Electoral and Non-Electoral Politics: Not A Zero-Sum Game

Gordon Lafer makes several great points in response to the critique of organized labor that has emerged because of the failure in Wisconsin. First, the idea that it’s a bad idea to engage in electoral politics in response to union-busting is bizarre:

Really? The limitations of electoral politics are obvious, but the assumption that electoral strategies per se are always wrong is hard to fathom. The loss in Wisconsin is very serious. But that loss would be the same if unions had forsworn the recall. Around 175,000 employees would still be stripped of union rights, with all that entails for them personally and for the material and organizational basis for progressive mobilization. And while the electoral loss no doubt emboldened anti-union conservatives, not challenging the governor would have conveyed much the same message: It’s politically safe to follow Walker’s example—after all, the unions didn’t even have the guts to take him on! Labor leaders confronted a genuinely hard choice: roll the dice on the recall, which everyone knew would be an expensive and uphill battle, or give up.

For that matter, how should we account for last fall’s referendum in Ohio, where voters overturned a copycat law modeled on Wisconsin’s? The Ohio labor movement chose an electoral strategy—and won big. Was that also a “horrible mistake”? If not, what—besides the outcome—makes the Wisconsin choice obviously wrong, a crime instead of a tragedy?

Precisely so. The result of abjuring electoral politics would be that things would be the same in Wisconsin and much worse in Ohio, unless you buy the theory that a media campaign would force John Boehner to pass single-payer.

In addition, the idea that unions can’t organize because they care about statutory protections for organizing, care about the outcomes of elections, and have too much bureaucracy runs into the problem that not every union is the AFL-CIO, and there’s no evidence that more radical strategies in fact lead to more effective organizing:

Polls show that 40 million non-union American workers wish they had a union in their workplace. This is unsurprising—all other things being equal, workers with a union make 15 percent more and have a 20-25 percent better chance of getting healthcare or pensions than similar workers who have no union. The top reason that more Americans aren’t union members is not because they’re alienated; it’s because the anti-union industry is so aggressive (almost 20,000 Americans a year are economically punished for supporting unions in their workplace), and the law is so toothless that workers correctly fear for their jobs if they try to organize. After all, if the real problem was overpaid union bureaucrats, then radical unions like the Wobblies or United Electrical workers—unburdened by highly paid staff or Democratic politics—should be meeting greater success in organizing. But, of course, they are not. The problem is not what unions are doing; it’s the coercive power of employers.

Plenty of other good points too. [via]