You can't have a democracy without unions

I read the transcript of a Gaslit Nation episode titled America’s Income Inequality Crisis: How Did We Get Here? with host Andrea Chalupa. The guest is Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, among other things. He is also the architect of the 2020 movement that helped protect the integrity of the vote (a subject of another episode). From the introduction:

The American Dream is increasingly resembling a Neoliberal Ponzi Scheme, where the promise of prosperity seems to be reserved for nepo-babies. Beyond the obvious moral implications, income inequality has profound consequences for our society. It undermines trust in institutions, worsens political instability, and contributes to declining life expectancy—a stark reality in America today. When the rich get richer and the rest of us get left behind, it doesn’t just create social rifts; it destabilizes the United States, and therefore the world.

Podhorzer did most of the talking. Unless I note otherwise I am summarizing what he said. He starts with going back to the Gilded Age, which was worse than now. Rich Andrew Mellon as Secretary of Treasury was seen as appropriate. The US had the most violence against unions, which was legal. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal worked to change that, which brought an era of worker agency, important in the post-war boom.

What is true in any capitalist system is that it will run amok. It will crash everything. It will make this kind of inequality if there isn't a countervailing power. And that was explicitly the purpose of the Wagner Act and the Early New Deal legislation was to give working people the power to contest GM or US Steel or the big companies at the time. And it worked right, it created a shared prosperity.

That shared prosperity didn’t extend to everyone because of racism, though that is not part of this post’s discussion. Of course, corporate bosses never accepted his new order and, in the 1970s, began to unravel worker power. Simply voting is thin protection against capitalist power. Workers must also have power. Republicans were out to destroy unions (and still are). By 1976 and up to the Biden administration Democrats weren’t explicit about gutting unions, but did support business and banking deregulation done by Clinton and Obama, things that if a Republican president had proposed it a Democratic Congress would have rejected. The solution to inequality, to good healthcare, to decent wages and pensions – to democracy – is healthy unions. We had it and we threw it away. “You can't have a democracy without unions.” Chalupa added, the big change in the 1970s was in 1971 when the Powell memo rallied business leaders to send lobbyists to Washington to attack the new deal, roll back regulations, reduce taxes, declare war on workers, and buy off the Democratic Party establishment. (Powell was awarded a seat on the Supreme Court.) Which explains Biden’s difference. He was a part of the Democratic Party establishment for quite a while, but had a pro-union upbringing. Podhorzer added a clarification. It wasn’t that Democrats were bought off. It’s that they were replaced with pro-business Democrats, thanks to support from business. So Obama was not bought off. He actually believed that getting Larry Summers from Wall Street into his administration was a good thing. Also, Carter and Clinton didn’t have to get union support to be governors in Arkansas and Georgia, right to work states. And Obama didn’t have to go to a lot of union halls to get to Illinois state legislature, the Senate, or to be president. They didn’t have to learn what Biden grew up knowing. Harris is being pressured to give up her goal of getting the rich to pay more taxes. Of course she is and will be – that’s billionaires being billionaires. Will she succumb? Whether she does or not billionaires have enough resources to pressure the more than 200 Democratic representatives and 50 Democratic senators. And if that fails the Supreme Court has been mighty friendly to business lately. But for America to work for working people the tax rate must go much higher. There are other things Harris could do. Join picket lines as Biden did is a big one. That’s a powerful message. Also, enforce labor laws so workers feel safe trying to form unions, make pro-union nominations to the National Labor Relations Board and similar pro-union boards, and continue pro-union rulemaking. But that won’t be enough. She or any president won’t be able to do enough until all of us understand that democracy and freedoms depend on strong unions. Reagan accelerated what started in the 1970s by taking us from the conventional wisdom that America should be a pluralistic society to one that was focused only on a good business environment. Trickle down economics was laughed at until people saw it was in their best interest to believe it. Biden may be helping the union resurgence, but it also comes from a decline in confidence in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, police, military, and big business. Confidence in all those is at really low levels. Much of that confidence was lost in the 2009 crash [I thought it was in 2008] when all but unions failed the working people. Though media doesn’t mention it, Americans have increased their confidence that unions can help America be better off. Even Republicans are increasing their support. Until the New Deal the purpose of the US federal government was to protect the rich. Before then most of the rest of the industrialized world had a labor party to counterbalance the business party. We had that balance for a while, creating the myth that the purpose of government is to protect the little guy (I stubbornly believe in that myth). The biggest way the government subsidizes business is to protect it, to make class action suits difficult, to prevent gig workers from unionizing. Remember that in the early years of the New Deal the Supreme Court struck down really basic things, like minimum wage. Podhorzer said:

The Supreme Court has really been there to be the last line of defense against democracy. That it's like if there's too much democracy breaking out in Congress that they can clean it up afterwards.

Would Congress be able to let billionaires spend freely in elections, allow gerrymandering, or repeal the Voting Rights Act? They could not. That’s what the Supreme Court is for and why the Federalist Society captured it. The solution is to unionize. Part of that is to pressure Democrats to stand up to the Supremes. Democrats were pretty mild on abortion rights – until the Supremes overturned that right. Then Democrats found their voice. They need to find their union voice. Adding more justices to the Supremes is good, but not enough. We must go after the power that packed the court the way it is now. Just rebalancing the Supremes means billionaires will find another way to push their influence. We must seek a rebalancing of power. Podhorzer thinks we don’t have an oligarchy in America, we have a competitive plutocracy. The fossil fuel industry controls Republicans that want a low wage economy. Democrats are controlled by tech and finance who need knowledge workers and innovation. They have some interests in common (like low taxes), but in many other issues they are in competition. That means we have some ability to veto the worst. To get the society we want for ourselves and our children we have to work for it. Podhorzer doesn’t believe in Martin Luther King’s moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice. We have to constantly work at it and institutionalize the gains. And unions are an important way to get there.