Union breakup won't revive declining influence of labor

The Detroit News

Let's hope Tom Bray is right about this. . .

By Thomas Bray

The recent fracturing of the AFL-CIO has led to speculation that new, more dynamic labor unions might now take root. The dissidents, led by the Service Employees International Union, complain that too much money is spent on politics and not enough on organizing.

But then the AFL-CIO is led by John Sweeney, former head of the SEIU, who made the same complaint when he took over the 13-million-member federation. Translation: Don't stand on one foot waiting for a union renaissance to occur.

Unions, which now represent less than 8 percent of the private-sector work force, down from 35 percent at their peak, are going the way of the dinosaur. Though not yet extinct, the labor movement lacks both the economic environment and the ideas necessary to sustain its vitality.

Unions are an artifact of the industrial age, when giant corporations could be portrayed as threatening to crush the worker in a system of remorseless production. Workers naturally sought shelter in countervailing organizations, which would negotiate fair pay, benefits and work conditions in return for dues and votes. The stubbornly long Depression of the 1930s gave a big political push to the union movement in the form of laws requiring employers to recognize them.

In return for these laws -- and the reluctance of frightened public officials, particularly here in Michigan, to crack down on union violence -- the public was promised that higher wage scales would benefit the economy by stimulating spending. Alas, the Depression dragged on until World War II, which proved to be a very expensive way of ending an economic downturn.

Later, as Europe and Asia began to recover from the war, America's older, seemingly invincible industrial organizations -- steel, autos, apparel -- were hard hit by rising competition. The unions came to be seen as an aristocracy of labor.

The union movement held off its overall decline by finding other large, uncompetitive organizations to colonize -- chiefly Big Government. But labor leaders missed the obvious irony: Could a government capable of oppressing its own workers really be seen by the public as the benevolent force of liberal dreams?

Nonetheless, the unions poured money into Democratic coffers in the hopes of expanding government -- and the dues-paying work force. The average American paid for it through higher taxes and miserable services.

The real question is when the political structure will recognize the new economic realities. In Michigan, even conservative Republicans will talk only under their breath about turning the state into a right-to-work state like most of those in the South.

But the marketplace is moving steadily to reduce union influence in the private sector via outsourcing, downsizing and bankruptcy. Much the same thing is happening in the public sector. Even a Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm, has been reluctant to ask for the taxes that would sustain Michigan's state work force in the style to which it is accustomed.

Meanwhile, Detroit is all but bankrupt. When Dennis Archer ran for mayor in 1993, he promised the unions he would never privatize city services. His protoge, Freman Hendrix, the front-runner in the polls, now says "everything must be on the table" because of the massive deficit facing the city.

A union renaissance? In other circles, such talk is known as whistling past the graveyard.