As Labor Goes, So Goes the Nation

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from In These Times:




As Labor Goes, So Goes the Nation
Unions once united workers across gender and racial boundaries. Their decline imperils modern American liberalism.

By Melvyn Dubofsky


It is easy to lament President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party’s compromises over their first two years in power, especially their failure to do as much for unemployed workers and foreclosed homeowners as they did for bankrupted and indebted financiers. Yet there are explanations for why Obama and the Democrats have behaved as they have. To understand them, we must analyze the deeper forces behind the political dynamics of the past 30 years.

What we know of as modern American liberalism, or what is more fashionably characterized today as progressive politics, is largely the result of the rise of organized labor. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, a still-divided labor movement represented the largest single electoral bloc in the nation, and it would remain that through the 1960s. The votes of union members and the lobbying of their representatives in Washington and in state capitals expanded the ranks of workers covered by minimum wage and hours laws, and raised that wage repeatedly. They helped bring millions of previously excluded employees into the Social Security system and improved the system’s benefits for retirees, their survivors and the disabled. However much many white union members and their leaders remained racist and misogynist, labor’s political influence proved decisive during the 1960s in the enactment of civil rights legislation.

Labor exerted such influence because at its peak it represented a third of the non-agricultural labor force. Even after its density began to slip in the late 1950s, absolute membership rose, however erratically, for two more decades. Almost all unions (other than the white male bastions that were the building and construction trades) acted as a place where working people who otherwise lived in separate neighborhoods, worshipped in different churches and temples, patronized different taverns, and even belonged to ethnically or racially-based local political clubs, met together to discuss work issues, union matters and politics.

Blue Collar Community, William Kornblum’s sociological study of Chicago steel workers in the early 1960s, shows how unionism brought together white, black and brown members. In those sectors of the economy where women entered the labor force in substantial numbers, and especially in the rapidly expanding public employees’ unions, organized labor united women and minorities along with dwindling numbers of white males. Over time, minorities and women rose to leadership positions in public employee and service industry unions. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6950/as_labor_goes_so_goes_the_nation

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