How Unions Pave the Way to the American Dream

Yves here. This article describes how unions, even in an era of weak labor bargaining rights, can secure pay levels and benefits, critically decent health care, and a good level of sick and vacation days, that makes the difference between scraping by and being able to save and plan. One of my brothers who was a union member all his working life and also took every opportunity to get double and triple overtime, built up a seven figure net worth, and not through house price appreciation (values in his area have gone close to nowhere for decades, but being careful with spending and investing well. It is also seldom acknowledged that unions help white collar workers. Management needs to have social distance between hourly and salaried employees. So many of the terms that unions won, such as cost-of-living adjustments and employer contributions to 401(k)s, would generally be extended to the supervisory and managerial levels. By Roxanne D. Brown, the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW). Produced by the Independent Media Institute Marcelo Assis recalled how his family arrived in the United States about 35 years ago, “poor as hell”—yet certain that America offered the path forward that they’d never find in their native Brazil or anywhere else. The following years brought ups and downs, with Marcelo serving as a combat medic in the Army and then falling disillusioned with low-paying nonunion work that held him back instead of helping him move ahead. But Marcelo ultimately landed back-to-back union jobs that catapulted him into the middle class and firmly anchored him there. Just as he clearly recalls his arrival in this country, Marcelo vividly remembers the moment years later when he looked around his newly purchased home, thought about the good life he provided to his family, and realized for the first time that he’d made it. “This is the American dream,” he said to himself. Marcelo’s experience shows how unions pave the way to a brighter future. That’s true even now—a time when the majority of working people feel as though the American dream has slipped out of reach because of rampant economic inequality, skyrocketing costs, and the callous indifference of the greedy rich. In all, nearly 70 percent of Americans no longer see the country promising mobility or financial security to those who work hard and strive to get ahead, according to a January 2024 ABC News/Ipsos poll. A separate survey, conducted in conjunction with the nation’s 250th birthday by AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, found that half of respondents lost faith in the American dream. Many see America working for the wealthy, not people like them. But Marcelo, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 12000 and a mechanic at Southern Connecticut Gas, will be the first to say it doesn’t have to be this way. After helping him fulfill the American dream, the union now enables him to hold on to it. A USW contract provides Marcelo with the good wages he needs to ride out Donald Trump’s inflationary economy, including the runaway costs of groceries, utilities, and house insurance. It affords him retirement security even as Republicans threaten to cut lifelines for the elderly. The contract delivers quality, employer-sponsored health care, while more and more Americans today have no choice but to put off doctor’s visits or treatments because of the spiraling costs. “There’s the stability of knowing you have benefits,” Marcelo said of the contract, which he and his coworkers negotiated. “You don’t have to worry.” This is all fabulous. But it isn’t unique. Union members across the country make significantly more money than their non-union peers. They’re also more likely to have family leave, paid time off, and work-life balance. This all adds up to cars in the garage, summer vacations, and sports leagues for the kids, along with all of the other pluses that make life worth living. This is what independence looks like. Marcelo simply calls it the “union life.” There’s more. Because unions provide a voice on wages, safety, and other issues, they empower workers at a moment when a depressing sense of helplessness haunts many other Americans. Union members also forge a bond that transcends the shop floor. Everyone looks out for everybody else, and that’s a formidable counterweight to the epidemic of loneliness and isolation also plaguing the country right now. Even better, this shared identity galvanizes union members to fight together for the greater good and to assert an ownership stake in their communities, often through the kind of volunteer work and political advocacy that Local 12000 members do. “Doing it together makes it a much easier climb than doing it by myself,” Marcelo said of the solidarity uniting hundreds of his coworkers. It’s a message that’s resonating with the growing number of workers weary of working their tails off, only to fall further behind while the rich get richer. Polls show record levels of support for unions, and workers in every part of the country are joining them to take the future into their own hands. The American dream endures. We just have to stand together to claim it. In Ohio, the building trades unions are backing Republicans, most recently Senator Jon Husted, for their support of data centers. Former Senator Sherrod Brown is attempting to return to office by making a rare break with labor and attacking Husted on data centers. https://signalohio.org/hes-trying-to-win-this-election-sherrod-brown-attacks-jon-husted-support-of-data-centers-in-break-with-labor-construction-unions/ Unions are great and nobody can convince me otherwise. Helped both my grandfathers build solid middle-class lives after coming from poverty (one family were migrant farmworkers and the other were small farmers in rural WV). Both jobs had solid pay and good benefits. Still a very relevant goal for today’s families. Repealing Taft-Hartley would return some real power to unionized labor. You never hear anyone talk about that. Instead, betrayals happen like Biden breaking the railroad workers’ strike, and people just take it lying down. My experience as a member of a white-collar union was that the concessions it had won actually gave management levers to discipline workers it would not otherwise have had. This was because the union had no real power. Unions with power exist at economic chokepoints and represent workers who, even if they are only semi-skilled, are not easily replaced:* Autoworkers, longshoremen, teamsters, the building trades Carla mentions above, and utility workers, like the subject of this profile. Hotel maids and warehouse workers** may be vital, but they are readily replaceable; baristas are neither vital nor difficult to replace. The implicit proposition that unions can do for all workers what they have done for workers with specific technical skills, whose jobs must be done, is false. This matters now, more than it did during the Golden Age of American Capitalism (and labor, though it mattered then, too) because of the trend toward a soft-skill based, service economy over the past five or six decades. This is not to say that workers everywhere shouldn’t try to organize. Conditions are bad enough in plenty of workplaces that even extremely minor concessions (e.g., bathroom breaks) can make a difference. But the amount of magical thinking on the left about what unions can actually do is really discouraging. *I hate the distinction of unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers, but am using it anyway, because it is immediately recognizable. I would argue that when people talk about labor and degree of skill, what they are usually talking about is replaceability. **As someone who has worked in more warehouses than I would care to think about, I fully admit to being easily replaceable–as in the other jobs I have held. “Unions with power exist at economic chokepoints and represent workers who, even if they are only semi-skilled, are not easily replaced:” Given the way that the courts and NLRB have tilted the playing field way in favor of management, you’re right. Even before worker-bass relations were regulated by the feds, in the Wild West days of pre-Wagner Act bargaining, skilled workers at choke points had way more power to organize effectively. The Reuthers were tool-and-die guys. When there was a model change in the auto industry, the tool-and-die guys had to do their work before anyone else could do theirs. Once they had organized their colleagues, it was much easier to get the bosses’ attention. My criticism of this article is that the author lives in the “wages and bennies” trap that’s been a big factor in unions’ undoing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The late Staughton Lynd, the labor historian kicked out of Yale for his anti-Vietnam War activism, the chief trainer of the students who participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the lawyer who represented the despised participants in an Ohio prison riots, the Quaker who organized the first anti-Vietnam War demonstration in DC, delivered the keynote address at the IWW convention a decade+ ago. He spoke about the stark contrast between standard American unionism and the IWW’s approach. Lynd believed our labor movement was crippled by several factors, a position more and more vindicated as time passes: 1) Separate bargaining units in an industry The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1937 used bargaining units to structure worker/boss relations. When I was a callow lad in the summer between the first and second year of law school, I clerked for a management side law firm in KC. I spent a few weeks of that summer in an NLRB hearing involving Bendix Corporation’s atom bomb plant in KC. Most of the workers were represented by the IAM, but a significant minority of the workers were in separate bargaining units and represented by craft unions like the Platers and the Plumbers. The IAM felt that their strength in bargaining with Bendix was reduced by this arrangement, and they sought to consolidate all the bargaining units into one. Such a divide-and-conquer structure is common in American labor-management relations. 2) No strike clauses Though not required under federal law, nearly all labor agreements include no-strike clauses. This means that during the life of the contract, which may run for multiple years, union members are forbidden from engaging in collective action regardless of the provocations management might throw at them. 3) Federal undermining of the right to strike Collective action was first protected by the federal government by the National Recovery Act’s Section 7, early New Deal legislation that was ruled unconstitutional by the Four Horsemen Supreme Court. A similar provision found it’s way into the Wagner Act, but subsequent federal court and NLRB decisions eliminated many of unions’ most effective tactics like sitdown strikes where workers went to work, but occupied the plant, refusing to work. It was a sitdown strike that led to the Battle of Flint where the UAW and GM goons engaged in a pitched battle for control of the plant. Since the only legal remaining option was to leave work, that opened the way for courts to allow bosses to hire replacement workers, completely undermining the effectiveness of the strike. Taft-Hartley further reduced union options by making secondary boycotts illegal. Secondary boycotts occur when union workers not involved in the primary strike take concerted action against the struck employer’s suppliers, buyers or transport partners. 4) Management prerogative clauses Like no-strike clauses, there is nothing in federal labor law that requires unions to concede management prerogative clauses, but they are almost always found in contracts. These clauses limit the reach of bargaining and grievances to wages, worker discipline and benefits. This means that unions concede all other, broader issues to management, issues like offshoring, production of dangerous or lethal products, firm political activity, working conditions at the firm’s plants outside the US. 5) Unions’ own attitudes and strategies– Lynd was very critical of the way unions seemed to have little interest in issues beyond the represented workers’ wages and benefits. A contemporary example is the way building trades unions are cheerleading data centers. Lynd seemed to agree with the old IWW saying, “The working class and the employer class have nothing in common.” Unions like Spain’s CNT and the American IWW were revolutionary unions. They sought not to bargain with capitalism, but to end it. Yes, they employed solidarity unionism to win better wages and working conditions for their members, but they also worked toward a fundamental goal: the ending of capitalist power over not just their lives, but the lives of all workers. To be fair, American labor leaders like Walter Reuther sought the same, but in Reuther’s case, he was convinced, temporarily, that labor could use the vehicle of the Democrat Party to attain broader goals. He didn’t live too long after he came to his senses. Lynd was also critical of the bureaucratization and institutionalization of American labor unions: The drafters of the Taft-Hartley Act recognized this process, and included heavy fines should a union be found guilty of violating its restrictions. Fines would have been meaningless to the IWW in the early 20th century or even the early versions of the CIO unions, but by the end of WW II, unions were acquiring real estate and pension funds and had a lot to lose, a factor that goes a long way toward reducing, if not eliminating, militancy. Union “successes” of the early post-WW II period turned out to be less real advancements in worker power and more a successful employment of a strategy to soften up a successful, growing and often militant labor movement by facilitating the bureaucratization of unions and turning members from militant workers into fat and happy members of the “middle class,” pursuing not the overthow of the capitalists and their government adjuncts but another 3-day holiday and wage bump that would mean a new boat or travel trailer. Yes, it worked for a while, but the capitalists, left in place, bided their time until their strategy worked and a once fearsome labor movement was rendered toothless. American unions by and large represent a kind of midpoint or compromise between our toxic, Devil-take-the-hindmost individualism, and something like meaningful solidarity. Thomas Frank (whom I generally like) had this really jaw-dropping statement in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (If I had a copy, I would find and quote it; it should be easy to find for anyone who does) that the mere fact of union membership creates political consciousness among workers. He may have even cited surveys. Even if there weren’t arguments against the particular claim–like the reactionary nature of American labor during the cold war–how durable could this political consciousness have possibly been? He makes this argument in a book about how deindustrialization turned blue-collar Democrats (more likely to have been union members than the population as a whole) into culture-war Republicans. 1) Separate bargaining units in an industry Look at the railroads.. talk about unrealized union power! The Railway Labor Act predated the new deal legislation and was in response to bitter post WW1 strikes. It now applies to airline workers. The act was most recently used by Biden to undermine the railroad workers in 2022 by imposing a settlement. 5 years without a contract and then no sick pay! There were reasons for having over a dozen craft based unions, most notably engineers (drivers) versus conductors and trainmen. Engineers are the pinnacle of railroad workers and it is the highest paid occupation. The ability to earn additional income is/was enforced by craft barriers. The repair shops also have/had multiple craft unions (eg, in a locomotive shop Machinists, pipefitters, electricians, carpenters [painters mainly] and laborers). By the time I was working in there in the 70s, the leadership was totally bought off and collaborated with management. Even modest attemps at militancy tended to be in certain locals and crafts. Negotiations on contracts were mostly done in secrecy at the whole industry level and with a group of union and industry executives. There was no voting on contracts, except by district chairmen. And aside from locals, there were no elections. Those of us that were militant would be brought up for “investigations” (kangaroo coursts) on trumped up rules violations or unauthorized absences for an unpaid sick day, etc, etc. The local or district union officials were hand-in-glove with the company resulting in unpaid suspensions or worse. Once Carter’s railroad deregulation passed, the pace of permanent layoffs, concessionary contracts, draconian discipline and huge reductions in physical plant made it a hell hole workplace. Leaving the industry was painful and even with going to university and getting an MS in statistics, it was more than 15 years before i attained the same and later far better income. But the point is so many workers have huge unrealized power. The atomization of the workplace, constant surveillance and co-opted unions make this seem like an impossible dream. The workplaces and communities of 100 years ago allowed for shared experiences and worker propaganda. How could that happen today with dark factories and warehouse sweatshops? Printed militant newspapers were circulated; big tech and the surveillance state would shutdown electronic equivalents if the gained traction. I’m not opposed to unionization, but unfortunately an organized workers and a working class political movement is hopium until there is such and economic meltdown it becomes necessary for survival. My grandfather was a member of the Order of Railroad Telegraphers for the 50 years he worked for the pre-mergers CB&Q (now the Santa Fe Burlington Northern). He was a small-town depot agent from the 30s until the 70s. Locals were where Lynd held out hope. The internationals, with bureaucracies swelling as membership shrank, were best ignored, he felt. They weren’t worth the time necessary to reform them. There are unions and there are unions, American unions can often be described as Business Unions which basically focus on pay and benefits for members – like the AFL and ICFTU. The other type of unions, which are more left-wing and political, are pretty rare in North America and were aligned with the WFTU. This snip Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Federation_of_Trade_Unions , gives a nice quick history of the WFTU: Here is a quick history of the ICFTU, the North American version of international unionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Confederation_of_Free_Trade_Unions My point is that the ICFTU unions supported the capitalist economic system and focused on getting better pay and benefits for its members. They never got political or focused on social issues unless it benefited their members, in other words they had zero class consciousness. They would fund the Democrats, but didn’t get much for that funding. I remember when Bill Clinton was asked about how his policies that were hard on labor went over with workers, he said something to the affect of: Who else are they going to vote for? When that massive move to deindustrialize the US happened, the business unions were left in the dust as factory after factory closed. Sure, their members get better pay and benefits where they still exist, but there was no worker movement in the US to stop offshoring and union membership has been declining for years. I see a few bright spots in union leadership and hear some positive things, there is still a long way to go.