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).
Another line of thought outlined in a provocative article by Eric Levitz 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 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, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with 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, 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 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 and Ruy Teixeira’s articles at Liberal Patriot (minus the cultural conclusions) particularly informative.
There may be a more obvious answer to the union voting problem. In a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll 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 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 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 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 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, 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, “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, 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 Digging in the soil for the roots of labor's decline and revivial.
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