In Which the Superb Tom Edsall Gets One Big Thing Wrong About Unions. New York Times contributing columnist Tom Edsall is a national resource. In column after column, he provides encyclopedic research both scholarly and journalistic, extended interviews, astute insights, and hard questions for progressives on politically urgent topics.
His most recent column, on the political consequences of the decline of unions, is no exception. As Edsall demonstrates, the Republican right’s strategic war on unions has been devastating to Democrats, since union members and union families, with their sense of solidarity and better understanding of how capitalism works, are more likely to vote for Democrats than demographically similar nonunion families.
Edsall was not exaggerating when he wrote that the right has a better appreciation of unions than the left. Thus, the systematic union bashing. In Wisconsin, as Edsall shows, courtesy of Scott Walker’s anti-union crusade, the union share of Wisconsin employees was cut from just over 15 percent as recently as 2008 to just 8.1 percent by 2018.
Edsall ends his piece by wondering why “many liberals and Democrats” don’t get the importance of unions.
The problem in building support for a resurgent labor movement is that many liberals and Democrats do not appear to recognize the crucial role that unions continue to play not only in diminishing the effects of inequality, but in voter mobilization and campaign finance.
And here is where Edsall misses a key part of the story. The problem is not that “Democrats” fail to appreciate unions. It’s that the corporate and Wall Street Democrats who have dominated the presidential wing of the party since Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton actively loathe unions.
Carter, Clinton, and Barack Obama all had the opportunity and the votes to put serious teeth back in the Wagner Act, in the face of vicious corporate union busting. All decided not to lift a finger on behalf of labor law reform.
All three presidents had progressive labor secretaries. But the real power players were elsewhere.
Most Democrats in Congress get unions. The problem has been the corporate influence on the presidential party and its domination of key positions at Treasury, OMB, and Legislative Affairs. Some of this is about campaign finance, but not all of it.
Edsall brilliantly depicts the class warfare that leads Republicans and their business allies to bash unions. He misses the fact that the same class warfare has infected the Democratic Party. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Why Charter School Proponents Have Lost Many of the Democrats Who Once Supported Them | naked capitalismhttps://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/why-charter-school-proponents-have-lost-many-of-the-democrats-who-once-supported-them.html
may 2020 bring a very high focus upon this problem until one day that headline reads How Charter School Proponents Have Lost All Support From The Left
I think part of the reason they don’t get is they are one or two or three generations removed from anyone who worked for a wage. They don’t live in those neighborhoods or socialize with wage workers. They quite literally don’t KNOW any.
That’s why it’s terrifying that they are designing career and technical education. They don’t know anything about these jobs. They don’t even know anyone personally who does the jobs.
Have you been listing to the Uber and Lyft drivers? This is the awesome “independent contractor” work that every academic lauded as the “future of work” from their tenured, salaried perch at a university. It’s a blatant and brutal rip off for the drivers, which was obvious to anyone who has ever worked for an hourly wage.
They may as well live in a different country than the rest of us. This nonsense they endorse and promote has no practical application to ordinary people.
“They quite literally don’t KNOW any.”
Wow. An extraordinarily important point, Chiara! Increasingly, the well-off in the US (and I’m not talking, here, about the wealthy but about the Upper Middle Class and what remains of the Middle Class) are isolated in their bubbles. They literally do not know what life is like for the millions of working poor in the US.
I am not a heavy user of public transportation, but I have yet to take an Uber. The only thing I see it having done is maybe improve the perceived attitude problem of taxi drivers! People make their living driving taxis. They don’t driving Ubers. Uber just makes it easier for people who do little to nothing to profit off of the work of others. I watched millennials, in particular, jump into Ubers, pleased with how convenient, cheap, and easy it was to get a ride. As much as I hated the stupid union rules I ran into in my last (urban) district, that union protected people from an administration that treated its people with little to no respect.
That is why I was disappointed that the House passed $400 million for more charters. The Dems control the House. If real Democrats support public schools, then a lot of fake wishy washy Democrats voted on this funding. Every dollar for a charter is a dollar subtracted from a public school.
Neoliberals including many Democrats have no appreciation for unions. They live in a world of cognitive dissonance. They think they can support working people while at the same they oppose unions and undermine public school and teachers. Unions are largely responsible for any gains workers have made including the five day, forty hour work week, over-time pay, minimum safety standards and vacations. Sanders has the right idea. We need to make “right to work” laws illegal. These laws were crafted to put all the power and rights in the hands of employers. Unions allow workers to unite to negotiate more fairly.
Most recently, every day I read the news, look around, try not to listen to the news, and still I weep. I can’t help myself. I know I must keep informed, but the news and the spins just brings tears to my entire being.
How do the rest of you cope? It’s become harder and harder for me to stay centered as try not to weep.
I had to write the above because you seem to be coping better than I am.
Please, tell me, “How do you cope?”
Focus on family, and keep your sense of humor. Seek out some inane distractions. Give yourself a break from news. No matter how bad it seems here, remember we are still more fortunate than a good percentage of the world.
Just remember that there are 3 sides to every story. One news outlet will spin it one way and the next news outlet will spin it in the complete opposite direction. The truth lies somewhere in between….and that’s where you need to use your common sense and find the truth. If you insist on watching the news, just know that they are sensationalizing every story so that you will watch their station. If you don’t let yourself be fooled by the sensationalism, it’s easier to cope. Yes, it’s pretty bad out there….but it’s not as bad as each side wants you to believe. Make yourself smile, pet a puppy, do something nice for someone…just because. Sometimes you have to make your own “happy”.
Thank you, retired teacher, LisaM, and Joel.
And thank you, Diane for your blog.
Welcome to the club. Trump derangement syndrome set in months ago. Which is why I have been commenting less on Diane’s site.
Cursing out a Trumpanzee on Facebook may not accomplish much. But it does serve as a release for pent up anger. I can curse and I need the edit button desperately
Yesterday to my surprise a far less progressive friend that I had not spoken to in months turned around and said something that I won’t repeat and expect to get on a plane. As critical as I was about Clinton and the Democrats he was far worse. Yet here we are two and a half years later and I had to say I hope the NSA is not listening.
So cheer up, another 18 months of Trump and this anger may translate to people voting for a toilet bowl rather than Trump. Then I can go back to throwing rocks at Democrats.
If people get angry at low unemployment, moderate inflation, falling oil prices, and solid GDP growth, they might vote against Pres Trump.
The 2020 election is going to be about economic issues.
Pres Trump is going to clobber the Dem nominee so bad, there will nothing left but a greasy spot on the carpet.
Charles, so glad you showed your true colors as a MAGA man. I have read that Hitler and Mao were great for the economy. If the election is about our rights and freedoms, if it’s about the importance of the Constitution, your man Trump will be badly beaten. Then there will be criminal investigations that will send him to jail for bank fraud, income tax evasion, and more.
Charles
The Omnipotent Trump of 5th and 57th Street has solved all our economic problems. Yes, he has taken unemployment to a historical low all the way down from 4.4% in March of 17 which no sane person can attribute to the Donald as that he was only in office for 6 weeks when the March report for February was issued, down to 3.8%. Pick the steak house the April number will go back up to 3.8% as that the worker participation rate was down the same .2%.
Doing this miracle while the economy under Trump for the last 27 months created 410k fewer jobs than the economy under Obama in the previous 27 months. It is a bit more complicated than that. But it would be beyond your grasp. However, was that job creation going to end the day Clinton got elected?
But a funny thing happened on our way to economics 101. Neither the EU nor England nor Germany seemed to embrace the Republican economic plan and somehow their unemployment numbers are at record lows as well. Germany was almost .5% lower than the United States at 3.1% a 30 year low.
The UK.2% lower. And I am pretty sure their prime age work participation rates are higher.
But alas the tax cut is a stimulus and try as we may, we haven’t been able to prove Keynes wrong. When you print money and drop it from helicopters people spend that money and the economy grows. Now if you agree with AOC, Darth Vader Cheney, and the MMT school, as I might. Perhaps it does not matter how much money we print. But of course, that only applies when Republicans are in power because try as he might to get an infrastructure plan passed, Obama was blocked from every one of his second term requests for a far smaller and more useful stimulus. It is at this point that I usually start cursing at Trumpanzees but out of respect for our host, I will spare you what I tell NYC Union Construction workers. Every one of the major projects in this great City was funded, planned, approved and most had shovels in the ground before the election.
But how are wages doing? Well, they are still barely rising and much of the increase is due to states increasing the minimum wage. Yet they are still 1% behind the wage increase after the 2001 recession. And they are 2.5% below the rate of increase during the peak Clinton years.
Let us move on to GDP. After a 2.5 trillion increase in Deficit spending the last quarter GDP report was marked by a decline in business investment. Marked by a decline in Residential investment. Marked by a decrease in consumer spending while inventories piled up on the shelf.
So how did we get a number over 3%? We had an increase in defense spending of 5 billion dollars more debt. And state and local governments also increased spending. The Omnipotent Wizzard of Trump tower may be in for a shock when figures get revised.
But the Trumpanzee base has not a clue. And will say the sun started revolving around the earth the day Trump got elected.
The 2020 election is going to be about three things: The economy, the economy, and the economy. If the dems nominate some tired socialist, and they articulate a bunch of failed socialist programs, they dems will lose.
I can’t wait to see what everyone is up to. I am cheering the economic reports. Unemployment is at a 40-year low. Employment for black people and Hispanics, is at historic highs. Inflation is low. Oil prices are slightly down. In some places, there are more jobs than there are applicants.
Of course there is bad news too. I am not a “Polyanna”, always trying to find something to be glad about. No one denies that our nation has problems.
“We are not in this world to be tourists” – author unknown.
I do not agree that the three presidents, with the possible exception of Obama, mentioned above could have helped unions to any great extent. Here is why.
Carter became president by a hair after Nixon resigned. Fighting stagflation was on the minds of the American public, and many perceived unions as the culprit. During the Carter years, the generation which had screamed “Gimmie Shelter” was passing into “Gimmie Tax Shelter”, proving that most of them had protested Vietnam for less than idealistic reasons. This was the generation that cemented the republican ascendancy. Carter was soon consumed by foreign policy, on his way to defeat at the hands of a person who had been seen as so far right in 1976 as to appear ludicrous. That should ring a bell.
Meanwhile, Clinton got elected as the centrist minority president, twice put into office over the republican due to Ross Perot with his charts and giant sucking sound. Any liberal leaning he did (like simply raising the question of health care reform) sent his possibility of re-election into a tailspin. Add to that the increasing effectiveness of the conservative amplification of any left movement, and Clinton had to behave like a conservative or die a political death of a thousand cuts.
What were they to do? Freedom of trade was a legacy left over from the generation of the New Deal that saw such as the savior of democracy. Outsourcing wrecked unions without democrats screaming, but it is not conclusive that anything really could be done about it. Could we have taxed Toyota to save Ford and GM? Perhaps, but all the liberals I knew drove Toyotas and Hondas and blamed the poorly made Detroit cars on the lazy union workers, however myopic this might have been.
It strikes me that the American electorate often gets what they ask for in their political leaders. My neighbor’s have exactly who they want. Even with the corruption swirling around Nashville now, the republican ascendancy seems unchallenged in our state by anyone who has the misfortunate in mind. So I suggest that it was the American majority that gave us the behavior of the past generation of democrats.
“During the Carter years, the generation which had screamed “Gimmie Shelter” was passing into “Gimmie Tax Shelter”, proving that most of them had protested Vietnam for less than idealistic reasons.”
So, Roy, you have somehow gotten into the minds of millions of us who protested against that war (and all the others since) to know that the protesters had less than idealistic reasons? I doubt it. Your statement is one of the many right-wing “rehabilitate the US’s more than tarnished military image”. Oh, and did you hear that it was the anti-war protesters who were responsible for that massive defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese?
You and I were lucky that those anti-war protesters were successful in helping to end the war sooner rather than later. Luckily for us the draft ended before it totally affected us. See Afghan/Iraq for further details on endless wars that continue without continuing massive protests.
You may have a point here. The anti-war protestors were undoubtedly not a majority. Still, they joined a majority in deserting the altruistic motives that seemed to portend a better future for a new generation.
I would most heartily agree with the debt I owe to those who ended the war in Vietnam. Nor was it the generation slightly older than ours that so roiled Indochina that it loosed the idiologue PolPot on Cambodia.
I would complain, however, that my generation has not voted for political leaders who ran on altruism. Rather, we voted our pocketbooks. As for getting into the mind of an entire generation, I would never claim that. There is, however, something we call zeitgeist, and it is the fun of history to try to pin it down. Being wrong and being called out for it is the entire fun of history. So thanks for doing that.
I agree that many of our generation opted into the I, me, mine mode of being after the mid 70s. “Don’t worry be happy” might be the model of that mode of thinking, i.e., zeitgeist eh!
Which has helped lead us into the current zeitgeist of I, me, mine ONLY and to hell with everyone else as epitomized by the likes of Gates, tRump, DeVos, and the many others that abound in the public realm.
Although I agree with much of your analysis of my generation especially having watched the draft lottery turn many into what Jim Hightower calls “yellow-bellied flag waving armchair patriots. You leave a few things out on the economics. Carter was not forced into his neoliberal stance. Although in all fairness deregulation was not targeted at union workers but their Government protected employers. Even Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy were pushing to break up Government sanctioned monopolies. Thomas Frank and Mike Lofgren do excellent jobs in describing the situation of the Democratic party and the White Working Class. I would define the working class as the bottom 80-90 % of the population. Regardless of the color of their skin or their collars.
We forget that the peace candidate in 72 was McGovern; McGovern who was eviscerated by George Meany. Meany could have done the Democratic Candidate less harm had he simply endorsed Nixon. Instead, he attacked McGovern throughout the election while not endorsing Nixon. We forget that in 68 Wallace had 40% of the Union vote according to AFL-CIO internal polls until he picked Dr. Strangelove as his VP. Then that vote switched to Nixon. We forget that in 1980 large numbers of Union workers voted for Reagan. Perhaps they could explain that by the economic malaise caused by rising interests rates and Carter’s Union Jobs destroying deregulation. But in 84 it should have been obvious that Reagan was encouraging in every way an assault on Unions.
Humphrey Mondale and McGovern had almost 98% voting records with the AFL-CIO yet large numbers of Union workers voted for their opponents. Is it any wonder that when Clinton came to office he dismissed the concerns of industrial Union workers pushing ahead with NAFTA . Clinton in every way pursued a policy agenda that Reagan only dreamed of accomplishing. Thomas Franks counts 5 major policy initiatives. I am up to about 8. NAFTA was far more devastating to Union Jobs than anything that Obama had done to sell out the Teachers who were the most reliable supporters of Democrats.
But before we came to ClintonKeynes Obama and the DLC / NDC labor did a pretty good job of destroying the connection between FDR Democrats and Organized Labor.
And in 2016 70% of the Building Trades labors elite. Voted for Trump. A man who loved Right to Work. Refused to endorse Davis Bacon. And now will through the NLRB and the Courts decimate what remains of Labor. If you think Janus was something ” you ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Uradnik v Inter Faculty Organization will completely gut what remains of organized Labo. Going after the heart of the NLRA.
Elections do have consequences and for Labor, they have had those consequences since Nixon.
That should have read Clinton, Obama ( to cheap to have my keyboard fixed I thought the coma was on the Clipboard)
Joel: thanks for your detailed analysis. I agree that labor was devestated by both democrat and republican free traders. I do not think they could have done that without some Americans voting against their own self-interest. It was difficult during that period for a person to move the political conversation toward an active federal government working for the worker. They just did not have the votes.
Can you spell Jpe Biden?
It has been very, very exciting to watch the teacher strikes around the country. Teachers, teaching. Their message? We CAN have a union movement again in this country. Today, only 11 percent of American workers are unionized, most of them in government jobs. So, the anti-union forces have been enormously successful.
Time to take it to the streets and regain that lost ground!
Only when things become desperate enough will we see that happen.
The labor movement in this country has not been a movement since the early 20s. For far too long we have been individual unions all too frequently willing to sell each other out for short term gain. Public Union vs Private Union and Private Unions against each other. The failures are profound. And we are being crushed.
A significant part of the problem – Bill Gates and CAP were positioned so that the public believed they were the left. The money that both have is used to diminish unions.
The election of Bernie or someone like Bernie is necessary to undue the harm that’s been caused. The election of a centrist stops the hole that the 99% are in, from growing deeper as quickly.
I agree with your judgment. CAP, The Center for American Progress, is not at all progressive regarding unions. But unions still send CAP big money, AFT, NEA, and others. I do not understand why. These union contributions are much less than money sent to CAP by the B&M Gates Foundation, and many corporate loyalists, including hedge fund managers and bankers who helped tank the economy in 2008.