71% Approve Of Labor Unions And 47% Want Them To Have More Influence

 

These charts Are from the Gallup Poll -- done between August 3rd and 24th of a nationwide sample of 1,200 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.

Unions Raise Wages. Tariffs Don’t

The following is part of a post from the Economic Policy Institute: 

Tariffs do not automatically raise wages or create good jobs. While strong tariff policies can help preserve jobs in industries facing unfair competition, strong unions are a prerequisite for tariffs to translate into widespread job and wage gains.

In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on the benefits of tariffs for U.S. workers. He claimed that tariffs would boost wages and create good manufacturing jobs by protecting domestic industries from unfair foreign competition. On the face of it, it might seem like tariffs would automatically protect entire industries, increasing profits for employers and wages for workers. But whether employers share the benefits of tariff protection with workers depends on their bargaining power—something very few workers have without a union.

Without unions, tariffs will mostly just lead to higher corporate profits in protected industries. And with the Trump administration waging the worst union busting in recent American history, high tariffs will mean corporate executives and Wall Street shareholders will see the big payday, not workers. Tariffs alone do not increase wages or create good jobs, unless the industries being protected by tariffs have strong unions.

Corporations Are Using Illegal Tactics To Bust Unions (& Getting Away With It)

This is from the Economic Policy Institute.

 

Has American Labor Really Turned A Corner?

The following is just part of an excellent post by Paul Krugman in The New York Times:

Why did unions decline? It’s tempting to assume that their diminishment was inevitable in the face of global competition and the falling share of manufacturing, their traditional stronghold, in employment. But other advanced economies are still strongly unionized — in Denmark and Sweden, for example, about two-thirds of workers are union members.

So what happened in America? The most plausible explanation is that beginning in the 1970s, employers became very aggressive in fighting unionization efforts and were empowered to do so by a political climate, especially after the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, in which Republicans were hostile to organized labor while Democrats were at best weakly in support.

Some existing unions — most famously the air traffic controllers — were broken. More important, unionization didn’t spread as America increasingly became a service economy. There was and is no fundamental economic reason giant employers like Walmart or Amazon couldn’t be mostly unionized. But they became giants in an era when employers were effectively free to pull out all the stops in blocking and, in some cases, persecuting union organizers.

Which brings us to the current moment, which may be an inflection point.

Right now there are two forces bolstering workers’ bargaining position. One is a tight labor market: We’ve just experienced the longest stretch of unemployment below 4 percent since the 1960s. This tight labor market is probably the main reason we’ve seen an “unexpected compression” of wages in recent years, with earnings rising much faster at the bottom than at the top.

The other is a shift in the political climate. President Biden, who joined a U.A.W. picket line in Michigan last September, is arguably the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman. This involves more than gestures. On Tuesday, for example, the Federal Trade Commission issued a ban on most noncompete clauses, which prevent a company’s employees from taking jobs with rival businesses; such clauses currently cover, roughly, an astonishing 30 million workers and have been a major force reducing labor market competition.

There’s a reason, then, that Biden has been getting early and enthusiastic endorsements from major unions, including the U.A.W. in January and, this week, the Building Trades Unions, which represents about three million workers in the United States and Canada.

But has American labor really turned a corner? Unfortunately, it’s easy to see how recent progress could be reversed. For one thing, that tight labor market might not persist. So far, the Biden economy has shrugged off all those confident predictions of recession, but that won’t always be the case.

And Biden could, of course, lose in November — and although Donald Trump portrays himself as a populist, his record shows that he’s anti-union.

So we won’t know for a while whether things are actually looking up for American workers. 

Public Has A Favorable Opinion Of Labor Unions (Except GOP)

This chart reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 11th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,500 adults (including 1,272 registered voters). The margin of error for both groups is 3.1 points.

Recent Union Wins Have The Potential To Help All Workers

 

This post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

The United Auto Workers has scored a major victory. 

It’s still awaiting a vote by union members, but it’s a big deal – a 25% wage increase over the 4 ½ years of the contract, cost-of-living increases that will further ratchet up hourly pay, the right to strike over plant closures, and a quicker time to reach top pay.

If the victory ripples across the auto industry and encourages wage increases in other industries, it will also be a victory for the American middle class.

For thirty years – from 1946 t0 the late 1970s – the American middle class expanded. That was largely because unions won increases in wages and benefits that roughly tracked gains in overall productivity.

Non-union companies gave their workers similar raises because they knew they’d be targets of union organizing if they didn’t.

It was the America’s postwar social contract.

But since the late 1970s, the wages of production workers have been nearly stagnant, adjusted for inflation. Most gains have gone to the top.

What happened to the postwar social contract?

For one thing, activist investors (called “corporate raiders” in the 1970s and 80s, and “private equity managers” today) got the right to mount hostile takeovers of companies, and then demand fatter profits.

Since payrolls comprise about two-thirds of corporate costs, the raiders forced corporations to keep a lid on wages and benefits.

To do this, corporations had to bust unions -- outsourcing jobs abroad, moving to anti-union (aka “right-to-work”) states, and firing workers who tried to organize.

Ronald Reagan legitimized all this when in 1981 he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers represented by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO.

The result was a dramatic decline in the bargaining power of ordinary workers. And with it, a shrinkage of the American middle class.

In the 1950s, over a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Today, unionized workers comprise just 6 percent of private-sector workers (10 percent of all workers belong to a union but many work in the public sector). 

 

From 1946 through the early 1970s, unions staged hundreds of major strikes each year. After 1981, the number of major strikes dropped to a few dozen per year.

Is the pendulum now swinging back?

So far in 2023, there have been 22 major strikes, 17 of them at corporations.

Contracts negotiated by the UAW, Hollywood writers, UPS workers, Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers, and even university employees, among others, provide significant pay increases and more job security (writers even got some protections against AI).

Most Americans are solidly behind the workers. Polls show that the public supported autoworkers over the companies by large margins.

Confidence in big business is at its lowest point in decades while approval of labor unions is near its highest.

What accounts for this burst of labor activism, remarkable run of labor victories, and public support of unions?

Partly, I think, it’s the harsh inequalities exposed by the pandemic.

The pandemic dramatically revealed how much easier it is for rich Americans to survive than everyone else, and how dependent all of us are on average workers simply doing their jobs.

Couple this with the rise in populist politics -- starting with Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in 2016 and Donald Trump pose as the “voice” of workers -– in a system looking increasingly rigged against average people.

In addition, union victories have animated a virtuous cycle -- encouraging more workers to join unions and more unions to flex their muscles and demand wage hikes.

And then there’s the tight post-pandemic labor market, in which consumers are spending like gangbusters, the economy is surging, and employers worry about getting and keeping the workers they need.

So, will the pendulum continue to swing toward unions?

I’d love to think so. But I frankly worry about Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his colleagues.

They continue to believe – wrongly – that inflation is being pushed by wage increases rather than by corporate profits.

If they succeed in slowing the economy to the point where workers lose whatever bargaining leverage they now have, it’s far from clear that populist politics or more vivid inequalities or a string of labor victories will be enough to put organized labor on the path to where it was four decades ago.

The United States Needs Its Labor Unions

 The following op-ed is by Nicolas Kristoff in The New York Times:

As the United Automobile Workers strike continues, we’re likely to hear grumbling about labor unions.

“They killed the auto industry once, and now they’re trying to do it again,” some will say. Or “They’re corrupt.” Or “They’re Luddites resisting modernization.”

Sure, there’s something to criticisms of unions. Yet the critiques miss a fundamental point: Labor unions are also a powerful force for equality, elevating underpaid workers who otherwise are often treated as doormats.

The central reality is that as unions declined over the past half-century, workers were stiffed. They were paid poorly, they lost health care and retirement benefits, and they lost control over their schedules. They were robbed of dignity and sometimes of wages as well. Deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol and suicide surged among blue-collar workers.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the Princeton University economists who pioneered the study of deaths of despair, tell me that one factor in the rise of such deaths has been the decline of unions and the related loss of good working-class jobs.

Like many educated professionals, I used to regard labor unions warily. They insisted on rigid work rules, impeded technological modernization, suffered corruption scandals (which have dogged the U.A.W.) and sometimes engaged in racial and gender discrimination. They periodically manipulated overtime hours and leveraged the threat of disruption to rake in staggering sums.

In 2019 two Oakland, Calif., police officers “earned” more than $600,000 in pay and benefits, through absurd amounts of overtime; meanwhile, full-time dockworkers on the West Coast reportedly earn more, on average, than many lawyers or dentists in America, and dock foremen average more pay than physicians.

Yet executive pay seems even more scandalous, and I shed my disdain for unions as I reported on the crisis in America’s working class over the past 15 years. Having lost too many working-class friends to substance use and related pathologies and having witnessed the consequent crumbling of families and communities, I’ve come to believe that unions are good not only for individual workers but also for America itself.

Some of the U.A.W.’s non-wage-related demands seem to me unrealistic, and the overall package might double labor costs for companies that already pay significantly more than their competitors; then again, it’s not obvious to me why the Big Three’s chief executives merit pay packages of more than $20 million each while some of their autoworkers earn just $16 or $17 an hour, although in fairness, Ford says that, including benefits, the average compensation for union-represented workers is $112,000 a year.

(Anyone who thinks that executive pay is invariably calculated through an arms-length negotiation doesn’t understand board behavior. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, the paycheck “is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”)

The golden age for unions in America was the period from 1945 to 1970, and there were indeed abuses and disruptive strikes then. But that was also a magical period in American economic history, in which the economic pie grew rapidly and was also divided more fairly. Shareholders benefited, but so did workers, including African Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder.

In 1970, unions still represented 29 percent of private-sector workers. Now they represent just 6 percent. Over the decades, blue-collar workers lost a path to the middle class, and pay gaps for Black men yawned as great as ever.

So I’ve come to think of it this way: Unions are as imperfect as capitalism itself, and just as essential.

A major study by academic economists found that union households earn 10 percent to 20 percent more than nonunion households, controlling for other factors, and researchers have found that higher wages for union members spill over and lift earnings for nonunion members. Those scholars found that about 10 percent of the increase in American inequality since 1968 was a result of falling union membership.

Another study found that lifetime membership in a union resulted in an additional $1.3 million in income over the decades compared with the income of someone in the same industry who was not a union member.

While unions unchecked sometimes behave badly, consider what corporations do unchecked. Millions of Americans are addicted to opioids in this country because pharmaceutical companies found it profitable to get people hooked.

We need checks and balances to rein in overreach by both sides — and unions are part of that system of watchdogs. Yet in recent decades laws have impeded unions, and a lame National Labor Relations Board essentially allowed union busting because penalties were so pathetic. (That appears to be changing under President Biden.)

Unions have also been powerful advocates of policies like early childhood education, child care, a higher minimum wage and a refundable child tax credit to take on the scandal of American child poverty.

So it’s reasonable to worry about the autoworker strike and the impact it might have on today’s economy. It’s fair to wonder if the U.A.W. is overreaching, particularly in its nonwage demands. Then again, it’s also reasonable to worry about what happens when nonunionized blue-collar workers are squeezed and crushed, year after year, decade after decade, and what that does to their children, to their country, to our future.

GOP Doesn't Support Unions/Workers (Only More For Rich)

 The following is part of an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times:

It has been interesting to watch the response of Republicans to the United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three American car manufacturers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler).

The most openly anti-worker view comes from Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who condemned the striking workers as insolent and ungrateful in a stunning display of conservative anti-labor sentiment. “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” Scott said at a campaign event in Iowa. “He said, ‘You strike, you’re fired.’ Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.” Scott also criticized the union’s demands. “The other things that are really important in that deal is that they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.” In America, he continued, “that doesn’t make sense.”

Most other Republicans have sidestepped any discussion of the workers themselves in favor of an attack on electric vehicles and the Biden administration’s clean energy policies. “I guarantee you that one of the things that’s driving that strike is that Bidenomics, and their green energy, electric vehicle agenda is good for Beijing and bad for Detroit, and American autoworkers know it,” former Vice President Mike Pence said during a recent interview on CNBC.

Donald Trump took a similar swing at the same target. “The all Electric Car is a disaster for both the United Auto Workers and the American Consumer,” Trump wrote last week. “They will all be built in China and, they are too expensive, don’t go far enough, take too long to charge, and pose various dangers under certain atmospheric conditions. If this happens, the United Auto Workers will be wiped out, along with all other auto workers in the United States. The all Electric Car policy is about as dumb as Open Borders and No Voter I.D. IT IS A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER!”

That much was expected. But beyond the presidential contenders, there were also the ostensibly populist Republicans who have placed workers at the center of their case.

“Autoworkers deserve a raise — and they deserve to have their jobs protected from Joe Biden’s stupid climate mandates that are destroying the U.S. auto industry and making China rich,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio wrote that he was “rooting for the autoworkers across our country demanding higher wages and an end to political leadership’s green war on their industry.” Likewise, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida pinned the strike on “a radical climate agenda that seeks the end of gas-powered cars even if it means destroying American jobs,” adding: “Instead of supporting either union bosses or C.E.O.s we need to support American workers who want policies that protect their jobs.”

You’ll notice that for all the talk about workers, not one of these more populist Republicans has actually said their demands should be met. They haven’t affirmed the right of labor to strike. They haven’t even blamed management for the strike, despite the fact that the U.A.W. is taking aim at rising corporate profits, which it believes could support higher wages, cost-of-living protections and stronger benefits — and the two-tier system that pays new workers less than veteran workers for the same work.

And they haven’t voiced support for the largest, most ambitious organizing goal of the U.A.W. — the unionization of new electric vehicle and battery factories, either as part of a new contract or pursued through new organizing. If anything, Republican attacks on electric vehicles work to obscure the nature of the conflict, which is less about a new product category than about the balance of power between labor and management in the American auto industry. . . .

In other words, Republican support for workers remains little more than rhetoric, signifying nothing. They have no apparent problem with management granting workers a modest increase in wages, but remain hostile to workers who seek to organize themselves as a countervailing force to corporate and financial power.

The Labor Strikes Are Good For The United States

Robert Reich explains why labor activism is good for the country: 

America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a quarter century. 

The United Auto Workers, the Writers Guild of America, the actors’ union known as SAG-AFTRA, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, the Teamsters and UPS, flight attendants. The list goes on.

Over 4 million workdays were lost to stoppages last month, according to the Labor Department. That’s the most since 2000. And this was before the UAW struck the Big Three.

Some worry about the effect of all this on the U.S. economy, and view organized labor as a “special interest” demanding more than it deserves.

Rubbish.

 

Labor activism has proven good for the economy in the long run. And organized labor isn’t a special interest. It’s the leading edge of the American workforce.

What accounts for this extraordinary moment of labor activity?

Not that workers enjoy striking. Even where unions have funds to help striking workers offset lost wages, they rarely make up even half of what’s forgone. Large corporations whose operations are hobbled by strikes often lay off other workers, as the Big Three and their suppliers are now threatening to do.

The reason workers go on strike is their expectation that the longer-term gains will be worth the sacrifices.

Today’s labor market continues to be tight, despite efforts by the Fed to slow the economy and make it harder for workers to get raises. So employers (like UPS) are more inclined to give ground to avoid a prolonged strike.

But something far more basic is going on here. As I travel around the country, I hear from average working people an anger and bitterness I haven't heard for decades. It centers on several things.

The first is that wages have barely increased while corporate profits are in the stratosphere.

 

Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are now.

The American dream of upward mobility has turned into a nightmare of falling behind. Whereas 90 percent of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this proportion has steadily declined. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.

Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, executive compensation has gone through the roof. In 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Today, the ratio is over 398 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded. So has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5 percent in 1993 to more than 15 percent today.

Corporate apologists claim CEOs and other top executives are worth these staggering sums because their corporations have performed so well. They compare star CEOs to star baseball players and movie stars.

But most CEOs have simply ridden the stock market wave. Even if a company’s CEO had done nothing but play online solitaire, the company’s stock price would have soared.

Stock buybacks have also skyrocketed — a huge subsidy to investors that further tips the scales against working people. The richest 1 percent of Americans own about half the value of all shares of stock. The richest 10 percent, over 90 percent.

Why don’t corporations devote more of their income to research and development, or to higher wages and benefits for average workers? In a word, greed. 

Small wonder that unions are more popular than they’ve been in a generation. A Gallup poll published in August found that 67 percent of Americans approve of unions, the fifth straight year such support has exceeded the long-term polling average of 62 percent.

President Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union president in recent history. More surprisingly, Republican politicians are trying to curry favor with union workers as well. Both parties know that much of the working class is up for grabs in 2024.

American workers still have little to no countervailing power relative to large American corporations. Unionized workers now comprise only 6 percent of private-sector workforce — down from over a third in the 1960s.

Which is why the activism of the UAW, the Writers Guild, SAG-AFTRA, the Teamsters, flight attendants, Amazon warehouse workers, and Starbucks workers is so important.

In a very real sense, these workers are representing all American workers. If they win, they’ll energize other workers, even those who are not unionized. They’ll mobilize some to form or join unions.

 

They’ll push non-union employers to raise wages and benefits out of a fear of becoming unionized if they don’t. They’ll galvanize other workers to stage wildcat strikes for better pay and working conditions.

For far too long, America’s top executives, Wall Street traders, and biggest investors have siphoned off almost all the economic gains. This is unsustainable, economically and politically.

It’s economically unsustainable because the only way businesses can sell the goods and services American workers produce is if workers have enough money to buy them. If most gains continue to go to the top, the economy will become ever more fragile, susceptible to downdrafts and crashes. 

Today’s mainstream media emphasizes the feared negative effects of the current wave of strikes on the U.S. economy, forgetting that the wave of strikes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen — the key to America’s postwar prosperity.

Stagnant wages and widening inequality are politically unsustainable because they foster anger and bitterness easily channeled by demagogic politicians (re: Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party) into bigotry, paranoia, xenophobia, and authoritarianism.

The current wave of strikes isn’t bad for America. It’s good for America.

Labor is not a “special interest.” It is, in a real sense, all of us.