Labor and the Democratic Party

Hamilton Nolan has a good piece here on the state of labor vis-a-vis politics, both in terms of the limits of what the present Democratic Party can even do and the identity that so many unionists have as Republicans that trump their union identity.

Did Joe Biden earn his self-proclaimed title as the ​“most pro-union president” of our lifetimes? Sure, probably. His genuine attentiveness to union demands certainly exceeded that of any Democratic president in the past half century. His NLRB, under the leadership of General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, has worked mightily to make labor law both friendlier to workers and something that actually gets enforced — at least within the strictures of that agency’s inadequate resources. His Federal Trade Commission, under Commissioner Lina Khan, has attacked corporate power with unprecedented fervor. Biden shook loose billions to save union pensions and stood on a picket line with striking auto workers and notably did not use his power to shut down the recent longshoremen’s strike, when he could have. (He did crush the railroad workers’ right to strike in 2022 — a conspicuous sellout of the labor movement, but one that all of his political peers would have done as well.) 

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would revolutionize America’s broken labor laws in a way that might truly revive organized labor’s power, did not pass during the Biden administration, despite being the stated top legislative priority of the labor movement. Even without a crystal ball I can tell you that the PRO Act will never pass until the filibuster is abolished. It is too substantial, its reforms too meaningful. Both the Republicans and the more pro-business Democrats would be pressured to an extreme degree to do anything to stop it. Any conversation about the PRO Act must therefore also be a conversation about ending the filibuster. Until unions make it clear to their political allies that these things are a package deal, it will be easy for Democrats to promise their support without having to do anything too controversial. The AFL-CIO could save itself a great deal of empty words by changing its conversation about the PRO Act into a conversation about the filibuster — a conversation that might actually do some good. 

The greatest political value of the PRO Act at the present moment is that it is a handy yardstick for understanding which politicians are and are not aligned with labor. It is the quickest way to check whether the pretty words coming out of a politician’s mouth about their love for the working class are true or false. Failure to support the PRO Act is the closest thing we have to a functional bullshit detector for labor issues. And the 2024 election season demands such a tool more than ever. 

Alas, too many unionists just don’t care that much about their unions.

Here is one thing we can say for sure about union members who vote for Trump: The fact that they are union members is not the most important part of their own identity. If it were, they could be easily persuaded not to vote for Trump, a literal billionaire scab who we have already seen act like a typical anti-labor Republican during his term in the White House. Hell, J.D. Vance gave a speech opposing the PRO Act just a few days ago! The interesting question here is not whether these guys are full of shit when they ask union members for support; the interesting question is why many union members care so little about being union members that they allow themselves to be tempted into the Republican camp. Their competing identities — as macho guys, or as racists, or as anti-elites, or as Christians, or whatever — have overtaken any hold that their identity as a union member may have had on their hearts and minds. That is a problem that cannot be solved by any politicians. It can only be solved by the labor movement itself.

This trend, which has the potential to decimate the already tenuous toehold that organized labor has in Washington, is a blaring siren alerting unions that they must drastically improve on two fronts. The first is in the political education of their members. Clearly, endorsements by almost every union president are not that convincing to a significant portion of union members. Why? Well, in many cases, the unions are not democratically run, they do not frequently meet with and solicit the political input of members, and the members feel alienated from the decisions of leadership, causing them to care little for who their union president wants them to vote for. 

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Second, and even more importantly, unions need to organize many, many new union members. Organized labor has wasted the presidential term of a friendly, pro-union president by allowing union density to decline during the time that Biden has been in office. You often hear unions bragging about the fact that public opinion polls say that their popularity is at a 60-year high. What you do not hear them bragging about is the fact that union density has dropped from 10.8% in 2020 to 10.0% today. What use is popularity if nine out of ten working people don’t even have a union? Nothing is as important to the American labor movement as turning around the decline of union density. By that metric, the past four years have been squandered. And there is no reason to think that the political landscape of the next four years will be as friendly as the years that just slipped by.

It’s very easy to say unions should organize more and mostly they should, but it’s not actually clear that would work out very well. It’s so hard to win NLRB elections, for example. But leaving that aside, political education by unions is absolutely abysmal. Like liberals generally, they have dropped much in the way of institution building and instead just try to get people to show up for the election. But you need much more than this. With unions, this is extra frustrating because you actually have the institution to do the education! Union newsletters used to be really good around these things, or at least OK. But they have completely given up the ghost of even trying. A few years ago, I received the Communication Workers of America “newspaper” which at this point was nothing but a glossy cover and a list of contracts negotiated. What the hell even is that?

Now, the reality is that at this point, union democracy might lead to more Trumpism. That’s what happened with the Teamsters, where Sean O’Brien was the democracy candidate and steered the Teamsters straight to Trump, quite possibly channeling his membership. So let’s not pretend like democracy is going to lead to Democracy. But like most liberal institutions, union leaders just want things to go back to how they used to be with the institutions working like they once did. Having a really good labor president just isn’t enough, nor is increasingly ineffective attempts to get members to vote for Democrats. We need to start over. The upcoming overturning of the National Labor Relations Board might force people to do so, but at this point, I will believe it when I see it. And I don’t think we are anywhere near having our minds around what it would mean to start over. And the need to start over is just as true if Harris wins as if Trump. As I said the other day, without better and stronger institutions that do real political education, we might squeak out a win today but we are not going to keep winning forever.