UW-Madison researcher predicts that income gap will catalyze union comeback

[Teamster Jeff]

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Bruised but not broken by losses at the ballot box and in the courtroom, labor unions will find new ways to organize and ratchet up their influence to the point where legislatures and courts will be forced to recognize that workers’ rights need to be respected, predicts Barry Eidlin, a post-doctoral fellow in sociology at UW-Madison.

But that point is a ways off, he admits.
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Union activity is already being stripped back to pre-New Deal levels, he said. It took strikes and social upheaval for workers to win rights in the 1930s and “workers will once again have to take up that fight,” he says.

More broadly, Eidlin says, the most optimistic view of the nation’s economic future is that “people will recognize the economy is incredibly skewed toward the wealthy and powerful and something has to be done to redress the situation for the rest of us.”

There may be no sign of such a mass movement just yet, but historically such societal upheavals are recognized only in retrospect, he says. People involved in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, didn’t realize they were making history for a long time, he says.
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Pendulum swing or wishful thinking?

[riversedge]

1. Not enough folks 'get it' YET!!--

[Teamster Jeff]

2. You are right about that nt

[pennylane100]

3. I was thinking that people would eventual wake up

and realize that only in joining together can they make the system work for them. It is quite surprising how slow the working class in this country are to understand this. However, when they do, it will be the awakening of a sleeping giant.

[CatholicEdHead]

4. Wishful thinking in short term

The Circuses part is well in swing with politics being like a contact sport, the Red vs Blue narrative, prosperity gospel hearsay, global flat markets, and generational lack of groups to hang out with have kept bottom line economic discussions off the table.

There can be a resurgent of labor, but as capital is now global, so does labor, but it is not just a domestic crackdown but harsher international crackdowns on labor.

The only intense populism we have now is a faux populasim with the Tea Party, the anti-IWWers in historical perspective.

Capital has done its homework, time for Labor to re-write their plays, stop being so conservative on moving policy forward and move the pendulum the other direction.