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LABOR MILITANCY IS THE WAY TO INCREASE UNION MEMBERSHIP  
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C.J. Polychroniou
August 31, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ We need to rebuild the labor movement, and that means not going
back to the kind of unions that existed in the postwar era. We need
unions with a radical vision, unions that exert power in the workplace
and society. _

Member of United Auto Workers Local 4811strike at UCLA carrying "On
Strike" pickets, academic workers and supporters walked off the job
Tuesday on Tuesday, May 28, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA., Brian van der
Brug

 

With Labor Day 2024 upon us, it is important to critically reflect on
the current state of the U.S. labor movement and the challenges that
it faces in an environment where Big Business dominates the economy
and mainstream society continues to abide allegiance to the values of
a Lockean political culture in which ruthless individualism reigns
supreme. To put it mildly, without a strong labor movement and a
public spirit guiding our institutions, the country will never succeed
in realizing the vision of a just and fair society.

However, the news on the labor front is not very encouraging. The
share of U.S. workers who belong to a union has been declining since
the early 1980s—an era which coincides with the full swing of the
neoliberal counterrevolution and deindustrialization. In 1983
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the first year for which comparable data are available, the union
membership rate was 20.1 percent and declined to 11.1 percent in 2015.

In 2021
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the union membership rate was 10.3 percent and dropped to 10.1 percent
in 2022. In 2023 [[link removed]],
union membership declined even further to 10.0 percent, which is a
historic low.

The irony is that the United States has seen a “union boom” over
the last couple of years. Thousands of employees at Starbucks
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stores across the country have voted to unionize and workers at Amazon
warehouses
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and Trader Joe’s
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grad students
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and Uber and Lyft
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drivers also joined the unionization fight. But the data, as cited
above, tells a different story. The share of U.S. workers belonging to
a union continues to decline and is now at the lowest rate in history.
Today, organized labor in the United States is dominated by
public-sector employees
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five times higher than the 6 percent rate of private-sector employees.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious
class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its
supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union.

The United States
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is near the bottom among industrialized democracies when it comes to
union membership rates. The average level of union membership across
the European Union
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(EU) is 23 percent, but the average is held down by relatively low
levels of membership in some large EU states, such as Germany with 18
percent and France with 8 percent. However, even in countries where
union density is lower, such as in France, virtually all workers are
covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Denmark, Sweden and
Finland, union density is 70 percent. Incidentally, the Nordic
countries consistently rank among the happiest nations in the world.
In the latest World Happiness Report
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United States doesn’t even make the top 20 list. Trade union density
is even higher in Africa [[link removed]] and
most parts of Asia than it is in the United States.

Why is union membership in the United States so low? This is something
of an anomaly considering the fact that polls
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consistently reveal that majorities of U.S. adults see the decline in
union membership as bad for the country and for working people. It is
mostly ultra-conservatives and reactionary think tanks like the Hoover
Institution [[link removed]]
that believe that the decline of unions is good news.

Globalization, technology, and the transformation of an industrial
economy into a service-oriented society are the most common reasons
offered for the decline of U.S. unions. However, these explanations,
even when put together, are not sufficient in explaining why the U.S.
has one of the lowest union membership rates in the world. Europe
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is much more open than the United States, according to the
International Monetary Fund. Thus, globalization alone cannot be an
explanation for the general decline in unionization in the U.S.
Europe’s technology lags behind the U.S., but it is not technology
but rather institutional arrangements and intentional policy decisions
that succeed in altering in significant ways the balance between
capital and labor that can explain why union membership has plateaued
at 10 percent among workers in the United States. We must acknowledge
that neoliberalism itself is not a monolithic process; rather, it is
affected by a variety of domestic pressures and thus plays out
differently in different national contexts.

In the U.S., it is politics—manifested in the form of a vicious
class struggle orchestrated from the economic elite and its
supporters—that keeps workers from joining or creating a union. The
basic rights of U.S. workers to unionize and engage in collective
bargaining have been under attack throughout the history of U.S.
capitalism. Strikes
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figured prominently during the height of the industrialization era and
well into the twentieth century, with immigrant workers from Ireland,
Italy and Germany being at the forefront of labor radicalism, but so
did employer and government violence directed against striking
workers. The U.S. has the most violent labor history
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in the western world. The U.S. government may be the only government
in the industrialized world that has engaged in systematic massacres
of striking workers
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The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act,
was passed in July 1935. The Act
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whose broad intention was to guarantee employees “the right to
self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to
bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing,
and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective
bargaining or other mutual aid and protection” was probably
instrumental in the dramatic increase in unionization rates that was
witnessed from the late 1930s to the 1950s, hitting its apex at 32
percent; yet, its failures are well established and can, conversely,
be attributed to the decline in private sector unionization rates that
started taking place following their peak
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in the late 1950s. In fact, NLRA, however ironic this may sound, may
be responsible for the creation of “a vibrant non-union sector
instead
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The Supreme Court, of course, has also been instrumental in creating a
“vibrant non-union sector.” The Court has consistently made
decisions that limit union power, including the right to strike.
Rather typical here was the stance taken by the union-busting Supreme
Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
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when she said that employees who strike in support of union bargaining
“gamble
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their jobs.

In no other country in the western world is anti-union consulting as
huge of an industry as it is in the United States.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world has the right to
strike
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been as severely undermined as in the U.S. In fact, U.S. labor law is
an outright failure when it comes to safeguarding one of the key
International Labor Organization (ILO) principles, which is to
guarantee the right to strike, as it allows employers to enjoy the
right to replace workers
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who strike for better wages and conditions.

Indeed, in no other country in the western world is anti-union
consulting as huge of an industry as it is in the United States. As
shocking as it may sound, it’s estimated that employers spend more
than $400 million per year in hiring “union-avoidance
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Moreover, “the party of the people” is equally guilty for throwing
U.S. workers under the bus. All three living Democratic presidents
(Jimmy Carter [[link removed]], Barack
Obama, and Bill Clinton) let down unions
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and certainly were no friends to working people. In fact, they worked
ceaselessly to promote neoliberalism and overall policies that were a
disaster for labor, with Clinton
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leading the pack.

But no narrative for the dismal state of unionization in the U.S. can
be fully complete if the role that unions themselves played in
undermining the vision and the goals of the labor movement can be left
out. As David N. Gibbs points out in his outstanding book _The Revolt
of the Rich_
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largest union in the country, the AFL-CIO, “was conceived on very
conservative terms as an institutional reaction against leftist
strains within the labor movement” and one of its main activities
was working with the Central Intelligence Agency in fighting communism
both at home and abroad. Getting rid of class struggle unionism was a
primary objective of the AFL-CIO even when the union had begun its
steady decline. Worse still, the ties between mafia and labor unions,
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which go back to the early 1930s, had reached such a high point by the
late 1950 that government investigation on labor racketeering got
underway that in the ensuing decades would lead to convictions of
major labor leader and mob figures. As James B. Jacobs argues in
_Mobsters, Unions, and the Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor
Movement_
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“labor racketeering” was a major feature of U.S. organized labor
and contributed in a very big way to the decline of U.S. trade
unionism.

We need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the struggle
to create a fair and just society.

The U.S. labor movement has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts
over the last few years, although the truth of the matter is that
union membership remains stagnant. The challenges ahead are indeed
immense as there is no alternative left party in the U.S. and no
social democratic traditions which rely on trade unions for softening
the injustices inflicted by the capitalist system. U.S. capitalism is
brutal and the reactionary forces, which lead all the way up to the
Supreme Court, are extremely powerful, well organized, and massively
funded.

Yet, we need unions as they are absolutely a critical force in the
struggle to create a fair and just society. We need to rebuild the
labor movement, and that means not going back to the kind of unions
that existed in the postwar era. We need unions with a radical vision,
unions that exert power in the workplace and society. There is no
reason why a service-based economy, which is mainly associated with
low wages and insecure employment, should offer less opportunities for
union membership. In this context, there is much to learn from the
experience of the Union of Southern Service Workers,
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militant action on the job against low pay and dangerous work
conditions and to demand a seat at the table.

Rejecting business unionism and renewing in turn labor militancy
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the only way to increase union membership and fight back labor
exploitation and inequality.

 

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has
taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in
Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice:
Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A
collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021),
and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists
(Verso, 2021).
 
 

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