For his first opinion piece after the midterm election results have fully settled, "Republicans Sure Love to Hate Unions," the sagacious Edsall highlights the curious contradiction of the GOP preoccupation with organized labor versus the predilection of Democrats to institutionally ignore unions.
I say curious, but one could also label it neurotic or psychotic. Without organized labor the Democratic Party isn't credibly competitive. Yet year after year the Democratic Party delivers nothing to the unions; it takes their money and uses union volunteers to knock on doors and make phone calls, while at the same time it pursues free-trade deals and Wall-Street-friendly tax policies and bailouts.
The current GOP strategy to weaken organized labor and eviscerate the Democrats centers around going after public-sector unions. Elect hard-charging Republican governors who, acting in concert with GOP-controlled legislatures, rescind collective-bargaining rights for government employees. Call it the Scott Walker phenomenon. It worked to wonderful effect in Wisconsin:
A paradox of American politics is that Republicans take organized labor more seriously than Democrats do.
The right sees unions as a mainstay of the left, a crucial source of cash, campaign manpower and votes.
“Unions are the largest player in American politics and they will be for some time,” Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, declared in March at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Fourteen million Americans have to pay union dues. If they average $500, and that is a low estimate, that’s a $7 billion slush fund for the left.”
Democrats are happy to get labor’s votes and money, but they have done little to revitalize the besieged movement.
“The unions basically have become an A.T.M. for Democrats,” Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., told me in a phone conversation. “There is a sense of taking unions for granted, no place else to go, don’t need to do much for them.”
Republicans are willing to go to great lengths to weaken the union movement, especially at the state level. Even as the strength of organized labor as a whole declines, conservatives view unions that represent public sector employees, in particular, as anathema. They are desperate to gut the power of the 7.2 million organized government workers — who range from teachers, to clerks in the Department of Motor Vehicles, to social workers, public hospital employees, meat and poultry inspectors, road workers, property tax auditors and civil servants in general. These are the employees who populate the extensive bureaucracies that the right loathes.
Unions the right has targeted include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, appearing at the same C.P.A.C. event as Norquist, boasted that in Wisconsin the successful drive to render public sector unions impotent was the result of a coordinated effort between the party and the conservative movement: "We had total and complete unity between the state party, Americans for Prosperity, the tea party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty, the 9-12ers were involved. It was a total and compete agreement that nobody got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the track together."
The anti-union alliance between the Republican Party and movement conservatives got a big boost on Nov. 4. The heroes of this anti-union drive, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, and Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, were re-elected in states with a long history of strong labor movements. Prospects for the enactment of additional anti-labor legislation also improved as Republicans made substantial gains in legislatures and governor’s races across the country.
After the 2010 election, Republicans had complete control (governor and both legislative branches) in 21 states, almost double the 11 states with complete Democatic control. Now, 24 states are fully in Republican hands; Democrats dominate in just 7.
The 2014 election was “a major political defeat for the unions, particularly state-wide public sector unions, because it shows how much the voting public sees unions as part of the problem of persistent unemployment and underemployment, rather than being part of the solution,” Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University, replied in response to my email. Chaison’s assessment: "The election of Republicans is indicative of the degree to which the voters have turned on the unions. There was once a time, two decades ago, when candidates to the governor’s officer sought the endorsement of major unions in his or her state; now they run on being anti-union crusaders. Quite a reversal of fortunes. The public sector was, for fifty years, the engine of union growth in America. This will happen no more. The brake on union decline is gone. The victory of Republican governors shows how much unions have lost their political power – now they are vulnerable to attempts to strip them of their power at the state level. Every new governor seems to be a Chris Christie, ready for a fight."
By 2013, 11.3 percent of wage and salary workers were covered by unions, down from 23.4 percent in 1983.
Republicans have good reason to target public sector unions. Without them, the share of the work force represented by unions would be even smaller than it is now. By last year, union coverage of private sector workers had fallen to 7.5 percent, from a high of roughly 35 percent in the mid-1950s. Government workers today make up 15.8 percent of the total work force, but union representation of this sliver has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1950s to 35.3 percent.
Norquist told the C.P.A.C. conference that conservatives hadn’t taken on public employee unions in the mistaken belief that “you can’t do anything about the public sector. The rules are set, and they elect the guys who set the rules.” But Walker’s success in winning a recall election, and in getting re-elected, has permanently changed thinking on the right, Norquist declared. By this reasoning, Walker’s survival and ultimate triumph demonstrates that changing the rules to make it more difficult to organize public workers, to collect dues and to bargain over wages and fringe benefits is politically viable, even in a Northern state.
In 2011, when Walker first took office, 37 percent of the nation’s 21-plus million public sector employees were union members; by 2012, this droppedto 35.9 percent; and last year, it fell to 35.3 percent.So that's the formula for 2016: Continue the frontal assault on public-sector unions because that is where the union density is; get overall union density down to where it is in the private sector, below 8%, and choke out what is left in the bathtub; oh, yes, and elect Scott Walker as POTUS.
Edsall goes on to describe why the Democratic Party is not only not doing anything to fight back against this assault, it is actually attacking unions itself. As Edsall explains,
If Republicans and conservatives place a top priority on eviscerating labor unions, what is the Democratic Party doing to protect this core constituency? Not much.
In fact, the Obama administration has undermined the bargaining leverage of the most successful unions by imposing a 40 percent excise tax, which takes effect in 2018, on health insurance premiums in excess of $10,200 annually for individuals, and $27,500 for families, in order to finance Obamacare. The provision, which covers what many of labor’s enemies call “Cadillac plans,” has provoked an angry response from labor leaders. They see the tax as threatening the continued survival of key health insurance benefits that unions have won as part of total employee compensation packages.
In an email to me, Joel Parker, national vice president of the merged Transportation Communications International Union and International Association of Machinists, wrote about the consequences of the new excise tax:
The result is a nightmare for union workers at large companies, and even worse for non-union workers. For the latter, companies will simply unilaterally cut benefits and/or shift to high-deductible plans. Institutionally, the bill weakens unions, one of the remaining core groups in the Democratic coalition. Private sector unions’ main selling point to non-union workers was superior health and pension plans. The health insurance advantage, if the excise tax is allowed to survive, will gradually disappear.
Democrats neglect the union movement at their peril. Not only does organized labor provide millions of dollars – the Center for Responsive Politics reports that unions spent $116.5 million on politics in 2013-14 – but union members are a loyal Democratic constituency. On Nov. 4, the 17 percent of voters who come from union households supported Democratic House candidates by a margin of 22 points, 60-38, while the remaining 83 percent from non-union households supported Republicans 54-44.I know something about unions. I've worked for various union locals, central labor councils and Taft-Hartley trusts for 15 years. Unions are dying. No question about it. And, yes, Obamacare is hastening the process because it is helping to drive out the "blue chip" medical, full-maintenance-of-benefits type plan in favor of these 80-20/70-30 co-insurance, high out-of-pocket limit plans.
Mostly though unions are dying because there is a lack of class consciousness in leadership. Union chiefs see themselves closely aligned with plutocrat-friendly Dem politicians; they fancy themselves executives in a corner offices with a shiny nameplates. And that kind of thinking is a serious problem.
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