On this Labor Day, a lot of folks are thinking about what ever happened to labor.
Where did those unions go?
And more immediately, where did those jobs go?
The two might be more connected than you might think.
E.J. Dionne Jr. writes that “When unions mattered, prosperity was shared.” We had less of what one notorious Citibank memo referred to as “plutonomy,” a concentration of wealth among the few at the top. Working families got to share in the material bounty they’d created.
This wasn’t just given. It was fought for, in decades of organizing and struggle.
But it created the consumer power that drove the US economy to new heights.
But then something happened.
The “labor peace” promoted by, among others, Seattle Teamster leader Dave Beck, led union leadership closer to corporate management, further from their own rank n’ file.
Then came what’s commonly called “The Sixties,” though much of it really happened in 1971-75. The McGovern Democrats and the New Left, with their “identity politics” and all,
had a rift with some of labor’s aging-white-guy leaders, a rift the Nixon Republicans were
glad to exploit. Then came the Reagan years with their deliberate policies of killing labor, offshoring jobs, and redistributing wealth upward.
It’s time to bring labor back.
Not just to ensure our rights. Not just to make an economic recovery possible.
But to revive the kinds of
workplace innovations that only come when employees are empowered to come up with them.
