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We are witnessing one of the greatest assaults on our democracy since the Civil War,” tweeted AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. Union leaders throughout the country denounced the coup attempt and attack on the Constitution.
Here is a book on union organizing that seems about to become a classic for our times.
The present is explosive because of the fusion of crises. In this situation, organized labor has been inconsistent; sometimes paralyzed; other moments outspoken. Left unaddressed is the "cold civil war," created by political polarization.
Although Janus threatens to deal a blow to U.S. unions, the West Virginia teacher strike suggests a way forward for organized labor. The strike effectively used social media as a tool for mass organization, centered on the needs of the community, and linked its cause to issues of social justice.
Here are two articles outlining theory and practice of a model around which the Left could organize cooperative enterprises into a more coherent base upon which to build more powerful, more confrontational politics as well as historic iniquities, or how it would be able to defend the gains it makes. That is how a commonwealth network could be formed and expanded.
Caveats aside, the evidence thus far cautions against making too much of Trump’s success at wooing union households. What these results do suggest is the need for Democrats going forward to craft a message and groom candidates that might reverse waning enthusiasm among this core constituency.
The new labor liberalism, built with the support of proportionally more non-white workers (and women), is more progressive than the old pre–civil rights era labor liberalism. If it achieves its powerful new vision, it will be a more humane, cosmopolitan, and egalitarian movement than its predecessor. But as of now, it is a significantly smaller movement and lacks economic and political leverage in key sectors of the political economy.
Most liberals continue to pay lip service to unions and their importance to the Democratic coalition. But in private, many will tell you that they have little use for them. Julian Zelizer, a Princeton political economist, argues that the marriage between liberalism and organized labor “took a terrible turn starting in the 1970s,” when global competition moved manufacturing jobs from the unionized Northeast and Midwest to the non-union South and, ultimately, abroad.
The Right insists that working class Americans are falling behind because of overly-generous "entitlements" and overpaid public sector employees. In reality, the lost income of workers -- union and non-union, black and white, male and female, public sector and private sector -- can be found in the pockets of the 1 percent. With the decline of unions over the past several decades, wages have stagnated and the "American Dream" has drifted out of reach for millions.
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