Labor Movement Roars Again, But It's A Wounded Sound

WASHINGTON -- Labor is roaring again, like in the old days. But it's a wounded sound now.

In the bitter aftermath of a showdown with Wisconsin's governor, and as other states move to weaken public employee bargaining rights, unions and their allies dare to hope they can turn rage into revival. This could be a make-or-break moment for a movement that brought the nation the 40-hour week, overtime pay, upward mobility, a storied century of brawls, progressivism and corruption – and now a struggle to stay relevant in the modern age.

Not so many answer to the call anymore when labor demands, as it did in the bloody strife of Kentucky coal country generations ago, "Which side are you on?"

One way or another, the Wisconsin Waterloo and the forces it set loose will fill a chapter in organized labor's history. The dispute mobilized masses, attracted public support on the side of workers and set up a political donnybrook to play out in the months ahead as labor leaders seek voters' vengeance against the Republicans who eviscerated union rights.

But it was, at the core, a defeat for labor in the one place where it has stayed strong: the public sector.

Suddenly this redoubt looks like a fat target.

"I think Republicans smell blood in the water," said Leon Fink, a labor historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Politics is a highly organized game of money ball and this could set back both the unions and Democratic Party power for years."

Since the heyday of organized labor's influence in the 1950s, when union membership reached its peak at about one of every three workers, unions have fought a losing battle against the steady erosion of membership and clout.

Last year union membership fell to 11.9 percent of all workers, and just 6.9 percent of the private sector. The number of major strikes in 2009 and 2010 was the lowest on record.

If you're a labor sympathizer wondering why unions got weak, pick your poison.

The decline of unions in the private sector mirrored the push to globalization, especially the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs to other countries and the shift of other factories from the longtime industrial heartland to states less hospitable to organized labor.

Companies took an increasingly aggressive stance against union organizers, emboldened by the Reagan administration's firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. That act was taken as a wink to the corporate world that the long-established order was upended and that business, too, could play rough.

"Labor now gives off an almost animal sense of weakness," Chicago union lawyer Thomas Geoghegan wrote in his Reagan-era ode to the movement – something of an obituary for it.

In the mid-1970s, when miners pulled off one of their multiple massive strikes, they choked coal production, idled steel plants that were starved of fuel and caused rolling brownouts in New York City. Americans far removed from strikes sharply felt their effects.

Not now.

In the 1970s, the nation saw an average of 269 major strikes or lockouts each year. The number has dropped precipitously ever since, to 17 per year over the past decade. The five in 2009 were the fewest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started counting in 1947.

When industrial unions negotiated higher wages and better working conditions in more influential times, those advances rippled through the economy, setting a benchmark for union and nonunion workplaces. With less than 7 percent of the private sector unionized now, contracts no longer have the reach to raise all boats.

Young workers today float from job to job and often have little vested interest in long-term improvements in employee satisfaction at a company. That has made it harder to organize new generations to replace the loyalists of old.

Nor are communities as cohesive as they once were.

When 1,900 miners staged an 11-month strike against Pittston Coal in 1989-90 to restore health and other benefits for retirees, widows and disabled miners, their makeshift Camp Solidarity drew thousands from across southwestern Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky as well as from coal towns as far away as Canada. More than 37,000 participated in wildcat strikes throughout coal country to support the Pittston miners in a standoff that ranged between peaceful civil disobedience and ugly confrontation. The United Mine Workers finally won the day.

And now? It's questionable how much common cause there will be between the public servants whose union rights are at risk and the rest of the population.

Instead of solidarity, says John Russo, labor studies professor at Youngstown State University, a "politics of resentment" may be in play.

"There's a sense of hopelessness," he says. "Some people feel like, `If we're not going to go anywhere, I'm going to make sure nobody else is going anywhere.'"

To be sure, unions have made recent strides in pulling in new members in the service sector and health care industry. Labor remains a powerful political force. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., owes his narrow re-election victory last year to the dogged work of union organizers.

"There is no institution in America on either side of the aisle that has an infrastructure that gets people to the polls like the labor movement," said Amy Dean, a former head of the AFL-CIO in California's Silicon Valley. "Nobody can put people out on the streets and go door to door like we can."

Public sector unions have grown in recent decades as labor leaders found less resistance in state legislatures – the first being Wisconsin in 1959 – to granting public employees collective bargaining rights. In 2009, for the first time ever, there were more union members working for federal, state, local and municipal governments than in all of the private sector.

Now that trend is meeting the budget crunch in state after state, and running into waves of Republicans elected in November. Conservatives see this as an opportunity to show that public-sector unions simply spend dues to elect Democratic lawmakers with the goal of boosting government workers' wages and benefits, even if it means raising taxes for everyone else to pay for it.

Beyond Wisconsin, Ohio is moving to restrict the collective bargaining rights of roughly 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees – a wider sweep of the public sector. Efforts to take away union powers continue as well in Florida, Iowa, Tennessee, Indiana and more states with Republicans in charge. The Democratic governors of California and New York also seek concessions from the public- service unions, but without trying to curb their labor rights.

Now union leaders and Democrats are pinning their hopes on a backlash will spread into next year's elections and help fuel recall efforts to oust GOP lawmakers who backed the anti-union agenda.

Unions remain a core of the Democratic Party, a reliable source of campaign money and boots on the ground during election season. But without huge membership numbers in the movement, Democrats no longer jump every time labor calls. Democratic President Bill Clinton's push for the North American Free Trade Agreement, against union opposition, was one big signal that the alliance was no longer cast in stone.

After President Barack Obama was elected with a Democratic majority in Congress, unions pinned their hopes on passing legislation that would make it easier to organize workers. The "card check" bill would have let unions simply have a majority of workers sign cards to support forming a union instead of voting in a secret-ballot election. Unions complain that company managers often intimidate and threaten to fire workers in the run-up to such elections, causing many workers to vote no.

But the measure stalled in the Senate as conservative Democrats declined to support it. Business spent millions lobbying against card check.

Indeed, it has been decades since the federal government has advanced collective bargaining rights to any substantial degree, no matter which party had power. Labor might be forgiven for asking Democrats, too, which side they are on.