History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes passes itself on the way back.
From River Rouge to Republic Steel, from Flint to the Haymarket, the biggest battles in the rise of industrial unions took place on Midwestern soil. Now, from Columbus to Madison, the fiercest struggles over the survival of public employee unions have come back to the Midwest.
There’s a reason for this historical resonance. Nowhere else can public sector workers -- the union members who still have decent salaries, pensions and working conditions –- see so clearly what will happen to them if they lose the bargaining power that their unions give them.
Once upon a time, before the Rust Belt era and the arrival of globalization destroyed so many of its factory jobs, the Midwest was the industrial core of America. Because the nation’s mightiest industrial corporations rose here, so did its biggest and strongest unions.
These great corporations and unions didn’t exactly love each other. But together, they created one of the proudest achievements of America’s economic history – an industrial middle class. These workers toiled on blast furnaces and assembly lines and carried their lunch in lunch pails, but they owned their own homes and a car or two, had a cottage by the lake and took vacations. In short, they were middle class.
That is history. Most of those corporations are gone, decamped first to the American South and then to Mexico and China, all largely non-union territories. The unions couldn’t follow, so they are shrunken: only 6.9 percent of American workers now belong to unions, only 10 percent of those in durable goods manufacturing.
The unions that remain are increasingly toothless. Like the United Auto Workers, they keep their roles and their members by doing what they can, which isn’t much: most new union contracts provide two-tier wage scales, protecting the salaries of older workers while freezing younger workers at lower wages with fewer benefits.
The result is what you’d expect. According to the Michigan economist Dan Luria, unionized factory workers in the Midwest used to make about $40 an hour, including benefits. Now that pay is around $25 an hour, also including benefits.
Not surprisingly, the industrial middle class is gone, too. The Midwest’s old factory towns too often are wastelands where these workers once lived, pocked with vacant lots, rusting mills, empty stores. The Midwestern wage structure today is an hourglass, with quite a lot of well-educated and skilled employees at the top, many more destitute workers at the bottom, and not much in between. Those middle-class workers may still be here, but their jobs aren’t.
Many Midwestern workers grew up in relatively comfortable families where the father worked in the factory and the mother stayed home. Today both parents work, sometimes at more than one job, to support a diminished lifestyle that still depended on borrowing -- at least, until the debt bubble burst in 2008.
Technology took some of these jobs. Globalization took others. Lax labor laws made the process possible. Mostly, what happened was that corporations discovered they could move to cheaper places, leaving their workers and their unions behind.
But so far, public service jobs can’t be outsourced. What teachers, firemen, cops and street repairmen do can’t be done from India or China. Theoretically, the work done by some government workers – the people who keep records, issue marriage licenses and collect taxes – could be done by someone in Bangalore but attempts by some governments to outsource this work has been halted by political protest.
But these teachers, teachers, firemen, policemen, state, and local government workers are learning that what happened to the industrial union members can happen to them.
If private-sector union membership is only 6.9 percent of all workers, public-sector union membership is 36 percent. Among local government, the figure rises to 42 percent. For the first time, there are more union members employed by government now than by private business, even though the private sector has six times as many jobs.
Not surprisingly, public-sector wages are considerably higher than private-sector wages – an average of $917 per week, exactly $200 more than the $717 taken home by private-sector workers, not counting benefits like pensions and health care. (All figures come from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are up to date.)
This is the background to the battles that raged in state capitals in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. In each state, governors or legislative leaders tried to wipe out or limit the power of public sector unions: unable to outsource the public workers’ jobs, they have mounted a direct assault on their unions. In each state, the government workers looked at what happened to private-sector workers when their unions collapsed, and decided to fight.
But why now? The new labor battles result from the confluence of two events – big state deficits and the sudden rise to power of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, including the far-right Tea Party faction.
Of the two events, the rise of the Tea Party is the most important. None of the three states on the firing line – Wisconsin, Indiana or Ohio – has an especially big deficit, at least compared to other states such as California or Illinois, where Democrats rule and where no union battles have broken out.
The new governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, Scott Walker and John Kasich, are longtime foes of unions. They are funded by anti-union businessmen, such as the Koch Brothers. The suspicion is that both Walker and Kasich, like the Republican legislative leaders of Indiana, are using their state deficits as an excuse to cripple unions. (The Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels, also a Republican and a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, has publicly denounced his legislative allies’ attacks on the unions.)
The mid-term elections of last November brought these new Republicans to power, as they did the Tea Party members of Congress determined to cut the federal government’s deficit. Once again, it’s easy to suspect that these deficit hawks are more devoted to crippling the federal government and returning power to states than they are to trimming the deficit itself.
The Tea Partiers won, in the Midwest and elsewhere, on the wave of public angst over the recession, genuine worries about the deficit and the waning support on the left for President Obama. All the Midwestern states are genuine “swing states”: none is reliably Democratic or Republican. All went for Obama in 2008. Most, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, went Republican last year.
There’s more to this than union rights. The Midwest, having lost its industrial economy, desperately needs to invent a new, 21st-century post-industrial economy. This means investment especially in education and infrastructure. Both Walker and Kasich propose cuts in exactly these areas.
The Tea Party won last year fair and square and is moving fast to turn its wishes into law. But too fast? The Democratic hope is that the new Republican leaders over-estimated their power and under-estimated the continuing support for unions, even in this post-industrial era. Polls show that Americans, most of them non-union members themselves, still support the union rights of government workers by a solid two-to-one margin.
So the Tea Party may be sowing the seeds of its own defeat, in the nation and in the Midwest. But that defeat, if it comes, is still two years away. By then, public sector unions may have joined the industrial unions on the scrapheaps of the Midwestern economy.
These great corporations and unions didn’t exactly love each other. But together, they created one of the proudest achievements of America’s economic history – an industrial middle class. These workers toiled on blast furnaces and assembly lines and carried their lunch in lunch pails, but they owned their own homes and a car or two, had a cottage by the lake and took vacations. In short, they were middle class.
That is history. Most of those corporations are gone, decamped first to the American South and then to Mexico and China, all largely non-union territories. The unions couldn’t follow, so they are shrunken: only 6.9 percent of American workers now belong to unions, only 10 percent of those in durable goods manufacturing.
The unions that remain are increasingly toothless. Like the United Auto Workers, they keep their roles and their members by doing what they can, which isn’t much: most new union contracts provide two-tier wage scales, protecting the salaries of older workers while freezing younger workers at lower wages with fewer benefits.
The result is what you’d expect. According to the Michigan economist Dan Luria, unionized factory workers in the Midwest used to make about $40 an hour, including benefits. Now that pay is around $25 an hour, also including benefits.
Not surprisingly, the industrial middle class is gone, too. The Midwest’s old factory towns too often are wastelands where these workers once lived, pocked with vacant lots, rusting mills, empty stores. The Midwestern wage structure today is an hourglass, with quite a lot of well-educated and skilled employees at the top, many more destitute workers at the bottom, and not much in between. Those middle-class workers may still be here, but their jobs aren’t.
Many Midwestern workers grew up in relatively comfortable families where the father worked in the factory and the mother stayed home. Today both parents work, sometimes at more than one job, to support a diminished lifestyle that still depended on borrowing -- at least, until the debt bubble burst in 2008.
Technology took some of these jobs. Globalization took others. Lax labor laws made the process possible. Mostly, what happened was that corporations discovered they could move to cheaper places, leaving their workers and their unions behind.
But so far, public service jobs can’t be outsourced. What teachers, firemen, cops and street repairmen do can’t be done from India or China. Theoretically, the work done by some government workers – the people who keep records, issue marriage licenses and collect taxes – could be done by someone in Bangalore but attempts by some governments to outsource this work has been halted by political protest.
But these teachers, teachers, firemen, policemen, state, and local government workers are learning that what happened to the industrial union members can happen to them.
If private-sector union membership is only 6.9 percent of all workers, public-sector union membership is 36 percent. Among local government, the figure rises to 42 percent. For the first time, there are more union members employed by government now than by private business, even though the private sector has six times as many jobs.
Not surprisingly, public-sector wages are considerably higher than private-sector wages – an average of $917 per week, exactly $200 more than the $717 taken home by private-sector workers, not counting benefits like pensions and health care. (All figures come from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, and are up to date.)
This is the background to the battles that raged in state capitals in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. In each state, governors or legislative leaders tried to wipe out or limit the power of public sector unions: unable to outsource the public workers’ jobs, they have mounted a direct assault on their unions. In each state, the government workers looked at what happened to private-sector workers when their unions collapsed, and decided to fight.
But why now? The new labor battles result from the confluence of two events – big state deficits and the sudden rise to power of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, including the far-right Tea Party faction.
Of the two events, the rise of the Tea Party is the most important. None of the three states on the firing line – Wisconsin, Indiana or Ohio – has an especially big deficit, at least compared to other states such as California or Illinois, where Democrats rule and where no union battles have broken out.
The new governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, Scott Walker and John Kasich, are longtime foes of unions. They are funded by anti-union businessmen, such as the Koch Brothers. The suspicion is that both Walker and Kasich, like the Republican legislative leaders of Indiana, are using their state deficits as an excuse to cripple unions. (The Indiana governor, Mitch Daniels, also a Republican and a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, has publicly denounced his legislative allies’ attacks on the unions.)
The mid-term elections of last November brought these new Republicans to power, as they did the Tea Party members of Congress determined to cut the federal government’s deficit. Once again, it’s easy to suspect that these deficit hawks are more devoted to crippling the federal government and returning power to states than they are to trimming the deficit itself.
The Tea Partiers won, in the Midwest and elsewhere, on the wave of public angst over the recession, genuine worries about the deficit and the waning support on the left for President Obama. All the Midwestern states are genuine “swing states”: none is reliably Democratic or Republican. All went for Obama in 2008. Most, including Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, went Republican last year.
There’s more to this than union rights. The Midwest, having lost its industrial economy, desperately needs to invent a new, 21st-century post-industrial economy. This means investment especially in education and infrastructure. Both Walker and Kasich propose cuts in exactly these areas.
The Tea Party won last year fair and square and is moving fast to turn its wishes into law. But too fast? The Democratic hope is that the new Republican leaders over-estimated their power and under-estimated the continuing support for unions, even in this post-industrial era. Polls show that Americans, most of them non-union members themselves, still support the union rights of government workers by a solid two-to-one margin.
So the Tea Party may be sowing the seeds of its own defeat, in the nation and in the Midwest. But that defeat, if it comes, is still two years away. By then, public sector unions may have joined the industrial unions on the scrapheaps of the Midwestern economy.
Are you sure you are comparing public sector workers with their counterparts in the private sector that have same amount of education? The average public sector worker typically has more educational attainment than the average private sector worker, which generally accounts for the differences you are describing. But I suspect that when you compare public sector lawyers with private sector lawyers, etc., you'll find that the average private sector workers' salary is higher.
Posted by: Lincoln Kennedy | Wednesday, March 09, 2011 at 08:56 PM
While unions may help ensuring a living wage, I dont know any fire fighters, police officers, teachers, or other public sector employees who I would say are out there making too much money. These people have chosen a profession of public service and with the same time spent on education could likely be making more money in the private sector. Public employees didn't make our deficit. We are at a time when the top tax brackets are at historic lows, with caital gains tax taking an even deeper drop. We need to look past the divide and conquer tactics of pitting the private against the public sector and look to how we can seiously reduce our debt without evicerating the nation.
Posted by: Steve Stemmerman | Sunday, March 13, 2011 at 08:31 AM