How Unions Have Been Hunted to Extinction
The anti-labor movement has worsened the lives of America's workers for decades. Can it be stopped?
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. Above photo of Scabby the Rat by War on Want’s Flickr account.
In May 1886, hundreds of thousands of American workers, many of them immigrants, went on strike and filled the streets of major cities. The labor movement was in its noisy infancy; these protesters were tired of enduring long hours, horrid working conditions, and inadequate pay. Their immediate demand that May was an eight-hour workday, which seems like such a small ask today but which was apparently regarded as a radical proposal by anti-labor forces. The authorities met these protests with violence, and they turned into riots.
After at least two demonstrators were killed by Chicago police on May 3, a massive rally was held in Haymarket Square the next day. Sketches from that event seem eerily familiar to 21st-century America: line after line of uniformed police officers standing opposite a less organized mass of angry protesters, the potential for violence hanging in the air. Then someone tossed a dynamite bomb into the crowd, turning a peaceful event into a bloodbath.
Seven cops died, and who knows how many protesters. In the aftermath of the bombing, police arrested left-wing activists indiscriminately, and eventually eight men (seven of them foreign-born) were convicted of having incited the violence, on extremely flimsy grounds. One committed suicide, four were hanged to death in an alley, and three were pardoned a few years later after it was realized what a terrible miscarriage of justice had taken place.
The “Haymarket Affair” was such an incendiary event—in every sense of the word—that when Labor Day was established as a federal holiday in the United States in 1893, President Grover Cleveland wanted to avoid a May date and instead picked the first Monday in September, which was also a day of celebration and activism for many unions. Every Labor Day political leaders and ordinary people ceremonially thank the union leaders of yesteryear for giving us things like the weekend, workplace safety standards, and the eight-hour day. But those victories—which came at the cost of blood—are being reversed.
Though left-wing politics is undergoing a resurgence in the US, organized labor does not have the juice it once did. From 1897 to 1923, the number of workers in unions shot up from around 450,000 to 3.8 million; by the early 50s about a third of all workers belonged to a union. Now only around 11 percent are represented by a union, including just 7.2 percent of private-sector employees. And as union membership has declined, those hard-won worker protections have eroded:
The federal minimum wage has not been increased since 2009 and sits at $7.25. Though state and local minimum wages are generally higher, wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living in the US. Likely as a result, many Americans are burdened by high rents and record amounts of credit card debt.
Many people do not have a 40-hour workweek: The average employed American works more than that, and thanks to the Trump administration, almost all salaried employees remain ineligible for overtime. A restaurant manager or administrative assistant making $30,000 a year isn’t eligible for extra pay if they grind out 55-hour weeks.
Even if your job gives you health insurance, it might not be very helpful. According to a 2019 report, 29 percent of Americans with health insurance were “underinsured” in 2018, meaning their deductibles and copays weren’t affordable, an increase from 20 percent of underinsured Americans in 2014.
Under Donald Trump, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency that investigates workplace conditions, is dangerously understaffed even as investigations of workplace deaths have spiked.
The decline of unions has unquestionably hurt workers in the US. (Some research has shown that unionization helps even nonunion workers because unions can establish pay and benefit standards across an industry.) But how have unions, a feared insurgent force in American politics that became a pillar of the Democratic establishment, lost so much ground? There’s no single answer. Unions lost power slowly, bit by bit, as the forces of business and management slowly chewed them up. As a result, they have retreated into a defensive crouch. But part of the story is that the economy has shifted under unions’ feet.
Union industries have dried up
In a 2015 map showing the decline of union membership across all 50 states, NPR notes:
In 1964, the Midwest was full of manufacturing jobs and had the highest concentration of union workers in America. That has changed dramatically—both because the share of jobs in manufacturing has fallen, and because fewer of the manufacturing jobs that remain are held by union workers.
In other words, factory jobs in places like Detroit used to pay really well because they were unionized. But corporations moved their manufacturing operations elsewhere, those union jobs vanished, a story that has been told many times, including in the Springsteen song “The River.” In the simplest version, the global economy has made union jobs obsolete, like VHS players.
But the last part of the NPR quote is worth focusing on. Why aren’t today’s factory jobs—or today's non-factory jobs—unionized?
Many states have passed anti-union laws
The answer is that Republicans have sabotaged unions however they could. By doing so, they both helped out business interests and damaged Democrats’ ability to win elections, since unions generally support Democrats. The principal way the GOP has done this is through “right to work” laws, which prohibit unions from automatically collecting dues from workers who are covered under a collective bargaining agreement.
This is a big deal. Negotiating these agreements with employers is one of the main activities of unions. If your union is a halfway competent one, it will use the threat of collective action (up to and including a strike) to force management to agree to pay raises and benefits that more than makes up for the money you pay your union. Right to work laws allow workers who get the perks of these contracts to avoid paying the costs, making running a union more expensive.
In recent years, when Republicans have taken control of traditionally union states like Wisconsin and West Virginia they have passed right to work laws and struck down collective bargaining rights for government workers. (It should be said that Democrats have not always been maximally supportive of labor: Barack Obama failed to aggressively push for legislation that would have made it easier for workers to unionize.)
And as the GOP worked to undermine unions through legislation, a parallel effort was taking place in corporate America.
Companies have gotten better at fighting unions
In the Haymarket era, management would engage in egregious and violent union-busting tactics, sometimes hiring armed goons to attack organizers. In some cases, this led to armed conflict between unions and companies and their government allies.
These days, firms that don’t want their employees to organize can turn to “union avoidance consultants” like the ones at Adams Nash Haskell & Sheridan, whose website advises employers to “take back the control you’ve worked so hard to achieve” and features a “vulnerability quiz” to determine whether you have an infestation of union-minded employees:
If employees are planning on unionizing, the law firm Gentry Locke will help you “proactively respond to union organizing efforts,” including “anti-card signing efforts and meetings with management and their supervisors to understand the dynamics and create a prompt and effective plan of counterattack.” Legal methods of counterattack include holding meetings for the sole purpose of disparaging unions, telling workers they might lose their jobs if they unionize, asking employees one by one if they support a union, and over-the-top internal communications campaigns. In one notorious example from a few years ago, management at a Boeing production plant in South Carolina put up a display in the break room of $800 worth of diapers and other goods, a representation of what union dues would cost, as a way of persuading the plant’s 3,000 workers not to unionize.
These tactics are commonplace; trying every legal method to break a union is regarded as merely a smart business decision. When employees at left-leaning digital media companies attempted to organize (a trend I was part of when I worked at Vice), these firms often retained aggressively anti-union lawyers to play hardball both during the organizing drives and the bargaining sessions. The progressive politics of some liberal publications stopped at the exact point their wallets became involved.
These tactics also work: That Boeing plant, which the International Association of Machinists had been trying to organize for years, voted not to unionize in the end. (Though a smaller group of 178 employees did unionize.)
Unions are finding it very hard to organize
There’s an argument that unions are at least partially to blame for their decline because they have failed to organize new workplaces and bring in new members. The country’s biggest collection of unions, the AFL-CIO, spends much more on political activities than it does on organizing, for instance, and critics have accused it of abandoning its core mission. In this telling it’s not that the idea of unions is obsolete; the problem is that too many of them are run badly.
But as the Boeing factory example shows, a combination of anti-union laws and skillful anti-union consultants makes organizing campaigns costly and time-consuming, and sometimes they aren’t successful, making them an extremely expensive risk for unions already on the decline.
That doesn’t mean unions aren’t trying to reach out to workers, even ones who are difficult to organize. The SEIU has been trying to unionize fast food workers, even though they have to win campaigns on a restaurant by restaurant level, rather than bringing in all McDonald’s employees together in one bargaining unit. And some workers, like Uber and Lyft drivers, have banded together to demand fair treatment and better pay even though Trump’s National Labor Relations Board has ruled they are technically not “employees” and can’t unionize. (The NLRB has also ruled minimum wage and overtime rules don’t apply to “gig economy” workers.)
Still, these barriers to organizing explain why years ago the labor thinker Rich Yeselson came up with a strategy called “fortress unionism.” The idea is that given the costs of organizing, unions should spend money supporting progressives and Democrats so they can hold on to what power they still have. Then they can wait for America’s workers to collectively decide that they can’t take it anymore and, like those Haymarket protesters, rise up and decide to embrace unions again.
“Wait for the workers to say they’ve had enough,” was Yesselson’s advice in 2013. “When they demand in vast numbers collective solutions to their problems, seize upon that energy and institutionalize it.”
Is that happening now? There have been some signs of a union revival. Approval of unions is at 64 percent, a 50-year high, according to Gallup. A 2018 wave of wildcat teacher strikes in deep red states showed that labor wasn’t dead even in Oklahoma and West Virginia. It’s now routine for Democratic political campaigns to unionize, which speaks to labor becoming a more central issue for the party.
But if unions come back they’ll be digging themselves out of a grave, and that’s going to be hard work. Even if the enthusiasm is there, workers will have to overcome nasty anti-union laws, an unfriendly court system stacked with Republican appointees, and clever internal PR campaigns crafted by expert anti-union consultants.
Management has spent the last several decades using every tool imaginable to claw back power from workers. If and when workers want to fight back in a real way, it won’t look very much like the current rearguard action of the current labor movement. There’s a good chance it will look like a riot.
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