Union members rally in Birmingham back in 2011: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As Americans celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday in September with barbecue, beans and boat rides, this is a good time to reflect on the status of organized labor in the United States in terms of politics and public opinion.

This should be a big anniversary for the holiday, since it has been 125 years since President Grover Cleveland signed the law establishing the holiday after a period of labor unrest.

Unfortunately, due to the partisan divide in American politics and the divisive nature of the current occupant of the White House, there seems to be no major push to celebrate this anniversary.

While some unions play a critical role in pushing for workers rights in the U.S. economy, many rank and file union members were complicit in voting in Donald Trump as president.

It is not clear what role unions plan to play in the 2020 election, since unions themselves are divided on what candidates and party to support.

That’s too bad, since a significant majority of Americans support the idea of organized labor.

According to Gallup’s latest poll on the subject, 64 percent of those surveyed in the U.S. say they approve of labor unions. Polls show this is the third year in a row when more than 60 percent of Americans support at least the idea of organized labor, if not necessarily specific unions.

Looking back in time, union approval averaged 68 percent between Gallup’s initial measurement of the issue between 1936 and 1967. But support for unions dropped in the late 1960s, about the time union memberships became divided on race, religion and politics by wedge issues and lost their political leverage on behalf of workers in the battle with the growing power of corporations in American life.

Gallup’s analysts attribute the current level of support to positive economic conditions, especially the reported low unemployment level according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But since most of those jobs are non-union positions and not full time, high paying jobs with full health care and retirement benefits, many workers are left unrepresented and are overworked and underpaid.

Union leadership, largely white and male, has been slow to include African Americans, Latinos and women in their ranks, or to address changes in the job market due to new technology. So according to the latest numbers, only 14 percent of Americans reside in a union household, and only 10 percent of workers are members of a union.

According to Gallup, the lowest union approval ratings in public opinion polling history came from 2009 through 2012, years of high unemployment that followed the Bush Great Recession. Gallup also observed relatively low union approval during the allegedly “poor economic times” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But there were political as well as economic reasons why Americans stopped supporting unions, including corruption on the part of union leaders.

It is a bit hard for Americans and journalists to understand why rank and file union members tend to vote Republican, since the Republican Party leadership has been consistently anti-labor back to the time when President Ronald Reagan busted up the Air Traffic controllers union in the early 1980s and ordered an end to a strike for higher pay and better working conditions in those stressful jobs.

Only 45 percent of Republicans say they approve of labor unions, compared to 82 percent of Democrats who say they support the rights of workers to organize and stand up to corporations for higher pay as well as better, safer working conditions like on the job safety measures and workers compensation pay.

I probably know more about this issue than any reporter in the country, since I spent four years a few years back working directly with unions and trying to help them understand their necessary role in American politics. You can read much of our previous coverage here.

A turning point in the relationship between unions and corporations and union participation in U.S. politics should have taken place after the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, granting corporations unlimited power to contribute campaign cash to politicians of their choice by ruling that corporations are “people” and therefore entitled to “free speech.” The court ruled that political contributions are a form of free speech, and mentioned unions in that ruling, saying they should be able to raise money too and act as a counterweight to corporate power.

Only rank and file workers failed to grasp this important distinction, and union leaders did a poor job of educating their memberships about it.

I wrote a ground breaking piece back then that went viral about the history of workers voting against their economic best interest.

Why Do Working Class People Vote Against Their Economic Interests?

But since many union members did not like then-President Barack Obama because of the color of his skin, union voters went a different way in the elections of 2012, 2014 and 2016, basically voting with the tea party instead of the occupy movement.

So here we are today, with Democrats supporting the rights of workers to organize in unions, but many union members still supporting politicians like Donald Trump. Not because Trump and the Republicans support unions. They don’t. But because union members still support the likes of Trump on the basis of race and religion, and they support his efforts to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and the fight to keep illegal immigrants out of the country on the unfounded basis that immigrants tend to take away union jobs.

This could not be further from the truth. Immigrants tend to take jobs other Americans don’t want, like picking fruit and vegetables and cleaning office buildings and houses.

If labor union leaders were smart, they would be moving to organize the new technology working fields of the future, like workers who build solar panels and windmills. Even workers who are involved in fracking for natural gas are non-union. Technology workers at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Microsoft are also non-union.

If American democracy is going to work and survive, we need union workers and leaders on the right side of the political struggle for control of the White House, the U.S. Senate, Congress and the Supreme Court. We need them on the right side of struggles to control governorships and legislatures in the states.

Maybe it is time Democrats started talking about this more on social media. Where is the peer pressure on union workers and leaders to use their resources and power to elect Democrats, who are far more likely to support workers rights than Republicans?

This is just one of the many misunderstandings that plague our politics and prevent American democracy from working as it should — on the basis of facts with clearly designated and financially supported sides.

It would also help if someone in the mainstream media understood this struggle and covered it like we do here on the independent web press. Of course that’s not happening and not going to happen, because mega corporations own all the media outlets most people depend on for information.

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