IGNORING LABOR HURTING DEMOCRATS

Mike Fiorillo sent out a great New York Magazine article earlier on the Democrats destroying themselves by ignoring unions, particularly when they are in power.

From the article:

The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not. If you want a two-sentence explanation for why the Midwest is turning red (and thus, why Donald Trump is president), you could do worse than that.

With its financial contributions and grassroots organizing, the labor movement helped give Democrats full control of the federal government three times in the last four decades. And all three of those times — under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — Democrats failed to pass labor law reforms that would to bolster the union cause. In hindsight, it’s clear that the Democratic Party didn’t merely betray organized labor with these failures, but also, itself.

Between 1978 and 2017, the union membership rate in the United States fell by more than half — from 26 to 10.7 percent. Some of this decline probably couldn’t have been averted — or, at least, not by changes in labor law alone. The combination of resurgent economies in Europe and Japan, the United States’ decidedly non-protectionist trade policies, and technological advances in shipping was bound to do a number on American unions. Global competition thinned profit margins for U.S. firms; cutting labor costs was one of the easiest ways to fatten ’em back up; and breaking unions (through persuasion, intimidation, or relocation) was one of the easiest ways to cut said costs.

Nevertheless, there was lot that Democrats could have done — through labor law reform — to shelter the union movement from these changes, and help it establish a bigger footprint in the service sector. At present, employers are prohibited from firing workers for organizing or threatening to close businesses if workers unionize — but the penalties for such violations are negligible. Further, while they must recognize unions once they are ratified by workers in an election, employers can delay those elections for months or even years — and, even after recognition, face no obligation to reach a contract with their newly unionized workers.

Democrats could have increased the penalties for violating labor law, enabled unions to circumvent the election process if a majority of workers signed union cards (a.k.a. “card check”), and required employers to enter arbitration with unions if no contract was reached within 120 days of their formation — as Barack Obama promised the labor movement they would, in 2008.

Or, if they were feeling a bit more radical, they could have repealed the part of the Taft-Hartley Act that allows conservatives states to pass “right to work” laws. Such laws undermine organized labor by allowing workers who join a unionized workplace to enjoy the benefits of a collective bargaining agreement without paying dues to the union that negotiated it. This encourages other workers to skirt their dues, which can then drain a union of the funds it needs to survive.

The article then cites a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research which makes the case by examining data that right to work laws lead to Republican gains. Let's examine the abstract and the conclusion of the paper.

The Abstract:

Labor unions play a central role in the Democratic party coalition, providing candidates with voters, volunteers, and contributions, as well as lobbying policymakers. Has the sustained decline of organized labor hurt Democrats in elections and shifted public policy? We use the enactment of right-to-work laws—which weaken unions by removing agency shop protections— to estimate the effect of unions on politics from 1980 to 2016. Comparing counties on either side of a state and right-to-work border to causally identify the effects of the state laws, we find that right-to-work laws reduce Democratic Presidential vote shares by 3.5 percentage points. We find similar effects in US Senate, US House, and Gubernatorial races, as well as on state legislative control. Turnout is also 2 to 3 percentage points lower in right-to-work counties after those laws pass. We next explore the mechanisms behind these effects, finding that right-to-work laws dampen organized labor campaign contributions to Democrats and that potential Democratic voters are less likely to be contacted to vote in right-to-work states. The weakening of unions also has large downstream effects both on who runs for office and on state legislative policy. Fewer working class candidates serve in state legislatures and Congress, and state policy moves in a more conservative direction following the passage of right-to-work laws.

Now read the conclusion as you ponder your future without being in a union or paying union dues:

Conclusion

The anti-tax political activist Grover Norquist recently declared that while President Trump may be historically unpopular, the GOP could still “win big” in 2020. The secret to the Republican party’s long-term success, Norquist argued, involved state-level initiatives to weaken the power of labor unions. As Norquist explained it, if union reforms cutting the power of labor unions to recruit and retain members—like RTW laws—“are enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” A weaker labor movement, Norquist reasoned, would not just have economic consequences. It would also have significant political repercussions, meaning that Democrats would have substantially less of a grassroots presence on the ground during elections and less money to invest in politics.

Norquist’s theory is also shared by state-level conservative activists who have been driving the recent push to enact additional RTW laws in newly GOP-controlled state governments. Tracie Sharp runs a national network of state-level conservative think-tanks that have championed the passage of RTW laws in recent years in states such as Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin (Hertel-Fernandez 2017). In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sharp explained why she was optimistic about the long-run effects of her network’s push against the labor movement, explaining that “When you chip away at one of the [liberal] power sources that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote...I think that helps [conservative activists and GOP politicians]—for sure.”36 Internal documents from Sharp’s organization provide an even clearer message: by passing RTW laws, the work of conservative organizations like hers was “permanently depriving the Left from access to millions of dollars...every election cycle.” That meant dealing “a major blow to the Left’s ability to control government at the state and national levels.”

In this paper, we have brought these arguments to the data, examining the short- and long-run political consequences of state RTW laws. Comparing otherwise similar counties straddling state

(and RTW) borders, we find that the passage of RTW laws led Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to receive fewer votes. In Presidential elections, Democratic candidates received about 3.5 percentage points fewer votes following the passage of RTW laws in the counties on the RTW side of the border. RTW laws also lower turnout in both federal and state races. Further survey-based analysis revealed that working class Americans (but not professional workers) were less likely to report get-out-the-vote contact in RTW states following the passage of RTW laws, suggesting that weakened unions have less capacity for turning out Democratic voters. And we showed that union fundraising for state and local races (and Democratic funding in general) falls sharply following the passage of RTW laws.

The effects of RTW laws go beyond elections. We also examined how, by weakening the relationship between unions and the Democrats, RTW laws may have changed the political landscape across the U.S. states. Working class candidates—politicians most likely to be backed by the labor movement—are less likely to hold federal and state office in states following the passage of RTW laws. State policy as a whole, moreover, moved to the ideological right in RTW states following

the passage of those laws.

Beyond revealing the importance of state RTW laws for a wider set of political outcomes than has been previously appreciated, our paper makes a broader contributions to the study of labor unions and the labor market. In older debates in the literature, scholars have asked what unions do in the United States. While a long line of work has shown the ways that labor unions directly affect the wage and income distributions—by compressing wages in unionized firms and industries—we emphasize the political nature of labor organizations. Beyond the bargaining table, unions affect inequality through the ballot box, through the politicians and policies they support. The capacity of unions to affect the labor market and the income distribution through this second channel may be waning as labor’s strength—and political clout—diminishes in the face of unfavorable state policy, such as RTW laws.

We're losing as working people and as if we read some of the right wing comments on this blog, we can see that some of our own people are contributing to our defeat.