At The Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman make a strong case that Democrats should start talking a lot more about the importance of unions and the party’s support for them. Pointing to surveys showing positive attitudes towards unions at decades-long highs (one Gallup survey shows 71% favorability), they note that the time is ripe for contrasting the party’s general pro-union stance with the GOP’s ideological resistance to the labor movement.
In one sense, the recent wave of unionization efforts, and what appears to be a positive public reception, suggest profound changes in how most Americans identify their place in the economy. I’d speculate that more Americans are identifying with fellow workers than with management, perhaps amplified by workplace conflicts during the covid pandemic, and almost certainly related to inexorably increasing inequality in this country.
Of course, the Democrats can also do more than just talk about unions. With control of Congress currently and possibly again after November, the party can move forward legislation that makes it easier to organize and harder for companies to punish workers who do so. The Democrats’ general reluctance to foreground the GOP’s anti-union attitudes as a way of peeling off white working class voters in particular has been a source of deep frustration for me, an attitude that speaks to the enduring hold of neoliberal, pro-management beliefs among a substantial number of Democrats. At this point, such reluctance has become self-defeating, a refusal to read a sea change in public sentiment and the reality that the Democrats are stronger when unions are. In this sense, the party’s ability to respond to a significant shift in the general public’s support for unions is also a test of the party’s broader ability to adapt and change with the times.
This test is all the more important when you consider that unions, and public support for them, is a clear countervailing trend to the reactionary movement led by Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans that seeks to undo the last 50 years (at least) of social and economic progress. It’s a reminder that the American majority wants to move forwards, not backwards, toward greater equality and fairness in American society, and that as frightening as it is, the MAGA movement is a minority backlash to real progress and commonly-held ideals. From this perspective, it’s even more important that Democrats lean into the pro-union tide, and consider that the tools for defeating the GOP’s authoritarian movement may be closer at hand than they thought.