"Unions are obviously a mixed blessing," writes Kevin Drum, "and in any case the political obstacles to increased union power seem pretty insurmountable these days. But what's the alternative? What better institutions for workers might we construct?" Without getting into the issue of better or worse alternatives, there are a bunch of, at the least, complementary structures worth thinking about. One is associations. Unions have historically played many roles, but among the most important has been to aggregate the power, numbers, and economic might of a far-flung and diverse membership into a single political constituency known as "Labor." Unions were local organizations to their members, but they used their members to become national organizations to politicians. And in doing, they gave the working class what the rich, through their own money and various business organizations, already had, what the elderly, through AARP, wield so well: Political power. As unions decline, so too does their capacity to create a countervailing lobbying institution for workers, and those who might someday be workers. As in all else, unions are imperfect, and occasionally shortsighted, in carrying out this role, but there's no successor waiting in the wings, and the political sphere is bettered by their involvement. So the question becomes whether you can create associations that disentangle the national role of labor from the way their national arm was organized -- a collection of local unions. The tough part is money, dues, buy-in. Unions extract enough benefits for their members that it's worthwhile for them to pay dues. But most of those benefits, at least the tangible ones, are fought for locally, not nationally. The better model is probably AARP, but AARP has a couple advantages a middle class association would not -- namely, the elderly, who are more involved in civic affairs, have more time, and feel more dependent on public policy. So I don't really know how to build this organization, what benefits it could offer to achieve a broad membership. But it seems possible, and damn important.
