The Labor Movement was the New Deal- and Striketober May Be More Important than Reconciliation

A lot of people - including myself at times - hoped Joe Biden might spend big enough to create a “New Deal” kind of energy that could cement new political loyalty to the Democrats in the way FDR’s policies did. But the reality is that even if his whole plan was enacted, it was unlikely to accomplish that.

Not because Biden was proposing to spend less than FDR. In fact, as a percentage of GDP, he and the Dems were proposing more.

A lot of myths exist about the New Deal, the biggest one being that the federal government spent massive amounts of money and that’s what explains the recovery from the Great Depression and the building of the modern welfare state.

But that’s a bit of nostalgia exaggeration. The New Deal had some great programs, but most of them were gone by the end of the 1930s - replaced by wartime mobilization - and, aside from Social Security, most New Deal era federal domestic government spending was close to completely gone after World War II.

The Explosion of Union Membership was Largest Tax on Corporate Profits in History

But what persisted was the explosion in union membership in the 1930s and the higher wages and benefits that this delivered. In no period in US history did the share of US income held by the wealthy fall so much and so quickly. As the graph below emphasizes, it happened almost exactly in sync with the rise in union membership. And the share held by the wealthy would rise again as union membership began to decline.

Unions demanded that corporate profits go to wages, health care, and pensions rather than to shareholders. The result was a far larger corporate tax on profits than the IRS ever imposed on those companies- or that Biden was ever promising to impose on companies even in the most expansive versions of his Build Back Better program.

Politically, the explosion of union organizing in 1935 and 1936 was arguably one of the most important reasons FDR had his landslide victory in the 1936 election- and what is inarguable is high union densities were the bedrock of Democratic Party victories in states across the country for decades. These were the kinds of headlines that focused national politics on labor issues that played to the strengths of the Democrats.

As those unions lost membership and even disappeared from many communities in the 1980s and 1990s- and news stories turned to plant closings not strikes for higher wages - not only did wages stagnate and economic inequality increase, but the social ties that unions had built in communities across the nation came apart. This is part of what I detailed in this September post, Organizing the Alienated: Take the Skinheads Bowling- to the Union League.

Can Striketober Change the Political Narrative and Overcome Racial Polarization?

The social aspect of unions, the way they brought people together across race and across geography, is part of what built the “New Deal Order” and its fraying is part of what we see in the racial and geographic polarization in our politics. Rebuilding unions is critical to rebuilding social ties to change that.

“Striketober” is a small sign that, post-Pandemic, workers may be reevaluating the fear that has undermined strikes and new union organizing in recent decades. Labor unions have their highest favorability ratings since 1965, according to Gallup. As factory equipment workers, mineworkers, health care workers, Hollywood craft workers and others threaten to strike or go out on strike, it’s a reminder to the nation, particularly in many red states areas, that anti-CRT fights and abortion are not the only politics that matter in their lives.

Look at the John Deere strike. The fourteen factory locations on strike include a mixture of red and blue states: seven in Iowa, four in Illinois and one each in Kansas, Colorado and Georgia. Not only is this an act of solidarity with each other, a multi-racial, multi-state alliance of workers, but every white striker knows that the strike pay helping put food on the table for their kids comes from the dues paid partly by black autoworkers in Michigan.

That dynamic of racial solidarity fundamentally shapes politics over time and as I argued in the earlier piece, there is solid research that being part of a union reduces racism among members. As I detailed, “partly this is sharing a vision but partly it stems from what organizers do in the workplace – converting an employer-dominated space meant to divide workers into one that deliberately creates organic links between them.”

If Striketober spreads and we see strikes in multiple industries and new organizing in places like Starbucks and Amazon, it will both change the reality of who many workers see their fates tied to — not just local racial identities but broader multiracial worker alliances across the country — and also change the discourse on what issues matter going into the midterm elections.

“Building Back Better” will mean not just the particular dollar amount attached to the reconciliation bill, but improving the work conditions in every employer in the country, supporting the unions that make that happen - and firing the politicians who continually undermine worker power.

If the GOP can try to build their election campaigns around the mostly non-existing “Critical Race Theory” taught in schools, Dems should be able to build theirs around defending workers against anti-union politicians around the country. And there’s nothing like strikes and new union organizing campaigns to shift the national conversation to make that more effective.

No guarantee that Striketober leads to Strikevember and a spring and summer of union activity next year. Labor law is still stacked against workers and while there are hopes that even the partial provisions that could survive reconciliation may pass, it still takes a lot of support to make sure unions succeed.

Hopefully, some of the “Resistance Democrats” who don’t always think about unions will understand how successful union drives could fundamentally change the political narrative in 2022. Heck, as I’ve argued, if just the $103 million spent on the always-doomed campaign of Amy McGrath in Kentucky had instead gone to support union organizing campaigns, that would make a big difference.

To keep informed of what union fights are going on, I’ll continue to update in these posts but I urge folks to sign up with Jonah Furman’s Who Gets the Bird substack, which does a weekly roundup of labor activism happening across the country.