To continue the union theme of my previous post, I wanted to talk a little about this fascinating piece from last month’s Atlantic magazine. Titled “Organized Labor’s Growing Class Divide,” it tells a fraught story that in some ways offers some strains of hope. Although unionization across the U.S. economy has plummeted over the past 40 years, particularly in the private sector, white-collar workers are currently forming unions in numbers that defy the overall decline in labor organizing. Some 90,000 people in “professional and technical occupations” joined unions last year, and the number of workers in unions in "law, arts, design, entertainment, sports and media" increased from 4% in 2010 to 7% in 2017.
A remarkable, if explicable, development that this piece highlights is the growing divide in the success of unionizing in the above-referenced areas when compared to industries we more commonly associate with union efforts, such as manufacturing. In an ironic twist of history, it turns out that the very inequalities that are tearing at the fabric of our country are also creating a divide in labor organizing. The article notes that while lesser-skilled workers in places like auto plants are less able to find other jobs if their company (illegally) punishes them for organizing efforts, workers in white collar industries have higher confidence that they’ll be able to find another job elsewhere. Moreover, a higher proportion of white collar workers organizing these days are younger and so less likely to have families that they need to support, and that might limit their ability and willingness to gamble with their job prospects. It also makes the basic point that white collar work is generally less physically demanding, and so workers literally have more energy outside work to do union organizing.
The article also points out structural changes in the economy, particularly since the Great Recession, that are feeding this disparity: out of around 12 million jobs created, more than two-thirds went to workers with a B.A., so that “[b]lue-collar workers [. . . ] are competing for a smaller and smaller share of jobs in the economy, and thus may feel less willing to commit to labor drives.”
I’m obviously pro-union, but the larger principle I’m arguing for goes beyond the elemental structure of labor power embodied by unions. The power balance between an employer and employee will always be skewed to the employer; we can either embrace this fact with the free market fundamentalists, and accept the downward spiral in wages and economic success that results, or we can choose to see that employment is a basic human right, that economic power is political power, and that the solution to this imbalance is for the many who are employed to band together to get a fair shake out of the few who employ them. And if that weren't enough, the rise of Trump and the authoritarian right can be seen as a direct result of a steady diminishment of American prosperity that has been abetted by the de-unionization of the American workforce (as I argued in my last piece).
My utopian hope is that the principles of solidarity and fairness that drive white collar workers to form and join unions will also lead them to reach across the economic divide and support similar efforts by blue-collar workers. Self-interest should also be a motivation: these are not competitors for their jobs, but fellow citizens who, at the most basic level, will be more powerful political allies against an oligarchic mindset that has conquered the Republican Party and largely neutralized the labor traditions of the Democrats. You can't make political change if you don't make alliances based on common interests; wanting sound employment at fair pay is one of the commonest.
