Demosophia

Best News for Labor in 50 Years

Four dissident unions representing about one-third of the union members in the US will boycott the upcoming AFL-CIO Convention. The boycott is more than symbolic. Two of the unions, the Service Employees Union and the Teamsters, have already withdrawn from the federation. The reason given for the withdrawal, as announced by MSM, is that the AFL-CIO has placed too much emphasis on political lobbying at the expense of membership recruitment, and for once MSM isn't far off the mark.

If they've made a mistake in reporting the situation it is that they've allowed the impression that this is just a recent or local dispute, rather than a sea change within the "progressive coalition." But make no mistake, this is the first domino to fall in an ideological orientation that has straight-jacketed the progressive left for more than half a century.

Union density has been declining in the US, and the beginning of the decline can be traced and registered specifically with the establishment of the AFL-CIO. You see, the logic of the merger was precisely the same as the logic behind the establishment of religion in most of Western Europe. The assumption was that strength comes from unity, and that in order to adequately defend the American worker from the whims of management the unions had to operate under a single coordinated leadership. The problem is that once individual unions no longer had direct responsibility for their own programs in competition with other unions they lost the incentive to excel at their representation function.

They also lost the incentive to provide other benefits of union membership, not the least of which concerns the function of a professional association that confers kudos and respect on the people who practice a given occupation. Studies I conducted with Lipset on attitudes toward trade unionism in Canada and the US demonstrated that the segment of the worker population in the "off-diagonals," which includes workers who aren't in a union but want to be, and workers who are in a union but want to be independent, are about evenly split in Canada. In the US, however, they're almost all in the non-union category. Nearly everyone in the US who doesn't want to be in a union, isn't in one. However, there are a lot of people who would like to be in something like a union, but don't like any of the unions that represent their choices.

The reason the US is the most religious nation in the Western world is simply because we're sectarian. There are lots of little churches instead of one big one. All the little churches have to compete with one another for members, so they excel at the task. They manage to fulfill whatever it is that people are looking for in a religion, and also manage to steer clear of the taint of being associated with The State. Contrary to what many religious people believe, being too close to The State is bad for religion. The legitimacy of The State is always in periodic ebb and flow, but if the Church is subject to the same judgments determined by how well the State is doing at meeting its political expectations it's the ebb that sticks, and the flow that people forget. The result is a slow and gradual decline in the legitimacy and stature of religion. Church attendance in all countries that had a State Religion is now in single digits. On the other hand, church attendance in the US is higher than anywhere else in the "industrialized world."

But it never occurred to anyone that trade unionism might be subject to the same dynamic whereby the closer it is to The State the less legitimate it becomes, and the less well it accomplishes the task of representation. The events of this week in the AFL-CIO could well be the signs of trade unionism in the US trying to save itself from complete irrelevance and marginalization. Contrary to what the Democrats are saying, this is actually good news for the union movement. Very good news.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Anticipatory Retaliation and The Jawa Report)

Posted by Demosophist at July 27, 2005 02:30 AM | TrackBack