Union Erosion Crumbled the Blue Wall
by Lane Windham

Here's my latest piece on why the decline in union membership, and collective bargaining, enabled Trump's victory From The Hill

Democrats had good reason to believe that Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would remain a solid fixture in their "blue wall," the bulwark of states that had voted their way in the previous six elections.

The race seemed tight in Pennsylvania in early November, but national polls consistently gave Clinton the edge, and hardly anyone thought Michigan and Wisconsin were truly in play. What a difference a couple of weeks makes. The thunder of that blue wall's crash has since shocked the world.

What brought the Democrats' wall down? Much of the post-election commentary blames the white working class. Economic anxiety was key, especially among the lower middle-income voters most likely to vote for Trump. Trump lassoed their fear of falling economically to regressive views on race, gender and immigrants. We now know that this strategy was enough to turn key states red, in part because many decent people became willing to look the other way. Almost no election analysis, however, has taken a deeper look at the structures that supported the blue wall in the first place.

Labor unions long served as the blue wall's load bearing bulwark, and their steady erosion finally allowed it to give way. It's not just that union members and their families tend to vote more Democratic. They did so again in 2016, albeit by smaller margins than for Obama.
What matters most is that we've reached a tipping point at which unions are too weak to effectively improve large numbers of workers' lives, and that void leaves working people vulnerable and angry in the face of tumultuous economic changes.

America has long had a fraught relationship with its unions. The idea of workers' collective power holds an uneasy seat within a culture that prizes an up-by-the-bootstrap mythology. Yet collective bargaining was central to the mid-twentieth century prosperity that Trump supporters idealize. Strong unions balanced corporate power and set higher wage and benefits standards not only for union members, but for much of the economy. Unions made sure that rising productivity translated into rising wages and so made sure that the economy's fruits were widely shared.
Inequality started to grow in the 1970s. That's when a more globalized and financialized economy took root, and when well-paid jobs in the manufacturing sector started to lose ground to far worse jobs in retail and service. Meanwhile, unions shrank and fewer workers benefitted from collective bargaining's equalizing effects.

Thirty years ago, nearly one in four working people in Wisconsin was a member of a union. Today, a mere eight percent have a union. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, union membership has dropped by half. Private sector union membership has reached a paltry 6.7 percent, a nadir not seen in the United States since 1900.

Unions did not just fade away, but came under heavy attack. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the state's GOP set their sights on unions in 2011, and effectively stripped unions of their base. Public-sector workers must now vote each year on unions and can't even volunteer to have dues deducted from their paychecks.The national offense against unions started decades earlier, however, when employers began to squeeze unionized workers and began to break labor law more frequently. Democrat after Democrat did too little to defend workers' access to unions, and so quickened labor's demise.

We are now living through the latest contest over the terms of a new global economic system. What will be the rules and whom will they serve? It's part of the same struggle that undergirded Brexit and is fueling right-wing parties throughout Europe. We find ourselves at a dangerous moment. Diverse and inclusive democracies thrive best when prosperity is broadly shared, yet today inequality thrives and backlash surrounds us.

The Republicans' sweep means that they will be a position to rewrite the rules for the new economy, and it's clear they will soon escalate their attacks against workers' unions. They will attempt to do to the nation's union members what they did to Wisconsin's union members.
Shoring up unions must be at the core of the Democrats' plans at a deeper and more meaningful level than at any time in the last 30 years. Our democracy depends on economic equality more than ever, and unions remain one of our best tools for achieving it.

Windham holds a PhD in history and is a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. Her book, Knocking on Labor's Door, is due out from UNC Press in 2017.

If not unions, then what?

If not unions, then what?

Opinion Editorial in Baltimore Sun:


Membership in organized labor, a tremendous force for ensuring broad prosperity, is at a 93-year low

January 28, 2013| By Lane Windham

You wouldn't know it from our nation's debate over Obamacare, but the U.S. has had government-supported health care for nearly 80 years. Not only that, but our nation bolsters a retirement level well beyond the thin safety net provided by Social Security, and it even ensures Americans a path to a family-supporting wage. And, no, I have not mistaken the U.S. for a socialist European nation.

Our government assures us these broad economic benefits by guaranteeing our right to form a labor union. Those among us who join a union — or who get a job with a company that matches the higher wages and benefits offered by its unionized competitors — effectively win a more robust social safety net through government-sanctioned collective bargaining. Thus, the U.S. has long relied on unions to do the kind of economic redistribution work which is shouldered by governments in other nations.

However, our nation is about to lose this leveling tool. We learned this month that the nation's rate of unionization is at a 93-year low. Only 11.3 percent of America's workers belong to a union, including a mere 6.6 percent of private-sector workers. In Maryland, union membership used to be above the national average, but in 2012 it fell below average to 10.6 percent. Much of the media coverage around this drop in union membership asks what this means for labor's future. The larger question, however, is what it means for America's future — how will our nation temper the inequities of today's new, global economy if we can no longer rely on unions to do that work for us?

Unions have long served as economic equalizers. From 1947 to 1972, the U.S. economy was the undisputed economic world leader, and our nation used unions to ensure that we spread that wealth around. Once union membership started falling, the income divide grew. Since 1973 the drop in union membership accounts for a full third of the growth of wage inequality among men, according to a recent study by scholars at Harvard and the University of Washington. Today, the income gap is larger than anything we've seen since before the Great Depression.

In fact, it was during the Great Depression that our nation struck a grand compromise to finally soften for its citizens the harshness of industrial capitalism. It was a bargain that had been in the works since the late 19th century, and we hammered out the details throughout the post-World War II period. America's citizens never got the kinds of universal health care programs, job insurance or wage guarantees that benefited European workers. Instead, we won very basic economic security through Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Plus we won the government's assurance that if we voted in a union election, the government would give legal backing to our efforts to win greater economic security from our employers.

However, too few of us were ever able to grab onto this economic life boat. It turns out that it is difficult to form a union, and employers have shrewdly upped their resistance over the decades. Employers routinely fire, harass and threaten workers who want to form unions, and U.S. labor law is too weak to stop them, according to Kate Bronfenbrenner at Cornell University. In fact, in 2000 Human Rights Watch declared that U.S. workers have effectively lost the freedom to form a union. However, labor law reform does not seem to be in the Obama administration forecast for the second term.

So, if not unions, then what's the new plan? What's the new institutional framework we will use to balance people's needs with those of corporations? If we're going to effectively scrap our nation's method of broad economic redistribution, what will we replace it with? A near 100-year low in unionization rates isn't just labor's problem. It's a problem for anyone who does not want to see U.S. economic inequality shred our nation's social fabric.

Lane Windham is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her email is lanewindham@gmail.com.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-28/news/bs-ed-unions-20130128_1_union-membership-labor-union-income-gap