Salon discussions on unions

[Die Neue Zeit]

I don't agree with huge chunks of what either writer wrote, but I'll post them anyway for discussion because key points were made:



Liberalism and the post-union future (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/02/22/lind_unions_wisconsin) by Michael Lind

The goal should be to do away with employer-based benefits in favor of universal social insurance programs

The struggle in Wisconsin over the future of collective bargaining by public employees is the most dramatic battle in a war being waged on many fronts over the future of public sector unionism. In other states and cities, the issue is whether states whose revenues have collapsed because of the recession should fund the promised pensions of public employees like police officers, emergency responders and schoolteachers.

In the divide-and-rule politics of the American right, public employees have for the moment replaced "welfare queens" and illegal immigrants as symbols of parasites who exploit working-class taxpayers. Never mind that the deregulation of finance and global trade imbalances caused the economic crisis and the subsequent cratering of revenues for state governments, not public sector unions. Never mind that it is illogical to assert that fairness requires not the upgrading of private sector worker rights and benefits until they are as decent as those of public sector employees, but the reduction of everyone’s rights and benefits to a miserable lowest common denominator. Resentment has its own logic, captured by a medieval Viking proverb: "One oak gains what is peeled from another." In times of crisis, populations often prefer scapegoats to explanations, and the right is ready to provide a scapegoat in the form of public sector unions.

Making the job easier for conservatives is the collapse of private sector union membership in the U.S. From a third of the American workforce in 1979, union members have shrunk to a mere 7.2 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. public sector union membership has grown from 11 percent in 1960 to more than 37 percent today. Even though private sector workers outnumber public sector workers 5-to-1, public sector union members now outnumber private sector union members, at 7.6 million to 7.1 million.

The same phenomenon is occurring in most other industrial democracies. Only in Scandinavia is a majority of the private sector workforce still unionized. France’s level of 7-9 percent private sector union membership is nearly as low as that of the U.S. In Germany, union membership has dropped since 2000 from a quarter to a fifth of the workforce. In the developed world as a whole, only one in five workers are unionized.

The disproportion in union membership between private and public sector workers is found in other countries. The U.S. ratio of private sector union members to public sector union members of 7 percent to 29 percent in 2009 was paralleled in Australia (14:42), Britain (15:57) and Canada (16:71).

Anti-union policies enacted by governments in the neoliberal era that began with Thatcher and Reagan are only part of the story. The transfer by companies of production to anti-union Southern states or developing countries like China and Mexico has eliminated many union jobs, while the expanding service sector is harder to organize than the mass production industries of the mid-20th century. The public sector has provided one of the few environments where workers can be successfully organized, sheltered from the threats of offshoring and (so far) from technological obsolescence.

In being unionized and having employer-provided defined benefit pensions, many American public employees are more like many private sector workers of the 1950s than like today’s non-unionized private sector workers, most of whom have neither an employer pension nor a stable, adequate 401K. Can public sector unions serve as a base, from which a substantial portion of the American workforce can once again be unionized? It is more likely that the right, having shattered private-sector unionism in America, will succeed in wiping out the remnants of unionism in the public sector as well. Even when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency after the elections of 2008, they were unwilling to try to pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would have made organizing unions slightly easier (if still difficult). And even if private sector unionism advanced, decades would be required before a substantial majority, much less a simple majority, of Americans belonged to unions.

The decline of trade unionism does not necessarily mean the decline of American liberalism. The union movement has been only one tradition in the American center-left. Others include technocratic progressivism, which puts its faith in paternalistic programs administered by nonpartisan civil servants and judges; the liberal variant of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism, which has championed small farms, small businesses and economic development of rural America; and social democracy, identified with universal social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. A fifth strain, democratic socialism, has always been marginal in America.

Of these traditions, liberal populism and social democracy have always been more popular with the American public than trade unionism and technocratic progressivism. Economic development programs like rural electrification in the 1930s, the interstate highway system and universal broadband today, typically championed by hinterland populists, appeal to American voters, as do programs to support small farms and small businesses. And despite the constant propaganda against "entitlements" by the elite media and pundits funded by the right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson, the American public embraces universal, contributory social insurance programs.

None of these popular liberal programs emerged from the union movement. Government support for economic development and small producers was championed in the 19th century by the modernizing boosters of the Midwest like Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century by similar boosters of the agrarian South and West like Lyndon Johnson. In the early 20th century, universal social insurance tended to be opposed both by union activists, who preferred to bargain for benefits with employers, and by elite progressives, who preferred means-tested, paternalistic programs for the poor.

Unions have long struggled to establish their legitimacy in the eyes of the American people. The argument that unions represent monopolies of labor as dangerous as corporate and financial cartels has always resonated in Jacksonian America. The fact that unions in the U.S. have frequently been associated with immigrant workforces, corrupt urban political machines and in some cases the Mafia has not helped their popularity, either.

The chief contribution of unionism to American liberalism has not been in the realm of policy but in the realm of politics -- turning out the vote for progressive candidates and causes. The labor movement was critical at key moments in the passage of New Deal and Great Society legislation, as well as in the recent healthcare reform. Private sector union members tend to be more liberal in their voting behavior than their non-unionized counterparts in the private sector workforce.

But the argument that unions are good because they multiply the number of Democratic voters has no appeal beyond Democratic partisans. And the domination of the union movement by public sector workers makes it easy for conservatives to claim that the politicians elected and funded by public sector unions are no more than the puppets of shadowy public sector union bosses. The argument that the corporate corruption of politics is even worse than the political influence of public sector unions implicitly, if inadvertently, cedes the right's talking point.

Liberals must ask themselves whether defending archaic 1950s-style employment and benefit arrangements that survive as fossil relics in the public sector fits into a plausible and potentially popular vision of a reformed American social contract in the 21st century. The goal of liberal reform should be to phase out employer-based benefits entirely, in favor of universal, contributory social insurance programs. Deprived of employer benefits to offer their members, unions might still bargain with employers over workplace rules and wages. But from a liberal perspective, it would be better if workplace regulations were universal and imposed by legislation, rather than piecemeal and achieved by collective bargaining. And while the minimum wage should be raised until it is a living wage and indexed to inflation, it is not clear that liberals are obliged to support efforts by workers in particular industries or particular professions to obtain above-market wages, possibly at the expense of innovation or consumers.

In the long run, conservatives who succeed in destroying public sector unions might inadvertently help American liberalism. To begin with, the right would deprive itself of an enemy. And the divide-and-rule tactics of the right might be less likely to succeed if all American workers -- private and public -- were in the same situation with respect to benefits and workplace rights. But in order to take advantage of a post-union America, liberals would have to create a popular political movement capable of replacing the lost legions of organized labor at the polls. In other words, American liberals would have to organize.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Maybe it's a relic, but the union model is essential (http://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/25/dimick_lind_unions) by Matthew Dimick

The struggle over the right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin raises yet again the question of the labor movement’s future and its role in a broad, liberal vision of America. First they came for the private sector unions, now they’ve come for the public sector unions. Is this labor’s last stand -- and if it is, should we care?

Michael Lind, writing in Salon earlier this week, offered a vision of liberalism without labor. The labor movement has constituted only one strand of the American liberal tradition, he contends, and it has hardly been the most popular or most supportive of its policy vision. The other traditions include technocratic progressivism, with its endorsement of paternalistic, means-tested programs for the poor and its faith in an administrative state run by experts; the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition of liberal populism, "which has championed small farms, small businesses and economic development of rural America"; and finally, social democracy, which he identifies "with universal social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance."

Only liberal populism and social democracy have held any sway among American voters. Lind therefore argues that the outcome of the fight over public-sector unionism in Wisconsin doesn't seal the fate of liberalism either way. Even more, Lind communicates the feeling that labor is something of a millstone around liberals' necks. Sure, unions have played a supportive role for key liberal policies, such as the New Deal and Great Society. But this seems hardly to have made up for the baggage the labor unions carry with them -- imposing monopolistic restraints on competition, sympathizing with "foreigners" and immigrants, corruption, and acting as shadowy puppet masters for the politicians whose campaigns they fund. According to Lind, "Liberals must ask themselves whether defending archaic 1950s-style employment and benefit arrangements that survive as fossil relics in the public sector fits into a plausible and potentially popular vision of a reformed American social contract in the 21st century."

Lind clearly sees himself as an avatar of American social democracy. Employer-based benefits that labor unions delivered are a relic; universal, contributory social insurance programs are the future of liberalism. I agree. But Lind, unfortunately, gives us absolutely no reason to think this vision can be achieved without a labor movement. I will explain why I think the labor movement is essential, but my argument depends only partly on the fact that unions turn out votes for Democrats -- a fact that, as Lind correctly notes, has no appeal outside liberal circles.

The beauty of universal social insurance programs is that they tend to generate broad-based support for their continuance. Thus, while means-tested programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) have been effectively rolled back, universal programs like Medicare and Social Security remain popular. But even the universalizing logic of social insurance has natural limits. All insurance is redistributive in the sense that the primary beneficiaries of the program are those who by force of bad luck have their houses burn down, their cars smashed, or whose bodies contract cancer. But public social insurance is inevitably more so, since it requires the participation of all, rich and poor alike; it tends to implicate life chances where the line between choice and luck are harder to define; and it will, by force of politics, bend toward the interests of the middling classes. Because of that fact, and despite the popular appeal of universality, the rich will always want to opt out and self-finance their insurance.

As a consequence, the distribution constraints of social insurance are greater the more unequal a society is. It is a brute, if unappreciated, political fact that countries that have more universal social insurance programs also have less inequality in the first place -- that is, less pretax, pre-transfer inequality. This is a deeply counterintuitive finding. Logic would suggest exactly the opposite. Countries with more economic inequality will have poorer median voters -- the voters who, in political theory, determine the platforms that parties propose in order to win elections. Poorer votes would like more redistribution. In order to win over the median voters, political parties should shift to the left, and propose programs that redistribute more.

Yet this is exactly the opposite of what we observe. Of course, what this simple story leaves out is campaign finance and, more generally, the power of the wealthy to influence the election process. In more unequal societies, not only would the poor like more redistribution, but the rich are both more willing and better able to spend money in order to shift the political game in their favor.

No better example of this process at play can be found than in the United States, where economic inequality is back to "Gilded Age" proportions. Medicare and Social Security are certainly popular programs. But the attacks upon them by the anti-redistributive and pro-wealthy right have been relentless. And the recent debacle over healthcare reform demonstrates just how difficult, and perhaps impossible, it will be to forge new universal social programs, let alone defend, in any form, the old ones. The jettisoning of the most universalizing aspect of the healthcare bill -- the public option -- earned Obama and the Democrats the accolades of "weak" and "spineless." But Obama and the Democrats understand the political game better than their Democratic base. To win elections requires money, and to get money you have to pay attention to the wealthy few.

If there is less inequality to begin with, broad and universal social insurance programs look and feel more like, well, insurance, and less like Robin Hood redistribution from rich to poor. The question is what causes lower pretax, pre-transfer economic inequality? Looking again cross-nationally, it turns out that labor unions play a critically important role. Collective bargaining over wages reduces economic inequality for workers both within and between firms. Thus, there is an important relationship between labor unions and the social democratic programs that Lind upholds as the best bet for liberalism. By reducing pretax, pre-transfer inequality, labor unions broaden the appeal for such programs while also making them more politically feasible.

Lind correctly notes that American labor unions have historically resisted universal social programs in favor of their employer-based bargains. But this has much to do with the very same reasons that American labor unions have in the past been less successful in reducing economic inequality. American labor unions are characteristically fragmented and historically wedded to a narrow, craft-union philosophy. But labor unions are undergoing tremendous change, as they must if they are to survive. Accordingly, it is not clear why Lind holds up the Old Labor of the past as any indication of how a revitalized labor will act in the future. The labor movement must do more to change itself, but given the transformations thus far, there is little reason to think the New will be anything like the Old.

Labor unions also represent the best hope for reviving the civic republicanism of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism, the other "successful" strand of American liberalism. The small farmer is even more of a relic than labor unions. And despite a lot of talk about a new, networked economy that was supposed to unleash individual entrepreneurialism, small business also only constitutes a minority fraction of an economy dominated by employees and large corporations.

In fact, a rich language of labor rooted in the Jeffersonian republican tradition was alive and well in the 19th century, but was squelched between the progressive elements of New Deal liberalism and an ascendant socialism and communism of the early 20th century. Labor unions, sometimes termed by their supporters as "schools of democracy," can be the institutional equivalent of the yeoman farmer for the 21st century. Necessarily collective because of the nature of a modern economy, they yet provide the same economic bulwark for the middle class independent of state or political-party machine. Labor unions, social democracy and Jeffersonian republicanism are not so far apart after all.

What institutional alternatives exist that can perform all of these functions? Lind dreams of "a popular movement capable of replacing the lost legions of organized labor at the polls." But alas, he offers no vision or reason to think of anything that can replace labor. And I can only think of reasons why potential alternatives will fail. As already noted, our winner-take-all, bicameral, federalist and candidate-centered political system is irredeemably rigged by the special interests of the wealthy few. In the wake of Citizens United, the notion of campaign-finance reform seems quixotic, if not a joke. Politicians can only think of "movement" from one political cycle to the next. Political parties, in and of themselves, are a dead end.

There are but a handful of exceptions to the strong correlation between pretax inequality and redistributive social insurance. They include France (relatively high inequality and high redistribution) and Switzerland (relatively low inequality and low redistribution). The reasons for these exceptions are not fully clear, but probably have more to do with historical accident than anything else. Switzerland, since it redistributes less, doesn’t fit Lind’s social-democratic vision. As for France: Good luck selling that country as your model of revived social-democratic liberalism in the United States.

The labor movement faces daunting odds. Lind is right to criticize the narrowness of Old Labor; the labor movement must still make great internal changes if it wants to revive itself. Yet whatever the prospects of a liberalism with labor, a liberalism without labor in a nation of staggering levels of economic inequality is even more unlikely.

[RGacky3]

Lind correctly notes that American labor unions have historically resisted universal social programs in favor of their employer-based bargains.

Organized labor was one of the strongest supporters of single payer healthcare.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The article says "historically" for a reason.

[RGacky3]

The article says "historically" for a reason.

They were also the big pushers for a minimum wage, and big pushers for labor laws and social security, so I don't think thats exactly the case.


American labor unions are characteristically fragmented and historically wedded to a narrow, craft-union philosophy.

I don't know, Ameican unions started industrial unionism pretty early on, the european labor movement was a little more lazy.

The IWW back in the day revolutionized the labor movement, really they can be creditited with ideas that birthed the CIO and the such.