Present: Labor's Love Lost

Update: At the Atlantic, Garrett Eps (I will take the credit for starting his career as a journalist by publishing him in Washington Newsworks so very long ago when I was its editor) shows why this case is playing out at the Supreme Court as a complete partisan scam, with the Republicans offering no facts whatsoever in challenging current law.

These days, being guided by past experience can be dangerous.  Too many things have changed.  But I remember when labor unions were strong, and they were the most vital supporters of Democratic candidates and the Democratic agenda. Moreover, despite some corrupt leadership, they moved America towards justice and equality.

But it seems that very soon the last remnant of this relationship is going to be destroyed by the Supreme Court, and today's hip commentators are unanimous that the Democrats are going to pay a huge price.

In a Slate piece titled Labor Lost, Sean McElwee and Mark Joseph Stern summarize the situation: the Supreme Court is about to decide whether public employees must pay dues to their union.  In its previous decision on the subject, the Court said yes, because all members benefit from the contracts the union negotiates on their behalf.

But with the cover of dubious constitutional arguments, the partisan Republican Court is about to decide the opposite, thus weakening if not destroying public employee unions.  The real reason will be: because that's what the Republican party wants.

Like suppressing voters, Russian interference and gerrymandering when GOPer legislatures do it, Republicans justify everything that gives them an unfair advantage.  Unions have long been a target, which is why Ronald Reagan and the 1980s Republican party did all they could to get rid of them, including the encouraging of jobs moving offshore to places where unions wouldn't be a problem for them.

Since then, public sector unions have been the last bastion and mainstay for Democrats.  Now the Supreme Court Republicans are about to take care of that, in a very likely 5-4 decision.

 This decision will go down in history along with Citizens United, Bush v. Gore and whatever case it was that sanctified opposition to all gun regulations because the Second Amendment was given a literal interpretation which parallels an interpretation of Genesis as officially naming creation day as October 23, 4004 BC.  All of these "decisions" twisted the Constitution in order to blatantly favor the Republican Party.

This comes at a time when one of the Democrat's new hopes, Conor Lamb, who making a race of it for Congress in a western PA district that went heavily for Trump, is advising that Democrats return to their union roots.  Ella Neilsen in Vox summarizes: Focused on recapturing blue-collar workers, Lamb’s campaign represents one school of thought — going back to labor-liberal economic values and working with unions to retake territory in Midwest and Rust Belt states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016."

But Democrats also have themselves to blame, for meekly accepting the decline of unions and the party's relationships with union leadership and members.  As Eric Levitz in New York succinctly put it last month: "The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not."

When Levitz says "historically" he means in recent decades.  From FDR to JFK and LBJ, the party certainly understood this.  In the elections I was part of, the party and the political committees of the unions were partners.  And this was in western Pennsylvania, which was reliably Democratic as long as those relationships were maintained.  Unions educated their members on issues, and represented their members' needs and wants to the party, and to its elected officials.

Unions were crucial as well to the Civil Rights movement.  They were in the leadership and in the crowd at the March on Washington.  They were progressives of the time.

That much of their white membership has grown so dismally right wing may well be partly if not largely due to weak or vanished unions, and the Democrats not responding to union issues as much anymore.  Levitz shows how much Democrats lost from a weakened union movement, and more importantly, what American society lost because of it, in laws that weren't passed and programs not enacted.  Including universal healthcare and a non-political national response to global heating, with enough time to save the future.

The survival of public sector unions to this point is due almost entirely to the past Supreme Court clarity on the right to organize.  But even some who support that right (or pretend to) question whether unions are compatible with public sector service.  That apparently includes conservative Republican justice Anthony Kennedy, considered a moderate or swing justice on at least some subjects, who made two blistering speeches on the first day of oral arguments on this matter on Monday, questioning the public sector unions right to exist.

It's no coincidence that public sector unions are largely comprised of minority and women.  Many public sector jobs are on the basis of exams or degrees, and rigorously color and gender blind.  That minorities and women tend to support Democrats because they agree with them on issues doesn't much matter to Republicans.  They see these unions as political entities opposed to them.

It used to be that once in awhile a Republican might suggest that the way to disengage unions from their historic ties with Democrats might be for Republicans to represent the interests of their members.  But that never got very far, and would be soundly booed at CPAC today, if not the cause of guns coming out of holsters and full scale riot.

  The Slate piece quotes research that suggests weakened unions will drive down voting.  It may not be so pronounced, or fatal to Democrats.  But then again, it might.  Regardless it's a big partisan win for Republicans, and for their very open brand of political corruption.

The great grandparents of many in the industrial areas of America literally bled and starved so that their unions could deliver a living wage and some just return on their labor.  Few tell that story anymore, or why unions--for all their faults--are still essential, and could do so much more that needs to be done if they were stronger.

  Some Democrats, like President Obama, have told this story, but not often enough.  And as Levitz shows, they haven't backed it up with legislation in recent decades.

And so Republicans will get away with this without the kind of public clamor that could make it a political liability.  Because the Democratic Party has forgotten its union roots.