A global recession and a deadly pandemic spur renewal
Count on E.J. Dionne to provide a Labor Day column each year. After decades of decline, unions ares seeing modest expansion again. Public support “for collective action, collective bargaining and the idea of solidarity” is the highest it’s been in 57 years. A global recession and record economic inequality will do that:
Gallup found that approval of unions hit low points of 48 percent in 2009 and 52 percent in 2010. They have risen ever since — to 61 percent in 2017, 68 percent last year and 71 percent last week, a peak not reached since 1965.
At a time when so many attitudes divide along racial lines, Gallup found that Whites and non-Whites were equally pro-labor. Approval spanned generations — at 72 percent for those under 54, and 70 percent among those 55 and over. Support for organized labor, close to unanimous among Democrats, is in fact bipartisan: 89 percent of Democrats approved of unions, as did 68 percent of independents and 56 percent of Republicans.
Opinion is translating into action. Vox’s Rani Molla documented how well-publicized union victories — at Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, REI, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s — are just the most visible part of a larger trend. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Post.)
“I do believe that this is the beginning of the next era of the labor movement—the modern labor movement,” Vice President Kamala Harris tells The Nation’s John Nichols. She cites the Biden administration’s advocacy as a key factor, but the pandemic also played a role:
“There’s so much about the pandemic that, I think, really highlighted for all to see what some of us have known to be the fractures and the fissures and the failures of systems—including the systems that should support working people but don’t,” she said. “We saw, for example, at the height of the pandemic, that 2 million women had to leave the workforce because a real issue for all workers is child care. How many people had to leave the workforce because they didn’t have paid sick leave? Or paid family leave? We saw how many workers were taking so much risk into their hands—especially those frontline health care workers who, through their sheer commitment, were going to work because they care about saving lives. Think about what that meant in terms of a workplace that may not be safe. Think about it in terms of teachers and other frontline workers.”
The term “essential worker” was a catchphrase for the media as the pandemic unfolded. But it resonated with the people who were putting their lives on the line. “Workers started realizing their value and started demanding that the dignity of their work would be respected in every way, including through their wages and benefits,” Harris said.
Even as industry couldn’t wait to send workers back into the meat grinder. Almost literally, in some cases.
Unions leaders spoke to Nichols about Harris’ history of support for labor that’s received little attention.
“Most people don’t even know that we represent people that work with Google, but she did,” United Steelworkers Vice President Roxanne Brown told Nichols. “She wanted to talk with them about organizing in new sectors, new industries. She was very specific.”
But it will take tangible results, not simply moral support for the Biden administration, to move the balance of power (and wealth) back in workers’ direction.
Dionne adds:
A spurt of new organizing will not undo years of union decline. Efforts to change labor laws to make unionization easier have failed even in Congresses controlled by Democrats. The new shape of the economy — with fewer of the sorts of manufacturing jobs on which labor built its power between the 1930s and the 1960s — creates challenges that the movement still needs to master.
But the new labor story, based on an embrace of the promise of triumph through shared struggle, runs crosswise to many of the trends in our politics, and usefully so. Unions have the capacity to bring Americans together across some very deep divides. Republicans have yet to alter their largely antilabor policy stances to accommodate a new constituency that includes large numbers of working-class voters. You’d never know from the party’s hostility to unions how sympathetic the GOP rank and file is to what they do.
It is not lost on progressives that the rise of movement conservatism accompanied the decline in union membership since the 1960s. More power for the investor class meant less for workers. And a smaller share for workers in the rewards of their labors.
Except for the paid holiday.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.