as the party of moderation and focusing on bipartisan ‘good government’ proposals, or (b) using the subpoena power of Congress to investigate the hell out of what’s been going on in the executive branch for the past six years.

Drum suggests investigating the hell out of Bush, because polls show that there aren’t many moderate voters who would support option a.

It took me several days to realize what’s wrong with this. It omits option (c): Develop legislation that might actually address some of our nation’s fundamental issues, such as global warming, incredible rates of crime and incarceration, high school dropout rates of nearly one-third, economic transfers from Gen Y to today’s retirees, loss of blue-collar jobs, vulnerability at the ports, etc. The necessary legislation might be moderate, or it might be radical–the important question is whether it would plausibly address our most crucial issues.

I am fully aware that most good legislation would be defeated in at least one house or would face a veto. But then Democrats could take the issue to the voters in ’08.

To anticipate an objection: Isn’t the malfeasance of the current executive branch a national problem that is worth addressing? In my opinion, it is a problem, but one that is soon to end with the departure of the administration. It doesn’t require legislative action as our deeper social, environmental, and security problems do. Finally, all Americans except the ones who identify strongest with the Democratic Party will be suspicious of an elaborate series of investigations. They will think the Dems are trying to achieve partisan advantage, not genuinely working on public or national or common problems.

(En route to Annapolis for a meeting with state officials.) It strikes me that the ’06 election is a great illustration of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of democracy–unfortunately.

Schumpeter did not see elections as opportunities for people to deliberate, debate, learn, or help to specify the public good. Elections were simply competitions among political elites (parties) that promised to provide agreed-upon goods, such as GNP and security, more efficiently than their rivals. Voting was a check on tyranny and incompetence, not a way to express values.

In 2006, the Democratic leader of the House calls for tax cuts but decries Republican deficits. The Democrats excoriate the Administration for its handling of Iraq, but do not offer an alternative foreign policy. In other words, they endorse the same values as the Republicans but promise to do a better job as managers.

Schumpeterian democracy is better than none at all. And it is highly tempting for the Democrats to make this year’s election a referendum on competence, given the Republicans’ record. But it means that the ’06 election will not be an opportunity for Americans to review our basic priorities, such as tax cuts versus public services, or aggressive interventionism versus multilateralism, or growth versus environmental protection, or federal power versus localism. None of those issues is on the table.

(Athens, Georgia): I’ve been at numerous meetings lately. They all concern the civic engagement of young people, but they draw remarkably diverse participants.

At a meeting on digital media and youth civic engagement, 10 out of 11 people seated around a table in a hotel suite at Newark airport have their laptops open while we discuss papers. There’s an official conference “back channel” on which you are free to email everyone present. People talk about “dumping the code” from documents into “wikispaces.” There is a strong air of philosophical anarchism in the room: participants most admire authentic, unregulated youth expression. They also use the term “affordance,” which I must look up on Wikipedia.

At a summit on youth leadership at the Holocaust Museum, a substantial proportion of the audience consists of pastors from rural African American churches that have been burned to the ground by racists. The pastors are diverse in terms of backgrounds, religious denominations, and politics, as I learn from speaking with them. But at the end, they rise in turn to speak in sonorous terms, with rhyming cadences. One denounces the use of “time outs” in discipline. If he’d been given time outs, he says, he’d have simply taken a break and then gone right back into mischief; and by now he’d be in the pen, not a pastor. Spare the rod, spoil the child.

At a downtown Washington Marriott for the annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship, Robert Byrd waves his crutches and invokes the Lord as he delivers a stemwinder of a speech in defense of the Constitution. Not long before him, the Attorney General had stood at the same podium and defended the administration’s policies–of very dubious constitutionality–regarding habeas corpus. Public school kids from Philadelphia watch these luminaries via closed-circuit TV. I have no idea what they’re thinking.

At the University of Georgia, we sit around a long seminar table watching PowerPoint slides with regression coefficients, learning about the effects of John Stewart on young Americans’ political views as measured in surveys. Later, we file into the student union to watch old clips of educational TV shows. Two clips from 1965 stick in my mind. One shows a man sitting behind a desk, reading a long and intensely boring lecture about the law and how men make it to restrain other men’s behavior. This is civic education that makes your skin crawl.

However, we also see footage of CBS’s “Town Meeting of the World” from the same year. Students from Mexico City, London, Paris, and Belgrade ask uncensored questions of Dwight Eisenhower, Thurgood Marshall, and Arthur Goldberg–via satellite connection. The students dress like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day, but they ask incredibly informed and pointed questions. For example, if the United States supports democracy, why (asks a Mexican student) has it invaded Latin American countries 132 times? Eisenhower replies that we renounced intervention under FDR and would never do it again. The student counters with the case of the Dominican Republic, where US Marines had landed earlier the same year. Arthur Goldberg answers rather testily. It is a remarkably unscripted moment. We see more authentic “youth voice” than would ever be allowed on television today. But the same questions still need to be asked.

(In Athens, Georgia, for a meeting on youth and the news media.) According to Curtis Gans, dean of the turnout experts, participation in the 44 states that recently held Democratic primaries was 8.4 percent of those eligible to vote, a record low. Turnout in the 40 states that held Republican primaries also set a pathetic record: 7.2 percent.

As Gans notes, this doesn’t mean much for November. In both 1982 and 1994, people stayed home in the primary and then turned out in force for the main event, defeating many incumbents in high-turnout elections. However, the low participation in primaries is itself a problem. Gans says, “the degree of decline (57 percent since 1966) and the level of average turnout … in statewide [primary] races is a danger to American democracy.”