Byron York has already weighed in
here on
Gallup’s striking finding that labor unions are suddenly much less popular with Americans than they were a year or even
nine months ago, right after the November 2008 election.
The Gallup findings are unequivocal. Approval of labor unions is down from 59% to 48%. Among Independents, it’s down even more, from 63% to 44%. Do unions mostly help or hurt the companies where they represent workers? Mostly help, 45%; mostly hurt, 46%. How about the U.S. economy in general? Mostly help, 39%; mostly hurt, 51%. Ouch. By more than 2-1 Americans feel unions help union members, but by a similar margin they feel they mostly hurt non-members, who after all are a large majority of American employees these days. Would you like to see unions have more or less influence? More influence, 25%; less influence, 42%. Will they become stronger or weaker? Stronger, 24%; weaker, 48%.
The Gallup organization has been asking questions about unions since 1936, the year after the first Gallup poll was conducted. Over those 73 years the public’s response has been mostly positive. Now, with astonishing suddenness, it has turned mostly negative—in just eight months!
How to account for this astonishing change in opinion. Mickey Kaus has some answers:
Gruesome new poll numbers on public support for unions–the percent who say they “mostly hurt” the U.S. economy jumps from 39% in 2006 to 51% last month, for example. …. Tom Edsall calls them “horror show numbers” and wants an explanation! Hmmm. I wish I could say “card check”–the labor plan to avoid secret ballots when organizing–but that isn’t the most visible of the roles unions have played recently. The most visible would be
1)
the auto industry, where the UAW helped bankrupt two of the Big Three and stuck taxpayers with the bill
without even taking a cut in hourly pay.
2) the public schools, which the teachers’ unions have helped to degrade in a way that adversely impacts the lives of even affluent Dem yuppies (at least those with kids). …It will be hard for me to avoid the Howell Raines Fallacy on this one: Once again the great and good American people have it right. …
P.S.:
Polls like this aren’t going to make it easy for the Senate to pass even a watered-down labor law “reform.” Did the UAW kill “card check”?
I think Kaus is right to identify the (formerly) Big Three auto companies’ troubles as playing a critical role in this shift in opinion. The United Auto Workers has long been one of America’s most visible unions and, at least for long periods during the 73 years Gallup has been measuring opinion on unions, one of its most visionary. And now they need a taxpayer-financed bailout, at least at General Motors and Chrysler. UAW Presidents Walter Reuther, Leonard Woodcock and Douglas Fraser were highly competent leaders who held up the UAW’s relationship with the Big Three as a model for the nation, and you can still find liberal columnists lovingly remembering those wonderful days when young men fresh out of high school and military service could get a job on the assembly lines and make a decent living until they retired at 65—or, thanks to the 1970 and later UAW contracts—51 or so. (They neglect to mention that everyone hated those jobs.)
Over the past dozen years labor leaders like John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO and Andy Stern of the SEIU have done a brilliant job of constructing a political machine run by very able and dedicated people which poured $400 million and much manpower into Democratic 2008 campaigns. In return they expected that the Democratic Congress would pass and Obama would sign the card check bill effectively abolishing the secret ballot in unionization elections and imposing binding federal imposition of wages, benefits and work rules on unionized employers.
What they didn’t figure on was public opinion. If you go back and read Marc Ambinder’s Atlantic political blog, you will find speculation about how many Republicans would support the card check bill plus a bland assumption that all congressional Democrats would. After all, all Senate Democrats had co-sponsored the bill in the 110th Congress, when it was supported also by then-Republican Arlen Specter, and it easily passed the House. But it’s one thing to pass or support a bill when everyone knows it won’t become law and public opinion hasn’t given it a thought, and another thing when it’s entirely possible it will become law and people will have to live with it. And with the Big Three auto companies and their UAW workers lining up for taxpayer subsidies, many people started to think it would not be an entirely good idea to enable unions to do to a large swathe of the private sector economy what the UAW had done (with some considerable assistance from dimwitted managements, to be sure) to the Big Three.
I think this is one of those situations where liberals and their political allies have been poorly served by their cheerleaders in the mainstream media. In 2007 and 2008 MSM never subjected the card check bill to serious analysis. It just blandly reported Democrats’ (and Specter’s) support for it in perfunctory news stories. It didn’t devote a single column inch (or if it did I missed it) to what impact card check would have in the real world.
The lesson is that if you want to change the world in some major way, you need to muster support for that change from the general public. Just lining up a bunch of politicians’ endorsements may not be enough; politicians don’t always stay bought. They are entirely willing to welsh on their commitments if they think that’s necessary to save their political careers. (Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, for example, seems entirely unembarrassed by her turnaround on card check.)
So I think I disagree with Kaus’s analysis. Yes, I recognize that liberal opinionmakers have been repelled by the horrifying excesses of the teacher unions, but I doubt this has had anything like the impact on public opinion that the UAW—er, General Motors and Chrysler—bailouts have had. And I think the public response to the card check bill played a greater role than Mickey thinks in the astonishing change in opinion on unions over the last eight months.
There’s irony aplenty here. Thanks to the work of Sweeney, Stern and union political organizers, unions entered calendar year 2009 with more political influence than they have had since the 1960s or 1970s. But the way they have deployed that political influence has made the unions more unpopular than they have been in the last 73 years.
