Perspective

Glad for legacy of labor

By ROBYN BLUMNER, Times columnist
Published December 2, 2007

I have a middle-class life. My employer pays me a living wage, provides health insurance, grants me days off when I'm sick and offers vacation pay. And while I'm not a member of a union, as a student of American history I know that the legacy of the labor movement is largely the reason that I enjoy these benefits today.

Too few Americans have any idea why they are decently treated by employers who then turn around and exploit workers overseas. Americans just assume it's a birthright. It's not.

The truth is, there was nothing historically inevitable about the rise of the middle class and the great shared prosperity enjoyed by Americans after World War II. There had been rich societies before: think ancient Rome, the Ottoman Turks, the British Empire. But none had spawned the remarkable equality in the distribution of wealth that America had, where the benefits of economic activity were widely shared even among those at the lower rungs. Even today, resource-rich countries like Nigeria, with its massive reserves of oil, consign most citizens to desperate poverty while a small elite enjoys riches beyond imagining.

America has had a very different trajectory. We catapulted the majority of our citizens into the middle classes within a very short time frame in the mid 20th century. This was due to an economic culture of shared rewards established by unions and a progressive government through a new legal regime.

This government-labor partnership, starting with FDR, protected union organizers from violence and retaliation, produced groundbreaking wage, hour and worker safety laws, used progressive taxation to invest in infrastructure and education, and generally promised that government was going to stand on the side of the worker, rather than big business, where it had always previously stood.

After World War II, unionization rates hit historical highs of more than a third of workers, which explains why as productivity rose by 103.7 percent between 1947 and 1973, and median family income rose by 103.9 percent. Unions successfully negotiated the spreading of that additional wealth among those who produced it, and nonunion firms followed suit in order to ward off unionization efforts.

Today's reality is far different. Union rates in the private sector are at an abysmal 7 percent and 12 percent overall. This sharp decline also tracks the diversion of wealth, away from workers and to shareholders and top executives. In recent years, productivity has risen over median family income by a margin of eight to one. American workers have essentially stopped reaping the rewards of a growing economy. Without a union, they no longer have a seat at the table when decisions are made as to who gets what, and they have the crumbs to show for it.

Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist who teaches economics at Princeton University, argues in his new book The Conscience of a Liberal that it is not the impersonal market forces of globalization and technological change that have stagnated Americans' living standards and caused income inequality to reach levels not seen since the age of the robber barons. It's a direct consequence of conscious decisions of government, driven by conservative Republicans, to cut taxes on wealth and undermine labor organizing.

Krugman points to Western Europe, which is subject to the same pressures from globalization and technology as the United States but has not experienced by any stretch the same rise in income inequality.

What this means is that to return to a time when it was really morning in America - not during Ronald Reagan's tenure when American workers were losing ground, but during the 1950s and 1960s - Democrats in power are going to have to get serious about helping to revitalize the union movement.

One of the craziest political strategies the Democratic Party ever adopted was to distance itself from labor - which it has since Walter Mondale in 1984 was painted as beholden to the AFL-CIO. Democratic political success is inextricably tied to the strength of the labor movement.

First, union members vote at an aggressive rate. Even as the percentage of union members drops, one in four voters belongs to a household with a union member in it, essentially the same percentage as existed in 1980.

Second, union members favor Democrats by two-digit margins. In 2004, when the rest of the country gave Democrats 48 percent of the popular vote, union member households gave them 59 percent.

When employees join unions they become more engaged citizens, more educated about their economic interests and more aware of which party will represent those interests.

Jobs like mine are becoming rarer these days, as the legacy of organized labor withers. In America today the rising tide is only lifting all yachts, while the dinghies founder - a trend that only a new government-labor partnership can begin to correct.

[Last modified December 3, 2007, 09:01:25]