A week or so ago, when labor dropped its complaints about the health-care bill -- the lack of a public option, the excise tax's effect on union-negotiated health-care plans -- and threw its full weight behind the bill, a union correspondent e-mailed this note: "Unions: The Folks who do Social Solidarity for a Living." Indeed, even though Democrats were generally unresponsive to labor concerns -- and millions of other Americans would be, typically, free-riding on union efforts to get the bill over the line -- the big union coalitions did their part to get the needed votes.
Stephen Greenhouse, the Times' excellent labor reporter, looks into labor's work on the next big issue, financial reform. Labor has been there since even before the crisis, nurturing experts like the AFL-CIO's Damon Silvers, who now serves on the Congressional Oversight Panel, and acting as the central and most critical force behind Americans for Financial Reform. Now, they're leveraging their complex relationship with the financial sector -- as populist critics, as employees, as investors, and, occasionally, as allies -- to support reforms to limit risk and prevent future crises.
It's often been noted that there is no natural constituency for financial reform, aside from everyone outside of the banking industry, which is a tough group to organize. Labor, a relatively small chunk of the political world, has thrown resources into the fray on behalf of its members, and everybody else. While it's certainly true that labor has been leveraging its work to improve its contract negotiations and organizing, and occasionally painting with too broad a brush, just as with health care, they're shouldering a heavy burden on behalf of a lot of working people who aren't even involved in unions. Would it be so bad to make organizing more democratic?
-- Tim Fernholz
