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Special interest group? History shows unions are good for America

Date Posted: May 30 2008

Editor's note: Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is seen as the single most important issue for organized labor after the November elections. Passage of the Act is expected to even the playing field during union organizing efforts.

By David Brody

In a rights-conscious society like ours, the regulation of labor-management relations is bound to be defined in terms of rights. That's how our labor law is written, and that's how the looming debate on the Employee Free Choice Act will go. (Every member of the next Congress, pro or con, will be rising in defense of labor's rights.)

But attend more closely, and you'll hear talk (from Republicans) about job growth and global competitiveness, and (from Democrats) about the plight of the middle class. Collective bargaining, that's what they're talking about. The Employee Free Choice Act will mean more collective bargaining - maybe a lot more collective bargaining - and for employers, collective bargaining is not about rights, but about power or, more precisely, a surrender of power. If you're curious about why this particular bill elicits so much fury, that's why.

But there is one big question that, however hard we listen, we're unlikely to hear addressed: What's at stake for America's public life?

Conservatives have had a grand time over many years tearing down the union movement. Even good reporters routinely refer to "Big Labor." And right up there with union corruption and labor bosses is the suggestion that unions are just - to use our esteemed secretary of labor's words - "special interest groups." Unions have members; they pay dues; and they expect results. So in that sense, yes, unions are interest groups, just like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) or the National Rifle Association.

But organized labor is a special interest with a difference. When the stakes are high, it puts the public welfare ahead of its own.

We can trace this strange behavior back a hundred years to the Progressive era when, having started out viscerally against an interventionist state - unions would be stronger, argued AFL President Samuel Gompers, if workers depended on their own collective power - the AFL grudgingly sided with middle-class reformers after they demonstrated that decent social legislation was actually achievable.

In the Depression, the union movement jettisoned Gompers's voluntarism entirely and steadfastly backed the New Deal. And when civil rights became a big issue in the 1960s, there the AFL-CIO was, in the thick of the fight.

As a special interest, labor should have been somewhere else. Why alienate racist members? Or make trouble for discriminatory affiliates? Or, more fundamentally, undercut labor's work by fostering a parallel civil-rights enforcement system? Yet it was the AFL-CIO that pushed for Title VII (prohibiting job discrimination), and the AFL-CIO, thanks to its clout on Capitol Hill, that got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through.

Or consider, finally, this thundering might-have-been. Forty-seven million Americans currently lack medical insurance, and our health delivery system is a shambles. The last best chance for something better came after World War II, in a simpler medical age when universal health care stood high on the Fair Deal agenda, only to be met by the reactionary American Medical Association, the insurance companies (who knew a profit center when they saw one) and the organized health care industry.

And who led the charge? You guessed it: General Motors and other once-fat corporations now sinking under their legacy costs.

The union movement should have laughed out loud, because if health coverage came from companies, then unions could - and quickly did - enfold it within collective bargaining. Instead, the unions fought for national health insurance, and lost. At the time, after World War II, a third of the labor force was organized, and pundits talked about union power (which was why in 1947 the Republicans got the Taft-Hartley evisceration of the labor law).

Organized labor too strong? Not strong enough when it came to health care.

That was then. Today, the labor movement represents 7.5 percent of private-sector employees. Union density hasn't been so low since Gompers rolled cigars for a living. No one really knows how much impact the Employee Free Choice Act might have. That depends on how American workers respond to the real freedom to choose that the Act offers them. But we can be sure that without that freedom, labor's decline will continue. Just think what American politics would be like operating-to use a favorite National Association of Manufacturing expression - in a union-free environment.

Is that good for America?

David Brody is a professor emeritus at the University of California-Davis and the author, most recently, of Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (2005). Via the AFL-CIO