Working people were not just abandoned by big business and their ideological henchmen in government, they were exploited and humiliated. They were denied the productivity gains that should have rightfully accrued to them. They were treated ruthlessly whenever they tried to organize. They were never reasonably protected against the savage dislocations caused by revolutions in technology and global trade.
That quote is from Bob Herbert. His column today is entitled Reviving the Dream. And his title? What is the dream?
It may seem like ancient history, but in the first few decades following World War II, the United States, despite many serious flaws, established the model of a highly productive society that shared its prosperity widely and made investments that were geared toward a more prosperous, more fulfilling future.
The dream was that all would share in that prosperous, more fulfilling future.
Herbert offers analysis and an overview of how we got to where we are now. Yet somehow, he fails to mention a key contributor to that dream, which was unionization of the work force.
In his column, Herbert notes that since Reagan's election i 1980, as his former NY Times colleague David Cay Johnson has observed, the economy, adusted for inflation, more than doubled, and that even when adusted for population growth, on a per capita basis has increased 66 per cent. In the same period, the wages for average workers have shrunk. It started before Reagan, since - again adjusted for inflation - the peak year for earning for the average worker was 1973, when that figure $33,000. Now? It is $4,000 less, with men in their thirties particularly hard hit.
Everyone knows that Reagan set down an anti-union marker, with his busting of the air traffic controllers after their strike. But that 1973 date caught my attention, so I decided to do just a little research. I wanted to see the pattern of labor union membership. I found this chart from the Labor Market Reporter which examines US Trade Union membership in the private sector, both as total membership and as a percentage of private sector employment. The peak year for total membership was 1974, with 18.5 million unionized employees in the private sector - in 2006, the last year in the chart, it was less than half that. For those two years, the percentage of private sector workforce were 29% compared to 7.4%.
Now, this chart does not account for public sector employment, unionized or otherwise. AS a teache, I am a unionized public sector employee. But many in public sector unions lack the ability to collectively bargain - teachers' unions in much of the South are officially barred from doing so, although some communities find ways around that. The vast majority of public sector unionized employees lack the ultimate weapon of the union, the ability to strike.
As a percentage of the private sector workforce, unions reached their peak in 1958, at 39%, with that percentage declining every year since. The first really substanstial one-year decline came during the Carter years, in 1980, with a 9.9% drop. The chart does not offer every year's data, with no subsequent data until 1983, when it begins to offer annual data. But consider this: at the end of 1980, even with that drop, there 15.3 million unionized workers, representing 20.6% of the unionized workforce, while by 1989, after 8 full years of Reagan, the figures had dropped to 10.5 million and 12.4% respectively. There is no doubt of the hostility towards union as a part of the Reagan administration, beginning with - but certainly not limited to - his busting of the air traffic controllers.
Or if we merely examine the decline from the peak earnings of 1973. The chart offers data from 1972 and 1974:
1972 18,181,000 30.00%
1974 18,538,000 29.00%
Now consider 2006, the last year of the chart:
2006 7,981,000 7.40%
And while declines continued during the Clinton years, the total number of unionized workers delined somewhat even while dropping as a percentage:
1993 9,554,000 11.20%
2001 9,113,000 8.97%
Remember - it was during the Clinton administration that we got NAFTA, which caused a good number of high paying jobs to leave for Mexico.
And again, compare the 1991 numbers of the 2006 numbers, and realize that the declining trends continued through the end of the Bush administration, and we are facing even more serious declines right now, especially if the auto makers go under.
Let me return to Herbert. Immediately after the last paragraph I quoted, he offers the following:
The American dream was alive and well and seemingly unassailable. But somehow, following the oil shocks, the hyperinflation and other traumas of the 1970s, Americans allowed the right-wingers to get a toehold — and they began the serious work of smothering the dream.
Social programs were a major part, with attacks on medicare leading the charge. But the rightwingers were too smart to take social programs head on. To shrink government to a size small enough to drown it in a bathtub, you do so incrementally:
You smother the dream by crippling the programs that support it, by starving the government of money to pay for them, by funneling the government’s revenues to the rich through tax cuts and other benefits, by looting the government the way gangsters loot legitimate businesses and then pleading poverty when it comes time to fund the services required by the people.
Neither of my parents ever belonged to a union. Both were born in the decade before the Great War, my dad in 1911 and my mom in 1915. My mother's employment was either in government or in her father's law firm. My dad was in government and the Navy, sandwiched between stints as an executive in the private sector. Their jobs were never unionized, but both benefited from the changes unions obtained for their members. Think of all of the following
8 hour day
at least 2 week paid vacation
paid holidays
paid sick leave
employer subsidized health care
pension
All of us have benefited from these advances in workplace compensation and benefits. And as union wages increased, so did those of the exempt employees who managed them.
It was the work that unions did on behalf of all Americans that made the American dream work - that people could believe their children would be better off than they had been. It was one reason so many Americans worked so hard.
And now? We have a near bankrupt economy, but the rich still fight every attempt to make them pay their fair share as if it were Armageddon. Derrick Jackson addresses one illustration of this in his column today, which begins:
IN HIS 2010 budget, President Obama wants $31.5 billion from oil companies over the next 10 years with new taxes and by closing tax loopholes. This is a mere $3.15 billion a year, but the oil execs still say Obama is the creature stealing their black lagoon.
They object even despite Exxon Mobil have made 45 billion in profits last year, and holding as much cash on hand as Obama proposed to tax the entire industry over 10 years.
We have been gutting the American dream for years. It would not have been possible to gut the dream without first hamstringing - or worse - the unions whose actions made the American dream possible.
Now we hear arguments about letting General Motors fail. We bail out banks and Wall Street and AIG because, probably correctly, we believe that without the flow of capital we cannot maintain the economy. That may be true, but then we do not properly account for the public money going to those purposes, nor do we insist on appropriate oversight. And in one of the few industries still heavily unionized? We are prepared to let it fail, or to force it to remove the union benefits. In either case the workers will bear the major brunt of the economic impact, both those in the big three and among their many, often common, suppliers. We will destroy not only the dreams of the workers who will lose jobs, or houses even if jobs are retained as their income is severely curtailed. We will destroy entire communities.
Somehow as we address our current economic crisis we need to remember that the further away from unionization we get, the less any benefits will accrue to the ordinary Americans whose labor is what built the economic power house of this country.
Let me point out that the largest single percentage increase in private sector employment, 22%, took place in 1940. In fact, let me offer the figures from 1940 through 1945:
1940 6,848,000 24.30% 22.00%
1941 8,268,000 25.90% 6.58%
1942 9,716,000 28.10% 8.49%
1943 11,182,000 30.80% 9.61%
1944 11,598,000 32.40% 5.19%
1945 11,674,000 33.90% 4.63%
In otherwords, the huge productivity increases during World War II,starting with our becoming the armory for Britain, occurred simultaneously with the largest rapid expansion of our industrialized work force.
I was surprised that Herbert did not address this in his column. It is a good column, well worth reading.
But it is insufficient. We need unions. Even those of you who are in management ought to recognize how we all benefit from unions.
We have an opportunity to make major changes. Herbert's penultimate paragraph reads like this:
Now, with the economy in free fall and likely to get worse, Americans — despite their suffering — have an opportunity to reshape the society, and then to move it in a fairer, smarter and ultimately more productive direction. That is the only way to revive the dream, but it will take a long time and require great courage and sacrifice.
I believe that one part of moving in the proper direction requires rejuvenation of the union movement. We cannot merely depend upon Democratic members of the House and Senate, because some of them are not particularly friendly to unions. One important way of reviving the labor movement is through the Employee Free Choice Act, EFCA, commonly known as card check. Today we will see the Congress move in the direction of making that the law of the land. This is critical, because without a strong union movement, the average American will lack a sufficiently powerful voice to advocate on her behalf.
Herbert's column is good, as is Jackson's. But both are insufficient. We need their advocacy for unions, for all of us.
Peace.