Michael Lind: Liberalism and the Post-Union Future
[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."]
The struggle in Wisconsin over the future of collective bargaining by public employees is the most dramatic battle in a war being waged on many fronts over the future of public sector unionism. In other states and cities, the issue is whether states whose revenues have collapsed because of the recession should fund the promised pensions of public employees like police officers, emergency responders and schoolteachers.
In the divide-and-rule politics of the American right, public employees have for the moment replaced "welfare queens" and illegal immigrants as symbols of parasites who exploit working-class taxpayers. Never mind that the deregulation of finance and global trade imbalances caused the economic crisis and the subsequent cratering of revenues for state governments, not public sector unions. Never mind that it is illogical to assert that fairness requires not the upgrading of private sector worker rights and benefits until they are as decent as those of public sector employees, but the reduction of everyone’s rights and benefits to a miserable lowest common denominator. Resentment has its own logic, captured by a medieval Viking proverb: "One oak gains what is peeled from another." In times of crisis, populations often prefer scapegoats to explanations, and the right is ready to provide a scapegoat in the form of public sector unions.
Making the job easier for conservatives is the collapse of private sector union membership in the U.S. From a third of the American workforce in 1979, union members have shrunk to a mere 7.2 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. public sector union membership has grown from 11 percent in 1960 to more than 37 percent today. Even though private sector workers outnumber public sector workers 5-to-1, public sector union members now outnumber private sector union members, at 7.6 million to 7.1 million.
The same phenomenon is occurring in most other industrial democracies. Only in Scandinavia is a majority of the private sector workforce still unionized. France’s level of 7-9 percent private sector union membership is nearly as low as that of the U.S. In Germany, union membership has dropped since 2000 from a quarter to a fifth of the workforce. In the developed world as a whole, only one in five workers are unionized....
The decline of trade unionism does not necessarily mean the decline of American liberalism. The union movement has been only one tradition in the American center-left. Others include technocratic progressivism, which puts its faith in paternalistic programs administered by nonpartisan civil servants and judges; the liberal variant of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism, which has championed small farms, small businesses and economic development of rural America; and social democracy, identified with universal social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. A fifth strain, democratic socialism, has always been marginal in America.
Of these traditions, liberal populism and social democracy have always been more popular with the American public than trade unionism and technocratic progressivism. Economic development programs like rural electrification in the 1930s, the interstate highway system and universal broadband today, typically championed by hinterland populists, appeal to American voters, as do programs to support small farms and small businesses. And despite the constant propaganda against "entitlements" by the elite media and pundits funded by the right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson, the American public embraces universal, contributory social insurance programs....
Read entire article at Salon
The struggle in Wisconsin over the future of collective bargaining by public employees is the most dramatic battle in a war being waged on many fronts over the future of public sector unionism. In other states and cities, the issue is whether states whose revenues have collapsed because of the recession should fund the promised pensions of public employees like police officers, emergency responders and schoolteachers.
In the divide-and-rule politics of the American right, public employees have for the moment replaced "welfare queens" and illegal immigrants as symbols of parasites who exploit working-class taxpayers. Never mind that the deregulation of finance and global trade imbalances caused the economic crisis and the subsequent cratering of revenues for state governments, not public sector unions. Never mind that it is illogical to assert that fairness requires not the upgrading of private sector worker rights and benefits until they are as decent as those of public sector employees, but the reduction of everyone’s rights and benefits to a miserable lowest common denominator. Resentment has its own logic, captured by a medieval Viking proverb: "One oak gains what is peeled from another." In times of crisis, populations often prefer scapegoats to explanations, and the right is ready to provide a scapegoat in the form of public sector unions.
Making the job easier for conservatives is the collapse of private sector union membership in the U.S. From a third of the American workforce in 1979, union members have shrunk to a mere 7.2 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. public sector union membership has grown from 11 percent in 1960 to more than 37 percent today. Even though private sector workers outnumber public sector workers 5-to-1, public sector union members now outnumber private sector union members, at 7.6 million to 7.1 million.
The same phenomenon is occurring in most other industrial democracies. Only in Scandinavia is a majority of the private sector workforce still unionized. France’s level of 7-9 percent private sector union membership is nearly as low as that of the U.S. In Germany, union membership has dropped since 2000 from a quarter to a fifth of the workforce. In the developed world as a whole, only one in five workers are unionized....
The decline of trade unionism does not necessarily mean the decline of American liberalism. The union movement has been only one tradition in the American center-left. Others include technocratic progressivism, which puts its faith in paternalistic programs administered by nonpartisan civil servants and judges; the liberal variant of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian populism, which has championed small farms, small businesses and economic development of rural America; and social democracy, identified with universal social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. A fifth strain, democratic socialism, has always been marginal in America.
Of these traditions, liberal populism and social democracy have always been more popular with the American public than trade unionism and technocratic progressivism. Economic development programs like rural electrification in the 1930s, the interstate highway system and universal broadband today, typically championed by hinterland populists, appeal to American voters, as do programs to support small farms and small businesses. And despite the constant propaganda against "entitlements" by the elite media and pundits funded by the right-wing billionaire Pete Peterson, the American public embraces universal, contributory social insurance programs....