I first encountered Jane McAlevey on The Argument, a New York Times podcast. I was really impressed by her and so I got this book. In the book McAlevey tells the history of unions and how to revive unions through case studies of real union struggles and strikes that she actually participated in. I found the book really easy to read, and I cruised through it in just a few days.
The major enemy of unions in the government seems to be the Supreme Court. McAlevey brings up many SCOTUS decisions that have harmed unions. For example, in Mackay Radio & Telegraph, the Court held that striking workers could be permanently replaced by strikebreakers. That decision would be weaponized decades later in the Reagan administration to replace all of the country's air traffic controllers when they went on strike. In another case, Abood b. Detroit Board of Education in 1977, the Court declared that government workers' unions could not negotiate clauses requiring all workers to become members even if they voted for it, although it allowed public-sector unions to collect an agency fee, which was an amount of dues with political activities subtracted. But then, in Janus v. AFSCME in 2018, SCOTUS reversed Abood and banned public-sector unions from collecting any fees from non-members at all, which will dramatically weaken them in non-right-to-work states.
McAlevey traces the history of union-busting since World War Two in three phases. First, gutting the NLRA through the Taft-Hartley act and containing the existing private sector unions. Second, to destroy those private sector unions. And third, the current phase of attacking public sector unions. Since Taft-Hartley repealed the Wagner Act, unions have lost the government support that used to balance out their power against management. Now it is illegal for unions to have closed shops, prohibiting entry by those who refuse to join the union. While this may sound like it was unfair, McAlevey points out that this is a provision that would have been voted on and decided by the employees of the union, and would be necessary to prevent and employer from diluting their power by hiring new non-union employees. Taft-Hartley paved the way for "right-to-work" laws that ban unions from requiring membership, effectively killing them by allowing non-union members to become free riders. Another law diminishing union capabilities is the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, passed in 1959, which requires that unions make regular reports to the government. These reports must include every hour of work done by union staffers, every expense with invoices, records of every mile driven, and "gifts" from employers, which includes shared lunches at negotiation tables. McAlevey says that these burdensome reporting requirements waste union leaders' time and since time is money it wastes union members' money.
Another big issue McAlevey talks about is how NAFTA destroyed unions by opening up sources of cheaper labor across the border in Mexico. She really hammers home how Democrats shot themselves in the foot by allowing unions to crumble since unions are some of the strongest liberal political organizers that can be. She quotes Dorian Warren, who says that "For white men in America (across class), the difference between whether they vote Democratic or Republican, conservative or progressive, can be summed up by whether they belong to a union or a church." McAlevey writes that "nothing can rebuild a progressive, ground-up electoral base like a strike-ready union. The Koch brothers know this. The Democrats don't. The choice is clear: build good unions, undo Taft-Hartley, and enable robust collective bargaining and strikes..."
The book and McAlevey's political analysis in it made me think about the split in the Democratic party and how confusing it is for politicians on either side to have to explain the idiosyncrasies of their political membership. Like I feel like it is very perplexing to most voters that Democrats won the Senate, the House, and the Presidency yet are unable to pass bills. Most people aren't paying enough attention to know that there are two Senators blocking everything, and I imagine most Arizona voters assumed Kyrsten Sinema would be a typical democrat when they voted for her. It makes me think it would be better to get ideological diversity across parties rather than within them. It seems better to have a proportional parliamentary system at least for clarity to the electorate. That way, voters can know what each party stands for and vote for that party, sure that the party will support what it says it supports, without being derailed by individual politicians. Then people can more accurately categorize themselves and the politicians they vote for based on the coalitions that the parties form formally, rather than the hidden, informal coalition-making that still must happen behind the scenes in a two party system.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated when he was in Memphis to support a wildcat strike.
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