In Defying the Odds, we suggest an under-examined reason why Democrats were unexpectedly weak in key industrial states; union membership was way down. Our next book examines the 2024 election.
Trump nominated pro-union Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon to labor secretary. Conservatives are unhappy. Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch:
But a lot of conservative ideological mooring has come unmoored under Trump. Why hasn’t right-wing opinion about unions done so as well?
One reason, I assume, is the role teachers unions played in lobbying to keep schools closed during the pandemic after it became clear that children had little to fear from COVID. Despite politicians bending over backward to prioritize teachers’ safety, from ushering them toward the front of the line for vaccines to appropriating nearly $200 billion for public education to address COVID-related problems, unions encouraged friendly Democratic politicians to extend closures well into 2021. Parents’ outrage at the learning loss their children suffered may have helped reelect Trump; his nominees to fill the public health positions in his Cabinet are all “COVID contrarians,” coincidentally enough.
The human face of union opposition to reopening schools was Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. She’s become a top-tier political villain in Republican politics because of it—yet there she was on Friday night cheering Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Labor Department. “It is significant that the Pres-elect nominated Rep. Chavez-DeRemer for Labor,” she tweeted. “Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize. I hope it means the Trump admin will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices from Teamsters to teachers.”
The implied warranty in Trump’s Us-and-Them brand of politics is that he’ll use public power to ruthlessly punish the right’s cultural enemies. That Weingarten, the dictionary definition of a tribal enemy, should be gratified by his choice on labor policy feels like a grievous breach of that warranty.
There’s another reason why Chavez-DeRemer might be hard for partisan conservatives to swallow, though. Compared with issues like government spending and foreign interventions, there’s been little ideological work done by populists to “uninstall” the Reaganite conventional wisdom on unions...
A lot of political energy has been spent over the last few years smuggling those ideas into mainstream right-wing thought. But comparatively little has been devoted to presenting organized labor as beneficial to the economy or useful to the working joes who voted for Trump on November 5.
That means unions are still “Democrat-coded.” The old Reaganite software on that topic is still running.
Janice Fine and Benjamin Schlesinger at Boston Review:
In the blame game that followed Harris’s loss, union leadership has been clear: you can’t put this on us. They are only partly right. According to both public exit polling and internal union surveys, the labor movement came through and a large majority of union members voted for Harris. While some polls had Biden tied with Trump among union members before he dropped out, early returns in some battleground states showed a commanding twenty-point margin for Harris. In every swing state, UNITE HERE and the AFL-CIO’s field program made personal contact with millions of their members. Organizers persuaded tens of thousands of voters to side with their economic interests and reward the administration that had done so much for them with another term. That spadework is what labor has traditionally been good at. It’s entirely possible that unions’ internal organizing efforts saved Senate seats in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan along with overperforming in down-ballot legislative races in Pennsylvania.
The Biden-Harris administration saw in unions what unions would like to see in themselves: a broad and powerful organization of the working class that could reshape American society and partner with them to end the neoliberal era. The problem with that vision is that it isn’t true. When only 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, unions are no longer a legitimate stand-in for the working class.Most working-class Americans have no experience with unions in their daily lives.
