There Is (Political) Power in a Union

Looking at some recent and not-so-recent research about the effects of union membership on politics.

“Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.” — E.P. Thompson

Since the start of July, “populism” and “pro-worker” have once again been the buzz words du jour. Is VP nominee JD Vance a sign that the Republican Party is pro-worker? Obviously not, answers UAW prez. Shawn Fain. Well, what about the speech the other union Sean gave at the RNC—Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters? In the digital pages of Compact Magazine, ideological dilettante Sohrab Ahmari and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley lauded the speech as a shocking sign of a forthcoming pro-labor Republican Party.

Ahmari praised O’Brien’s “concession to the reality of his rank and file’s political views” as a step away from supposedly blind partisanship. After all, according to Jacobin staff writer and wonderful journalist Alex Press, “the IBT’s internal polling suggests that around one-third of members are Trump supporters.” While praising O’Brien’s speech, Hawley accused corporate executives of “push[ing] diversity, equity, and inclusion and the religion of the trans flag,” engaged in the standard anti-China hawkery, and quoted Teddy (not Franklin) Roosevelt.

But despite O’Brien’s address, no major unions (besides the usual FOPs, the Border Patrol union, etc.) seem likely to endorse the Trump/Vance ticket. Most quickly lined up behind Biden, and then behind Harris. Even the UMWA simply opted to not endorse anyone, a decision the Teamsters appear to be considering.

Meanwhile, the 2023 handbook out of Oren Cass’ American Compass, one of the most prominent “pro-worker” conservative think tanks, still calls to “prohibit political spending by worker organizations.” In other words, “pro-worker” Republicans want to support some pro-union legislation as long as unions are stripped of their power to fight back when Big Business lobbies Congress to overturn that legislation.

In an article for Jacobin, Dustin Guastella argued, mostly convincingly, that O’Brien’s behavior is a symptom of labor’s current weakness. Despite the incredible success of the UAW’s Stand Up Strike last year, the hard fought victories of Starbucks Workers United, and the promise of the Teamsters-ALU merger, union density remains remarkably low.

Guastella writes:

In attempting to play both sides, Gompers hoped to avoid punishments from political adversaries and encourage a broad, bipartisan labor spirit in Congress. … As labor grew in strength, its political influence grew, and in the New Deal it consolidated its power within the Democratic Party.

With Republicans feinting towards supporting unions—even as you can still count the number of Republican sponsors of the PRO Act on one hand—I think it’s probably useful to look at what it meant for Democrats to become the de facto pro-worker party. How, for a couple decades, a party closely tied to unions dominated American politics and what that means for prospects of Republicans’ half-hearted attempt to win the support of labor.

Before the New Deal, before section 7(a) of the NIRA and before the Wagner Act, the Democratic Party was hardly the natural home of organized labor. John L. Lewis, the long-time leader of the United Mine Workers and first president of the CIO, was a loyal Republican save for ‘32 and ‘36.

While the AFL had been loosely associated with the Democrats for decades, in the ‘30s and ‘40s it was still within living memory that the most militant unions had helped a third party, the Socialist Party of America, elect hundreds of socialists across the country. The SPA’s tribune, Eugene Debs, had received over 2.5 million votes across his five runs for president between 1900 and 1920.

But as Nelson Lichtenstein writes in his 2001 book, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor: “In the quarter century that followed the end of World War II a solid majority of all unionists remained faithful Democrats, certainly when voting for president or their Capitol Hill representative” (146).

And at the same time organized labor was being welcomed into the party once known as the Democracy, an increasing number of non-white people began to experience democracy, with both an upper- and lowercase “D.” Lichtenstein explains that “both for the new immigrants and for people of color, the new unionism brought a semblance of citizenship rights to the shop floor” (83).

To be sure, socialists and communists of the sort that permeated the unions in the ‘30s and ‘40s had long had ideological commitments to racial equality. In Debs’ case, this amounted to what would be called class reductionism today. The socialist leader said in one 1903 speech that there “never was any social inferiority that was not the shriveled fruit of economic inequality.” While always calling for economic equality, Debs (like the mid 19th century Republicans before him¹) oft sought to push past the politically (if not ethically) fraught question of “social equality.”

Then, in 1936, FDR won a supermajority of Black voters. Twelve years later, Hubert Humphrey was able to get a commitment to civil rights included in the Democratic platform. It of course was a promise that came, as Humphrey admitted, “172 years late,” and one that would not be fulfilled for most of two decades, but an important development regardless.

And at the same time Black voters joined the New Deal coalition, laying the seeds for Thurmond’s ‘48 run and the eventual dissolution of the coalition in the ‘60s, unions across the country were beginning to challenge traditional racial prejudices. Far from the lily white craft unions that had typified American labor for decades, unions (especially the CIO) began to organize and politicize workers across racial lines.

“[A] shared dependence on wage labor forced on the races cooperation, even ‘solidarity’” in the ‘40s, Lichtenstein argues. Seats on union boards began to be reserved for non-white workers —“in places like Memphis, Birmingham, Newport News, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, and Atlanta the very presence of such interracial union leadership represented a radical challenge to the old order” (84-85).

Over a century earlier, in the early 1800s, journeymen in NYC had banded together (not yet across trades) to fight against the gradual degradation of the artisan system. That shared threat to their livelihood yielded the “raw material of class consciousness.” Their self-organization linked them together and “reinforced the members' sense of themselves as sober, self-reliant, respectable men, capable of running their own affairs.”²

In more technical language, “unions’ organizational structure facilitates political socialization through the dissemination and sharing of political information among workers as well as the mobilization of those workers in union election drives and contract negotiations” [emphasis added].

That’s a quote from Paul Frymer and Jake Grumbach’s article “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics” from the AJPS. Using 2010s survey data, they found white union members are “less racially resentful than nonunion members by between 4.7 and 6.3% of the racial resentment scale.” They attribute the difference to the effects of union leadership, unions’ ties to the Democratic Party, and the need for union members to cooperate and socialize across racial lines. And using panel data for 2012 and 2016, they found individuals seem to actually experience a decrease of ~equivalent magnitude after joining a union.

Another recent article written by Stephanie Ternullo and published in the Journal of Historical Political Economy, “The Local Politics of National Realignments,” also seems to validate unions’ ability to help keep people from embracing white grievance politics.

Looking only at the whitest of white New Deal coalition counties, Ternullo identifies four main trajectories: stayed Democratic, turned Republican in the ‘50s, turned Republican in the ‘60s, and turned Republican in the 2000s. If counties had “politically-oriented organized labor movements” in the 1920s, they were much more likely to have remained Democratic for the 20th century.

She also uses two case studies (“Gravesend” and “Lutherton”) to further illustrate the differences. In Gravesend, where the union movement was “more radically oriented toward building working-class consciousness, regardless of its partisan consequences,” (and union membership somewhat stable even as employers came and left), the voting populace kept leaning Democratic. In Lutherton, where the union left with the largest employer, it went red in ‘68 and only swung further right as time passed.

So, if we can trust political scientists and historians, unions and union membership encourage racial egalitarianism and threaten white supremacy. As local institutions, they checked the rise of Christian nationalism and the growing dominance of the Republican Party over rural white politics.

This is despite unions hardly being universally on board with cosmopolitan liberalism, or with the Democrats, even in the years immediately after the New Deal. Reuther’s UAW, not Meany’s AFL-CIO, cosponsored the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1970 NYC, “hardhat” union construction workers infamously brawled with “longhairs” protesting the Vietnam War. Two years later, the Teamsters endorsed Nixon (and they would go on to endorse Reagan in ‘80 and ‘84)

And where the ability of union membership to threaten racial hierarchies was most needed, it was scarcest. Racism in the South was only rarely challenged by shopfloor solidarity. Union organizing efforts like Operation Dixie floundered in the face of a social order thoroughly permeated by centuries-old prejudices.

From Robin Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists in the Great Depression:

Anti-Communist propaganda, rooted in popular myths and indisputably couched in the language of race, proved a mighty deterrent to Southern white support for the CP. … The cry of social equality, with all its multiple (specifically sexual) meanings and apparent ambiguities, was particularly effective because it symbolized the ultimate threat to white supremacy, class power, civilization, and Southern rulers’ most precious property—white women.

Then, later in the century, labor unions (their radical, egalitarian cred at an ebb) were viewed as a potential threat to Black political power. Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta, is quoted by Lichtenstein as saying in 1977 that he might be “only the first domino in [labor’s] Southern domino theory.”

Jackson had broken an AFSCME strike by firing hundreds of city employees. Besides the redolence of America’s anticommunist foreign policy, his words reveal a view of organized labor as a threat to a fragile post-civil rights movement political order. In Jackson’s words: “[I]f labor makes the move on black political leadership, it’s going to have severe consequences for labor Southwide.”

But despite the cultural divisions which have riven the union movement, when driven to cooperate with outgroups, prejudices are invariably challenged, if not immediately dissolved. Unions do have the potential, as Hamilton Nolan has persuasively argued, to be the core of a progressive, pro-democracy majority, even as that is far from guaranteed.

The Republican pitch, the argument from the conservative politicos staffing and supporting the Trump/Vance campaign, seems to be that Democratic policies, regardless of their support for unions, are anti-worker. In statements I mocked in an op-ed for the University of Alabama student paper, Trump and Vance have both claimed the IRA and environmentalism pose direct threats to American workers even as the UAW are more than happy to unionize EV and battery plants.

And of course, as Nolan explained in an earlier piece, demonizing immigration is the “number one sleight of hand at work in all of this.” From Trump’s recent extended interview with Bloomberg:

… the Black people are going to be decimated by the millions of people that are coming into the country. There will never be a decimation like this, and they’re already feeling it. Their wages have gone way down. Their jobs are being taken by the migrants coming in illegally into the country. And I said: Black people, No. 1, Hispanic people, No. 2. And you know who else? Unions. The unions are getting decimated.

Demonizing immigration is a tactic that’s worked before: Despite the opposition of some liberals and socialists, unions backed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Immigration Act of 1924. César Chávez’s UFW was a vocal opponent of undocumented immigration. Unions have been more amenable to immigration since 2000, but this is arguably a tenuous peace.

As they seek the White House, Republicans haven’t been lining up to say they’ll pass the sort of ambitious pro-labor legislation Democrats support. After all, nominee Harris has hardly backed down from VP Harris’ pro-labor pledges. And, at the behest of Big Business, Republicans still regularly try to thwart pro-worker regulations from the Biden-led administrative state.

Instead, Republicans are all-in on betting union solidarity doesn’t really extend to immigrants (undocumented or otherwise). As Vance “explains” in his stump speech, immigrants, not onerous zoning laws, are why housing costs so much. “Unions are getting decimated” by immigration, Trump opines. If you want to waste a few hours, it’s not that hard to find a Republican blaming immigration for any problem you can think up.

To provide one conclusion to this train of thought: Solidarity only develops naturally among those thrust together by a shared struggle. Journeymen in 1800s New York, members of CIO unions, and New Deal Democrats were all brought into wider coalitions by shared struggles. But nothing will automatically prevent some future union movement from viewing environmentalists, immigrants, and social liberals as the enemy.

In fact, nothing prevents union members from viewing other unions as the enemy (read Alexis Walker’s Divided Unions). Solidarity is a verb, not an eternal truth.

As Debs and the other proponents of industrial unionism argued, craft unionism encouraged unionists to pursue their own individual interests by dividing workers. Lichtenstein documented that even when more “industrial” longshoremen unions controlled the hiring halls, union membership was often “limited to a particular ethnic group or even to the offspring of current members” (70).

Once there is no felt and realized need to expand the scope of empathy, of solidarity, pursuing narrow interests is a default mode of politics. Because of the barriers we set in front of undocumented immigrants (in fact, precisely because we deny them a legal path to the US), they’re less likely to be union members, or to work in unionized fields. So it can be harder to develop solidarity. While I was walking a UAW picket line last year, some of the union members used racial stereotypes to describe the predominantly Latin American scabs. Reportedly one or two used slurs.

If we want to prevent the anti-immigrant demagoguery of the Trumpists from being effective, we need immigrants to be the obvious allies of American worker, to be seen as prospective and current union members and not probable scabs. We need to show billionaires can never be the allies of American workers just because they support tariffs or immigration restrictions, that they will always despise organized labor. In short, we need class consciousness.

If you’re still looking for something to read, here are a couple other things I have written recently:

• A summary of how the University of Alabama is shutting down its DEI office

• And an accounting of the horrific personal stories Alabamians told to the annual Joint Prison Oversight Committee

And here are some things I’ve been reading:

• Ryan Cooper on pragmatist socialism for the American Prospect

• Nelson Lichtenstein on labor intellectuals for Dissent Magazine

• Sean Wilentz on Trump v. United States for the NYRB

• And Paul Crider on Frederick Douglass for Liberal Currents

1. See Lincoln’s denunciations of “social equality” in the Lincoln-Douglas debates or how Radical Republicans argued for the Civil Rights Act (Eric Foner’s The Second Founding pgs. 66-67).

2. Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, pgs. 56-60.