Politics and Organized Labor

Erik Loomis has an excellent essay in Boston Review on the barely tenable relationship between labor and the Democratict party. Loomis points to labor's failure to organize outside of the northeast and industrial mid-west as leading contributors to loss of political support from democrats. I see the positive link here and also recognize how daunting that task really was.

At no point in labor's storied history have workers been truly successful without supportive government policy. These supportive policies often came at great sacrifice to working families - tens of thousands of whom beaten or killed. US policy has shifted with labor's ability to shift public opinion - mostly through the public relations damage done by wealthy industrialists in their attempts to thwart organizing efforts through every means possible.

Once the wealthy elite realized they could not win with only clubs and guns, the strategy shifted. Mostly gone was the violence (but not completely) replaced by a sophisticated PR plan of their own. The Natioanal Manufacturers Association rolled out the Mohawk Valley Formula in 1938, and industry never looked back. Ten years later, by following this script and using people like Vance Muse and his Christian Americans Association, anti-union forces passed Taft-Hartley. This was the beginning of the end for organized labor and has more to do with the unorganized south than any other factor.

Surely there were lost opportunities in the south for labor pre-Taft-Hartley, but these were fleeting moments. By restricting the rights of organized labor, the US Congress gave employers all the tools they needed to slow, stop and then reverse the growth of labor unions in our country.

The trend is clear and the inevitable seems at least probable. Although being a realist means acknowledging that the probable does not always happen.