On Monday, a bill squeaked through the Minnesota House of Representatives that would allow in-home child care and personal care workers in the state to unionize. By a margin of two votes, the state House of Representatives sent the bill to Gov. Mark Dayton (D), who is expected to sign it.

SEIU and AFSCME, the state’s largest unions, now have four years to organize those workers:

The 12,500 child care workers in Minnesota who look after children in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program, known as C-CAP for short, must vote on whether or not to join the union by 2017. At least 50 percent of the state’s providers will need to join in order of the union to be established.

Those who do not provide care to C-CAP families will not need to vote and will not be affected.

If care workers vote to unionize, the union will be able to negotiate the size of reimbursements from clients who use subsidies and members will be able to file grievances. The bill doesn’t give them the right to strike.

These positions are part of a booming industry. Personal care jobs are expected to grow by 70 percent over the next decade, much faster than the average. Child care positions are expected to jump by 20 percent. Yet the pay in both areas is low. Median annual wages are about $19,600 for personal care aides and $19,300 for child care workers.

Unionization levels have been falling for decades and last year hit a low not seen in a century, with just 11.3 percent of workers represented. That’s the lowest level since 1916. Strikes, one of the greatest sources of power for labor unions, have also become increasingly rare.

That’s bad news for the middle class. In a new video series, the Center for American Progress showcases three stories that demonstrate the important role union membership plays for working families struggling to get by.

La Tonya Johnson was a unionized child care worker in Milwaukee until Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) cracked down on collective bargaining rights in the state:

With the help of a union, La Tonya says she was “able to afford to pay my mortgage, I wasn’t facing foreclosure, and life was relatively comfortable,” thanks to a guaranteed weekly wage regardless of which children actually showed up to her daycare center each day. After her ability to join a union was repealed, she lost that guarantee, and she descended into poverty. “It feels like I’ve hit rock bottom over night,” she says. “For people who think that having a union or being organized doesn’t have a bottom line effect, I’m here to tell you that it does.”

Susan Kim and Jeremy Pikser, writers in New York, explain that a union has helped them to pursue their passions while maintaining a decent quality of life:

While Susan had misgivings at first, she quickly learned the benefits of joining a union. “It made really clear sense to me when I started seeing more money, when I started qualifying for health insurance… Suddenly I had a pension plan which I’d never had before.” The effects were even starker for Jeremy. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2008 and had to undergo an expensive course of treatment, “which would have beyond bankrupted me” without quality health insurance negotiated by the Writers Guild, he says. “It probably did save my life because I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the level of care that I got.”

Beresford Simmons has been driving a New York City taxi for more than 45 years and is a member of the non-traditional union the Taxi Workers Alliance:

The union has seen recent success, winning a 17 percent fare hike and health care coverage. That’s meant a lot to Beresford and his wife. “With unionization from the Taxi Workers Alliance, we could afford to put a roof over our head,” he says. He says he’s a part of the union because “I just don’t want to see the next generation of cab drivers go through the same thing that I’ve been through.”

One World Trade Center, which will replace the World Trade Center towers that fell in the September 11 terrorist attacks, became the tallest building in the United States this morning when workers hoisted a 408-foot spire atop it. At 1,776 feet tall, the building is now the tallest in the United States and the third-tallest in the world.

And, as American Rights at Work noted when it became the tallest building in New York, it was built with union labor:

It’s fitting: union members were among the first responders; union members served in the immediate cleanup; and now union members are part of the rebuilding.

Anti-union legislation has made its way across America in recent years, from Michigan to Indiana to Wisconsin. But unions were instrumental in building America’s middle class, in responding to the attacks on 9/11, and now, in rebuilding the World Trade Center in the decade since the attacks.

“It’s a pretty awesome feeling,” project manager Juan Estevez told the Associated Press. “It’s a culmination of a tremendous amount of team work … rebuilding the New York City skyline once again.”

Progressives have always had a fraught relationship with the radical left. Progressivism, steeped in Enlightenment liberalism as it is, sees the free market and private property as on-balance pillars for the economy: though free enterprise needs to be heavily regulated to prevent brutal unfairnesses, it’s the next-best means of lifting people out of poverty, checking the power of the state, and securing economic opportunity humans have come up with so far. Radical leftists, obviously, have a rather different assessment of the merits of capitalism.

Moreover, the American center-left is perpetually fending off charges from the right that anyone who favors more redistribution than Paul Ryan is the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, leading mainstream liberals to distance themselves from socialists in a fashion that can border on ridicule. The nexus of substantive disagreement and political expediency brings out the broader left’s seemingly natural tendency to devolve into infighting more vicious than any critique it manages to launch of the political right.

For obvious reasons, I can’t speak for socialists or Marxists. But one irony for progressives in this state of affairs is that the mainstream left would have a great deal to gain from the rise of a radical left movement that, in all likelihood, we’d mock and assail mercilessly.

A witty, self-deprecating manifesto in the new issue of the Marxist-chic magazine Jacobin serves as a good jumping-off point here. Comparing the current left to “someone getting to know himself” on the subway, founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara argues that the “socialist left” — which appears, for Sunkara, to encompass all left-wing groups who want to replace capitalism with a more some more collectivist economic system — needs to stop playing with itself and start organizing. American radicals, Sunkara argues, are “fragmented into a million different groupings,” creating “an environment that breeds the narcissism of small differences” (no argument here). His proposed palliative? Good old-fashioned organizing:

If it comes to fruition we’d see the convergence of American socialists committed to non-sectarian organizing under the auspices of an overarching democratic structure. This in itself may not seem like a significant undertaking — we’re only talking about a few groups and a few thousand people — but we shouldn’t let those humble beginnings obscure the potential that a fresh start for the organized left holds.

Suppose this comes to pass, and radicals, broken since end of the Vietnam-era New Left, end up with an organized apparatus capable of marshalling moderate amounts of people for rallies and other actions. What does that do to our politics?

History is some guide here. Contra received wisdom, the United States has a long tradition of radical economic activism, albeit one that’s forever been unable to break into the political mainstream. A number of early 19th century abolitionists and feminists were also radically redistributive, and the economic fringe left has since organized under various banners, ranging from the Industrial Workers of the World to the Communist Party to some elements of Occupy Wall Street. An easy introduction to all this is Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers, a book I’ve discussed on TP Ideas before.

Kazin traces the concrete influence of economic* radicals in two ways. First, they’ve been able to secure discrete, concrete benefits for the country’s poorest through direct action. Radicals, especially around the turn of the 20th century, helped strengthen labor unions and back them up during strikes, which in some, but not all, cases helped extract concessions from capitalists that benefited laborers. For example,a group of Jewish socialists played a key role in organizing New York City garmet workers’ strikes in 1909 and 1910 that secured the right to unionize and higher wages.

The second, and more significant, set of leftist accomplishments involved pushing the mainstream center of political gravity to the left. Sometimes leftists put concrete political pressure on liberals through organizations like the Populist Party. In other cases, they raised a specter of radical upheaval real enough to scare elites into mollifying poor and working class folk with welfare state expansions, an argument oft (though not necessarily persuasively) made about elements of the New Deal. Through these and other mechanisms, Kazin suggests, radical leftist movements contributed towards the great liberal-progressive expansions of the welfare state. So while the left never had a much of a chance at overthrowing the dominant political and social order entirely, it played a real part in helping mainstream progressives improve the lives of America’s poorest and most vulnerable.

It’s not hard to imagine how a revived radical front could fill both of these historic roles for radicals without actually posing a threat to the liberal capitalist system writ large. Union membership has declined precipitously in the past 45 years; a well-organized cadre of leftists dedicated to reviving organized labor’s potency could help restore a historically critical source of progressive power. Injecting an unapologetically class-conscious critique of revanchist right-wing policies and fiscal austerity into public life could also serve as a leftist counterweight to the underappreciated radicalism of Tea Party conservatism.

These are points Sunkara recognizes. His cri de coeur hopes that “a new organization would focus on anti-austerity and work hand-in-hand with liberal allies who want to see the welfare state rebuilt.” While his ultimate aim of going “beyond liberalism’s limits” is beyond quixotic, that’s a feature, not a bug, from a progressive point of view. If history is any guide, American radicals end up furthering the objectives they share with liberals, like expanding the welfare state, while failing abjectly to advance the ones they don’t, like the abolition of private property or the overthrow of the constitutional order. So long as radicals eschew the use of political violence, something progressives unflinchingly oppose on both principled and practical grounds, there’s little to fear, and potentially something to gain, from a rebirth of America’s leftist dreamers.

 

 

 

*Kazin argues, with some force, that some folks with far left economic views had a much greater influence in on American socio-cultural views about race, gender, and sexual orientation. He probably overstates the importance of radicals here, as elsewhere, but it’s worth noting he sees cultural radicals as far more successful than economic ones in the long run of American history.

Hundreds of fast food workers in New York City began walking off the job this morning to demand a living wage and the ability to form a union without intimidation or retaliation from their employers, the second such action workers have taken since November. Fast food workers went on strike on November 29 to demand a $15 wage and the right to form a union, and organizers expect this strike to be even larger. By 7:30 a.m., workers had already picketed multiple restaurants, including a Burger King location that was still closed despite its 6 a.m. opening time, according to organizers.

The strike was organized by Fast Food Forward, the group that also led the November walkout, and inspired by Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968. The strike is occurring on the 45th anniversary of King’s assassination during those organizing efforts.

In a letter to workers and supporters, the group said many of its members are living on food stamps or in homeless shelters even as profits continue to rise for low-wage fast food employers. “We’re on strike today because we can’t survive on $7.25. Higher wages will help us raise our families with dignity but will also help lift our entire economy. More money in the hands of workers means more money spent in local shops and a boost for our community,” the letter says.

Profits at low-wage food employers have indeed grown rapidly since the recession, as this chart from the National Employment Law Project shows:

Low-wage industries like fast food are the fastest growing sectors in America, outpacing the economy since the Great Recession. While such jobs accounted for just 21 percent of losses during the recession, they have made up 58 percent of jobs added during the recovery, and one in four American workers is expected to hold a low-wage job a decade from now. At the same time, the minimum wage is falling farther behind the cost of living — had it risen with inflation and productivity gains since the 1960s, the minimum wage would be north of $20 an hour.

Organizers of the strike expect between 400 and 500 workers to walk of the job today as they continue to fight for a union and a living wage. The strike will be concentrated in Harlem, where organizers will lead a march this afternoon.

Michigan’s so-called “right-to-work” measure officially went into effect today, just more than three months after Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed the anti-union legislation into law. Snyder and Michigan Republicans have touted the law as a way to boost the state’s lagging economy, saying it would make it more competitive for businesses and a better place for workers.

Evidence from other right-to-work states, however, presents a far different case. Such laws cost all workers, union and otherwise, $1,500 a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Those wage losses especially impact the middle class, and as a result, economic mobility between classes is stronger in union states. The following chart shows how states rank for relative economic mobility, which measures the percentage of residents starting in the bottom half of the national income distribution who move up 10 or more percentiles in a 10-year period. In the chart, 12 of the 13 states that outperform the national average for mobility are union states (including Michigan, which was a union state when the study was conducted), while 14 of the 15 that underperform are right-to-work states:

The Pew study did not attempt to find correlation between union membership and mobility, but it stands to reason that union membership plays a vital role in the difference. Union workers, as the Center for American Progress’ David Madland and Karla Walter found, are more likely to have health coverage and retirement plans. “If benefits coverage in non-right-to-work states were lowered to the levels of states with these laws, 2 million fewer workers would receive health insurance and 3.8 million fewer workers would receive pensions nationwide,” Madland and Walter wrote.

While Michigan’s law won’t benefit workers, it likely won’t help the state’s economy either. The Economic Policy Institute’s studies of right-to-work laws have found “that there is no relationship between right-to-work laws and state unemployment rates, state per capita income, or state job growth.”

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) initiated a high-profile effort to bust his state’s public sector unions in 2011, he said that he had no interest in pursuing similar efforts against private sector unions. “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development,” Walker has said. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that he “has consistently downplayed seeking any restrictions on private unions in public statements.”

Walker also said in December that “he wouldn’t pursue any new bills on public or private unions in the coming legislative session.” However, word evidently did not get down to his Republican colleagues, who introduced and are fast-tracking a bill to allow employers to cut hours of union workers without the unions’ consent:

Republicans are hurrying bills through the Wisconsin Legislature that they say could prevent layoffs by allowing companies to cut back workers’ hours, but Democrats on Tuesday called them a renewed GOP attack on unions.

The bills wouldn’t require companies to negotiate with unions about cutting back hours, in contrast to almost all similar laws in other states. But a spokeswoman for the author of the Assembly version of the Wisconsin proposal said there was no intent to harm organized labor.

The Wisconsin GOP is moving this bill under the guise of creating a “work-sharing” program, which is an idea aimed at using government support to allow businesses to cut back worker hours while not laying off employees (with the government picking up the tab for the hours workers miss). However, “in all but one of the 24 states with work-sharing laws, union representatives must agree to the reduction in hours for their members.” Wisconsin’s bill does not include a similar requirement.

“Republicans began their war on bargaining rights with Act 10, and with this bill they have now turned their attention to private sector unions,” said state senate Minority Leader Chris Larson (D). “This bill is a clear opening shot at undermining private sector unions.” “The Farrow-Brooks bill says that private sector unions shouldn’t be able to negotiate for their members. It’s one more step toward their goal of ending the right of Wisconsin citizens to have their voice heard in the workplace,” added State Senator Julie Lassa (D).