Reviving Labor Unions Despite Lazy Reporting

Today I read one of the most heartening news stories of the last five years. It said that nearly half a trillion dollars of federal spending, which our formerly Democratic Congress had already approved, includes subsidies and tax incentives to revive labor unions in America. The benefits do not go to unions directly; instead, the law provides tax credits and other incentives for private companies to hire union labor, have or allow union apprenticeships, pay “prevailing” (usually union) wages, and “buy American.”

That money will increase union membership, propel union apprenticeships for on-the-job training, and push for union-level wages. It will also encourage the use of American-made steel, iron and components in everything from infrastructure projects to chip-production machines and electric cars. In other words, the new laws pushed and passed by Democrats, which President Biden touted in his State of the Union address, will give American labor unions and American labor a half-trillion-dollar indirect boost.

Why is this story so important? The last generation’s decline in America’s military and economic power, social justice, economic equality, and “domestic tranquility” is largely a result of the disemployment and marginalization of our skilled workers.

To get lower labor costs and make more profit, our oligarchs moved some 60,000 American factories abroad. This left their domestic workers high and dry, factory towns emptying, and wages, skilled jobs and self-respect plummeting. The result was declining real (inflation adjusted) salaries for skilled workers, the emptying of the “rust belt,” a second pandemic of “deaths of despair,” the rise of the Demagogue as a false friend of labor, and the near-loss of our Republic on January 6, 2021.

All this won’t change overnight. But the revival of labor unions promises to reverse virtually all of the trends that drive our current discontents. First, it promises good, well-paying, dignified jobs for the two-thirds of American workers who lack college degrees. Second, by boosting their pay, it will boost our economy by increasing the demand for goods and services that most of us use. (Unlike many college-educated workers, most non-college-educated workers spend most of what they earn currently. They don’t “invest” in luxury goods or speculate in stocks or crypto. They don’t tend to buy good homes just to “flip” them.)

Third, instead of most of us going to Walmart to buy cheap foreign-made stuff, most of us will have the money to buy better products made by Americans in American factories to American standards of quality and safety. In this way, we Americans will pick ourselves up by our economic bootstraps. When you go to buy a manufactured product, you may pay a little more. But, in so doing, you will support your fellow Americans and help them have a better life. Then they can afford to buy more, boosting the economy, and to pay more in taxes, helping to make our infrastructure and defense more secure. A rising tide of better income and more economic security will raise all boats.

Fourth, America will return to making enough of its own manufactures so that it needn’t depend on its rivals and enemies for the things that make a modern economy run and grow, let alone things we must have to fight and survive a war. Finally, a majority of American workers will slowly come to realize that the Democrats are their true friends, and have been since the early twentieth century. They will come to reject the false promises of “free trade,” “globalization,” and “libertarianism,” which only let their factories and jobs be sold abroad and the oligarchs wax rich from cheap foreign labor and effective tax rates far lower than their own.

A must-read Vox article shows, in seven key graphs, how the decline of union membership has mirrored the decline of economic justice for workers in the OECD. (Everyone who works for someone else should carry a card with this short article in his or her wallet or purse.) The most important graph is the third one, which plots the share of union membership against the share of income accruing to the top ten percent of earners, i.e., oligarchs, bosses and the “elite.” Union membership peaked at about 33% during World War II and had declined to about 12% by 2008 (fifteen years ago). During the same period, the share of total income grabbed by the top 10% increased from 33% to 47%, or nearly by half.

Labor unions are the surest means by which workers can achieve fair wages and fair and safe working conditions. They can’t achieve them alone because their bosses can always find more desperate workers to replace a few who demand better treatment. That’s especially so in an economy with eleven million undocumented migrants effectively reduced to serfdom because they can be deported at any time with a single phone call. (The solution to this problem is to give them some sort of legal status, even if far from citizenship, so that they can organize and object to abuse without being instantly deported.)

Slowly but surely, workers in low-paid jobs are beginning to understand these facts of life. That’s why Amazon’s warehouse workers, Starbucks’ baristas, private delivery drivers and similar gig workers are already organizing unions. They’re doing so despite (in some cases) relatively benign working conditions and (in too many cases) full-court presses by their employers to convince them not to, sometimes in violation of labor laws.

Why are labor unions so important? For all who work for someone else, but particularly those without college degrees (whose work options are more limited), democracy is not complete without a labor union. Your political vote won’t matter much if you don’t have a job, or if the job you have won’t support a family without working two shifts, or without constant struggle, worry, and angst. And if you can be deported with a phone call, you have no rights beyond those your boss is willing to concede voluntarily, at least to the extent of not making that phone call.

If you’re white, male and straight, you may think that getting a “leg up” against the Black, Hispanic, Asian, foreign-born or LGBTQ worker next to you might help, but it won’t. “Divide and conquer” has been the means by which bosses have prevailed over workers since bosses broke the back of the progressive movement around the turn of the twentieth century. The only sure way for workers to move ahead is together, united without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender or sexual proclivities. That’s one reason all workers should know that any demagogue who tries to make them hate and fear their own co-workers, on the basis of mere identify or beliefs, is their enemy, not their friend.

Modern industry has made it possible, and sometimes necessary, to treat human beings as interchangeable cogs in big machines. In the early twentieth century, it was ladies behind endless rows of identical sewing machines, and men behind endless rows of identical lathes. Today, it’s workers in call centers, social-media workers trying to stamp out misinformation and hate, programmers cranking out code under impossible deadlines at their home computers, gig-delivery workers and warehouse workers tasked by algorithms, and even some health-care workers directed by machines as well as superiors.

If you work at one of these jobs, how much do you think your mere vote as a citizen is going to change your salary, working conditions or on-the-job safety, i.e., the important conditions under which you work from day to day? Only by organizing with all or most of your co-workers can you force your boss to see you, hear you, negotiate with you, and make things better. In this sense, a labor union is as essential to your being treated humanely as your vote as a citizen in a democracy.

So when I read the article about President Biden’s big push to revive labor unions, I stood up at my breakfast table and cheered.

But then had a second I thought. I saw the article about union boosting on February 11. President Biden had signed into law the CHIPS and Science Act on August 9 of last year, the Inflation Reduction Act on August 16, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (aka the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill) on November 15 of 2021.

Why, in all the nearly seven months since the signing of the last two acts, and all the fifteen months since the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill was signed, had I never heard about the union-boosting provisions of these laws? Why had this successful push by the Democrats, which goes right to the heart of the current discontents of our workers, our economic ills and our democracy, not been a matter of general public knowledge?

Maybe I missed it. But I think not. I think our so-called “meanstream media” (that’s a typo, but I like it!) dropped the ball, big time. Amidst avid reporting of useless pols brandishing weapons, amidst endless speculation about what pols would say or do next, amidst careful reporting of endless lies and misinformation, amidst even more endless reporting on degenerate celebrities, our media missed one of the most important stories since January 6, 2020. And a positive, encouraging story at that!

It’s also a story that any junior reporter could have broken just by reading the laws that Congress had passed. Maybe it’s too much to ask a billion-dollar media corporation to assign someone to read Congress’ admittedly boring thousand-page productions from cover to cover. But that might have broken this story early enough to have had some effect on the recent midterm elections.

You might be disposed to blame the silence on the Dems. If they don’t toot their own horn, who will? Even now, the President of the United States has undertaken a temporary near-full-time job going around the country talking about what he’s done for the working stiff.

But what about the media? If they had done their jobs back in August, September and October, let alone for all of 2022 before the elections, our midterms might well have have come out differently. Maybe we would have a new, fully Democratic Congress and be well on our way to resurrecting our democracy, not to mention economic and racial justice, as well as our economy.

It’s all enough to make me think that our private media—virtually all run or controlled by oligarchs (Jeff Bezos owns the WaPo, and need I mention the Murdochs and Fox?)— are engaged in a conspiracy of silence. But I’m not that paranoid, not yet. I just think our media have all become so entranced with social media and so fundamentally lazy that their reporters would rather walk over hot coals than read a thousand-page statute from cover to cover, or even pick up the phone and talk at length with a lawyer or analyst whose job is to do just that.

As for the future, it’s clear as day that the Democrats need their own media outlet. It shouldn’t compete directly with the big monopolies in retail news, for revenue and clicks. Rather, it should be something like Reuters or AP: a progressive-focused, authoritative and trusted original source of real news, based in part on real analysis of long and boring but crucially important documents like the statutes passed during President Biden’s first two years.

Today, we’re emerging (we hope!) from the Covid pandemic. At the same time, we’re dealing with spy balloons from China, a Demagogue still waiting in the wings (also a defendant in multiple trials), a smarter one waiting to pounce from Florida, a once-a-century disaster in Turkey and Syria, and the winds of war with both China and Russia. With all this going on, isn’t it a bit of a waste sending an overworked, eighty-year-old President around the country doing what fair, “balanced” and competent media ought to have been doing as a matter of basic good reporting?


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