Unions Missing from Public Discourse

There was a time when people had organizations in which they had discussions that crossed partisan lines. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were dedicated discussion organizations, some called lyceums, some called Chautauquas. They were all over the country and in many small communities. I’ve spoken at the original Chautauqua in western New York. It was wonderful for me – C-Span broadcast it nationally and Chautauqua paid me handsomely to talk about my book on the Rehnquist Court. I never once mentioned Democrats or Republicans. They expected and wanted to hear talks from people with very different views.

Those institutions were founded before the development of a reliable, neutral, national press. That was a twentieth century development, which owed its creation in part to advertisers who wanted to reach everyone without regard to partisan divisions. Some lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson were the rock stars of the age. But for the most part, those organizations were participatory – they were not about experts talking down to people. This is also before the professionalization of universities which was also a post-Civil War development with graduate schools on the German model. The great universities that we know today made that leap into specialization in the nineteenth century, the better to dig deeper into understanding the world around. That doesn’t mean they were liberal – they reflected the prejudices of their days – but they were getting involved in the production of knowledge.

Labor unions were another example of the organization of knowledge often at cross-purposes to partisanship. They grew as a third force, as agents for their members, so their partisan alignments depended on what the parties did for them lately – and they switched sides as needed. That meant many workers had organizations they trusted to represent their interests. It was not about party loyalty. It was about loyalty to the workers in their fields of endeavor. I don’t want to get romantic about it. Union leadership made lots of mistakes. What organization doesn’t? But typically they played all sides for the benefit of their members.

The parties did choose sides. Some supported the labor movement and labor interests and some chose to support capitalists. Most prominently beginning with the Reagan Administration, both the Court and the Republican Party have been doing all they could to shrink, defeat and destroy the labor movement. Part of that was about money. But robbed of unions as intermediaries, workers were on their own to understand how economic policies affected them. Without unions many were pushovers for the likes of Donald Trump, who was closely allied with the wealthiest in America and antagonistic to the needs of workers but convinced them the opposite was true, that they should ignore the press and listen only to him.

In other words, the power of a conman depended on stripping American workers of their own organizations, dedicated to workers’ interests.

Yes, strikes give us all problems, but the absence of labor unions threatens the survival of democratic government and the substitution of government of, by and for the wealthy. In other words, unless you are a captain of industry, you ought to be for labor unions, Grange movements and other organizations of working people. Otherwise, it’s just money talking.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 25, 2023.