I am old enough to know that unions once were the mainstay of the working class and the root of middle class prosperity. I remember a Democratic Party that was the home of every man and woman who worked for a living. But I continued to think of the party that way long after it no longer was true. I had missed the break-up. This election has caused me to go back and figure out when and where it happened.
I’ve been told that that’s divisive. Let it go; after all, we won the popular vote and by a lot. Well, thanks to an eighteenth-century hedge against democracy and appeasement of the slave power, that and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee. In the material world, Republicans control the presidency and the Congress, which means they soon will own the judiciary, and that for decades to come. They also own a record number of State governments.
And this isn’t your grandfather’s Republican Party. The modern Republican Party is a wannabe oligarchy, and they will act on that ambition unconstrained by any moral code. In the next few years, they will roll back 80 years of progress, entrench discrimination, legalize repression, institutionalize corruption, enshrine inequality, and cause untold suffering among the most vulnerable. The party that hid behind Friedrich Hayek will be the one to impose serfdom on us.
If there are lessons here, we have a duty to find them.
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We really were, once, that home of working men and women.
Franklin Roosevelt said, “It is now beyond partisan controversy that it is a fundamental individual right of a worker to associate himself with other workers and to bargain collectively with his employer.” Roosevelt’s pro-union stance was responsible for the “tremendous gains labor unions experienced in the 1930s.” The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) “declared a whole series of coercive management practices to be illegal, and gave private sector workers the right to form unions and to engage in collective bargaining.” For decades after that, “organized labor and the Democratic Party … worked together in U.S. politics.”
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We worked together, and the masses prospered. Unions bolstered both the working class and the middle class, and the decline of unions, according to the Economic Policy Institute, is the “overlooked reason why wages are stuck and inequality is growing.”
The Center for American Progress Action Fund, using data from “Estimates of union density by State,” has plotted how the decline of the middle-class share of income parallels the decline in union membership rate from 1967 through today. The correlation is stunning. To address possible causality, the authors cite research showing that unions help also nonunion workers and the middle class.
Dr. Paula Voos, a professor in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers, says, “In short, unions help foster the broad middle class that is essential to our nation’s economic strength.”
There also is a moral reason to support unions: they are the only voice that working men and women have.
Republicans are enthusiasts of rugged individualism when the subject is people. When the subject is business, they magically transform into collectivists.
Business has the Chamber of Commerce. Business has ALEC. Business has sponsorship by most States, has any number of lawyers and lobbyists, and it flat-out owns Republican lawmakers. Business has public-relations firms and other visible or under-the-table channels to promote their cause.
People have unions.
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At first, business could only scream: FDR’s union laws would be the end of the economy. They weren’t, of course: “Over the next ten years both union membership and the size of the US economy would grow hand in hand ….”
Then, business made common cause with racists. “After a wave of strikes, a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, worried about biracial labor organizing that would threaten Jim Crow, passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.” Taft-Hartley, among other things, allowed states to ban union shops – something that cripples unions to this day. The Act was passed over President Harry Truman’s veto. Democrats have tried to repeal it, but not very hard. It has taken its toll.
The International Monetary Fund has expressed concern that “Americans have become inured to the decline of unions, especially in the private sector, in part because they don't appreciate the role of organized labor in much of the quality of modern life we all take for granted today ….”
Daniel Schlozman of Johns Hopkins University has noted that, as the Republican Party has trended ever more to the right, “corporations have steadily accelerated efforts to weaken unions.” Worse, since the 1970s, Democrats have trended dramatically to the right, as we will see, leaving unions vulnerable. Schlozman says, “Just before the 2012 election, the head of the Amalgamated Transit Union worried aloud that if Republicans “take over the federal government, there will be no such thing as a labor movement.””
Well, guess what just happened.
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How did we get from FDR to here? I thought there would be a simple answer: “Party leaders in the ‘80s and ‘90s changed our priorities to bring in more Wall-Street money.”
That’s not wrong, but it’s not close to the full picture, and what it misses is more important than what it gets right. The story winds through multiple movements and “isms” going back to the 1960s: the New Left, the New Politics, neoconservatism, the Watergate Babies, neoliberalism, the Democratic Leadership Conference, and the New Democrats. There was so much to the story that I decided to tell it in a series of posts. In the next post, I’ll look at the initial cracks in the relationship that occurred early in the 1960s.