As a slow-motion, right-wing coup continues to propagate from the White House, day by sordid day, a central question that haunts our politics is which democratic institutions and organizations will resist and halt this authoritarian stupidity. A recent article by Eric Levitz reminds us of one of the reasons we’ve arrived at this pass: the evisceration of unions over the past few decades, and the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to fully defend workers’ basic right to organize.
Levitz provides a concise overview of the decline of unions over the past 40 years and how the Democrats have repeatedly failed to pass legislation that might slow or arrest this decline. He makes the point that while unions have continued to provide massive organizational and financial support to the Democrats, the Democrats have not reciprocated in the area that most counts — passing laws to make it easier to organize and protect unions.
Apart from the disheartening numbers of the decline in union membership over the last four decades — from 26% to 10.7% of the working population — Levitz’s most shocking statistics are those that show the relationship between unions and votes for Democrats. In so-called “right to work states” — where employees don’t have to pay dues in order to gain the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement in a unionized workplace, thus depriving the union of crucial resources for political organizing — Democrats’ share of the vote has declined an average of 3.5%. He quotes Nation writer Sean McElwee, who contends that anti-union legislation in Wisconsin and Michigan may have cost Hillary Clinton victory in those two states. Lest you think this is mere sour grapes, he also notes the shocking statistic that in 2008, Barack Obama won unionized white men by 18 points, but lost non-unionized white men by 16 points. Yes, you read that correctly. White working class men, seen as the backbone of Trump's support, voted for a black man by nearly 20%. Racism may be a huge part of Trump's appeal, but this is a clear indicator that people's sense of economic empowerment is crucial to their susceptibility to such appeals when it's time to cast their votes.
Such observations remind us that one of the lesser-known but critical decisions of the last administration that helped set the stage for the rise of Trump was President Obama’s failure to back the Employee Free Choice Act, which essentially would have made it easier to organize unions. At the time, it felt like a slap in the face to unions, who spent $250 million backing Obama’s candidacy, and whose workers voted for him by the margins cited above.
From the vantage point of 2018, though, we can see that this failure was a critical mistake for the future of the Democrats, if also a symptom of a party that ultimately chose to embrace neoliberalism with a few legislative tweaks rather than the structural, pro-worker, pro-consumer reforms that the financial crisis and Great Recession called out for. Just as none of the bankers who helped wreck the economy went to jail, no American workers got the government boost they needed to bring more democratic control over their workplaces and help stabilize the economy; they also didn't get the help they needed to be able to continue their assistance in getting Democrats elected.
Not surprisingly, without a program to break apart too-big-to-fail banks, permanently reign in the excessive financialization of the economy, address the debt that cripples college students, bring affordable health care to ALL Americans, and boost the prospects of unions and the pay of American workers to fair levels, econonic inequality continues to grow past ever-more grotesque benchmarks, and economic despair continues to haunt millions.
And now we are all learning that simple human suffering isn’t even the full extent of the price we’re all paying. Throttle the American dream, kill the unions, outsource the jobs, and reward the richest among us long enough, and you end up creating the conditions for a Trump to come along and upend our democracy itself; to clear the path for the GOP to embrace its full authoritarian potential, and take the war against average Americans to sick new depths. It's not enough that our citizenship stops when we walk through the door at work, and we find ourselves reduced to peons subject to surveillance, overwork, and termination if we assert our democratic right to organize. No, now we must be taxed to pay for tax breaks for the richest Americans, and see social programs that benefit the working and middle classes put on the chopping block to help pay for these breaks.
But even this is not the worst of it. Make Americans suffer enough, deprive them of decent news sources, take away their worker protections, and point the finger at minorities and immigrants as the cause of their worries, and it turns out frightening numbers of us are ready for a strongman who tells us that the solution is him; that the solution is that our nation is not pure enough, has been polluted by parasitic outsiders, and must make war on all who challenge his reign, be it the FBI or undocumented immigrants unwittingly brought to our country by their parents.
Unions have traditionally been a key way for average Americans to feel a stake in our country; to exercise collective power against the rich and entitled; to feel a connection between their workplace and their democracy. Small wonder that Donald Trump, who claims to be the great protector of the American workers, has not a single word to say on protecting unions. I suspect that if more American workers were unionized, this glaring omission would have sunk his spurious appeal to them, bigly.
