When Workers Blame Unions

From CounterPunch:

A regular CounterPunch reader who’s written me several times—an African American ex-Steelworker from Pittsburgh, now an aspiring playwright—laments that the younger workers he meets not only believe that Ronald Reagan was one of the greatest presidents America ever had, they blame labor unions for our troubles. They blame them for ruining the U.S. economy by driving out so many of the good jobs.

Mind you, this isn’t Wall Street or the Chamber of Commerce talking. These are regular working people. But instead of viewing organized labor as the one institution capable of propping up the middle-class by offering decent wages and benefits, they’ve reached the startling conclusion that America’s unions are a detriment, not an asset. Sadly, this ex-Steelworker said he can’t recall a time in his life when unions were less respected.

And

As Detroit continues to sink, the South continues to rise. Astonishingly, prior to its opening, in 2009, the Kia plant in West Point, Georgia, had more than 100,000 applications for 2,100 jobs. But in order to keep the union from gaining a foothold (and counter to the law of supply-and-demand), Kia wisely offered high wages and generous benefits. To the folks of West Point, the Kia plant was a godsend, the best manufacturing job anyone had ever seen.

Of course, what organized labor—and, apparently, few others—realizes is that once the American union movement is more or less neutralized, the economy will not only turn into an extravagant and lopsided sellers’ market, the clamps will come down harder and more brutally than anyone could have imagined.

More here.

This is difficult.

My whole life the prevailing narrative about unions is that they're bad news. From stories my corporate manager dad would bring home from work in the late 70s about how the union was fucking with him to what quickly became the conventional wisdom for many in the 80s that unions once served a useful purpose in the past but do nothing today but fuck up companies' ability to make the economy prosper, we live in an era when the entire concept of labor unions, the whole storyline associated with them in people's heads, is negative.

Indeed, a few months ago my old pal Matt, not an arch-conservative by anyone's measure, sent me an essay from the right-wing Economist magazine that supposedly dismantled the intellectual concept of public sector unions. I found the essay so full of half-truths, distortions, flawed assumptions, and straight-up lies, such as the "fact" that public sector union employees make more than their private sector counterparts, that I really had no idea where to begin criticizing the article. And that's essentially the problem in microcosm: the anti-union narrative has become so extraordinarily widespread, so extraordinarily dominant, that in order to rhetorically counter it, one must spend an hour or two simply addressing the many ways in which anti-unionism is founded on ideas that just don't exist in the real world.

Take, for instance, the widely believed notion that unions are somehow bad for the economy. On the one hand, there are a few real life instances I know of when union demands literally ran a company out of business--labor strikes at the New York Herald Tribune back in the 60s, during a time of economic uncertainty for the paper, effectively put the nails into that company's coffin. But I don't really know of enough instances of this happening that really add up to making business failure an identifying feature of labor unions. I mean, you're always going to find a few examples of bad things going on with unions that capitalists will hold up as "proof" of their anti-union views, just as you will always find a few examples of folks who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to become Bill Gates or whatever that "prove" our economic system's upward mobility. But Horatio Alger stories don't in any way add up to actual economic analysis.

That is, unions do indeed have problems, but they pale in comparison to problems caused by corporate capitalism. And without unions, short of embracing actual socialism, there is absolutely no political force in our nation capable of combating the wild corporate excesses that are destroying permanently the middle class.

How do we create a more reasonable and fact-based narrative on unions that stands a chance of competing in the marketplace of ideas with the currently dominant anti-union narrative? The Democrats are no help: they abandoned the unions sometime in the 70s. It seems that the unions, and only the unions, can be the savior here. There is some activity on the horizon, but is it too little, too late?

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