Last year, Democrats took control of the legislative and executive branches in Virginia for the first time in a generation, bringing to fruition an electoral re-alignment many years in the making. Yet despite its political power, the Democratic leadership has decided to retreat from a legislative initiative to repeal the state’s right-to-work law, which means that union employees will continue being able to join unions without paying dues — a long-standing anti-labor strategy to starve unions of funding.
As Eric Levitz writes at the Intelligencer, this decision was based on a surely-unscientific and biased survey of CEO’s in the state who pointed to a likely loss of jobs to right-to-work states, while failing to weigh the potential economic benefits of higher-paid workers who could afford more goods and services.
While this particular story involves a single state — one with its own particularly strong anti-labor history — there are warning signs for the Democratic Party at large when Virginia Democrats fail to acknowledge the importance of strengthening the labor movement. The GOP has long seen smashing unions as key to gaining and maintaining power, despite the fact that many of the working-class voters it purports to represent have been well-served by organized labor. Of course, Democrats across the nation have enacted their own betrayals of the labor movement over the years, including President Obama’s difficult-to-understand unwillingness to back a card-check bill early in his administration — a simple change in law that could have helped jump-start organizing by working people as the economy struggled out of a recession caused by some of the richest and most powerful economic interests in America.
What’s particularly galling to me, though, isn’t the economic stupidity of not doing everything possible to boost working people at a time of obscene inequality and stagnant wages, when strengthening the earning power of the working class would both help them and the economy at large. It’s the fact that Democrats, even moderate, labor-skeptical types in Virginia, would still refuse to understand that the failure to court, strengthen, and support unions has helped ready us for the ongoing Trump disaster and what increasingly feels like a life-and-death struggle to stop authoritarianism from taking root in the United States. The current president can court the support of working-class Americans in part because so many of these workers see no other power in the nation willing to fight for them. Without a union, or a concept of labor power, they feel atomized and powerless; rather than joining together to make change, they’ve been convinced that the only way to change things is by putting a strongman in charge to bring order to what feels like a chaotic and unfair economy.
A country with a strong labor union would be far less vulnerable to the false promises and authoritarian pretensions of a leader like Donald Trump. Workers would see themselves as powerful, rather than in need of a crooked real estate developer to save them. When Democrats fail to fully support working people’s economic aspirations, they self-destructively help create the conditions of their own political doom, alienating those who should be allies and degrading those allies’ ability to act as bulwarks of democracy.
Instead, we see Democrats like those in Virginia choosing the interests of CEOs over blue-collar workers. This chillingly echoes a phenomenon that I fear we will see more of as the 2020 election ramps up — corporate America determining that it would rather accept authoritarian rule so long as it guaranties low taxes and docile labor, rather than democracy and the specter of a pro-labor Democratic president who doesn’t value money higher than human lives and happiness. It is disheartening to see that some Virginia Democrats can’t see the larger stakes here, and would rather enable local businessmen to squeeze working people, even if the political cost is to weaken the movement to turn back the authoritarian GOP.