Public to Unions: Drop Dead
CHRIS MAISANO
For years, the AFL-CIO has touted a 2006 survey in which almost 60 million unorganized workers said they would join a union if they could. These positive numbers were supported by other polls that showed that solid majorities of the U.S. population had a favorable view of labor unions and saw them as necessary to protecting workers on the job.
What a difference a couple of years and an economic crisis makes. Today, the Pew Research Center released survey results that should alarm anyone in and around the labor movement. According to Pew:
Favorable views of labor unions have plummeted since 2007, amid growing public skepticism about unions’ purpose and power. Currently, 41% say they have a favorable opinion of labor unions while about as many (42%) express an unfavorable opinion. In January 2007, a clear majority (58%) had a favorable view of unions while just 31% had an unfavorable impression.
Yikes. This sharp decline in favorability cuts across all gender, race/ethnicity, income, educational, and political groups. The only bright spot is that a majority (53%) of people under 30 continue to have a favorable view of unions, although that number is down from 66% in 2007. Markedly less people think that unions are necessary to protect workers, and 61% of people think that unions have too much power, even though labor has won almost nothing that it wanted from the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress and overall union density continues to plummet.
The survey does not offer any insight as to why such a sudden and dramatic shift in public attitudes towards unions has taken place, but I think that there are a few factors that are driving these horrible results:
1) The United Auto Workers took a beating in the media during the 2009 auto bailout, and were identified by many as the main culprit behind the decline of the American auto industry. Regardless of their sometimes questionable veracity, all of those stories about GM employees making $70 an hour and having gold-plated benefits did not do much to make the labor movement as a whole look very good in the eyes of millions who were watching their livelihoods go up in smoke. I think a lot of plain old envy at the relative security and prosperity that many union members enjoy drives this particular form of anti-union sentiment.
2) As states and cities around the country struggle with massive budget deficits, supposedly greedy public employees unions are seen by many as one of the main causes (and many times as the primary cause) of state and local fiscal crisis. This is not true, but as anyone who has ever lived probably knows, many people do not have a very high opinion of government employees, to put it mildly.
3) The labor movement has failed in its effort to win the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act or any kind of useful labor law reform, and has looked pretty ineffectual in the process.
4) The unions have not put forth any serious proposal for a jobs program and have not been effective advocates for real healthcare reform, the two domestic issues that people care about the most and could potentially be mobilized behind. They have done little or nothing to advocate for the interests of the working class as a whole during the crisis. The unions have fought hard against the administration’s proposed “Cadillac tax” on high-value health insurance plans, but this is only out of self-interest and does little to combat the perception that unions are a special interest that is only concerned with protecting the advantages enjoyed by already existing union members.
I’m sure that many aspects of the increasing anti-union mood have little or no basis in reality, and can’t necessarily be blamed on the unions themselves. But it’s not just a matter of labor not doing a good enough job in “getting its message across.” In all honesty, the labor movement has not done much to deserve the support of the vast majority of working people who remain unorganized. Unfortunately, labor’s inability to do so is likely inherent in the current configuration of the union movement, and drastic institutional reforms are probably necessary to rescue the labor movement from its increasingly bleak future. It’s incredibly hard to figure out how to change this sorry state of affairs, but longtime labor activists Bob Fitch and Sam Gindin seem to offer some good ideas on how we might get started.
my understanding is they only asked white/black people in the race part – so no, it doesnt cut across all race/ethnicities. That to me is interesting, particularly given the inroads labor is doing in the latin@ community. Not to say that the results would be different, but more to say that this isnt the end all be all of polls.
brother, where do you get this from? “4) The unions have not put forth any serious proposal for a jobs program and have not been effective advocates for real healthcare reform, the two domestic issues that people care about the most and could potentially be mobilized behind.”
Are you serious? Sorry to disagree, but the only real plan I’ve seen on jobs is the labor plan. The other weak proposals I see being floated would actually serve to undermine collective bargaining, even some of the “progressive” ones. I would say labor hasnt yet mobilized on a jobs plan, that is true. Expect that to change in the coming months, count on it. On healthcare, maybe its because I saw how things worked here in DC, but my goodness when the tea party folks were crashing town halls, only labor and to some extent grassroots organizations were the ones who mobilized in response. You know who’s banked and paid for giant chunks of HC fight as well?
I guess in summation my point is that unless labor really re-evaluates what its priorities are (is it really EFCA in this economy?), and develops strategies that center around involving members and potential members in the streets (as opposed to mostly DC centered inside beltway strategies), they’ll continue to go downhill. One thing your survey points out that to me scream volumes is the opportunity, given young workers’ economic realities, for labor to really step out and capture the moment by going all out in industries where young people are heavily concentrated (retail, low-wage, part-time/temp, etc…)
Is this Carlos from SLAP? If so, good to hear from you! I hope you’ll be at the YDS conference next week. OK, down to business.
The unions have done basically nothing to mobilize people around a jobs plan, and I would be absolutely shocked if they actually mounted a forceful challenge against a Democratic administration and Congress. That’s just not what the labor leadership does. I don’t expect this to change in the coming months, when I’m sure the unions will probably be more concerned with electing Democratic candidates to Congress than mobilizing their own members in support of a jobs program or appealing to working people outside the unions.
And as for healthcare, labor’s approach to reform has been fairly pathetic. It’s lost on basically every point it wanted from the administration, but yet goes along with the administration because it’s more concerned with “being at the table” than actually winning real reform. And unfortunately I don’t think that most unions are really willing to push for single-payer healthcare because it would ultimately undermine union-negotiated healthcare benefits (the “union advantage”). I don’t think labor (outside of the nurses’ union and some others) deserves credit for doing much of anything useful on this issue.
See also: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5612/public_opinon_of_unions_falters/
Not sure if this is as significant in the mainstream as the other reasons listed above, but there’s also the narrative Fox News and others have pieced together about one of the most visible unions, SEIU. I know the opinion of them on here is mixed at best, but I do remember seeing on more than one occasion some sort of story pop up talking about how they were tied into the Obama-ACORN-SEIU-Bill Ayers-Stalin’s Ghost juggernaut at some point, and if recent polls about the delusions of the right are to be believed, these stories have some traction, as silly as they are.