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LABOR’S NEXT BIG MOMENT MAY FINALLY BE AT HAND  
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Timothy Noah
September 2, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Even if the movement isn’t rebounding quite yet, green shoots are
abounding—and presidential candidates ignore it at their peril. _

"Union yes!", by gwen (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

For my entire adult life, Labor Day has prompted commentators
to pronounce the labor movement dead
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Occasionally you’ll see somebody argue that organized labor is
regaining strength
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but the evidence is always anecdotal. Final word must go to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics’ annual report on union membership, which is
perennially, relentlessly, dismal. Union density (i.e., the percentage
of jobs covered by a union contract) is today half of what it was
[[link removed]] when those “labor
is dead” commentaries started appearing in the early 1980s. In the
private sector, union density is six percent, down from its historic
peak of 34 percent [[link removed]] at the
end of World War II. Excepting a tiny bump here or there, union
density has tumbled steadily downward since the 1950s.

I will now attempt to make a plausible case for optimism about
labor’s future. We begin with the assumption that union density,
however definitive, is a lagging indicator. Unions won’t come back
until union density comes back, but maybe something else—some kind
of catalyst—has to emerge first.

One such catalyst might be popularity. As recently as 2009, unions
were unpopular; Gallup showed only 48 percent
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them (against 45 who disapproved and seven percent who had no
opinion). That was an outlier; in most years labor’s approval rated
somewhere between 50 and 60 percent. But after 2009’s dismal
showing, labor’s approval rating started climbing. After Donald
Trump was elected president it climbed into the low 60s and then the
high 60s. This year, unions’ approval rating is 70 percent
[[link removed]], the highest it’s
been since the mid-1960s (with the exception of 2022, when it was 71
percent). People don’t just approve of unions; they like them _a
lot_. Even some Republicans—according to
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more than one-third—like labor unions. Among moderate Republicans,
more than half view unions favorably, and among conservative
Republicans more than one-quarter do.

Another catalyst, or indicator, of imminent recovery might be union
organizing. A new report
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the sociologists Ruth Milkman and Joseph Van Der Naald of City
University of New York says organizing is on the rise as well.
Petitions to the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, to hold
union elections rose after Joe Biden was elected president, especially
during the last three years, and so did union victories in NLRB
elections. Petitions and union victories had both mostly declined
during the previous 20 years.

CUNY’s statistics don’t include instances in which management
recognizes a union voluntarily based on the informal collection of
union authorization cards (“card check”). The Center for American
Progress claimed
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year that voluntary recognition is increasing, too, but it offered
only anecdotal evidence. According to the CUNY report, voluntary
recognitions today represent eight percent of all successful union
drives. That doesn’t seem very many. When a union asks the boss to
recognize it, the boss still usually says no.

Next, let’s consider demographics. Much like the Democratic party,
the labor movement is becoming more amenable to Joe College. Indeed,
the proportion of college grads who belong to a union now exceeds
slightly the proportion of high school grads (9.5 percent versus 9.2
percent, per CUNY). This reflects stepped-up organizing efforts in
prestige fields where wages are falling, such as journalism and higher
education, and, over the longer term, the larger role of public
employee unions, which scarcely existed before the 1960s. Another
likely driver is corporations’ growing solicitude since the 1970s
toward stockholders at the expense of employees.

I don’t know whether to count the gentrification of organized labor
a favorable indicator, as Noam Scheiber of _The New York
Times_ seems to
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or an unfavorable one. It will be a bad thing if it drives a deeper
financial wedge between so-called skilled (i.e., college-educated) and
unskilled labor. At the labor movement’s height, a union card was
the financial equivalent of a college degree. If a union card now
becomes, instead, a sort of accessory to a college degree, then the
result will be greater economic inequality.

But on the other hand: Unionization tends to breed more unionization.
As more college professors and newspaper reporters vote union, the
proletariat may resolve not to be left out. In the 1970s, economists
thought labor organizing increased economic inequality. That turned
out to be wrong
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Let’s hope it continues to be wrong. Labor strength has always
been, and, I believe, still remains, a central working-class concern.

Which brings us to the 2024 election. To become president, a
Democrat needs to win a working class majority
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That’s been my mantra. Lately, polls have shown support shifting
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Trump to Harris, which is good. But Harris still isn’t winning the
working class, and that’s bad. As Ruy Teixeira wrote
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Liberal Patriot, “Democrats Are Super Happy, Working Class Voters
Are Not.”

Teixeira cited a _Washington Post_-ABC News-Ipsos poll
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August 9 to 13 that showed Harris leading Trump among all registered
voters, 49 percent to 45 percent, but trailing Trump among working
class voters (defined as those who lack a college degree), 44 percent
to 51 percent. Biden lost this group by two percentage points in
2020, according to exit polls
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Harris is behind by seven. As with Biden in 2020, the problem appears
to be leakage among nonwhite (mainly Latino) working class voters. In
2020 Biden won nonwhite working class voters by 46 percentage points,
which sounds great until you consider that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won
this group by 50 percentage
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Harris, who is nonwhite, leads among that group by considerably less
than even Biden did: 29 percentage points. That’s really bad.

Look, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Harris can win without a working-class
majority, just as Biden did in 2020. Biden was the only Democrat to do
this going back 100 years. He made himself an exception because he was
running against Trump, who was mishandling the Covid pandemic in
spectacular fashion. Maybe Harris can repeat Biden’s trick. Trump
is, after all, the Republican nominee once again. He’s no longer
botching the government’s response to a deadly pandemic, but perhaps
his conviction on 34 felony counts, plus his increasingly erratic
personal behavior (most recently
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Arlington National Cemetery), will prompt some sort of equivalent
revulsion among college-educated voters of the sort that gave Biden
his crucial boost. Harris does a little better with college-educated
voters than Biden did.

Still, I wouldn’t count on it, because the overwhelming majority of
voters are _not _college graduates. As I noted last week, Harris has
a detailed labor platform
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to hand in the form of a 2022 report
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a task force she chaired on worker organizing. Yet I’ve never heard
Harris even say the words “worker organizing.” Trump has close to
hand Project 2025’s _Mandate for Leadership_
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which would, among other things, undermine union contracts, eliminate
the voluntary recognition of unions, invite states to opt out of
overtime rules, eliminate child labor protections … and so on.
(Click here [[link removed]] for an
overview by the AFL-CIO.) If voters start actually believing Trump’s
claim that he knows nothing about Project 2025, there’s always
Trump’s own terrible labor record
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president to fall back on. And don’t forget Trump telling Elon Musk
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less than a month ago: “You walk in, you say, ‘You want to
quit?’ They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company,
but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK, you’re all gone.
You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.’”

Especially today, Harris needs to publicize her strengths and
Trump’s weaknesses in supporting organized labor. Breezy
generalities won’t do the job. _The New York Times _reported
[[link removed]] last
week that Harris’s wealthier donors are trying to persuade her not
to raise their taxes. Lord only knows what they’ll say when they
find out she chaired a task force to strengthen and expand union
representation. But pledging to build on President Joe Biden’s
pro-labor policies, reciting specifics, is the fastest and best way to
reach working class voters whose support she needs. Things may be
looking up for labor, but without a Democrat in the White House its
winning streak won’t continue.

_Timothy Noah [[link removed]] is
a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence:
America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It._

The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking.

Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
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and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
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* Labor Day
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* Labor politics
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* Labor Organizing
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* Union density
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