Ignoring the evidence

I usually enjoy Thomas Edsall's columns for his data rich arguments. In this instance, ‘The Right Has a Greater Appreciation of Labor’s Role Than We Do.’ by Thomas B. Edsall, there is data but not really much of an argument.

Edsall does not address a fundamental issue - he elides private sector union membership with public sector union membership. I think this materially undermines the integrity of his argument. A first read of the column leaves you with the impression that Republicans simply hate unions. I suggest that the real issue is that Republicans hate public sector unions.

From the BLS we know that union membership continues to decline. We also know almost half (49%) of all union members belong to a public sector union. 34% of all government sector workers are unionized versus only 6% of private sector workers.

What explains those disparities? That is a different topic. I just observe that such differentials reflect a more complex picture than a simplistic "Republicans hate unions." That makes this Edsall column a far more polemical and partisan piece than I think is normal for him.

Wisconsin Act 10 — the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill — was a bill proposed by Scott Walker, the former Republican governor, and passed in 2011 by the Wisconsin Legislature. The act, as described by the liberal Center for American Progress, was brutal and laid waste to public-sector unions in Wisconsin:

Act 10 reduced collective bargaining rights for most state and municipal employees, including K-12 teachers. The law also weakened unions by mandating annual recertification elections and prohibiting paycheck deductions for dues collection. It also eliminated teachers’ and other public employees’ rights to bargain over hours and conditions of employment, as well as their ability to bargain over any compensation beyond base pay. Act 10 further restricted this base-pay bargaining by limiting increases to annual inflation.

Norquist’s claim about the effectiveness of Act 10 is spot on.

The relentless Republican assault on unions in the industrial belt states during the first half of this decade was an unquestionable success, politically speaking. It resulted in decreased Democratic turnout, a crucial drop in the bankrolling of Democratic candidates and, more subtly but no less significantly, a debilitating sense of powerlessness among union members.

But Act 10 was a public sector union issue, not a union issue per se. The difference is important because there are clear and longstanding concerns across the political spectrum about the role of unions in the pubic sector. FDR, among our most progressive presidents famously opposed public sector unions.

Edsall conflates two different Republican strategies, one of which is opposed to public sector unions and the other supports right to work. Edsall characterizes both as anti-union but I think that is uncharitable and misleading.

Take Right to Work. If your political philosophy is a Classical Liberal one grounded in personal freedom (the Republican position) then you can immediately see why a union security agreement is anathema. Union security agreements entail coercion. It is an agreement between business management and the union(s) that all workers covered by the union agreement will be compelled to receive the benefits of the labor agreement but also must pay the union for those collective bargaining benefits. Essentially, it is a tax on the individual to which they have not consented for benefits they have not sought.

This is an obvious and mutually beneficial approach for business management and union leadership. Management gets labor stability, unions get money and it precludes the free-rider problem. Free riders are a real problem, it is just not clear that unrepresentative coercion is really the best solution. There is a perfectly valid philosophical, and a reasonably widespread position that union security agreements are not an appropriate solution. It is just a variant on "No taxation without representation."

I think it is disingenuous to simplistically characterize your partisan opponent as anti-union when it is clear that they view their position as pro-freedom. One might even say it is a contrast between anti-choice and pro-choice. Which position is most valid is a matter of opinion (and de gustibus non est disputandum) but the alternate view ought to be at least acknowledged.

In contrast to the Right to Work distinction, the ambivalence about public sector unions has even more practical issues acknowledged by both sides. Beyond Roosevelt's arguments in the above link, there is a simpler pragmatic one which Republicans especially focus on. Their argument has two foundations. The first is the inherent conflict of interest between the tax paying public, politicians and public sector unions. Republicans would argue that the interests of politicians and those of public sector unions coincide in a fashion disadvantageous to the tax-payer. Public sector unions are not negotiating with the tax-paying public but with that public's political representatives but those political representatives often have a strong incentive to favor public sector union peace at the expense of tax increases and/or increased debt (see Chicago and California for egregious examples).

PATCO's actions in 1981 were perhaps one of the clearest examples of public sector unions trying to exploit their position as government employees to force politicians to accede to demands for ever greater benefits by threatening the public with massive travel disruption. Actions which led to Ronald Reagan's decertification of the union. While controversial, it was an extremely clear example of a public sector union inappropriately holding politicians and the public for ransom in the negotiating process.

This ties to the second foundation of the Republican argument. Given that labor unions, and public sector labor unions in particular, have historically been affiliated primarily with the Democratic Party, then union security agreements in combination with public sector unions constitute an illegal subsidy of one party. More specifically, Democratic politicians grant ever greater benefits and wages to public sector unions, paid for by the public, in return for public sector union election support for the Democratic Party in get out the vote efforts, union donations, etc. And indisputably that is how it has worked for some decades.

None of that comes through very clearly in Edsall's column where he characterizes it all as simply Republican anti-unionism.

Edsall only tangentially refers to one of the key transitions in the past 40 years, something that goes far beyond philosophical or electoral actions by Republicans. That is the cultural dissociation of the Democratic Part from actual blue collar workers. Ronal Reagan famously exploited this, carried to victory in significant part by the votes of blue-collar union workers.

As the Democratic Party became dominated by an urban, far-left, progressive agenda which included strong currents of anti-white, anti-religion, anti-America, anti-freedom, anti-military, anti-police, they gradually lost the allegiance of white, church-going, patriotic, traditional Americans, describing much of the union movement, particularly private sector unions.

This had nothing to do with Republicans and everything to do with Democratic policy and political choices.

Scott Walker's Act 10 was a ground zero for these churning tides. The public sector unions fought him tooth and nail but he defeated them every step of the way which he could not have done without strong support from the public and at least some material portion of union members (primarily private sector.) The NYT illustrates Edsall's column with this graph, again eliding private and public sector unions. Since Act 10 primarily only affected public sector, if you looked at public sector union decline, it would be even steeper.

Click to enlarge.

At the time, I followed the developments in Wisconsin reasonably closely. It was astonishing how many public sector unions were clearly simply leaching off their membership; they were providing no real benefit. As became apparent when a plurality of them simply disbanded once the coerced collection of union fees by the government for the public sector unions stopped. These weren't organic and useful structures, they were just mechanisms for raising money for partisan purposes. When given a choice, people kept their money.

Again, in that respect, this has little to do with Republican policy. If the public sector unions were not providing clear value to half and more of their membership, what real argument is there for them?

I am aggravated that Edsall's column is such a dog's breakfast of thrown against the wall data and unsupported assertions. It is not his usual way.

But for all that, his core point is, I think accurate. Democrats abandoned the union movement without ever really thinking about how important it was to them. Or as he puts it,

The problem in building support for a resurgent labor movement is that many liberals and Democrats do not appear to recognize the crucial role that unions continue to play not only in diminishing the effects of inequality, but in voter mobilization and campaign finance. Unfortunately for labor, and for the future of the Democratic Party, groups that are shrinking in numbers and in financial resources lose political leverage and influence, the two commodities unions are most in need of.

What too many on the left of the political spectrum also ignore (or fail to understand) is that labor unions are inextricably intertwined with the economic condition of women and minorities — and, for that matter, of white men. In other words, Democrats make a fundamental mistake if they engage in the politics of subtraction, downgrading the priority of battered but pivotal institutions like the labor movement. They would be wise to commit to the politics of addition instead — amplifying the power of labor to lift up the most loyal Democratic constituencies.

This seems so stupid as to not be conceivable except that we have a much smaller example of the same type of bubble thinking by a similar Democratic institution, NPR.

Sometime in the past five years, a Republican Congress began a campaign to defund NPR. NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. and their then CEO initially dismissed the threat. NPR's argument was that they received only 10% of their budget from the Federal government. She was not only dismissive but insulting of the politicians leading the effort. A position she could only have taken if she believed what she was saying.

Which, if what she was saying was true, would be an understandable position. But it wasn't true. That belief by the CEO betrayed a profound ignorance of her own organization and its structure.

While NPR headquarters only received 10% of the funding directly from the Federal government, and could conceivably be replaced with greater fundraising, the same was not true for their member stations. NPR HQ produced materials which was then licensed to the member stations and the member stations provided the 90% of funding to NPR HQ. However, the member stations in turn received massive funding from the Federal government ranging from 20-80%.

If the federal spigot turned off, NPR, HQ and member stations, would collapse. And the CEO did not know that.

I was astonished. When a casual reader of the news could know this and the CEO of her own organization did not seemed completely incomprehensible, but there it was, plain as day.

So Edsall's claim that Democrats have not known of the storied and crucial role of unions in their party seems laughably implausible. And yet . . . NPR.

I think he is right. The tide of empty headed and ignorant extreme enthusiasts for postmodernism, social justice, urban corruption, etc. has overtaken the establishment leaders while they weren't looking. Pelossi and Schumer and Biden and that older ilk I am confident understand the importance of unions, though they may not have a clear policy bead on how to support them. But the younger generation, those yelling the loudest, those dominating the airwaves? I suspect for them, given the prevalence of white men, traditional values, ethnic Catholicism, etc. traditional unions, especially private sector unions are part of the problem and not part of the solution.

It appears to me that Democrats have abandoned unions owing to ideological positions rather than policy positions and they have little or no taste of helping unions regain relevance in the modern, fast evolving, much less hierarchical economy. And while Republican strategies and policies might have helped this along somewhat, the root issue is within the Democratic Party itself rather than with Republicans. It is a matter of physician, heal thyself and by trying to offload the blame onto nefarious Republicans, Edsall actually obscures the problem and postpones a solution.