How Labor Can Be Big Again

“Organizing Power: The Prospects for an American Labor Movement” by Margaret Levi, in Perspectives on Politics (Mar. 2003), American Political Science Assn., 1527 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036–1206.

Can organized labor recover its political mojo? “Big Labor” was once feared and courted by politicians because it represented more than 33 percent of the nation’s wage and salary workers. Today organized labor is often regarded as just another special-interest group, representing, Levi notes, “only 13.5 percent of all wage and salary workers” and “only nine percent of private-sector wage and salary workers.” (Unions had their highest absolute number of members, 20.2 million, in 1978; by 2001, that number had declined to 16.3 million.) Nonetheless, she is hopeful about the future of unions and believes that they are vital to democracy.

Labor needs “to become once again a social movement,” argues Levi, a political scientist at the University of Washington. “In order for organized labor to play its critical role as a countervailing power within the Amer­ican political system, there must be intensified organizing, internal democratization, increased electoral and lobbying clout, and social-movement unions willing to mobilize with others and, if necessary, on the streets.”

A study last year, commissioned by the AFL-CIO, found that there has been a surge of support for union representation since 1984, when no more than 35 percent of nonunionized workers wanted a union. Now, 50 percent do. To boost their rolls, Levi contends, unions must do more than try to improve members’ paychecks, benefits, and working conditions. They must also encourage members to get involved in “larger issues of democratization (within the union and within the larger polity), social justice, and economic equality. . . . Members pay dues and strike but are also expected to mobilize on behalf of causes beyond their own.” Such “social-movement” unions, Levi maintains, “tend to be democratic and participatory.”

Since their election in 1995, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and his “New Voices” colleagues have been shaking up the labor union bureaucracy, says Levi. “Redefining its program through action,” the AFL-CIO has gotten involved in campaigns against sweatshops and for “global justice” and a “living wage.” About 80 cities and counties around the country have enacted “living wage” ordinances, obliging contractors to pay wages that are usually above the federal minimum.

Levi believes that the “fresh vitality” she detects in American unions has come none too soon. Unions “offer collective influence to those who lack individual clout in important political and economic domains,” and, for that reason, they’re “essential to a vigorous American democracy.” If unions “mobilize as a social movement,” she says, they’ll be better able to get that message across.