Josh Eidelson has a very important piece in Salon today looking at Harris v. Quinn (a little known case before the Supreme Court this year) which as Eidelson reports, "offers the court’s conservative majority a chance to make so-called “Right to Work” the law of the land for millions of public sector workers."
As Eidelson writes:
And it targets one of the most effective ways unions have grown their ranks – getting governors to classify the growing ranks of taxpayer-funded home care workers as public employees with unionization rights – and a decades-old precedent that the 2012 Knox v. SEIU case suggests justices may be itching to overturn. If the Court strikes that 1977 (Abood) precedent – that workers in union workplaces can be required to pay fees for “collective bargaining activities,” though not for “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining” – unions fear further defunding, diversion, division, and discrimination will follow.
For further insight, Eidelson provides a recent interview with Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Sachs, who is himself a former union attorney and founder of the
On Labor blog. Both the interview and the Sachs' blog are very informative and well worth a read.
Given the current composition of the court, Harris v. Quinn could well be the blow which makes organized labor effectively irrelevant in this country. Should this come to pass, America will have lost a crucial vehicle whose historical significance in the rise of the middle class is difficult to overstate.
Yet for decades now, organized labor has been dying a slow death. And given all that it has done for working Americans, you would have thought that there would be more outrage. Ironically, the public barely seems fazed by this. Why?
Almost three years ago to the day, Ezra Klein wrote a wonderful piece looking at "how and why the Great Recession has ravaged labor when the Great Depression was so instrumental in invigorating it." Working from The New Yorker's James Surowiecki own piece, the basic thesis as to why labor has weakened, is because it is today unable to deliver benefits broadly, as it once did.
The gains unions won for their workers were no longer shared by their non-members. A few generations back, Americans knew that organized labor had given them weekends and workplace benefits and higher wages and shorter days. Today, they see unions getting things at their expense: tenure for bad teachers, underfunded pensions for state workers, bailouts for auto companies. Solidarity has shaded into resentment.
Klein goes on to say that while some might be able to see labor as capable of reversing decades of falling membership, he cannot. And I personally have a difficult time seeing a resurgent labor movement too. Which thus begs the question. If Klein is correct, and labor is unable to mount a historic comeback (a feat that seems all the more implausible should the Supreme Court rule on Harris v. Quinn the way many expect them to do), what comes next? What will replace the labor movement? Can anything?
Kein, for one, has no easy answers, and he honestly can't see anything matching labors historic power and defense of working families.
As for myself, while I am often in general agreement with Klein (and indeed agree with him that the best days for labor are likely behind it), I'm less certain that society won't be able to find a new vehicle through which the values and needs of working class families can be articulated and advanced. Perhaps, I am overly naive, but as a rule, I am quite optimistic in our ability to innovate and overcome. Yes, I wish labor was stronger. Yes, I believe working class Americans need something like the labor movement (and they need it really bad right now). But if the Supreme Court is going to kill off labor (as they appear posed to do), the biggest tragedy the left could make is just to complain about it. What we need to be is proactive. We need to be creative. We need to think of the next big thing.
I'm willing to be the Kos community is open to new ideas. I certainly am. What do you got?