This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1472907
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1472907
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Joe is rebuilding the Blue Wall.
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Paul Krugman addresses this very topic today.
While the article is about UAW victory and what it means going forward, from a political standpoint we need to be concerned with this:
By the way, I constantly encounter people who believe that the recent economic recovery has disproportionately benefited the affluent. The truth is exactly the opposite.
The entire article is below and at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/opinion/columnists/uaw-autoworkers-strike-union.html
It’s not officially over yet, but the United Auto Workers appear to have won a significant victory. The union, which began rolling strikes on Sept. 15, now has tentative agreements with Ford, Stellantis (which I still think of as Chrysler) and, finally, General Motors.
All three agreements involve a roughly 25 percent wage increase over the next four and a half years, plus other significant concessions. Autoworkers are a much smaller share of the work force than they were in Detroit’s heyday, but they’re still a significant part of the economy.
Furthermore, this apparent union victory follows on significant organized-labor wins in other industries in recent months, notably a big settlement with United Parcel Service, where the Teamsters represent more than 300,000 employees.
And maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023 will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation.
Some history you should know: Baby boomers like me grew up in a nation that was far less polarized economically than the one we live in today. We weren’t as much of a middle-class society as we liked to imagine, but in the 1960s we were a country in which many blue-collar workers had incomes they considered middle class, while extremes of wealth were far less than they have since become. For example, chief executives of major corporations were paid “only” 15 times as much as their average workers, compared with more than 200 times as much as their average workers now.
Most people, I suspect, believed — if they thought about it at all — that a relatively middle-class society had evolved gradually from the excesses of the Gilded Age, and that it was the natural end state of a mature market economy.
However, a revelatory 1991 paper by Claudia Goldin (who just won a richly deserved Nobel) and Robert Margo showed that a relatively equal America emerged not gradually but suddenly, with an abrupt narrowing of income differentials in the 1940s — what the authors called the Great Compression. The initial compression no doubt had a lot to do with wartime economic controls. But income gaps remained narrow for decades after these controls were lifted; overall income inequality didn’t really take off again until around 1980.
Why did a fairly flat income distribution persist? No doubt there were multiple reasons, but surely one important factor was that the combination of war and a favorable political environment led to a huge surge in unionization. Unions are a force for greater wage equality; they also help enforce the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive compensation.
Conversely, the decline of unions, which now represent less than 7 percent of private-sector workers, must have played a role in the coming of the Second Gilded Age we live in now.
The great decline of unions wasn’t a necessary consequence of globalization and technological progress. Unions remain strong in some nations; in Scandinavia, the great majority of workers are still union members. What happened in America was that workers’ bargaining power was held back by the combination of a persistently slack labor market, with sluggish recoveries from recessions and an unfavorable political environment — let’s not forget that early in his presidency, Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers’ union, and his administration was consistently hostile to union organizing.
But this time is different. Research by David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew shows that a rapid recovery that has brought unemployment near to a 50-year low seems to have empowered lower-wage workers, producing an “unexpected compression” in wage gaps that has eliminated around a quarter of the rise in inequality over the previous four decades. The strong job market has probably encouraged unions to stake out more aggressive bargaining positions, a stance that so far seems to be working.
By the way, I constantly encounter people who believe that the recent economic recovery has disproportionately benefited the affluent. The truth is exactly the opposite.
The political ground also seems to be shifting. Public approval of unions is at its highest point since 1965, and Joe Biden, in a presidential first, joined an autoworker picket line in Michigan in September to show support.
None of what’s happening now seems remotely big enough to produce a second Great Compression. It might, however, be enough to produce a Lesser Compression — a partial reversal of the great rise in inequality since 1980.
Of course, this doesn’t have to happen. A recession could undermine workers’ bargaining power. If Donald Trump, who also visited Michigan but spoke at a nonunion shop, returns to the White House, you can be sure that his policies will be anti-union and anti-worker. And Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, has an almost perfect record of opposing policies supported by unions.
So the future is, as always, uncertain. But we might, just might, be seeing America finally turn back toward the kind of widely shared prosperity we used to take for granted.
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Thank you for posting the full article. It is so frustrating to follow a link to the NY Times only to find a paywall. I won’t pay for that rag as much as I like some of the authors and articles.
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This. 1000% this.
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Excellent article and a well-earned victory for the UAW and all workers in the US. The right to collectively bargain is an important adjunct to the 1st Amendment Right to Assemble. It should be defended as vigorously as free speech and the right to vote.
Collective Bargaining is the one proven way to give working people a voice in our economy. Without it, labor becomes just another “cost of goods sold” to be minimized by corporate management.
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The ‘mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore’ response for 2023.
Now let’s see if we can replicate that same passion against the GQP in 2024.
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Yes, and he is taking a big-picture approach to the economy that incorporates middle class growth, national security, and promoting democracy.
Reading lists say lot about a person, or at least what they care to spend their time thinking about. Ben Harris, who served as chief economic adviser to President Joe Biden when Biden was still the VP, remembers prepping for his first day on the job in 2014. The vice president’s policy staff had sent Harris a large pile of documents designed to get him into Biden’s headspace. It was filled with esoteric papers on corporate governance, financial market short-termism, and labor policy. Still, Harris wanted to know more about the personality traits of his new boss. When he asked his predecessor, Sarah Bianchi, about Biden’s character, Bianchi said, “What can I tell you? This guy is the vice president of the United States, but he still gets up on a ladder and cleans his own gutters.”
He also stands in picket lines with UAW members. Biden is, of course, an excellent politician, and he’s long been a friend to labor. Still, few people would have expected, when he entered the White House, that his administration would herald the beginning of a sea change in America’s political economy, from trickle down to bottom up, or, as the president’s campaign slogan put it, to a core emphasis on “work, not wealth.”
The record on that score is unequivocal. His COVID-19 stimulus bailed out people, not banks. His domestic economic policy has been about curbing giant corporations and promoting income growth. His infrastructure bills invested in America in a way not seen since the Eisenhower administration. He taken commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.
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Pharmacists of all people are staging walkouts trying to simulate a union without actually forming one. My fear for them is that a strike with no union is just an unexcused absence.
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I hear you. I am frequently running across NYT articles that I want to read, and am sometimes tempted to subscribe. I recognize that journalism requires payment, while all manner of disinformation is free on the internet; that’s axiomatic.
But then I think: why should I be subsidizing pompous douchebags like Ross Douthat, or paying for the Mean Gurl from Catholic girls’ school, Maureen Dowd?
To the subject:
Regardless of the speakership turmoil and the Hamas-Israel war, had the auto strike dragged on and inventory became short, or had UAW folded its tent and gone back to work without winning concessions (after Biden became the first president since FDR to espouse labor’s cause), you can be damned sure the press would have covered it lavishly.
You’d have seen above-the-fold headlines like “Biden’s reelection in peril as labor strategy implodes,” or “car-hungry consumers lash out at Biden.”
Instead, Biden’s strategy paid off. But the press is going to be considerably more restrained in seeing any positive electoral consequences.
Why? Because Washington and its press are wired for Republican themes.
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Some good news.
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Use this link and just copy/paste the URL and you can get past the paywalls.:
h/t @txlawyer
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And do it without shame because the publishers all want to have their content archived.
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Spouse of a retired journalist here. How do you think they get paid?
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Greatness has always and forever been a combination of circumstance, the opportunity to take advantage of it and the wherewithall to do so, and Joe is rising to that as I predicted he would…and no amount of the GQP MAGAt KKKult’s neofascist idiocy and cultural resentment disinfo propaganda and stochastic terrorism (or the Zombie Fourth Estate’s abject, self-serving failure to help fight against it/efforts to assist it) changes that. Looking back objectively, historians are going to tell us we were lucky to have both Obama and Biden within one lifetime, even if the GQP breaks everything in their efforts to wipe the slate clean.
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Precisely!
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Can we post full, pay-walled articles without getting Josh/TPM in trouble?
I’d vote for that.
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I love these Cafe articles, and this one is especially welcome because it’s great news and useful data.
In particular, I am so heartened to learn that the public has not been soured on Labor or collective bargaining despite decades of expensive anti-union propaganda.
Just imagine where we’d be if the Email Lady had run things from 2016 - 2020.
Another Biden term could be similarly transformative. Godspeed, Joe.
The Biden campaign asked for a donation today. I can’t afford to give right now, but if the man needs an organ, he can have his pick.
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Well, pharmacists too are victims of consolidation. In the past, they could own their own pharmacy but the chains consolidated & CVS, Walgreen, Target & WalMart have contracts with Rx networks where they have corralled patients.
Moreover, the pharmacist is being pushed into administering vacccines while there is a backlog of waiting prescriptions. They too, need relief as the volume of prescriptions has tripled without the pharmacist being able to clone themselves.
Think of the famous scene with Lucy & Ethyl making chocolate covered bananas & being unable to keep up with speed of assembly.
Thats how life is for vast majority of pharmacists working for the big chains.
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