The lowest moment for the modern American labor movement came after the 2004 election. Unions spent more than $85 million trying to beat President Bush, money spent and gone forever. The loss left unions facing another four years of hostile labor regulators and anti-union policies, as well as the relentless effects of globalization on American workers.
"No one woke up the day after the election and didn't feel like they shouldn't go back to sleep for a few years," said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union.
After the election, unions also faced an internal fissure, with the SEIU and its 1.8 million members, as well as six other major unions, splitting from the AFL-CIO. The drive to destroy organized labor, which had begun in earnest 25 years before with the election of President Ronald Reagan, was, it seemed, nearly complete.
But now, just three years later, labor is suddenly resurgent.
The signs are all around: Passage in the House, and near passage in the Senate, of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to join a union by signing a card rather than going through what labor advocates consider the onerous process of an election; and a genuine sense that Democrats, on the cusp of real power, will owe their allegiance to labor rather than the party centrists, or New Democrats, who dominated the party during the Clinton presidency.
The story of how and why labor has reemerged is instructive on the recent past and future of American politics and the American economy, where tectonic shifts now seem possible.
Paradoxically, Bush and the Republican Congress turned out to be a gift to labor. The Iraq war, economic insecurity and various Washington scandals helped unite Democrats and deliver Congress to them.
Nor is the Democratic Party what it was 10 years ago.
The country has moved to the left on a range of economic issues. The richest 1 percent of Americans in 2005 controlled nearly one-fifth of the nation's income, the greatest share since the ominous year of 1929. American workers tell pollsters they are deeply pessimistic about their future, naming health care, exploding college costs and the outsourcing of jobs overseas as major concerns.
"Growing economic inequality and the return of what can be called the robber baron ethos in the business community has revived the idea that workers need their own organization to defend themselves -- against employers that overreach and against a government that enacts polices that favor wealthy people," said Lance Compa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Labor is highly attuned to the country's changes and leveraged them with its campaign against Wal-Mart, the epitome of an anti-labor, profit-at-all costs company. After failing to organize Wal-Mart workers, two unions -- the SEIU and the United Food and Commercial Workers -- launched campaigns in early 2005 to shame the retailer into change.
As they try their new organizational strategies, unions are fantasizing about a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress, as Democratic candidates pitch unions as part of the economic solution to globalization and stagnating wages.
"If they get a Democrat in the White House, they'll get a better agenda," said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. She noted, though, that, "Anything is better than what they have now. Remember, the bar was pretty low."
With a Democrat in the White House, unions will see a friendlier National Labor Relations Board, one more sympathetic to workers trying to organize.
Still, although labor is more optimistic about its future, labor experts warn that Democratic victories in 2008 might not result in the kind of dramatic changes for which union leaders are hoping.
"What's on the horizon, even with a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president, is trench warfare," said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara and director of the school's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.
Unions should pursue a broader working-class agenda, including a national health care plan, that would remove from the bargaining table one of the most contentious items in contract talks, Lichtenstein said. Employers would be less resistant to labor, he said.
Ultimately, some labor leaders say unions must take a hard look at themselves, before relying on politicians to reverse their decline.
"The fortunes of labor will not be decided by politics," said D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas. "They will be decided by organizing workers."
Still, friends in the White House and Congress never hurt.
(scrippsnews.com)
Nearly 8,000 students from southern Roscoe, Machesney Park and Loves Park were told to stay home on what was scheduled to be their first day of school today because teachers went on strike when their labor union contract negotiations had not reached agreements.
