The Uncertain Future for Workers

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Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/SIPA USA via AP Images

Worker protests (like this one in front of a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, New York) are necessary but insufficient for real progress.

This article is part of our series on “The Post-Corona World.”

What the future holds for American workers—and how those workers might shape that future—lies shrouded in uncertainty. We don’t know when it will be safe for “nonessential” businesses to reopen. We don’t know how many businesses will go bust, or how many will bring back just a fraction of their workforce, perhaps at half-time or half-pay. We don’t know how many retail transactions will remain online, and how many retail jobs that will destroy. We don’t know how prolonged will be the vicious circle of “uns” and “unders”—unemployment and underemployment leading to underconsumption leading to underproduction leading to still more unemployment.

High unemployment seldom leads to labor’s advances—except that it surely did in the era of labor’s greatest advances, the Great Depression. Might the dynamic in our own day be similar—a rendezvous of heightened worker militancy with a sympathetic public and friendly presidency and Congress? As I write, there have been at least 150 reported instances of workers walking off the job demanding safer conditions.

More from Harold Meyerson

The combination of being hailed as essential and treated as disposable has been consciousness-raising for millions of frontline workers. It’s been consciousness-raising, too, for the media, for the government, and for upper-middle-class professionals, for whom these workers—health care aides, farmworkers, packing-plant workers, supermarket employees, drivers, transit workers, warehouse workers, hands-on public employees, and many others—have been politically invisible for decades. Public sympathy has also swelled for the “nonessential” retail, hospitality, and other workers who can’t work at home and have been abruptly laid off.

Moreover, the economic earthquake the pandemic has triggered comes at a time of heightened public awareness of the injustice of our stratospheric levels of economic inequality. Might all this potential energy for social and economic reform yield actions that effectively overcome the damper that depressions put on worker uprisings?

Again, we don’t know yet. We do know that misery needs company if it’s to be transformed into effective action for change. With the self-isolation and social distancing imposed by the coronavirus, however, company has been hard to come by. When workers can’t huddle with co-workers, welcome organizers into their homes, or go to mass meetings, the hurdles erected by our deficient labor laws, hostile employers, and public officials become even higher. Despite the successes of digital union organizing among the largely young employees of media outlets, nonprofits, and universities, the stirrings of remote organizing for the broader workforce are at best a precursor to real organizing.

HOW, THEN, can workers survive what may be another Great Depression and come out of it, as in the 1930s, with expanded power, greater rights, higher pay, and more certain benefits? Their militance and a heightened level of public sympathy will be necessary but insufficient conditions for progress. To restore small-d workplace democracy, the key player will have to be capital‑D Democratic governments at the national, state, and local levels, compelled to do the right thing in part by whatever power established workers’ movements retain and new such movements can muster.

The necessary complement to such action will be three groups of measures required to allay the advent of another Great Depression.

First, the most important immediate need for American workers is to have the government directly appropriate funds to employers to keep their workers on payroll, with full pay and retaining whatever benefits they had. Legislation mandating such action has been introduced by senators encompassing the full ideological spectrum of the Senate’s Democratic Caucus (its authors include Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Alabama’s Doug Jones), by House Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and, in a somewhat less generous version, by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Their bills would also provide payments to employers who have laid off or furloughed their workers, provided they restore them to paid-employee status.

It is a measure of the comparative powerlessness of American workers, and the distinctly American absence of national solidarity, that such legislation was adopted with little if any controversy in most European nations, even the Tory-run United Kingdom, but not in the United States. The one U.S. industry where keeping employees on payroll did become public policy was the airlines, and that involved an explicit quid pro quo that illustrates how Democrats and unions can together combat economic catastrophe. The Republican Senate and administration clearly wanted to bail out the companies, most of whose leaders have long been prominent in Republican-donor ranks. The airline industry is exceptional, though, in the high percentage of its employees—pilots, flight attendants, and mechanics—who are unionized, and their unions made clear to the Democratic House that a bailout had to include direct funding for their members. Moreover, one of the most powerful and politically active unions in the country—the Service Employees International Union—had succeeded in recent years in organizing service workers (such as wheelchair attendants) in East Coast airports, which, as Steven Greenhouse has reported, may have constituted the largest successful unionization of private-sector workers in many years. At SEIU’s prodding, House Democrats therefore got an additional $3 billion set-aside in the appropriation for airport workers, union or (primarily) not, across the country. By the end of April, of the $29 billion in airline grants and loans that the government had delivered, $12.4 billion had gone directly for workers’ paychecks.

Second, complementing any federal legislation to keep workers employed, we need a massive program of direct public employment. Periodically, the Trump administration makes noises about a large-scale infrastructure program, but it has always insisted that states and localities pick up 90 percent of the tab—a nonstarter in the best of times and a complete absurdity at a time when states and localities are slashing budgets. Such a program requires a multitrillion-dollar federal commitment—which is to say, Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress.

A President Biden would thereby be enabled not merely to launch a huge infrastructure investment paying union-level wages, but to direct it primarily to Green New Deal projects—a political mega-twofer that could win support from both construction unions and climate activists, today the two most diametrically opposed elements of the Democrats’ political universe. At a time when the domestic consumption of fuel by cars, trucks, and airplanes fell by 31 percent from mid-March to mid-April, the alliance that those unions have struck with the oil industry may come to strike them as increasingly questionable when other forms of power entail less risk. An oversupply of sunlight can cause sunburn; an oversupply of oil can tank the industry.

But the nation’s needs and the composition of its workforce have changed since the 1930s. Just as important as a national infrastructure program is a national caring program, in which government directs massive funding to child care, elder care, and public-health programs that create living-wage jobs. (Hawaii’s Commission on the Status of Women has crafted a “feminist economic recovery plan” that lays out some particulars.) Absent such policies, particularly in times of high unemployment, family caregivers—disproportionately women—will tend to these tasks at home, either uncompensated or barely compensated, depressing the nation’s purchasing power and economic vibrancy.

The third element to keep the nation from careening into Depression levels of unemployment is federal funding for state and local governments. One reason recovery from the Great Recession took so long was that the federal stimulus funds were more than offset by the funding cuts at lower levels of government. In late 2009, I calculated that the value of the Obama stimulus for fiscal year 2009-2010 (some was to be allotted in subsequent years) was $571 billion. But the budget cuts and tax hikes of states and localities—funds taken out of the economy—came to roughly $325 billion. That means the net government stimulus was just $246 billion, or 0.8 percent of GDP—a level lower than that of many nations the U.S. was then chastising for insufficient stimulus. The balance of the Obama stimulus was appropriated for the years 2011 to 2019, adding a small bump each year while continued cuts in state and local governments’ spending at least through 2014 clearly exceeded the federal outlay. Both the Obama administration and congressional Democrats wanted to enact more stimulus spending in those later years, but the Republicans who took control of the House in the 2010 election blocked any such measures—as they threaten to again today.

If Democrats can win these three battles—for federal payments to keep workers on payrolls, for an infrastructure and care-profession stimulus, and for assistance to state and local governments—Depression levels of unemployment will likely be avoided. Absent those victories, however, improvements in workers’ lot will likely come to a standstill. In one illustration of how this dynamic might play out, this April the Democratic majority in the Virginia legislature passed, and the Democratic governor signed, a measure that postponed an increase in Virginia’s minimum wage. Earlier this year, those same Democrats, who’d finally wrested control of the legislature from Republicans last November, had proudly increased that minimum wage for the first time in decades. Facing the prospect of record-high unemployment, and small businesses not certain they could afford to reopen, and of once full-time workers returning on a part-time basis, however, they opted to delay the wage hikes for at least one year. That’s the kind of conundrum Democrats will confront if unemployment goes through the roof and stays there.

THE NEW DEAL, of course, consisted of more than public works and public employment to allay joblessness. Its two other defining achievements were the creation of a skimpy but nonetheless unprecedented social safety net and laws enabling workers to build powerful unions.

The emergence of worker power in the 1930s was both cause and effect of New Deal reforms. During the New Deal, the direct gains in worker power began with the factory occupations and then general strikes (in San Francisco and Minneapolis) in 1934, which were certainly a factor in the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act one year later. The occupations and strikes, all led by radicals, were themselves preceded by the emergency enactment, during Roosevelt’s first hundred days, of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which included a section that prefigured the NLRA’s legalization of collective bargaining.

One can imagine a similar dual track to enhanced worker clout emerging in 2021 should the Democrats win power in Washington. Outbreaks of worker militance are already in ample evidence today, beginning with the teachers strikes of 2018-2019; the concomitant strikes of hotel and supermarket workers; and, even during the current shutdown, the walkouts of frontline workers across a range of occupations. At the state and local level in recent years, workers have won a number of victories improving their conditions of work, such as increases to the state or local minimum wage and the enactment of workplace wage and hour standards for workers (such as domestic and gig workers) left out of federal coverage.

But federal law—the now wholly useless National Labor Relations Act, violated with impunity by American employers for the past four decades—preempts states’ ability to enhance worker power, to enable them to build organizations of their own. SEIU’s Fight for $15 and a Union has raised the wages of millions of workers by winning state and local legislated wage hikes but has failed to generate a single new member for the union, since federal law makes that all but impossible.

The decisive mover for labor’s cause isn’t just labor. It’s also the government.

Is there any way that states can devise an end run that increases worker power? In an April Prospect article, labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein proposed that state governments can require the formation of worker safety councils at all businesses with at least 25 employees. After democratically selecting their leaders and procedures (a process the state would organize and oversee), the councils would have equal voice with management on the current question of when to return to work, and the power to monitor safety conditions after their return. Lichtenstein hopes such councils could be “prefigurative” of actual unions—whose formation would require not just militant union organizing, however, but a sea change of law and practice at the federal level. That might come to pass. Given the widespread awareness of the nation’s towering economic inequality, and a narrower awareness of how the de-unionization of the once-industrial Midwest has played a major role in the defection of the white working class to Republican ranks and Donald Trump’s column, every leading Democratic presidential contender over the past year included major labor law reforms in their platforms. Their policy pledges went well beyond the union-ratification-by-card-check proposal of the late lamented and doomed labor reform bill of 2009. They also included proposals for instituting sectoral bargaining, invalidating state “right to work” laws, and in some cases, establishing regular worker council meetings with management, permitting unions to boycott companies doing business with companies being struck, and even requiring corporations to divide their boards between shareholder representatives and the elected representatives of their employees.

There is no one magic solution to the rebirth of worker power, but the great surge in union membership in the 1930s didn’t come with the sit-down occupations and general strikes of 1934, but in the wake of the 1935 federal legislation legalizing collective bargaining. The union surge that followed still required sit-downs and physical battles with management thugs, still required the leadership of radicals, still required the active support of surrounding communities and broad public support as well—but it is difficult even to imagine that surge had the federal government not made unionization a legal possibility.

Today, labor again has a cadre of radicals (by no means a majority of labor’s leadership, but a cadre should suffice), active support from many surrounding communities (the natural outgrowth of some unions’ strategy of partnering with community groups to win community as well as workplace demands), and a high level of public support—according to the Gallup Poll, currently the highest in 50 years. But as in the 1930s, they need new federal legislation to actually create self-sustaining worker organizations that can effectively win power and gains for their members, whether at the level of the workplace, the enterprise, the sector, or the region; whether their members are full-time workers or part-timers, mislabeled “independent contractors” or gig workers, or employed by franchises or sub- or sub-sub-contractors.

The decisive mover for labor’s cause isn’t just labor, then. It’s also the government. It’s the Democrats, warts and all, the great cross-class party that once again must tilt decisively toward workers—that labor and progressives must lean on to make that tilt—lest the nation devolve even more fully into oligarchic rule.