Brent Harold: The renaissance of union logic – Arizona Daily Star

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

Recent Gallup polls show approval ratings among all Americans hovering around 70%, the highest since the 1960s. (There would seem to be a lot of purple overlap in this otherwise so sharply divided country.) We are seeing stories of union beachheads at Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes, the burgeoning strike of the traditional union stronghold of automakers, and the recent success of Hollywood writers.

Although only 10% of workers are in a union, down from 35% at the zenith, its good to hear of this renaissance of unions. And of the logic of unions.

In 1940s and 50s that logic had become as unassailable as democracy itself. I assume it was part of my public schools curriculum that the passage in mid-Depression of the Wagner Act legalizing unions, that unions represented self-evident progress. It seemed a feature of the zeitgeist, even in the Republican country I grew up on. I dont know where else a kid would have learned it.

The progressive logic of unions was taught in relation to the anti-union, owner-oriented logic that had prevailed until then: its my property and when youre on it working for me, for which you are paid, and should be grateful, youll do what I want you to. I set the rules.

That way of thinking had been linked with what had been seen by many as the great progress wrought by capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as railroads spanning the continent. Most Americans guessing here identified with these acts of fulfilling our so-called Manifest Destiny, important progress for our country, even if we called their capitalist-perpetrators Robber Barons. If workers were abused, many killed, in the process, so be it. (Omelettes require breaking eggs.)

That logic was slowly supplanted by the idea that owners will never on their own see things from their workers point of view. You may own the building and other means of production, but we workers are the indispensable means of production we actually make the stuff you sell at a profit so in that sense its our business, too. Which you will find out when we withhold our labor in a strike.

As for the owner-serving notion of the owner as a benevolent parent to workers, it was not seen as in the owners interests to keep workers safe, a common sense illustrated by the terrible Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, in which 146 workers died. Owners could not be counted on to keep workers safe or care about children working 16 hours a day.

Along with anti-trust laws, unions were a sort of checks- and -balances for our voracious economic system.

The logic of unions was a big conceptual change, and one not, of course, embraced by a lot of the owner class. But there were more workers than owners and managers.

It was a story we were taught, not as a political victory of the left but of genuine progress for humans, as self-evidently logical and humane as that slavery was bad or that women are fully human and should have all the rights of full humanity.

The logic of unions seemed as natural/unassailable as that of two plus two equals four.

But the triumph of that logic was short-lived and began to decline almost as soon as it became installed as law. Reasons often cited for the decline: union corruption such as that depicted in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, Reagans union-busting, as well as OSHA and genuine improvements in workplace safety built into law as a result of the labor movement.

It seems that workers themselves also lost a grip on the hard-won logic from struggles earlier in the century, of worker empowerment, of democracy of the workplace. This despite what many economists have seen as the clear connection between the decline of that logic and the rise, over the past five decades, in economic inequality as reflected in the dramatic rise of the ratio of CEO income to that of the average worker.

With the rise of Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joes, the idea of the benevolent owner has been a likely factor in the erosion of union logic, the idea of worker happiness going hand-in-hand with company profits. This idea has of course been cited in owners pitches to workers who believe they have reasons to unionize.

So even as we wait to see if the logic of democratic institutions in general survives, it is heartening to see the re-emergence of the logic of unions and democracy in the workplace.

It feels like welcoming back as an old friend the logic of two plus two equaling four after a long period of it equaling five.

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Brent Harold, a former English professor and writer., is an Arizona Daily Star contributing writer. He lives in Tucson. You can reach him at kinnacum@gmail.com.

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Brent Harold: The renaissance of union logic - Arizona Daily Star