The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson has a must-read piece on the United Auto Workers union, and why hating unions holds a hallowed place in Republican ideology:
[B]y the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.
The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez’s fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early ’60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther’s death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care — a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.
Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today — which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.
That’s all true. And it’s an important reminder for people like me, a liberal who generally holds unions in low regard. Unions are hardly the entire solution to labor’s problems, but they’ve earned a prominent seat at the table.
Amit
my biggest problem with unions is when they have forced membership and/or open ballot. otherwise, they are capable of doing good work.
unacoder
i’m a bit of the same mind. i’d like to see unions adapt and stay relevant in years to come, but effectively forcing themselves on folks isn’t a way to accomplish that task.
James Young
I’m not sure I’d disagree with anything you’ve said, except for the caricature that “hating unions holds a hallowed place in Republican ideology.” Of course, that’s nonsense, and if you paid the least bit of attention, what Republicans “hate” (read: oppose) is the special privileges that are granted to labor unions by their Liberal friends. Amit gets it right.
MB
James, if there were a god of irony, you would be struck dead.
Alas, there is no god, so I’ll just have to laugh, instead.
James Young
That’s right, Mark: when you can’t answer an argument, just imply that someone who disagrees with you a liar. You can’t point to a single thing I’ve ever said, anywhere, which would justify a conclusion that I “hat[e] unions.” It’s only when you filter it through the ideological prism of union ideology that the conclusion is possible.
I suppose that, contra, I could question whether you truly “generally hold[] unions in low regard,” (I wouldn’t agree with that sentiment, either) but why bother?
MB
No, James, it’s when I’m not going to rise to the bait of being told that the sun rises in the west by an astrologist that I decide to shortcut it with call him a liar.
Amusingly, I was just telling someone last week that as abhorrent as I found your politics, I thought you were a generally honest fellow. Try not to disappoint, yes?
~
As to my opinion of unions, I’m perfectly happy to share that story. I just try (for the most part) to avoid personalizing this space. The short version, however, is that the American half of my family was quite involved with unions for 50 years, and has fuck all to show for it. I don’t have a very hard time extrapolating that experience in light of the apparent inability of many of the unions to change with the times (say, for example, moving away from a death grip on the seniority system – which screws everything from the schools to the skys)).