Cause, Effect, And Unions

One recurring theme is that people correctly observe that a policy or arrangement persists and works, but the conventional wisdom widely misinterprets the reason that this policy or arrangement persists and works, instead attributing a plausible, but incorrect cause for it.

When a misidentified cause is used merely to justify something that works, albeit for a different reason, this is harmless. But, when one wants to make policy reforms, a misidentification of why something happens leads to reforms that don't fix a problem. 

One of the ubiquitous arguments made by Democrats is that the working class well-being and the size of the middle class that we associate with the 1950s, in which single income families with a working class or middle class income could afford to own a home, could afford a car, could afford to have a stay at home spouse with many children, and had reasonable forty-hour work weeks was due to unions. Likewise, Democrats very frequently attribute the fall of the American family from this state of grace to union busting and legislation that weakened unionization.

While this isn't entirely wrong, for the most part, it gets cause and effect wrong.

Instead, the strong economic demand for less skilled and moderately skilled labor gave these workers economic power which they then utilized unions to accomplish (although the breakdown in meritocracy also created a corps of potential union leaders who weren't coopted by management to make this approach viable).

But, the decline of the private sector union in the U.S., which coincided with the stagnating economic state of working class America and secondarily with a shrinking middle class, likewise is fundamentally driven by declining economic power for less skilled and moderately skilled labor, which made unions less effective at delivering results. Some of this was due to the mechanization and computerization of work that made individual workers more efficient but demanded more from them in terms of skills sets. Some of this was due to off shoring of work to cheaper labor markets. And, the effect of meritocracy at coopting people who might otherwise have become union leaders was a secondary and parallel factor.

One way to see that this is the case is to observe that pro-union, and anti-union legislative changed are lagging indicators, not leading indicators. Pro-union legislation gets enacted only after unions are already getting strong without the benefit of protective legislation. Anti-union legislation gets enacted only when unions and the sector of workers they represent are already getting weaker before they are deprived of protective legislation.

The recent upsurge in unionization, for example, with more than 200 Starbucks locations being unionized in the last year or so, flows from the fact that the going market price for barista skill level labor in the labor market surged in the late pandemic. Wages rose first, and unions followed to better utilize greater market power, and not the reverse.

This matters in the current political environment because one of the most serious causes of political polarization, the anomie that drives Trumpism and right wing political violence and the decline of right wing respect for rule of law, and the demise of working class marriage in the United States, is the stagnant compensation and economic insecurity of working class men accompanied by the improved economic and educational prospects of women, and by the perceived improved economic prospects of minority working class men relative to white working class men relative to the pre-civil rights status quo due to anti-discrimination laws.

Strong protections for private sector unions won't solve this problem, because unionization is an intermediate means to an end facilitated the economic power in the labor market, and not the actual direct cause of working class men's economic woes.

Instead, some other solution for this problem is required.