80 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
inflation, and about the stress they worked
under, which President Jimmy Carter’s
aviation chief had pooh-poohed as no
worse than that of driving a New York
City bus. After Reagan took office, they
demanded a hefty raise and a four-day
workweek. The counteroffer from Rea-
gan’s team was the most generous the
federal government had ever extended
to a union. Even so, in August, 1981, the
controllers walked off the job.
It was illegal for federal workers to
strike, though they had got away with it
before. Reagan had led a strike himself
as the head of the Screen Actors Guild,
and, as the governor of California, where
it had been illegal for state workers to
strike, he had resolved more than a hun-
dred walkouts without punishing strik-
ers. Not this time. “They are in violation
of the law,” Reagan told reporters, a few
hours after the strike began. His Admin-
istration fired more than eleven thousand
people, banning them from ever working
for the federal government again, and
decertified their union, fining it twenty-
nine million dollars. Dozens of strikers
and union officials were arrested; there
were bankruptcies, divorces, and suicides.
To return planes to the air, the govern-
ment hired permanent replacements for
the strikers, a tactic that had been legal
since a 1938 court ruling but had been
considered socially unacceptable.
“Suddenly people realized, Hell, you
can beat a union,” the president of a cop-
per mine later recalled. Almost overnight,
strikes became scarce. There had been
two hundred and eighty-nine large strikes
a year, on average, during the nineteen-
seventies, but there were only eighty-
three a year in the nineteen-eighties. The
yearly rate so far this decade is fourteen.
After the Second World War, wages were
more generous in sectors of the econ-
omy with a high rate of strikes, but that’s
no longer the case, probably because
strikes are more likely to fail. Collective
bargaining has become “defensive” and
“marginal to the real problems,” Lichten-
stein writes. Accordingly, real hourly pay
for the average American is lower today
than it was in 1973.
I
n 2008, when the Democrats took
the House, the Senate, and the White
House, labor leaders hoped that pol-
iticians would level the playing field.
But Barack Obama’s priority was health
care. For decades, Rosenfeld writes,
there hasn’t been “even one significant
piece of pro-union legislation.” On the
contrary, the tide lately has been in the
other direction. In 2011, a law proposed
by Scott Walker, then the governor
of Wisconsin, stripped public-sector
unions of most of their bargaining
power; Greenhouse interviews the pres-
ident of a Wisconsin local whose mem-
bership dropped from eleven hundred
to eighty. Throughout the next half-
dozen years, Indiana, Michigan, Wis-
consin, West Virginia, and Kentucky
passed so-called right-to-work laws,
which make union dues optional and
were once common only in former
slave states. Since 1961, union mem-
bers have had the right to decline to
fund their union’s political activities,
but, in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled
that government workers can’t even be
required to pay for a union’s negotia-
tions on their behalf.
Some labor groups have met the set-
backs by refocussing on old ideals of
economic justice and workplace de-
mocracy. That may sound utopian, but
Rosenfeld suggests a hardheaded justifi-
cation. Although unions often gauge
their power by the premium that mem-
bership adds to a worker’s compensa-
tion—Greenhouse reports an estimate,
from 2015, of 13.6 per cent—it’s not in
a union’s interest for the wage premium
to be too high; if a unionized company
is put at a competitive disadvantage, it
might go out of business. A more stra-
tegic goal is to establish a wage floor
across an economic sector. That has been
the aim of the Fight for $15, a grassroots
movement to empower service work-
ers. It began in 2012 with fast-food
workers in New York City and a year
later won a law, in a Seattle suburb,
phasing in a fifteen-dollar-an-hour
minimum wage. Similar laws now cover
California, New York City, Massa-
chusetts, and New Jersey. The Service
Employees International Union helped
launch the movement and put tens of
millions of dollars into it, even though
most beneficiaries aren’t union mem-
bers and may never be.
The Fight for $15 has featured a new
kind of strike, lasting only a day and
designed not to deprive a company of
labor but to draw media attention. Why
try to shut down a McDonald’s when
you can hold a sit-in at a shareholder
meeting, or publicize the fact that
the company’s help line advises cash-
strapped workers to visit food pantries
and sign children up for Medicaid? In
a similar strategy, the Coalition of Im-
mokalee Workers, a group that advo-
cates for tomato pickers in Florida, boy-
cotted one fast-food chain at a time in
order to persuade the businesses to buy
tomatoes only from growers certified
as providing rest breaks, shade tents,
drinking water, and fair pay.
Perhaps altruism and storytelling
are the new union weapons. Green-
house reports that a teachers’ union in
St. Paul, Minnesota, won support from
the community when it added the goals
of students and parents, such as more
nurses and fewer standardized tests,
to the teachers’ demands for them-
selves. During the Red for Ed strikes
that spread via social media last year,
teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma,
and Arizona made their economic
plight part of a bid for broader polit-
ical engagement.
Even weakened, unions continue to
have benevolent effects on civic life. The
children of union parents earn more
when they grow up, and so do children
merely raised in a neighborhood with
many union families. Though unions
are losing their capacity to reduce in-
come inequality in the private sector,
they continue to reduce it among gov-
ernment employees. Rosenfeld estimates
that union membership increases voter
turnout by five percentage points; the
only other institutions capable of boost-
ing it for voters of low socioeconomic
status are churches. In a backhanded
compliment to unions’ political effi-
cacy, a 2018 study found that right-to-
work laws, by impairing union activ-
ities, reduce turnout in Presidential
elections by two percentage points—
and reduce Democratic vote share by
enough to have cost Hillary Clinton
victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania in 2016.
In a world where technology allows
an employer to script and oversee every
decision, workers will need to help one
another if they want to defend their
dignity. It’s not at all clear what the
unions of the future will look like, but
it may be that grander aspirations are
necessary to achieve smaller ones.
