Josh asks, "How can unions make a comeback to post WW II levels with all the roadblocks set up to prevent them organizing?" Honest answer? They probably can't. And even if you turned back the legislative clock, even if you gave unions the Employee Free Choice Act, even then, it's not clear you'd get to post-World War II levels of union organizing. There was a lot going on in the post-war moment. Some of it, of course, was legislative. But some of it was cultural. Unions had been part of the New Deal, part of the assault on poverty and economic unrest. The President of the United States had brought them into the fold. Corporations and corporate executives were scared of a government that plausibly could nationalize them, or tax them right out of existence. Some disagree, but I don't think we're on the cusp of a similar ideological or economic moment. Moreover, American workers face a level of competition that simply didn't exist before. Low wage labor existed in the South, and a bit in Mexico, but you couldn't really ship jobs to China, you couldn't have folks telecommute from India, you couldn't really replace workers with robots or cashiers with self checkout kiosks. It's much easier to unionize a fairly fixed pool of labor than a dynamic pool of labor. This is true for structural reasons, but also true because labor that knows it can be replaced is scared labor, and scared labor doesn't discount the boss's threat of shipping away their jobs if they unionize. For these and other reasons, restoring the worker compact of the 40s and 50s is an uphill battle. If union density is to once again rise to serious levels, my hunch is it won't look like the unions of the manufacturing age. Rather, it will be through an open source unionism that's more dependent on commonality of interests than commonality of workplace. Think AARP, or for that matter, Obama's movement. Various unions are trying experiments along these lines (Working America is one of the more exciting projects), but since open source unions work through leveraging political power rather than immediate wage negotiations, the benefits are less immediate and more diffuse, and it's harder to get folks to sign up and pay dues. No one has quite solved that problem, but if unionism is to make its great comeback, someone will have to.
