Must-Read: The question I always find myself going back and forward on is this: Do strong unions primarily reflect or primarily cause a high labor share of income? And I find my views on this question both disturbingly ungrounded in evidence and disturbingly volatile…
: The Decline of Labor; The Increase in Inequality: “Between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s, the American labor movement was one of the reliable signposts…
…that defined the parameters of American life. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that the signposts of our culture, economics, and politics are continually evolving, even as we believe they will be perennially rooted…. No less a figure than Dwight Eisenhower assumed an America that would always have strong unions…. Timothy Noah, relying on the work of economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, describes this period in his book about American inequality, The Great Divergence (2012), as one in which “incomes became more equal and stayed that way.” Union density peaked at about 1/3rd of the non-farm workforce in the decade following the second world war…. States like Alabama and Tennessee had “low” union density rates in the high teens that were equal to the “high” density rates of “union states” like Michigan today….
During the 1972 election, Meany’s AFL-CIO, enraged by George McGovern’s opposition to the Vietnam War and the influence of the New Left and the counter-culture that permeated his campaign, remained neutral rather than endorse the Democratic candidate. Organized labor was so important to the Democrats that the wily Republican president, Richard Nixon, had courted Meany over several rounds of golf and sought to identify the administration with what Nixon and his top aides took to be the cultural symbols of blue collar, white manhood. The Federation’s neutrality was his reward…. By the middle of the 1980s, history had fooled the present again: the “secure place” of American labor which Ike had spoken of so confidently in 1952, turned out to be, in fact, evanescent. By 1991, union density had declined to just 16%. (It is now about 11%.)… In 1978, despite the most massive lobbying drive in union history, Carter placidly watched a modest labor reform bill be filibustered to death by Republicans and Southern Democrats in an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress….
Why did this happen?… For some of the same structural, macro-economic reasons it has declined in almost every advanced country… but… also occurred for reasons intrinsic to the American political economy…. Just as labor and the economic base of much of its membership lost altitude, unions faced the egalitarian necessity to modernize themselves. This was not without complications. Title VII of the1964 the Civil Rights Act accelerated a much longer struggle by black workers to have full and equal representation within unions. Arguments against racial (and gender) discrimination, especially in building trades and manufacturing unions, that had mostly been ignored by the NLRB, gained salience before the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)….
Labor… today… remains the most effective institutional bulwark against income inequality. Within its blue state zones of urban power, labor has, effectively, fought inequality via the “fight for 15” led by the still formidable SEIU, and promoted the passage of minimum wage laws in states and cities around the country. Unions, despite their inability to win legislation of direct benefit to themselves, still lead efforts to augment social insurance and regulate companies and banks…. Advancing beyond their previous racism and sexism, unions are, in significant ways, better advocates for such concern today than they were when George Meany was refusing to endorse the March on Washington and, then during the McGovern campaign, railing about the Democratic party being seized by “people named Jack who look like Jill and smell like johns.”…
The numbers of union members and the dollars in the stagnant paychecks of millions of American workers tell an unhappily congruent story. If, in subsequent years, union membership numbers don’t increase dramatically, workers’ paychecks aren’t likely to increase very much either.