There is Power in A Union: From Joe Hill to Joe Biden?
After the Minimum Wage Setback, It’s Time to Empower American Workers
By Jim Miller
Back during the progressive era, the great Wobbly bard Joe Hill sang that there was “Power in a Union”: “There is power, there is power/In a band of workingmen/When they stand hand in hand” to fight for “freedom from wage slavery.”
For much of the middle part of the twentieth century this was true. The power of working people in America peaked as the union movement exploded during the New Deal era, and the country underwent what Robert Reich has called “the great compression” when the gap between the rich and the poor shrank dramatically, and the American middle class grew to historic heights as union density reached over a third of workers.
As workers gained more economic equality via collective bargaining, their unions’ growing political clout ensured that the concerns of ordinary Americans could no longer be ignored as many of their social and educational initiatives helped create more opportunity in the United States. It was during this period that the union movement was at the heart of the Democratic Party and most of the American working class clearly identified their interests as being served by it.
By then, slowly at first then quite rapidly, the tide turned against the labor movement as a combination of external forces such as neoliberalism, globalization, as well as the rise of the American right and internal forces like the failure to robustly organize the service sector led to a steep decline in unionization. With this decline came an explosion of economic inequality in recent decades with our current levels rivaling those of the era of the Robber Barons of old.
More lately, friends of labor and their allies have bemoaned the failure of the Democratic Party to abandon its neoliberal turn and come to the aid of the union movement. While that never happened during the Obama years, it appears that President Biden may be signaling a change in course.
Last week in his column “Introducing Joe Biden, Union Man”, Paul Krugman observes how noteworthy Biden’s straightforward support for the workers trying to organize a union at Amazon in Alabama is for a number of reasons:
This could be the beginning of a very big deal.
America used to be a nation with powerful unions. In the early 1970s roughly a quarter of nonfarm workers in the private sector were union members, not too far short of the 35 percent unionization rate in the mid-1950s. And even companies without unions tread carefully, because they knew that playing hardball with their workers could easily lead to a unionization drive . . .
So what did happen? Politics. Unions could have remained an important force in American life, even as we transitioned from a manufacturing to a service economy. But to do so they would have had to organize workers in rapidly growing service companies like Walmart and now Amazon. And they generally failed to do so, because the transition to a service economy took place in an era of conservative political dominance.
It wasn’t so much that the laws protecting union organizing were weak, although to some extent they were. More important, employers trying to block unionization believed, rightly, that the laws wouldn’t be enforced — that they could get away with, as President Biden said, intimidation, threats, coercion and anti-union propaganda.
And the result was that we became a largely nonunion nation, with huge economic and political effects. Unions, while far from being saintly organizations, were by and large a force for higher wages and greater equality. They were also an equalizing force on the political field, because their manpower was an important offset to the power of big money.
So, echoing Krugman here, it would be a huge deal if the Biden Administration actually followed up his words with strong pro-labor action in the case of the Amazon campaign and elsewhere across America. Game-changing in fact. It’s been such a long time since unionists have seen a pro-labor President, it would be a bit of shock if Joe Biden a turned into one.
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Michael Hiltzik weighed in as well in “Biden Throws a Bombshell at Amazon’s Anti-Union Campaign,” noting that:
This is the most significant unionization drive faced by Amazon anywhere in the U.S., and the company has been drawing from the standard corporate playbook in fighting it.
Amazon has subjected the workers to compulsory workplace town halls at which they’re subjected to anti-union propaganda. Anti-union placards have been posted all about the warehouse, and employees have said they’ve been confronted one-on-one by supervisors with anti-union messages.
Hiltzik goes on to argue that Biden’s statement calling for “no intimidation, no coercion, no threat, no anti-union propaganda” in the Amazon election “goes well beyond any action taken by a president”—including FDR. While Krugman focuses on the failure of labor to organize the service sector and speaks more generally about how conservative political dominance led to falling union density, Hiltzik zeros in on the crucial role played by the Taft-Hartley Act that made a number of labor’s best strike tactics illegal and allowed for right-to-work laws at the state level:
The Taft-Hartley Act coincided with the start of a long decline in labor representation in the U.S. Union membership peaked at 33.4% in 1945, falling to about 10.8% in 2020. Meanwhile, labor’s share of national income has slid and corporate profits have soared. These trends couldn’t be coincidental.
To combat this dire legacy for American workers and reverse the negative effects of Taft-Hartley, Hiltzik champions the passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act which would pre-empt state right-to-work laws, prohibit a wide range of employer intimidation practices, give independent contractors the right to a union, require that companies negotiate in good faith, and more. In sum, the PRO Act would turn the tide in favor of organized labor at a time when a large majority of American workers would join a union if they could, and the wages of inequality have been made abundantly and cruelly clear by the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis for working people.
Thus, rather than spending their time demonizing teachers’ unions, local, statewide, and national Democrats should do everything they can to advocate for the PRO Act and a resurgence of American labor. If Joe Biden can lead this turn away from the neoliberalism of his party’s recent past to a newborn progressive economic populism, he may very well be remembered as a not just the guy who got rid of Trump but as a truly transformational President.
The inability of Democrats in the Senate to rally behind Senator Sanders’ call to keep a $15 an hour minimum wage in the Covid-19 relief package was a discouraging setback driven by a small crew of feckless moderates who fail to recognize that the best way to erode working class support for the right is to actually deliver tangible benefits for working Americans. Let’s hope that was not the last attempt to drive that much-needed change and that the push to empower American unions gains some real momentum.
America’s workers are watching.