Correct and Incorrect Conclusions About Democrats and Unions
It's the union density, stupid.
Joe Biden has been an uncommonly pro-union president. He has appointed strong pro-labor regulators, he has saved union pensions, he walked a picket line, he, in general, expended political capital on the interests of unions in a way that even previous Democratic presidents have not in my lifetime. Yet after almost four years of the Biden presidency, unions are still in decline. What does it mean?
Many people are going to take the wrong lesson from this. So let me say briefly what the correct lesson is.
Eric Levitz wrote a big piece in Vox making the case that “The Democrats’ pro-union strategy has been a bust” because the share of union members voting Democratic appears to be declining. I am not here to write a takedown of Levitz, who is a capable and thorough reporter; rather, I want to try to push back on people drawing bad conclusions from the facts that Levitz lays out.
The most misguided and damaging conclusion possible—a conclusion that, I assure you, many parts of the Democratic establishment will come to—is: “Biden did a lot to help unions and he was not rewarded with a huge increase in union votes. Therefore helping unions is a political dead end and the Democrats should look elsewhere for their allies.” The first and most profound mistake that this viewpoint makes is that it regards voters as working for political parties and not vice versa. In other words, increasing the power of working people relative to capital should be one of existential purposes of the Democratic Party (because the other party has the opposite purpose) and to give up on that purpose is to give the party one less good reason to exist. The second and more specific mistake it makes is that it gives up the game too quickly. It is like quitting a marathon because you started sweating in the first mile. Buddy, this is gonna go on a lot longer than you think.
I have long made the case that the fate of the political left is tied to the fate of organized labor. A Bernie Sanders-esque candidate will always hit his head on an electoral ceiling as long as unions are marginalize in America, because union membership is a sort of demonstration of genuine democratic socialism in action that changes the electorate itself over time. The fact that the Democratic Party seems to be leaking union voters to the right is a real issue. But it is not the underlying issue. The underlying issue is that America needs more union members. And four years of a Biden administration has not been enough to produce that result.
In the 1950s, one in three American workers was a union member, and today, one in ten American workers is a union member. More than 60 years of declining union density. This is the core problem that we need to solve. One element of solving that—and not the most important element!—will be Democratic electoral political wins, because the Republican Party is existentially opposed to increasing labor power. Democratic control of Washington is important to reviving the power of organized labor in the same way that having a nice, well-maintained playing field is important to winning the World Series. Yes, you need it, but there are a lot of other and frankly more vital steps, as well. I apologize for all the sports metaphors. But these things often get twisted in the public conversation.
Here is something that is much more alarming than the swings in which party union members are voting for: During the Biden presidency, union density declined from 10.8% to 10% flat. This means that having the most pro-union president of my lifetime was not only insufficient to increase union density—it wasn’t even enough to stop union density from going down. This is not “surprising,” necessarily (I wrote a book about why this might happen, if you’re interested), but it should be causing an enormous amount of chagrin inside the AFL-CIO and the headquarters of America’s biggest unions. Because it is clear, cold proof that Washington will not save us. The only people who will save unions are: unions. Time to wake the fuck up.
Union leaders will tell you that America’s damaging, anti-union labor laws would be fixed if we could only pass the PRO Act, and then that would allow us to organize widely. Sure. The PRO Act is not going to pass until 1) there is a Democratic trifecta in Washington and 2) the filibuster is eliminated. Those things are not about to happen. So we need to focus on the world we have. The labor movement needs to stop desperately jiggling the handles of locked doors while the monster advances on us. Increasing union density in America will mean organizing millions of new union members. The only way to do that is for unions to spend a shitload more money on new organizing. There are no tricks for this, my friends.
The great labor researcher Chris Bohner calculated that “ only 0.10% of workers in the private sector had the opportunity to vote for a union in an NLRB election” in the past year. That’s disturbing, since the NLRB is the most energetic pro-union agency in the entire Biden administration. Yet it is not sufficient to save us.
That union election rate used to be more than ten times higher in the 1970s. So, when union leaders huddle up to discuss how much more of their (ample) budgets they need to dedicate to new organizing, the starting point for that discussion should be: Ten times more. This points to the reason why the meaningful conversation that we all need to be having, the interesting and productive conversation, is about the question of where we will get the resources necessary to do the new union organizing necessary to turn around the decline in union density. The best way to get a lot of voters to appreciate the impact of pro-union policies is to have millions of people going through union organizing campaigns. Until then, this shit is pretty theoretical to most people.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CANNOT EXPECT TO REAP THE POLITICAL BENEFITS OF PRO-UNION POLICIES UNTIL THE LABOR MOVEMENT ACTUALLY STOPS ITS DECLINE.
INCREASING UNION DENSITY IS THE GOAL OF ALL OF THIS AND WE ARE NOT DOING IT.
THE LABOR MOVEMENT MUST DEDICATE THE RESOURCES NECESSARY TO WIDESPREAD NEW UNION ORGANIZING OR ELSE UNION POWER WILL CONTINUE TO DECLINE.
Please think of the points above whenever this conversation comes up, and not some bullshit that Democratic party consultants or disinterested political pundits or lazy union leaders who don’t want to do the work of organizing are saying. Thank you.
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Related reading: Ten Times This; We Are Failing; Ambition, Yall.
Yesterday I was on Majority Report making some of these same points. If you’re interested in the real prospects of the labor movement being a tool to transform America, you might like my book, “The Hammer,” which is available for order wherever books are sold. If you want to hear me talk about this in person, I’ll be speaking at the NY Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan on Sunday, November 3.
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New organizing is hard work, and can often take years. Too many labor leaders seem to think that it stops with the election. It’s not a new unit until that first contract happens. Bargaining a contract is a different skill (and different structure) than organizing the new unit. We need the nationals to provide bargaining support, organizing training and templates (like how to build a table team, how to build CAT, how to build a comms structure, etc).
Labor also needs to do a better job at political education. I am a member of my staff union and the political organizer for a small education local in the Midwest. (I can honestly say that it has taken *years* for members to begin to think about politics from an organizing perspective, in part because the Nationals and Internationals don’t.). Thinking about politics as more than just a horse race for votes means talking about politics at every member meeting, every member update, aligning political decisions with bargaining priorities AND the local thinking about how they as an institution interact and relate with communities. One of the reasons we have Trump-loving union members (aside from the racism and sexism and Islamophobia) is because union leadership talks a lot about elections and nothing else. This means that union members no longer connect their political identity with their union identity.
Union leaders need to push back, loudly and often, on the idea that the only role a union plays is to bargain a contract that is only focused on financial compensation and to provide representation. So we need stronger internal organizing campaigns as well. And those have to be done at the local level, by local members.
Rank and file also sometimes don’t seem to understand that *they* are the union and that a union is, at least in theory, a democratic institution. Too often I have seen union members complain about the way their union is acting, yet won’t even run for steward. Complaining while not taking action (even if it’s unsuccessful) means you will accept the way things are. I highly recommend checking out Labor Notes for anyone interested in starting down the path of union leadership.
Finally, I just feel it’s critical to reinforce that shifting the expectations that members have around politics takes fucking time and a shit ton of work. Silver bullet solutions do not exist. That also means unions cannot rely on a Sanders-style elected to save us. We have to save ourselves. We have to start November 6 talking about and organizing around our expectations for local and national electeds.
Organizing takes the political will of the top leadership ( not rhetorical pronouncements) to focus the entire union organization from the national to locals on growth. It needs significant resources (greater than it spends on politics as a baseline), and a strategy to build density in industries or scale organizing so it can best change workers lIves in bargaining.