On Wednesday morning, Huffington Post employees sent out a letter to their colleagues calling for them to unionize. “We believe organizing is the best way both to
preserve what’s already working and to bring about positive change,” they argued.
“Simply, a union will give us a voice in our newsroom’s future.”
Today we announced we are organizing a union at Huffington Post. This is how we fix inequality. http://t.co/sRvNYchcTE #StartTheConvo #1u
— Writers Guild of America East (@WGAEast) October 7, 2015
The staff at @HuffingtonPost have announced their union drive. Check out this letter from the organizing committee.http://t.co/xVshJ1d6NK
— UNITE HERE (@unitehere) October 8, 2015
We support the editorial staff at the @HuffingtonPost who are organizing a union. Solidarity! http://t.co/D077Lo3j7z #1u
— Jobs With Justice (@jwjnational) October 9, 2015
The Huffington Post writers may be making headlines right now with their movement
to unionize, but they are hardly the first online publication to work toward that goal.
Gawker’s media staff made the decision to unionize back in June, followed swiftly by Salon, Vice, the Guardian, Al-Jazeera America, and ThinkProgress.
Considering that increasing numbers of Americans are receiving their news and political
opinions from the Internet, the digital media unionization trend is noteworthy.
This raises an important question: Do unions work? In short, yes they do. When unions are stronger, the rise in wages increases broader
purchasing power among consumers, feeding economic growth and enabling employers to hire even more workers.
What’s
more, unions actually improve the economic status of non-union workers as well as
unionized ones. Since the benefits that accrue to organized workers frequently become the norm within their respective industries, employers that don’t have a unionized
workforce face pressure to provide similar wages and other perks—lest they face a
labor problem of their own.
What’s more, unions actually improve the economic status of non-union workers as well as unionized ones.
Perhaps most importantly, widespread unionizing would significantly alleviate income
inequality in this country. “One big reason America was far more equal in the 1950s
and 1960s than now is unions were stronger then,” explained former Secretary of
Labor Robert Reich. “That gave workers bargaining power to get a fair share of the
economy’s gains—and unions helped improve wages and working conditions for
everyone.”
He also pointed out that America’s peak years of inequality, 1928 and 2007,
were immediately followed by the worst economic crashes in our recent history. On
both of those occasions, unions were significantly weaker than they had ever been
before.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t disadvantages to unions. In a piece for Business
Insider defending unions, Henry Blodget noted that unions can create a divisive
culture within companies, drive businesses to move jobs overseas, become career
employment for their (often overpaid) leaders, and force employers to treat all workers
equally regardless of their relative skill and effort.
These are serious problems that, in
the past, have convinced many Americans to think twice about
supporting unionization.
Yet as Blodget himself points out, “great companies in a healthy and balanced
economy don’t view employees as ‘inputs.’ They don’t view them as ‘costs.’ They don’t
try to pay them ‘as little as they have to to keep them from quitting.’ They view their
employees as the extremely valuable assets they are (or should be). Most importantly,
they share their wealth with them.”
So why did unions become so weak? Much of the problem can be traced back to a
single origin—the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Back in 1981 (less than seven months
into his first term), Reagan famously threatened to fire nearly 13,000 air traffic
controllers unless they called off an illegal strike. After following through on his threat
for all employees who didn’t return to their posts, Reagan established a precedent
wherein the power of strikes to assert employees’ interests was lost.
These are serious problems that, in the past, have convinced many Americans to think twice about supporting unionization.
Before Ronald Reagan’s termination of the airline workers, strikes were commonly used to
force both public and private sector employers to be responsive to employees’
demands. When Reagan terminated the airline workers, however, he emboldened
businesses to view it as culturally acceptable to simply replace unhappy employees,
rather than listen to and accommodate them. Today, employees who try to unionize
their work force have a one-in-five chance of being fired for doing so, regardless of
whether their efforts are legal or have legitimate grounds.
Reagan’s game-changing decision occurred more than three decades ago. Today,
one of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential
nomination—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—recently unveiled a plan to make it easier
for workers’ to join unions.
“Millions of Americans who want to join unions are unable
to do so because of the coercive and often illegal behavior of their employers,” Sanders
argued. “The benefits of joining a union are clear: higher wages, better benefits and a
more secure retirement. If we are serious about reducing income and wealth inequality
and rebuilding the middle class, we have got to substantially increase the number of
union jobs in this country.”
While legislation like Sanders’ proposed Workplace Democracy Act is a good start, it won’t be enough. Another important step is spreading information about
why unions are so important. Although 58 percent of Americans approved of labor
unions as of August, that number was consistently north of 60 percent before 1972.
Right now, many Americans don’t fully understand the benefits of being in a union,
and as a result, they don’t prioritize it as highly as they should. The fact that the
Sanders campaign is gaining traction by focusing on labor issues is certainly a
promising step in the right direction, but it is a trend that needs to continue outside of
the realm of presidential politics as well as within it.
Although 58 percent of Americans approved of labor unions as of August, that number was consistently north of 60 percent before 1972.
Perhaps the best observation about the importance of labor unions came from,
ironically, the Republican president who happened to govern this country at the time
when they were strongest—Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“Unions have a secure place in our
industrial life,” he observed. “Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought
of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the
union of their choice.”
This is precisely the point: At the end of the day, a worker’s ability to join a union is
nothing more or less than an individual’s desire to have some measure of control over
their compensation and workplace environment. More than an economic issue,
unionization is a matter of civil liberties. When the workers at the Huffington Post
decided to unionize, they weren’t simply fighting for more money, but for the ability to
have their contributions to that publication given the respect it deserves.
Let’s hope the rest of America will someday follow their lead.
Matt Rozsa is a Ph. D. student in American history at Lehigh University who specializes in national politics. As a political columnist, his editorials have been published on Salon, Mic, and MSNBC.
Screengrab via thomhartmann/YouTube
