My friend and companion Susan sent me
this column by Harold
Meyerson at
The Washington Post.
Meyerson seems just right regarding the broad political and economic consequences of the demise of unions. The Democrats - wittingly or witlessly - have more or less orchestrated that demise. It is not that the unions are blameless. But the legal environment in which they operate is structured to the advantage of employers in a stark way. And that is a state of affairs that the Democrats repeatedly have failed to remedy. They
always have some other priority.
So, as
Meyerson notes, the problem is not just that
Obama's first year "has been close to an unmitigated disaster" for organized labor, most especially because the chances of passing even a compromise version of the
Employee Free Choice Act have evaporated due the administration's political incompetence. The problem is that this is like
groundhog day.
Meyerson points out that "this marks the fourth time in the past half-century that labor's efforts to strengthen workers' ability to organize have been deferred by the Democratic presidents and the heavily Democratic Congresses they supported." Maybe the unions need a new political strategy?
I am sure some readers will write in to suggest that unions are bad for economic performance . . . blah, blah, blah. Let's just recall that the truly nasty, unjustifiable
mal-distribution of wealth and income in the U.S., to say nothing of the deregulation that generated our recent financial meltdown, have been generated - indeed accelerated - during decades of marked union decline. I don't know if there is a causal story there, but the correlation is inverse. What we know is that absent strong unions the S*!T has hit the fan in economic terms.
