Joel, our reader who often comments on economic issues, is a union electrician, now retired. Here he weighs in on the subject of “good jobs.”
Joel writes:
Most of what Americans call good Jobs never existed. What existed was good Unions which made bad Jobs good. And that only for a brief period of time. From the 1930s thru the 1960s.
In 1906 Upton Sinclair described Meat Packing as “The Jungle.” By the 50s it was a desired job that could let the holder buy a house, go on vacations and send a child to a State School. The blood and stench washed off in the shower after 8 hours. Henry Ford was not a benevolent innovative mogul of American industry who paid his workers more so they could buy his product as the myth goes. The Nazi loving antisemite could not get skilled carriage builders to work on the monotonous assembly lines of his Model T. He had to raise wages.
The assembly line took the skills out of manufacturing. Far easier and cheaper to find a worker able to put the left front wheel on all day than one who can craft a carriage from soup to nuts. Ford after the most violent resistance to Unions was the last Auto maker to be Organized in the 40s after his thugs got featured on the front page of the Detroit Press brutally beating Union organizers. They seem to have missed a roll of film when the Press Photographer handed them his Camera. Having thrown the roll away before being stopped.
Unions grew from 5% of the private sector workforce in the mid to late 1920s before the Great Depression and the NLRA. Grown to between 31 -33% in the early 50s. Which essentially meant most larger firms. And if a firm was not organized there was a Union knocking on the door that forced them to treat Workers with some degree of respect. With better wages benefits and conditions. All this started changing in the late 40s after Taft Hartley eviscerated the NLRA. Almost immediately Corporations started moving Manufacturing to the Anti Union South. Turning the manufacturing Belt of the North into the Rust Belt from Lowell Ma. and Binghamton NY to Milwaukee Wisconsin. A time when Robbie the Robot was only in a Movie and on Lost in Space. That long before Foriegn Competition and out sourcing work. It took 30 years to move the American manufacturing Industry away from the North to the Non Union South. It took 10 years to move much of it out of the country to even lower priced more abusive Countries with no Labor Standards. A different issue was found in Coal mining where strip mining decimated the Unions. Of course the UMW under short sighted and criminal thugs like Tony Boyle had fought the environmentalists opposed to it. No major mine in WV is now Union. The state once the home of the UMW is now Right to Work.
But what about those “White Collar ” Jobs. Jobs that may require a College degree. C.W. Mills in the very early 50s postulated that because the Jobs required selling services and themselves. White collar workers felt more self reliant than Blue. Viewed themselves as individuals with valuable skills that others did not posses. Skills to be marketed to the highest bidder. So who needs a Union. With some disdain he also notes that, that ethos got them lower pay and benefits. An Electrical Engineer often paid less than the Electricians he handed the prints to. Possibly one day acquiring a management position. Most often not.
Through the 60s the presence of strong Unions always knocking on the door was a check on Corporate treatment of White Collar workers. The attitude from the CEO of IBM as he addressed the Public or a Shareholder meeting . “Here at IBM we are a family here to serve our Employees, our Costumers , the Public and our Shareholders.”
As Unions were eviscerated workers Blue and White collar were taken out of the stump speech as well as Costumers and the Public. Jack Welch said in the mid 80s “tell the Unions the Future of GE is in Mexico”. By 2006 IBM was dropping their defined benefit pension for White collar Workers and later taking away the matching 401k, capping it at 5%. The age of shareholder primacy was born as Unions disappeared. Back to under 6% of the private sector workforce.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Compare US unionization to that of much of Western Europe, especially the Scandinavian countries. The US unionization overall rate is 10.1% while the unionization rate for the Scandinavian countries ranges from about 50% to 91% (Iceland). Only one in ten American workers is now in a union, down from nearly one in three workers during the heyday of unions back in the 1950s.
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Conservative America has been on a campaign to undermine unions for the past forty years. Here in the South some believe that unions are all corrupt, and they want to take your money and give you nothing in return. These are the same working class people that can be convinced to vote against their own self-interest.
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American conservatism can be reduced to two simple words: cheap labor.
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American liberalism makes common cause with many conservatives in the policies they advocate that result in cheap labor, e.g. the bipartisan support for massive low-skilled immigration.
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Immigrants can join unions and help build the middle class too. The problem is not immigration, but outsourcing.
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Ken BowmanAlthough it can be argued that we can not have an unlimited supply of immigrant labor. There is no indication that we are at that point. I would also stress that aggregate good does not always mean that everyone prospers. Immigrants would be little problem even in industries like Construction if it was easier to organize workers into Unions. On that note the small gains in organizing high profile corporations have translated into no first contracts. That is a political problem named Republicans. Who almost universally have opposed restoring the NLRA to pre- Taft Hartley status. Only 5 Republican Congressman in both Houses (none in the Senate)supporting the Pro Act and it has been the same story since 1978. So we can talk about neo liberal (hate the phrase) Democrats like Clinton and Obama. But we can’t talk about that without asking what 50 years of Blue Collar workers voting for anti Union Republicans has done to cause that move. Biden has been the most pro union President since FDR . Will he be rewarded for it? Or will Blue collar workers be more concerned with a transgender youth competing with the daughter that doesn’t play sports. Or if she does has a greater chance of meeting a Martian than competing against a Trans Gender Athlete. The economy has added a record number of jobs. Unemployment is at under 4% for the the longest period since 1965. Or it will be if it says under 4% for 2 more months. Native Americans unemploymentat 3.7%. Real Wages exceeding inflation . So much for immigrant labor undermining native workers (in aggregate ).https://www.epi.org/blog/immigrants-are-not-hurting-u-s-born-workers-six-facts-to-set-the-record-straight/
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Conservatives have always opposed unions. That goes back more than 40 years. Big business was always opposed. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, campaigned for an eight hour workday. It was succeeded by the AFL in 1886.
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The teacher unions, AFT and NEA are vibrant, and fight for public education across the nation as well as forming alliances with a wide range of advocacy organizations, and, the Dartmouth basketball team just filed a unionization petition ….
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Back in the 1970s after graduating from college with a BA in journalism, I ended up with a corporate job in middle management. Before I accepted that job, I’d applied for a job in journalism, but the starting salaries for those white collar workers was so low there wasn’t enough to pay rent and eat (not counting other expenses) so I ended up in that corporate job with one of the largest trucking companies in the United States, a subsidiary of Southern Pacific Railroad.
A few years later, I left that job, disgusted with the way that corporation treated their employees, and went back to college to earn a teaching credential through a full-time, school-year long urban residency program with a master teacher as my guide.
Thirty years later in 2005, I retired from teaching in public schools, with a defined benefit program through CalSTRS that ended up paying me a lot more than Social Security would have. For thirty years, I paid about 8.5% of what I was earning into CalSTRS with the school district where i taught matching that with about another 8.5%. I think the districts were required to pay a bit more than teachers did.
When I was born, my family lived in poverty, barely surviving with poverty wage jobs. A few years later, my father got a union job in construction, and my family climbed out of poverty and stayed that way in the lower strata of the middle class. Dad retired early with an a defined benefit retirement plan through the labor union he belonged to, that paid enough to keep my parents in their strata of the middle class. SInce they grew up during the Great Depression, they were very frugal.
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Quite a story, Lloyd.
And, it’s the real story of what has made America great. And, there are millions of family histories that share similarities with it out there.
Which makes me so mad (once again, over and over) about how our collective consciousness has been bombarded by the phony saga of Donald Trump and his dysfunctional, weirdo family.
The Trump sons showed up at a local bar not that long ago. (The family owns property near here.) And, the verdict of one of the locals was, “They’re good people.”
Of course, it’s an age old trick. Fool the regular folks into thinking that the privileged and powerful are more like them than some of their own neighbors.
So, Eric and Don Jr. are “good people”. And, someone like me, who will put a Biden sign on my lawn, is an “enemy”.
The results of all this, judging from human history, could be devastating to our nation…and the world.
P.S. Nice piece of writing, Joel.
I’ve been very lucky to be part of a great teachers’ union.
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John,
I seriously doubt that either of Trump’s sons ever put in a day of work in their lives. Unlike Beau Biden, they never put on their country’s uniform. Lazy, entitled rich brats.
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So if the private sector is 6% unionized, most union membership is to be found in the public sector. Thus the public sector bashing that began in the late 70s (remember Reagan: “Government is not the solution; it is the problem”) remains a key part of a larger strategy by the Radical Right to both de-legitimize the state in the eyes of citizens and undermine unions.
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The GOP wants to diminish the role of the federal government while increasing the power of the states l as they did with the issue of abortion.
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“Stand up boys, let the bosses know.
“Turn your buckets over, turn your lanterns low!
“We won’t pull another pillow or load another ton,
“Or lift our little finger ’til a union we have won!
“There’s fire in our heart and fire in our soul,
“But there ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole!”
–by Hazel Dickens (1925-2011), union activist, singer, songwriter.
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Diane, Lloyd, et al: Two books were reviewed in the New York Book Review in an article called: Conspicuous Destruction (Oct. 19, 2023). Both concern the state of private equity funds (etc.) that are not subject to SEC regulation and that are involved in a much more concerted effort than (I think) most understand. I snip-quote below, but the article gives a brief history of financial movements over the last century to now and also relates to (1) an earlier exchange I had with quikwrit here about capitalism; and (2) the mania about privatization coming from the uberwealthy many who apparently are channeling both Gordon Gekko and Ayn Rand. Here are the books and snips:
Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America/Brendan Ballou
These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America/Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner
SNIPS: Conspicuous Destruction/Kim Phillips-Fein (article)
“Both books present forceful briefs for regulating the industry.”
“As their titles suggest, these books revolve around the scandal of looting, . . . Taken together, they raise the question: What if private equity is not a perversion of capitalism (as the authors maintain), but merely a distillation of its contemporary values and practices? What if its leading financiers are an advance guard for our economic elite as a whole? Along with many other popular accounts of private equity, hedge funds, and high finance, the books imply that private equity primarily works by distorting and twisting economic norms. By looking closely, though, we also find the possibility of understanding the problems of today’s economic order. . . .
“Private equity, they suggest, is not just an ‘extreme version of capitalism,’: as Ballou puts it, but something ominous and new—a ‘much darker enterprise’ bringing business and government together to exploit ‘legal gaps and obscure government programs for enormous short-term profits.’
“The result is an entirely perverse economic order in which the imperatives of getting rich quickly has preempted every other goal.” CBK
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Comment in moderation. CBK
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