Opinion | Workers’ militancy is the only way to increase union membership

As Labor Day 2024 approaches, it is important to critically reflect on the current state of the American labor movement and the challenges it faces in an environment where Big Business dominates the economy and mainstream society remains wedded to the values ​​of a Lockean political culture dominated by ruthless individualism. To put it mildly, without a strong labor movement and a public spirit guiding our institutions, the country will never realize its vision of a just and fair society.

The news on the labor front, however, is not very encouraging. The share of American workers who belong to unions has been falling since the early 1980s, an era that coincides with the full onslaught of the neoliberal counterrevolution and deindustrialization. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, union membership was 20.1 percent, falling to 11.1 percent in 2015.

In 2021, union membership was 10.3 percent, falling to 10.1 percent in 2022. In 2023, union membership fell further to 10.0 percent, a historic low.

The irony is that the United States has seen a “union boom” in recent years. Thousands of Starbucks workers across the country have voted to unionize, and workers at Amazon warehouses and Trader Joe’s, college graduates, and Uber and Lyft drivers have also joined the union fight. But the data, as cited above, tell a different story. The share of U.S. workers who belong to a union continues to decline and is now at its lowest level in history. Today, organized labor in the United States is dominated by public sector workers, which is more than five times higher than the 6 percent share of private sector workers.

In the US, it is politics – manifested in the form of fierce class warfare orchestrated by the economic elite and their supporters – that prevents workers from joining or forming unions.

The United States ranks near the bottom of the list of industrialized democracies when it comes to union membership rates. The average level of union membership in the European Union (EU) is 23 percent, but the average is held down by relatively low membership levels in some large EU states, such as Germany at 18 percent and France at 8 percent. However, even in countries with lower union density, such as France, virtually all workers are covered by collective bargaining agreements. In Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, union density is 70 percent. Incidentally, the Scandinavian countries consistently rank among the happiest countries in the world. In the latest World Happiness Report, the United States doesn’t even make the top 20. In fact, union density is higher in Africa and most parts of Asia than in the United States.

Why is union membership in the United States so low? This is a bit of an anomaly, since polls consistently show that a majority of American adults see the decline in union membership as bad for the country and for working people. It is mostly ultraconservatives and reactionary think tanks like the Hoover Institution who believe that the decline in union membership is good news.

Globalization, technology, and the transformation from an industrial economy to a service society are the most common reasons cited for the decline of American unions. However, these explanations, even when taken together, are not sufficient to explain why the United States has one of the lowest union membership rates in the world. Europe is much more open than the United States, according to the International Monetary Fund. Globalization alone cannot explain the general decline of unions in the United States. Europe’s technology lags behind the United States, but it is not technology but rather institutional arrangements and deliberate policy decisions that succeed in significantly changing the balance between capital and labor that can explain why union membership has stagnated at 10 percent among workers in the United States. We must recognize that neoliberalism itself is not a monolithic process; rather, it is influenced by different domestic pressures and thus plays out differently in different national contexts.

In the United States, it is politics, manifested in the form of vicious class warfare orchestrated by the economic elite and their supporters, that prevents workers from joining or forming unions. The basic rights of American workers to associate and bargain collectively have been under attack throughout the history of American capitalism. Strikes played a major role during the height of the industrialization era and well into the twentieth century, with immigrant workers from Ireland, Italy, and Germany at the forefront of labor radicalism, but so did employer and government violence against striking workers. The United States has the most violent labor history in the Western world. The U.S. government is perhaps the only government in the industrialized world that has engaged in systematic mass murder of striking workers.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act, was passed in July 1935. The act, whose general intent was to guarantee workers “the right of self-organization, to form, join, or assist unions, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection,” was likely instrumental in the dramatic rise in union membership rates observed from the late 1930s through the 1950s, peaking at 32 percent; yet its failures are well documented and can be inversely attributed to the decline in private-sector union membership rates that began to occur after their peak in the late 1950s. In fact, ironic as it may sound, the NLRA may have been responsible for the creation of “instead a vibrant nonunion sector.”

The Supreme Court, of course, has also played a major role in creating a “vibrant nonunion sector.” The court has consistently ruled against union power, including the right to strike. Most typical of this was the position of union-busting Chief Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she said that workers who strike in support of union negotiations are “gambling” their jobs.

In no other country in the Western world is anti-union consulting as big an industry as it is in the United States.

In fact, in no other country in the Western world has the right to strike been so seriously undermined as in the US. In fact, US labor law falls completely short when it comes to safeguarding one of the most important principles of the International Labor Organization (ILO), namely guaranteeing the right to strike. It gives employers the right to replace workers who strike in exchange for better wages and working conditions.

In fact, in no other country in the Western world is anti-union consulting as big an industry as it is in the United States. Shocking as it may sound, it is estimated that employers spend more than $400 million a year hiring “union-avoiding” consultants.

Moreover, “the party of the people” is just as guilty of throwing American workers under the bus. All three living Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton) abandoned unions and were certainly no friends of working people. In fact, they worked tirelessly to promote neoliberalism and general policies that were disastrous for the working class, with Clinton leading the way.

But no story about the sorry state of unionization in the United States can be fully complete without considering the role that unions themselves played in undermining the vision and goals of the labor movement. As David N. Gibbs points out in his excellent book The Revolt of the RichThe nation’s largest labor union, the AFL-CIO, “was conceived on very conservative terms as an institutional reaction against leftist tendencies within the labor movement,” and one of its main activities was to cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency in the fight against communism, both at home and abroad. Eradicating class-struggle unionism was a primary goal of the AFL-CIO, even as the union movement steadily declined. Worse, the Mafia’s ties to the unions, dating back to the early 1930s, had reached such a height by the late 1950s that the government began an investigation into labor racketeering that would lead to convictions of key union leaders and Mafia figures in the decades that followed. As James B. Jacobs argues in Gangsters, Unions, and the Federal Government: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement“Labor racketeering” was a major feature of American organized labor and a major contributor to the decline of American union membership.

We need trade unions because they play an essential role in the struggle for a fair and just society.

The American labor movement has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, although the truth is that union membership is stagnant. The challenges ahead are indeed immense, as there is no alternative left party in the United States and no social democratic traditions that rely on unions to mitigate the injustices perpetrated by the capitalist system. American capitalism is brutal, and the forces of reaction, all the way to the Supreme Court, are extremely powerful, well-organized, and massively financed.

Yet we need unions, because they are absolutely a crucial force in the struggle to create a fair and just society. We need to rebuild the labor movement, and that does not mean going back to the kind of unions that existed in the postwar era. We need unions with a radical vision, unions that exercise power in the workplace and in society. There is no reason why a service-based economy, which is largely associated with low wages and precarious employment, should offer fewer opportunities for union membership. In this context, there is much to learn from the experience of the Union of Southern Service Workers, a union that has not shied away from taking militant action on the job against low wages and dangerous working conditions and demanding a seat at the table.

The only way to increase union membership and combat labor exploitation and inequality is to reject union membership and renew workers’ struggles.