From The Guardian UK: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/labor-unions-decline-can-turnaround
To secure gains for working people requires a social transition that puts them in charge of producing society’s services
Richard Wolff
theguardian.com, Monday 2 September 2013
Organized labor’s decline in the US over the past half century is well-known; what drove that decline, less so. The New Deal‘s enemies – big business, Republicans, conservatives – had developed a coordinated strategy by the late 1940s. They would break up the coalition of organized labor, socialist and communist parties: the mass base that had forced through the 1930s New Deal. Then each coalition member could be individually destroyed.
One line of attack used anti-communist witch-hunts (McCarthyism) to frighten socialists and labor unions into dissociating themselves from former communist allies. Another attack targeted socialists by equating them with communists and applying the same demonization. Still another attack, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, directly weakened labor unions, their organizing capability and their alliance with the left.
Business and political leaders, mass media and academics cultivated a paranoid anxiety among Americans: suspect anything even vaguely leftist, see risks of “subversion” everywhere, and avoid organizations unless religious or loudly patriotic. Legal, ideological and police pressures rendered communist and socialist parties tiny and ineffective. Destroying unions took longer. The unionized portion of private sector workers fell from a third to less than 7% now. Since 2007, conservatives used crisis-driven drops in state and city tax revenues to intensify attacks on public employee benefits and unions. Both were denounced as “excessive and unaffordable for taxpayers”. That plus public worker layoffs reduced public sector unionization.
Nor did labor unions or the left find or implement any successful strategy to counter the 50-year program aimed to destroy them.
To reverse organized labor’s decline and to rebuild the left requires either reviving the old New Deal coalition or forming a new comparably powerful alliance. That means confronting and outwitting the long demonization of unions and the left. It requires a strategy that engages and wins struggles with employers. More importantly, it requires a strategy to reposition labor unions and their allies as champions of broad social gains for the 99%. To escape the label of “special interest” unions must work for far more than their own members.
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/labor-unions-decline-can-turnaround http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/labor-unions-decline-can-turnaround
