Saturday, September 30, 2023

"The United Auto Workers are winning the battle, but have they already lost the war?"

From Tablet Magazine, September 26:

The strike by the United Auto Workers (UAW) may succeed in forcing the Big Three automakers—GM, Ford, and Stellantis—to agree in part or in whole to the union’s demands, and comes at a time when the militancy of organized labor is greater than it has been in decades. But even if the union were to triumph on every one of those issues, it would still not be enough to reverse the decline of organized labor in the American private sector. That is a tragedy for the country, because if private sector unionism cannot thwart the unrelenting efforts of employers to drive down wages, the American middle class will become extinct, with the exception perhaps of unionized public employees.

It is no coincidence that the “30 glorious years” of mass prosperity that followed World War II coincided with the high point of trade union membership and pro-union government policies, in Western Europe as well as the U.S. The U.S. had the bloodiest labor violence of any Western country between the Civil War and the New Deal, with the National Guard, Army, or private detectives commonly used to crush railroad, mine, and factory workers on behalf of corporations. In American courts, meanwhile, unions were often treated as illegal conspiracies.

The prosperity of American industrial workers of the 1950s like those in the automobile industry was not the result of radical technological change. Work on the assembly line was not that different in 1950 than it had been in the 1920s. What workers had in the 1950s that they lacked a generation before was power—the collective power of trade unions, without which isolated individual workers have no leverage in negotiations with giant corporations over wages, hours, and benefits. Between the 1950s, when a third of the American workforce was unionized, and the 1970s, productivity growth was translated into widespread wage growth because unions forced employers to share more of their profits with workers, along with managers and shareholders.

Today, however, only around 6% of the private sector workforce is unionized in the United States. The decline of unions in industries like meatpacking has meant the return of low wages and conditions like those exposed in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1904). Service sector industries like fast food, which can provide decent jobs when they are unionized in other countries, offer poverty wages in America. Low wages and unstable schedules undermine stable family formation and community involvement in sports leagues and religious congregations among America’s 21st-century proletariat, just as they did in the 1800s and early 1900s. Unable to join the middle class through work alone, many workers in post-union America, like those of the pre-union era, work several jobs or turn for income to part-time gigs, which include not only stints for Uber or Lyft but also crime and prostitution (in its high-tech legal form as OnlyFans).

The decline of unions also changes our politics. Without the massed power of organized labor to counterbalance the influence of organized business in politics, the two parties serve rival business lobbies and affluent households. Corporations and banks and wealthy donors, along with nonprofits and the universities that they bankroll, celebrate race and gender characteristics which divide the working class while opposing unionization efforts that transcend those divisions.

Whether most American workers in the private sector in the future become prosperous middle-class citizens or struggling, insecure serfs will depend largely on the power of unions. Unfortunately, a revival of organized labor in the private market faces numerous obstacles, including inadequate federal labor law, transfers of production to American “right-to-work” states or foreign countries, and high levels of unskilled immigration.

Labor Law and Workers’ Rights

The major obstacle to a revival of private sector unionism is American labor law itself. With the exception of rail, transit, and airline employees covered by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, American workers seeking to join a union are governed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1936—the Wagner Act, named after Robert F. Wagner, a U.S. senator from New York. The Wagner Act was actually the second attempt by Congress during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to promote collective bargaining. It was passed in 1935 when the Supreme Court struck down most of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 as an unconstitutional delegation of power from Congress to the presidency.

The NIRA and the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that enforced it were not “fascist,” as libertarian propagandists often claim. Rather, the NIRA quite sensibly sought to avoid one-size-fits-all rules for business and labor regulation imposed by government, in favor of a high degree of self-regulation by business associations, which under government supervision would set codes of fair competition. Such self-regulation by industry with a government veto exists to this day with state bar associations, the American Medical Association, and various university accrediting agencies. The NIRA system, in which the government’s role was limited to ratifying sectoral codes, envisioned a more flexible system than the alternative, in which authorities in Washington engage in top-down regulation of all industries and all labor markets.

The most controversial part of the NIRA proved to be Section 7a, a provision guaranteeing workers the right to bargain collectively for wages, benefits, and working conditions....

....MUCH MORE

The public sector unions on the other hand need to be outlawed.  

It is a completely different situation from that of private sector employees up against "The Man" as they fight for an equitable share of profits. 

Related:

"The day that destroyed the working class and sowed the seeds of Trump"

Amazon and Unionization (AMZN)
They're against it.

Like their Silicon Valley tech confreres 700 miles to the south, unionization is the very last thing that Amazon wants.
And like Franklin Delano Roosevelt (he said modestly) I don't think public sector unions are an overall positive for the citizenry,* but as to the private sector, have at it....

*****
Posted by at