The historical record shows that modern conservative arguments for embracing unions are lacking.
The historical record shows that modern conservative arguments for embracing unions are lacking.
T heir songs are better.
They can help us marginalize loopy progressives.
They can help us win the 2022 election.
They can make our economy stronger.
These are just some of the arguments for teaming up with unions that conservatives have been throwing out lately.
You have to concede the point about the songs. A fine soundtrack for Labor Day Monday is Natalie Merchant covering “Which Side Are You On?,” composed during an epic Kentucky battle between miners and mine owners in 1931. Rougher but realer is the version crooned out by the song’s author, the miner’s wife Florence Reece.
“They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for JH Blair.”
But even the best of songs can’t obscure the evidence. A review of key two union periods, the 1930s and 1960s, suggests that siding with unions is a bad idea for politicians of both parties, but especially conservatives. Refusing to side with them is a good one, though that itself takes some courage.
This story starts in the early 1930s, when Florence Reece first tore the calendar page off her kitchen wall to scribble down the lyrics to her battle hymn. Joblessness back then stood at one or two in ten – an outrage, not just for the worker, but for the country. One of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression remedies was to offer the codification of collective bargaining. When the Supreme Court overturned Roosevelt’s first effort, the National Recovery Act, Roosevelt pushed through the Wagner Act, a tiger of a law. The Wagner Act not only gave unions the upper hand but also made union membership a requirement for job application to a unionized company. Not stopping there, the Act also established a separate court to adjudicate labor disputes.
The economic theory the New Dealers used to justify their pro-union regime — there always is one — was that stronger unions would yield comity in the workplace and, therefore, recovery. Or, as FDR put it when he signed the Wagner Act in the summer of 1935, “remove one of the chief causes of wasteful economic strife.” FDR told himself, and others, that his new laws would protect moderates, such as the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, who had taken to the airwaves to plug for Herbert Hoover in 1928. The Wagner Act would marginalize the loony Left of that era.
Conservatives by and large went along with FDR. More than. In his 1936 speech accepting the Republican nomination, Alf Landon, governor of Kansas, affirmed his support for strong unions:
I firmly believe that labor has the right to protect this position and to achieve those rewards by organizing in labor unions. Surely the history of labor in the United States has demonstrated that working conditions, wages and hours have been improved through self-organization.
The political part worked out for Roosevelt — once. Big Labor, then still a very young new power, gave Roosevelt a landslide in 1936. Landon and the GOP gained nothing from their New Deal Lite.
And instead of abating, the “wasteful economic strife” proliferated. Emboldened, the “moderate” John Lewis himself turned tiger — or loony, pick your descriptor — and led strikes across the land, shutting down factories. The new NLRB court decided so often in favor of Lewis and his new powerhouse, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, that people took to calling the NLRB a “kangaroo court.” Lewis wrested higher wages than they could afford from still strapped employers. The employers responded by re-hiring less. These unexpectedly high wages — see the scholarship of Lee Ohanian — helped to cause a second lurch upward in unemployment, towards 15 percent, and the infamous Depression within the Depression of 1937.
The ingratitude of the unions turned Roosevelt incandescent with rage. “A Curse O’ Both Your Houses,” the president sputtered at employers and unions in one conflict, apparently finding that only Shakespeare could capture his mood. To top it all off, in 1940 the opportunistic John Lewis did not side with the president who had sided with him when it counted. The CIO leader courted Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate. Willkie, flattered and eager, dropped concession language into his own campaign — and lost as well.
Uninhibited by such compulsion to craft Big Tent coalitions, local politicians from both parties across the land began to react to the evidence on the ground: that the Wagner Act, passed in the name of workers, was hurting work. Soon enough, individual states began voting to opt out of the union-shop regime, guaranteeing that individuals did not have to unionize as a condition of employment. Once World War II was behind them, members of the House and Senate also lobbied for and won a federal law sanctioning such opt-outs: the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. It tells you something about the national mood of that time that when President Harry Truman vetoed the bill, Congress overrode him.
Unfortunately, moderate Republicans on the national level — Robert Taft of Ohio, the bill’s steward in the Senate, is an example — felt the need to pander to Big Labor. They sanctioned other components of the bill, further codifying the authority of the National Labor Relations Board. The 1950s were the years when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged to become one of the powerful forces in American politics, with the ability to turn elections — especially close ones, such as John Kennedy’s in 1960. In 1961, former senator and current President John Kennedy joked that he himself was “one whose work and continuity of employment has depended in part upon the union movement.”
As the country moved through the 1950s and into the 1960s, companies begin locating or relocating factories in those “Right to Work” states, though for years their opponents always argued the shift was due to a love of the West, a love of the Florida Keys, or the innovation of air conditioning. More states passed “Right to Work” laws, as the state opt-outs came to be known. Recognizing Right to Work as the existential threat it was, George Meany of the AFL-CIO demanded that the Democratic candidate in 1964, Lyndon Johnson, place Right to Work repeal prominently on the agenda. Johnson did. The Republican Barry Goldwater didn’t, and he lost — also badly.
Nonetheless, by now it was becoming clear that both unions and the Big Three Automakers, who suffered from a version of Stockholm Syndrome, were, through various wage and benefit concessions, driving the prices of autos above what Americans were willing to pay. The first signs of decline of what was soon enough to be known as the Rust Belt were showing up. Japanese and Germans were delivering cheaper cars at our ports. Stopping repeal of Right to Work would be tough, as the repeal enjoyed considerable support. Opponents, among them Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat from North Carolina, and Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois, had to filibuster. And filibuster they did: Ervin even read aloud Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional.” Dirksen told his fellow senators that the issue was “the sovereign authority of the 50 states to legislate in this field if they so desire.” So it came to pass that Johnson, preoccupied as he was with civil rights, Vietnam, and domestic entitlements — themselves demanded by unions, especially the mighty United Auto Workers — somehow never managed to see through passage of Right to Work Repeal during his presidency.
This accident of history, Johnson’s slip, the failure to repeal Right to Work, proved a kind of miracle. For the natural experiment that local politicians, Democratic and Republican, and then members of Congress, had allowed with the Taft-Hartley Law was allowed to flower, providing incontrovertible harvests of innovation and jobs down the decades in Right to Work states. Where Detroit and Flint struggled, Right to Work states thrived. The American worker for his part recognized this, and voted not only with his feet, but also with his union card. Workers stopped joining unions. A National Public Radio chart shows the data: In the 1950s, one in four workers belonged to a union; today that level is one in ten. And even that one in ten is misleading, since a good share of those who are unionized are, now, public-sector workers. Much later, in his 1980 campaign, Governor Ronald Reagan courted workers. But Reagan’s campaign also drew inspiration from his old hero, Goldwater. Reagan made clear that his emphasis was work, or lower taxes, not abolishing “Right to Work.”
A few takeaways for your Labor Day, whatever your music: siding with unions out of political expedience generally doesn’t work for Republicans. That’s because Republicans rarely can deliver more to unions than Democrats, for whom organized labor is embedded DNA. Workers, whether unionized or not, spot the intellectual hypocrisy in such a Republican endeavor. So do other voters. The hero Republicans and Democrats of this story are men and women who responded to voter needs rather than styling themselves as architects of a presidential coalition.
Last, and as important, is to recognize the fallacy upon which the whole political discussion is based: “union = workers.” Workers, like anyone else, are individuals, some unionized, and some not. To build up unions as workers’ proxy is to worsen the possibility of the kind of cronyism our political commentators spends so much energy bemoaning. Union-boosting often ignores the basic need of workers, such as training and employment. Seen from the vantage point of recent decades, U.S. union history looks like a tragic and unnecessary imposition of a primitive class warfare cartoon upon a powerhouse of growth. The fundamental trouble with our union culture is that it forces people to take sides and themselves become those cartoon caricatures.
Which side are we on? Well, not that side.
Editor’s note: This article has been emended since its original publication.