Only Unions Can Save Liberalism

The most patriotic thing you can do today is to be part of your local Labor Day parade. Labor Day celebrates the strength and power working people find in collective action. Today, that power is needed to save the nation.

Mike Elk at Truthout:

The right has been winning over working-class whites by fostering hate since Richard Nixon. They are good at targeting groups. However, there has always been an equal number of white working-class people who never fail prey to such fear-mongering tactics. They voted for plenty of the most elite sounding northeastern liberals like Michael Dukakis because they knew Republicans were on the side of big corporations - the true elitists. However, this has all changed dramatically in the last 20 years because Republicans are actively targeting those working-class people using a different appeal.

The county where my grandmother is from -Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania - in 1988 voted for card-carrying ACLU member Michael Dukakis by an 11 point margin of victory, yet voted for McCain in 2008 by a 17 point margin. What happened in between, you might ask?

Tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs disappeared, and Westmoreland County was turned into a degraded version of its former self. Democrats on the national level did nothing in response to challenge the corporate ideology that wiped out their community and their way of life.

Glenn Beck followers tend to primarily be these inhabitants of the "bitter towns" who lost faith in government. As my colleague Sara Robinson points out, why would working-class people trust a government that is "so clearly rigged to suck money straight out of their pockets into the tax-free offshore bank accounts of the wealthy - who, of course, turn right around and use that money to buy off our government"?

The fight then becomes over who controls government, and cable TV news presents them with faces that fight the Ivy League liberal-elite stereotypes. Glenn Beck and his followers attack liberals as being out-of-touch Ivy League elitists, neglecting to mention that most prominent conservatives are also Ivy Leaguers.

We respond by calling the other side "stupid" in cable news sound byte clips, and they respond back at us by calling us "elitists"; this quickly devolves into an endless series of glorified name calling.

SNIP

In his famous book "Bowling Alone," Robert Putnam shows that trust among people disappears when members of different socio-economic classes don't interact and get to know each other through social organizations. He aptly names his book "Bowling Alone," based on the statistics that more Americans are bowling than at any time, but in fewer and fewer bowling leagues. What we need to do to rebuild trust among classes is to bring people into organizations where they can realize through interaction their shared interests.

Currently, there is only one place in America where illegal immigrants and Glenn Beck followers sit down together on a regular basis and fight for their collective self interests - the halls of organized labor. Unions unite people behind shared self-interest and a common social purpose: making their jobs better - something we all desire. Through working together, they gain trust of one another and are less likely to be victims of conservative scare tactics.

The statistics don't lie. Obama won by 23 points among white, noncollege graduates who belong to a union, even as he lost by 18 points among all white, noncollege voters.

Working-class whites aren't just more likely to vote for progressives when organized labor is strong, so are people of color, women and young people. As the landslide loss of corporate, anti-workers' rights Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia shows, working whites will vote for Republicans for cultural reasons when a Democrat fails to stand up for them. However, people of color, women and young people don't have a cultural punching bag in "liberal elites," so when Democrats disappoint, they simply don't vote.

Thus, keeping people from joining unions and thereby upsetting the conservative ruling class that thrives on cultural resentment is the number one goal of conservatives. The biggest barrier for making strong unions is the fact that 30,000 workers are fired from their job every year for trying to join a union. In the United States, an employer has to post a piece of paper saying they fired a worker for trying to a join. As my father, a union organizer, always said, "If the penalty for robbing a bank was you had to post a piece of paper saying you robbed a bank, we'd all be bank robbers!"

Killing the Employee Free Choice Act is the number one priority of the Chamber of Commerce for this reason. It's more urgent for them to squash than climate change and health care reform put together. They know that increased unionization threatens their whole balance of power.

It is time that we realize that the Employee Free Choice Act is this important. The Employee Free Choice Act is not just a union issue. Without a revitalized labor movement, we get bogged down in the cultural wars of TV, and any progressive change we make is unsustainable. We need to create organs of social dialogue.

It was no coincidence that the peak of middle-class prosperity, employment and secured occurred during the peak of union membership and influence.

And it's no coincidence that the nation's most powerful, most passionate, most articulate, most inspiring leader of the fight by the American middle class against corporations and the obscenely wealthy is AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka.