So, here's a question: why should Barack Obama, the quintessential 21st-century politician, care about blue-collar trade unions and their vision of a mid-20th-century management-labour compact? After all, over the past several decades America's economy has been remade around service sector work, most of which is non-unionised. Realistically no one – not conservatives, not liberals, not free traders, not protectionists – is going to be able to magically recreate the conditions of American industrial might during the years following the end of the second world war. Fifty years ago, 35% of the American workforce was unionised. Today it is 12%. So why bother wooing union leaders and their members?
Well, the answer is that broad social reform in America has always involved creating coalitions of interests. Unless unions are brought back into the dominant coalition, Obama's opportunities for durable social reform will be truncated.
If you want to create universal healthcare, you have to involve both employers and labourers in the discussions. Employers don't want to be stuck with soaring taxes, and those employees lucky enough to still have good benefits provided through their work – in particular public sector, unionised workers and workers in such old industrial sectors as cars, steel and mining – don't want their hard-fought-for benefits diluted by government intervention.
On the other hand, there's room for common ground. Take General Motors, for example: the iconic company is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy at least in part because of the huge retirement and healthcare obligations it has agreed to during decades of negotiations with the united auto workers union. Recently, GM froze its healthcare benefits for white-collar retirees, who are not covered by UAW contracts. Even though it's one of the country's most powerful unions, the UAW has to be worried that its own members are at risk of losing benefits if the company goes into bankruptcy.
In recent months members of Obama's economic team proposed that the government assume some of the financial burden for covering retired auto workers' health costs in exchange for car companies investing in the development of environmentally sound vehicles. That's a win-win for all parties, but it needs the support of the UAW for it to work.
Similarly, if the new administration wants to get big retail and fast food companies to provide better benefits to its employees, including healthcare, paid sick days and paid leave for mothers of newborn children, it has to be able to wield not just carrots (tax benefits foremost among them) but also sticks when dealing with these large and powerful corporations. In an era when it is virtually impossible for workers in companies hostile to trade unions to organise, government leverage has been minimal. If Obama's labour department made it clear that it would side with workers in union registration drives, as Roosevelt's labour department did under Frances Perkins, then the balance of power would start to shift.
A company like Wal-Mart might be more willing to provide decent health insurance to its workers if it feared that the labour department, along with the powerful service sector and retail trade unions, would otherwise go after it in the courts. In other words, Obama needs more than existing trade union members to support him. He should also make it easier for more workers to join unions over the coming years.
But there's something less tangible than mere numbers in play. Unions create a political culture. They educate ordinary people about how power works. They help people make intellectual connections, understanding the link between, say, low cost goods sold by Wal-Mart and the low wages paid by Wal-Mart to its employees. In the same way Bush used the religious right to achieve an amplifier effect for his policies, so too should Obama be able to use organised labour.
A few years back I wrote a piece for the Nation magazine on how a series of anti-union laws passed in Idaho in the 1980s and 1990s not only destroyed the power of trade unions to secure decent wages, but eviscerated the state's long-standing progressive political movement. One of the lead players in the anti-union campaigns there said that a collateral impact of these changes caused the destruction of the state's Democratic party and the rightward shift of Idaho's electorate. During these years, Idaho went from a state that alternated between Democratic and Republican rule to being one of the most conservative and reliably Republican states in the country.
During the past 30 years, conservatives have been successful at both the state and federal level because they neutered the ability of progressive institutions to bring in new blood and to shape the terms of the policy debate. Their ideas came to dominate at least in part because the ability to envision liberal alternatives in many states was almost lost. Old-timers in Idaho still remembered union battles for higher wages and better benefits. For their children who are working low-wage jobs in non-contract work environments, however, that legacy is simply the irrelevant stuff of nostalgia.
Now there is a chance for Obama to remake not just a few specific policies but a broad political culture. There's a chance to reconnect alienated and cynical citizens to institutions that historically helped the poor step out of their poverty and opened the way to the creation of America's vast middle class.
The past can never be brought back to life – nor should it be. But the aspirations embodied by trade unions are as relevant as ever. And that is why a 21st-century leader like Obama, elected on a mandate of change, should encourage the re-unionisation of America's increasingly embattled workforce.
