As the video shows – only 31% of Republicans approve of unions compared to 74% of Democrats. But in a poll several months ago from Gallup – they found that 35% of union workers who were registered to vote would vote for Romney. (source)
I do not understand Americans who claim to be pro-middle class and then say they’re against unions. It boggles the mind. Are unions perfect? No. But unions are the only organization whose sole focus is to increase the pay and benefits for middle class workers. The ONLY organization.
You can’t be for the middle class and anti-union. That’s like saying you love baseball but you hate baseball players.
If union workers get a better deal – so will non-union members. Corporations have to compete for their workers and the better deals that are out there … the more corporations have to do to compete for those workers. They’d rather not have to compete and outbid … they prefer a job market that has high unemployment so workers have very few options.
If you look at the trends over time …. using empirical data – the trend is clear. The fewer # of union workers, the worse off the middle class is. As we showed HERE – there is a clear correlation between the decline of unions and the increase in income inequality.
Rich Yeselson says the death of unions has been a long, slow death spiral HERE:
Yes, why don’t people organize their own unions, despite all the risks, rather than resent those who are union members? That was the question then, and that is the question now. But, mostly people aren’t even angry enough to ask it anymore. In his great and enduring work, The Making of the English Working Class of 1963, the British historian, E.P. Thompson, wrote of the emergence of early19th century British working class consciousness. Thompson showed how each generation of British workers of that period passed along to their sons and neighbors a broad world- view that asserted class and national pride. It is an American form of that historical memory that we have forgotten. There is now only a very thinly described transmission of working class solidarity and the role unions play in inculcating it.
We would be well served, however, to remember the power that union leaders like Wimpy—like Reuther and Lewis before him—once wielded. That power pissed a lot of people off, but inspired others. The results in Wisconsin ratify that we’re about to find out what it’s like when people like him no longer piss off or inspire pretty much anybody. There has never been an advanced capitalist country with as weakened and small a union movement as today’s United States. (There are very few union members in France, for example, but French unions still have the vast majority of the workforce under union contract.) And according to academic evidence cited in Tim Noah’s recent book The Great Divergence, which Nocera uses as the occasion for his column (and which I reviewed in The American Prospect), the decline of the labor movement is one of the primary causes of American income and wealth inequality, particularly among male workers.
