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The best argument I’ve ever seen for organized labor was on a bumper sticker I saw a few years ago. It said: Unions: The folks who brought you the weekend.
Not only was that a catchy slogan, it was true. Former Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley told me that when he was a child in the 1920s and 30s, those lucky enough to have jobs usually worked at least six days a week.
Weekends back then – two days off in a row — were reserved for the professional classes and the well-to-do, along with other luxuries like vacations. Then came the Great Depression, the union movement and a sympathetic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The rich hated FDR passionately and hated unions more. They didn’t seem to realize that organized labor had saved them from communism or fascism. People died in the fight for better conditions and wages back in the day. Men and women struck and sat in and passionately believed in their cause. Walter Reuther, the greatest of modern labor leaders, was in fact an idealistic intellectual who saw unions as the way to bring American workers into the middle class. He succeeded, as far as auto workers were concerned. He was totally incorruptible.
However, other unions and other labor leaders weren’t always as pure; think Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters. Reuther never stopped trying to organize the unorganized, and sought to make the union a force to fight for civil rights and social change.
He survived severe beatings and assassination attempts and year after year, expanded the wages and benefits his workers received. He failed at one major goal; to gain the union a seat at the table and a voice in running the automakers themselves.
Otherwise he succeeded. That success, however, would have had limits. George Romney, once president of American Motors, told me that he and Reuther had privately agreed that constantly giving workers more and passing the costs on to the consumer couldn’t go on forever.
But Romney said neither man had the political strength to challenge the system. Reuther died in a plane crash in May, 1970. As time went by, he became a revered picture on the wall, not an inspiration to be followed. Reuther would have never allowed the unfolding scandal in which prosecutors say top UAW officials, with the collusion of Chrysler executives, spent millions intended for worker training on themselves.
Nor could Michigan have become a right to work state. But unions have been losing power and influence for decades. They knew how to win when America was pretty much a self-contained market. They haven’t a clue how to cope with outsourcing to China, or how to organize independent contractors doing the company’s work from their homes.
Today, too many Americans see unions as lazy, selfish, and a barrier to progress. There are reasons unions are losing the struggle to organize, even when, as with a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, the company signaled that they would be just fine with the UAW.
The Michigan legislature has been waging a long and successful war against teachers unions, and recently managed to change the law so that the state could pay substandard wages to those on state construction projects. Unions are in big trouble.
And few of us realize what peril this puts us all in. Statistics show that states with a higher union membership have higher median income and standards of living.
Unions need to find a better way to tell their story. If not, we may see a day when ragged child laborers ask what a weekend was, and find that nobody seems to know.
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