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KAMALA HARRIS IS NOT DOING WELL WITH UNION VOTERS  
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Chris Bohner
November 2, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ What explains Kamala Harris’s poor numbers with voters who belong
to unions? The decline in real wages for union members under Biden may
have something to do with it. _

Kamala Harris holds campaign rally at IBEW Local 890 November 1,
2024, in Janesville, Wisconsin., Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

 

As the election mercifully draws to a close, I’ve been tracking the
polls to see how Kamala Harris is doing with union voters in swing
states and nationally. Here’s what I found:

As the chart above shows, since 2008, union voters have been edging
away from the Democratic Party in many swing states. Of immediate
concern, Harris appears to be trailing Joe Biden’s level of union
support in crucial swing states like Michigan and Nevada and hovering
at 50% in Pennsylvania.

 

What is driving Harris’s troubling lack of union support (if the
polls are to be believed)? While some media reports have suggested
that it may be motivated by racism and sexism within labor’s ranks,
I would be surprised if it is any worse than the general population of
voters (and unions tend to promote higher tolerance and reduce gender
and racial pay gaps
[[link removed]]).

Another line of thought outlined in a provocative article by Eric
Levitz
[[link removed]] at _Vox_ (paywalled,
but worth $5) argues that “the Democrats’ pro-union strategy has
been a bust.”

[T]o prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing
further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing
trade unions. . . . The Biden administration appears to have embraced
this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation,
Biden bailed out
[[link removed]] the
Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to
350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed
a staunchly pro-union federal labor board
[[link removed]], encouraged
union organizing
[[link removed]] at
Amazon, walked a picket line
[[link removed]] with
the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade
[[link removed]] and education
policy
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the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major
changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying.
In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis,
[[link removed]] Biden
has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Levitz concludes, however, that “the political return on
Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.”
Surveying a range of academic studies on union voting behavior, Levitz
notes that the ability of unions to shape union members’ political
identity has been declining or is exaggerated.

This point was also vividly illustrated in Lainey Newman and Theda
Skocpol’s marvelous book
[[link removed]] _Rust
Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away From the
Democratic Party_. They show how unions played a key role in union
members’ social life and community, creating a solid political
identity aligned with the Democratic Party. As the social footprint of
unions declined (aided and abetted by Democratic support for trade
policies), the Right filled the political vacuum with gun clubs and
Tea Party social gatherings.

There is another reason for the apparent disconnect between
Biden/Harris and union voters: the Biden labor reforms benefitted
unions _institutionally_,_ _but many of these policies haven’t
impacted the vast majority of members’ working lives in a tangible
way (yet).

 

For example, Biden’s overhaul of the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) is potentially transformative for union organizing, but few
union members know what it does or why it is important. The NLRB is
not present in their working lives except for the small number of
union members engaged in an unfair labor practice strike or organizing
their workplace through the NLRB. There is also a time lag in key
Biden labor legislation, like the union construction jobs that will be
created from project labor agreements in the infrastructure
legislation.

I’m very sympathetic to the line of thought that argues Harris is
losing the working-class vote (including union members) because of her
failure to embrace loudly and advance populist economic policies.
I’ve found the writings by folks affiliated with the Center for
Working Class Politics
[[link removed]] and Ruy Teixeira’s
articles at _Liberal Patriot
[[link removed]]_ (minus
the cultural conclusions) particularly informative.

There may be a more obvious answer to the union voting problem. In
a _Bloomberg_/Morning Consult poll
[[link removed]] conducted
October 16-20 in the seven swing states, voters were asked the
following question: “Thinking about your personal financial
situation, would you say you are better off under the Biden
administration or were you better off under the Trump
administration?”

Union households believe they were financially better off under the
Trump administration than they were under the Biden administration by
an 11% margin. Incidentally, union voters narrowly favored Harris
over Donald Trump in the poll by a 50%-46% margin.

So were union workers better off economically under Biden or Trump?
According to one line of thought, workers are suffering from a kind of
false consciousness. Here’s how a recent _New York Times_ article
[[link removed]] posed
the question:

Have Americans’ paychecks kept up with the cost of living over the
past several years? It is a surprisingly difficult question to answer.
According to most Americans, the answer is a clear “no.” In polls
[[link removed]] and
interviews ahead of the presidential election, people of virtually all
ideologies and income levels say inflation has made it harder to make
ends meet, eclipsing whatever raises they have managed to win from
their employers. According to economic data, the answer appears, at
least on the surface, to be “yes.”

I spent some time with the reams of economic data at the Department of
Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to determine how union
workers’ real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) fared under Biden
vs. Trump. After struggling to get a clear answer, I realized that
this is a highly complex question, and that there are many
methodologies and indicators one can use.

 

The Brookings Institution has an informative article
[[link removed]] breaking
down the complexity of the real wage question, concluding that
“different ways of calculating real pay can lead to conflicting
conclusions about whether pay has kept up with inflation.” In
addition, Brookings has an online interactive tool
[[link removed]] where
you can run different scenarios using different economic indicators.

Nevertheless, I settled on the BLS’s Economic Cost Index because it
breaks out wage and salary data by union and nonunion workers and has
a handy index that adjusts for inflation. According to the BLS:

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) measures the change in the hourly
labor cost to employers over time. The ECI uses a fixed “basket”
of labor to produce a pure cost change, free from the effects of
workers moving between occupations and industries and includes both
the cost of wages and salaries and the cost of benefits.

Adjusted for inflation, wages and salaries for union workers
(excluding benefits) in all industries declined under the Biden
administration (Q1.2021–Q3.2024) and increased under the Trump
administration (Q1.2017–Q4.2020).

Here are union and nonunion real hourly wages and salaries over time:

An important qualifier to this data, pointed out by some economists
[[link removed]],
is that the “pandemic and downturn led to a spurious rise/fall in
average wage due to composition effects, as low-wage workers
disproportionately lost jobs in 2020, and gained them back in 2021.”
In other words, average real wages went up under Trump because many
unemployed low-wage workers were not counted in the wage data.

But as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out
[[link removed]],
“Union workers had more job security during the pandemic . . . [and]
industries with lower unionization rates tended to experience greater
job loss during the pandemic.” So the wage experience of union
members may be different from that of nonunion workers.

Nevertheless, the decline in real wages for union members under Biden
— at least according to the Employer Cost Index — helps explain
why many union voters in the swing states believe they were
financially better off under Trump than Biden.

Of course, inflation resulted from the pandemic and broken supply
chains. Given a divided Congress and lack of control over monetary
policy, I’m skeptical that Biden could do much about it. However,
using the Employer Cost Index, real wages did indeed decline for union
workers due to the corrosive impact of inflation.

 

In addition, union wages are stickier than nonunion wages because of
collective-bargaining agreements (many of which do not have
cost-of-living increases). So as inflation soared under Biden, union
workers were bound by contracts that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be
renegotiated to catch up to the increase in the cost of living. The
flip side is that unions have negotiated large wage increases in the
latest round of bargaining, and many union workers will likely see
significant increases in real wages under the next presidential term
(and hopefully, Trump will not be there to take credit for it).

Whatever the cause of the ebbing support of union members for Harris,
it is crucial for the labor movement that she wins. As I’ve
argued elsewhere
[[link removed]], labor
is one or two bad election cycles from an extinction-level event. The
labor movement needs four more years to take advantage of the Biden
labor reforms, organize more members into unions, and rebuild its
political power to push for policies that address the real economic
anxieties of the working class. That won’t be possible under a Trump
administration.

_CHRIS BOHNER is a union researcher and activist. His work appears at
Radish Research [[link removed]]Digging in the
soil for the roots of labor's decline and revivial. _

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

_Subscribe to Jacobin. [[link removed]]_

* elections
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* Kamala Harris
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* Labor
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* wages
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* unions
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