This summer, something remarkable happened: 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike, and no one — save a few customers dealing with service interruptions — much cared.
The communications behemoth wanted more than 100 concessions on health care, pensions, sick days and outsourcing. Unions representing the workers said Verizon sought to void 50 years of collective-bargaining gains for middle-class workers, despite posting a 2.8% jump in revenue in the second quarter, up to $27.5 billion.
Thirteen days later, those on strike went back to work on good faith, the company guaranteeing nothing other than continued talks.
It’s an indictment of how anemic the labor movement in America has become, how irrelevant to the average worker that, even in this ever-contracting economy, the lower and middle classes couldn’t be agitated to care.
And why should they? Private-sector unions in the US are nearly extinct, having long ago abandoned an unwinnable fight against big business. Meanwhile, public-sector unions are thriving by comparison, even though public opinion has been on the decline since the rise of unions in the 1930s, when 72% of Americans had a favorable view of them.
By 2009, according to a Gallup poll, that number had declined to 48%.
How did this happen? How is it that the average American worker has come to view unionized labor — which, by definition, was meant to protect and progress each generation in ever-greater ways — with such contempt?
“At a certain historical moment, they had a real role to play, but they haven’t added to that,” says Jim Stergios, executive director of nonpartisan think tank the Pioneer Institute. “[They’re more concerned] that they meet their members’ needs at a time when the country is in a really rough spot.”
For New Yorkers especially, the prevailing attitude toward unions is akin to rent-stabilized apartments: great for the people who happened to luck into them, deeply unfair for those left to the vicissitudes of the free market.
And the unions, once self-branded as “the folks who brought you the weekend,” have only themselves to blame, long ago becoming the province of the few.
“There’s a big difference between a movement in the interest of the people, and an institution collecting dues and advancing the interests of its members,” says Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the modern-day classic “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”
“I think,” she adds, “that unions continued to go on with business as usual, and didn’t realize that things had gotten a lot meaner.”
Today, for the average worker at a minimum-wage job, there’s no one to protect against getting fired for taking a sick day, or to force an employer to pay for a sick day, or to require a lunch break — let alone provide health care or pensions or vacations.
For any unprotected worker, unions have come to represent an increasingly polarized economy, the haves and the have-nots. The public sector is regarded with even more disdain — workers who are, in part, subsidized by taxpayers, yet seem to live in a hermetically sealed nation-state of their own.
Labor unions in America rose to power during the Great Depression, and in 1935 Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which ensured collective bargaining rights for workers. Yet when it came to the rights of public-sector workers to organize, even FDR warned against it, saying the notion of government workers striking against the government and, by extension, the taxpayers providing those salaries, was “unthinkable and intolerable.”
And so we have a schizophrenic relationship with unions, most recently illustrated by the private-sector strike against Verizon and the far uglier battle over public-sector rights to collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
That fight, spurred by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, has devolved into recall elections (largely unsuccessful), the banning of Republicans from the Labor Day Parade (since reversed) and the super-gluing of doors to a Catholic school ahead of the governor’s visit (mature). Not to mention the concessions wrung from fiscally starving governors, both Democrat and Republican, in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, and the battles over public-sector collective-bargaining rights in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Tennessee.
“This is extremely unusual from a historical standpoint,” says Terry Moe, professor of political science at Stanford University and author of “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools.” “This is a perfect storm. Even the unions’ allies are saying, ‘We have to do something.’ ”
A Harris poll released this week shows similar dissonance, its headline more suited to The Onion: “Most Americans Critical of Unions While Crediting Them for Improving Wages and Working Conditions.” While 65% of those polled said unions had done much to spike pay and improve on-the-job safety and fair practices, 71% said unions are more concerned with fighting change than fighting for it.
Ehrenreich, the journalist and activist who worked a series of minimum-wage jobs to expose the plight of the working poor, believes that private-sector unions have become as bloated and ineffectual as the big businesses they ostensibly keep in check.
“In DC, the AFL-CIO is near the White House,” she says. “That’s very expensive real estate, and I don’t think they should be there. I think they should be in storefronts around the country. I don’t think they should regard themselves as a bureaucracy — and I sense, in big labor, bureaucratic sclerosis — but as a movement.”
Unions, after all, not only brought the American worker the weekend: They’re responsible for child-labor laws, sick pay, benefits, fairness in the workplace — even the inalienable right to bathroom breaks, a federally instituted right as of April 1998.
But union membership in the private sector has been on the decline for nearly 30 years, with 2010’s ratio — 6.9% of private-sector workers unionized vs. 36.2% public — about the same as 1983’s.
New York has one of the highest rates of unionized workers in the country, at 11.9%, but the gap between public and private is in keeping with the national norm: 14% of private vs. 71% of public, a historic high.
“Things are very, very difficult in the private sector right now,” says the Pioneer Institute’s Stergios. “With the Verizon strike — who looked bad in that? The unions are really out of whack with this high unemployment rate. If workers don’t give something up, they seem irrational. They need a reality check. ”
Private-sector unions hit their apex in the 1950s, largely representing blue-collar workers, and almost no one saw their imminent decline.
“Everyone thought they’d just keep going up,” says Moe. But a confluence of factors contributed to their erosion: a globalized economy and the outsourcing of jobs; the migration of businesses to the Sun Belt, where labor costs are lower and there’s less public support for unions; and good old-fashioned union-busting.
That trend started in the ’80s, says Ehrenreich, who cites President Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air-traffic controllers as a big turning point in attitudes toward unionized labor. “That’s when you started having much more money spent on anti-labor consultants, union-busters.”
While organized labor in the private sector was steadily decomposing, it was flourishing in the public sector largely due to labor powerhouses such as the AFL-CIO and the UAW, long allied with the Democratic Party.
Those organizations succumbed to mission creep, seeking to expand their power base by promising money and votes in exchange for legislation that extended such rights to government workers: Cops, firefighters, sanitation workers and, of course, teachers, the largest and most powerful group in the organized public sector.
“Massachusetts is the best state in the nation educationally, and yet the Boston teachers contract is 225 pages in length,” Stergios says. “It states how many kids are allowed in a classroom, how many minutes before school officially starts can a teacher begin, how often is the principal allowed in the classroom — stuff that does not allow you to implement so-called best practices.”
Author Moe, too, thinks that the teachers unions have long been doing active harm, that the control they wield over nearly all of the system is unconscionable.
“Since 1980, when the teachers movement gets going, people have been saying, ‘Hey, we have to reform the schools.’ Why would they say that? Because, over the last quarter century, the teachers unions have been blocking reforms,” Moe says. “They want reforms to fail, to weaken accountability. They don’t like school choice, because it means they’ll all lose their jobs if kids leave.”
In the short term, he says, the outlook is grim, but in the long term, he sees the teachers unions busted not by government or by charter schools but technology.
“In 15 years, I think most children will be taking their classes online,” he says. “It’s a big train coming down the tracks that no one sees yet, but it will change the politics of education.”
As for the rest of the public-sector unions, they’re largely considered safe. You can’t mechanize cops or firefighters, and as for non-essential workers, the concessions won are only as substantial as state government and public opinion.
Moe doesn’t foresee a slackening of power among public-sector workers, despite the current wave of political and populist outrage. And this, he says, is not necessarily to the greater good.
“In another couple of years,” Moe says, “the storm will be over. They’ll have the same amount of members, the same power, and will do what they can to recover the ground they have lost.”
Stergios agrees. “The public sector will continue to take a lot of hits on collective bargaining,” he says. “But I don’t know if I see them dying anytime soon.”