Unions: Our Last, Best and Final Hope
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By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan
File this under the We Couldn’t Have Said It Better Ourselves Department: Op-ed columnist Joe Nocera articulated on the very respectable pages of the New York Times what many of us have known for years: Unions are good for the economy. Well, no – make that, unions are essential for the economy to work for everyone. Nocera, the famously contrarian business writer, talks about his picket-line-walking parents and his union-solid Rhode Island birthplace – but how, as a member of America’s post-war educated class, he came to view organized labor “with mild disdain.”
The madeleine that stokes his remembrance of union things past is The Great Divergence, Timothy Noah’s new book about income inequality. After confessing to holding an outlook once similar to Noah’s early views of labor as “a spent force,” Nocera now agrees with him that liberals have turned their backs on unions with terrible consequences. Citing Noah’s claim that the decline of union membership has a neat, statistical corollary in the collapse of middle class incomes, the Times columnist follows up by quoting Harvard economist Richard Freeman’s assertion that the cratering of union membership unambiguously accounts for 20 percent of the present income gap in America.
“This makes perfect sense,” according to Nocera. “Company managements don’t pay workers any more than they have to — look, for instance, at Walmart, one of the most virulently antiunion companies in the country.”
Nocera concludes his column with a line that might have been borrowed from no less a radical economist than Paul Sweezy. “If liberals really want to reverse income inequality,” Nocera writes, “they should think seriously about rejoining labor’s side.”
Far from it, liberals – and even union members – seem to be abandoning and undermining labor. We only have to look at the dismal results of the Wisconsin recall election to see the evidence. There, National Public Radio and others report, exit polls revealed that 38 percent of union-household voters cast ballots to retain the state’s paranoiacally anti-labor governor, Scott Walker. Why this disconnect?
Some union members are solid Republicans, for a host of reasons beyond union identity. “You can’t assume just because a person is a union member, they are also a Democrat,” Kristin Hansen, an Obama campaign volunteer, points out in the NPR piece.
Other union voters, who would previously have leaned towards the Democrats, may be disenchanted with the donkeys. For one thing, the White House has kept labor at arm’s length since the morning after Election Day, 2008. They barely paid lip service, for example, to labor’s prime directive since 2007 – passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation that, among other things, would have made forming a union just a little more efficient – and democratic – by protecting pro-union workers from employer reprisals.
EFCA was nothing radical — it didn’t seek to overturn Taft-Hartley or force company employees to watch multiple screenings of Norma Rae. Getting it passed, however, meant everything to the unions. Nevertheless, many of labor’s erstwhile congressional allies were too cowed by the conservative assault to lift a finger for the House and Senate versions of the bill.
Finally, labor’s struggle to endure may be a self-perpetuating state. It’s losing streak — from EFCA’s death on the vine to the Wisconsin recall debacle — means that unions are now locked in a spiral of existential battles for survival in which every election drains them of resources and morale. Even when unions defeat cynical “paycheck protection” initiatives, they must devote more money and effort to defeat them than the corporatist forces spend kiting these measures. This means unions are doing less of the things – like organizing, standing up against the worst of big business and lifting jobs into the middle class – that would directly benefit the working people whose support is sliding away.
This translates into a grim calculus in which unions are diminished with every election cycle and have less muscle to offer in the fight to retain the White House. While unions remain the biggest source of election campaign money and boots-on-the-ground volunteers in voter drives, they are losing members and clout. As Noah and Nocera suggest, now is not the time for liberals to keep unions at arm’s length, but to embrace them tighter than ever.
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Steven Mikulan is a Los Angeles writer and editor of the Frying Pan, where this article originally appeared.
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It's been a coordinated nearly 40 year attack on unions (i.e. middle class, strong worker rights and benefits)by corporate power and their intricate network, from big business funded think tanks to right wing talk radio to Fox News to the GOP to the corporate media in general to the Federalist Society's infiltration of our judicial system to a slew of corporate written "free trade" agreements that undercut wages and ship jobs overseas (and weaken unions negotiating position)...and now, by more and more corporate Democrats that also get the bulk of their funding from big business and the super rich - rather than working people (esp. in the era of Citizens United...perhaps the death knell for worker rights and influence in this country).
Despite what you hear from the misinformed and brainwashed right wing commenters that troll this site, Democrats are demanding more and more concessions from unions as well - and they're obliging, too often, and giving too much.
Instead, more and more americans attack the very institutions (unions) that built the middle class and lifts wages and benefits for non-union workers alike (and boosts demand in the economy). We've seen the cost of this assault, the top 1%'s income has gone up 275% in the past few decades while remaining stagnant for the rest of us.
I'd suggest everyone see the movie Heist: Who Stole the American Dream to get the whole, sick, and twisted story...and you'll understand why so many people vote against their own interests, and, unbelievably, blame teachers, cops, firefighters, janitors, and other public servants as the source of our problems - rather than Wall Street, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, military spending, and war after war after war.
By taking out unions, the right realized not only does it take away the primary funding source of the Democratic Party, but it strips workers of their ability to demand fair wages, benefits, and basic rights. A win-win-win for the corporatocracy.
Wisconsin was a sad day to be sure, as their union membership has already been devastated in the state thanks to Walker and Kochs. This strategy will be taken across the country now to further the divide between the have's and have not's.
As Shamus Cooke recently wrote, we must take on the Democrats as much as the GOP (who we all know are nothing more than corporations impersonating people): "The nation's anti-union environment was already at a fever pitch. President Obama has, contrary to expectations, served over the most anti-union political climate since Ronald Reagan. The President of the nation's largest teachers’ union, Dennis Van Roekel, summarized teachers’ experience with the Obama Administration:
"Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced." He was referring, in part, to Obama's anti-union Race to the Top education program and his promotion of charter schools.
Many within the union movement wrongly blame Republicans exclusively for labor's plight. But no fewer than eleven Democratic governors in the past two years have targeted and attacked the public sector unions in their states, blaming labor for the budget deficits caused by the recession, itself caused by the banks and corporations. More than 600,000 public sector jobs have been lost since 2009, many of them union jobs. The re-emerging recession will re-impose this budget deficit challenge for unions for years to come. Will unions learn from their mistakes?
Instead of alerting workers to the new anti-union actions of the Democrats, union officials have miseducated their members by focusing rage solely on the Republican governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, etc. As bad as these governors are, they don't exist in a political vacuum. The Republicans have been given new life by the new anti-labor attitude of the Democrats; instead of mounting a vigorous defense of these Republican-targeted unions, Democrats have also been busy steamrolling unions across the country, while cynically pretending to "respect collective bargaining rights" at the same time.
In order to maintain their friendship with the union-attacking Democrats, labor leaders made an artificial, suicidal distinction between fighting to maintain bargaining rights (against Republican attackers) and accepting massive concessions demanded by Democratic attackers.
But these twin attacks on unions are two sides of the same coin: accepting concessions without a fight drastically weakens unions, enough to be vulnerable to losing bargaining rights. It was Republicans who demanded concessions today; it will be Democrats who attack bargaining rights tomorrow. Indeed, Democratic politicians in New Jersey have already worked with the Republican governor to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights, a stark reminder that labor unions have no political party of their own.
Nothing has weakened labor so much as its now-common attitude to accepting concessions to wages and benefits. Doing so makes union members think that their union is weak, since it's acting so, while non-union members are given the same impression. Who would want to join a union if they thought their wages and benefits would be reduced? What good are bargaining rights if they are used to lower wages and benefits?
Forty years ago it would be unthinkable to target bargaining rights, since unions were militant organizations that struck fear in the hearts of the corporate elite; it would have also been unthinkable to demand the concessions being demanded today.
But over the years labor became more bark than bite: when Democrats started demanding concessions labor simply rolled over and exposed its belly, instead of roaring back and tearing at its attackers. Union members don't mind paying dues when the money goes to an attack dog instead of a Chihuahua."
In other words, a true social movement, as Occupy has demonstrated, is needed now more than ever...while we still have a chance to prevent our complete transformation into the kind of Oligarchy we are already become (or are).
I agree with the most of article, but unions should not be allowed for public employees (according to FDR and other liberals). Public employees must negotiate with politicians who are playing with the public money. These same pols receive money from the unons; so there is an incestuous connection.
Union growth and power is based on one thing. The National Labor Relations Act. Passed in the 1930's union power quickly grew as a real force.
Then the Taft-Hartly amendedment to the NLRA were passed in 1948 and since the 1950's unions have been going downhill ever since.
EFCA was their ONE chance to recover as an amendment to the NLRA. The Unions did everything right. Spent 500 MILLION dollars to get a fillibuster proof majority in the senate a large majority in Congress and Obama in the Whitehouse.
All was done for ONE reason only - to pass EFCA which assured easy organizing and assured union contracts.
THEN THE DEMOCRATS ABANDONED THE UNIONS.
Obams went for Obamacare instead and allowed the Unions to sit out in the hall begging for passage of EFCA.
The Democrats allows a year to go by so companies could pressure more consewrvitive democrats to come out against it.
I am amazed that the Unions have not changed their game plan. EFCA is DEAD and NEVER coming back. The democrats turned their backs on their best supporters.
The Unions need to take their 500 MILLION dollars and instead of supporting Obama, Reed and Polosi, spend it ORGANIZING as this is all they have.