OPINION - Michigan Workers' Paradise Lost

"Workers’ Paradise Lost" by THOMAS J. SUGRUE, New York Times 12/13/2012

THE 211 Bar and Grill is a little watering hole near Michigan’s Black Lake, in a place that natives call “up north.” Its walls are adorned with prizewinning pike, deer heads, even a wolverine. But its most striking ornament is a patch of wall where visiting autoworkers proudly scrawl their union affiliations: “Fighting Local 600.” “Local 22 — Hamtramck.”

That wall testifies to more than 75 years of union power in Michigan. Given that history, many were surprised this week when Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed legislation preventing unions from forcing workers to pay dues. But, in fact, it’s been a long time since Michigan was a workers’ paradise.

The 211 Bar opened in 1946, a turning point for labor. That year saw one of the greatest strike waves in American history, and the United Automobile Workers elected the indomitable Walter P. Reuther its president. By 1950, he had forged the “treaty of Detroit,” ushering in an era of prosperity. Autoworkers won decent wages, health insurance, unemployment benefits and a pension plan. Unionization benefited nonunion workers too, because even nonunion employers needed to offer higher pay and benefits to compete with union pay packets.

Unionized workers used their wages and benefits to become homeowners. They could put their kids through college. They did not have to fret about bankruptcy when a medical crisis struck. They were cushioned against the scourge of cyclical unemployment.

And they could even get a taste of the good life, buying little summer cottages and hunting cabins in places like Black Lake. In the 1960s, the U.A.W. even built its retreat and conference center there.

Michigan’s unions, which at their height represented 45 percent of the state’s workers, became a powerful political force. Detroit’s Labor Day parade was a mandatory stop for Democratic presidential candidates (though, tellingly, President Obama skipped it in 2012).

Labor leaders advised Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Reuther stood with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of racial equality (even though some rank-and-file white unionists were skeptical), and he worked with Kennedy and Johnson to expand education, antipoverty and health care programs.

On the state level, even Republicans could not disregard unions. Gov. George Romney, who came to politics as a former auto industry executive, supported Michigan’s 1965 law giving collective bargaining rights to public employee unions.

That influence and prosperity were hard won — and fragile. No sooner did labor gain political clout than its opponents began trying to curb its power. In 1947, a coalition of pro-business Republicans and Southern Democrats pushed through the Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed states to pass right-to-work laws. Within two decades 19 states, all in the South and Mountain West, had right-to-work laws.

Low union density allowed these Sunbelt states to attract employers in search of low wages and weak regulations. Job flight — first to nonunion states, then to low-wage bastions overseas — hit hard, especially in Michigan. Union membership dropped to 17.6 percent of Michigan’s work force in 2011. In comparison, anti-union and early right-to-work states like Alabama and Arizona had higher union density in 1964 than Michigan today.

Meanwhile, income inequality has spiked, middle-class wages have barely improved and blue-collar jobs are lower paying, less secure and less likely to offer health care and pension benefits. It’s no coincidence that incomes have stagnated as union power has waned: the historian Colin Gordon found that inequality had been greatest in right-to-work states and that declining union membership accounted for a third of the rise in inequality during the 1980s and ’90s.

Today, unions face high obstacles to organizing, from corporate anti-union campaigns to weak enforcement of labor laws. The strike, once crucial to union bargaining power, is now inconsequential: it depends on community support, which is hard to muster when fewer than a fifth of a state’s workers are in unions.

This doesn’t mean Michigan’s unions are powerless. But they have used their dwindling resources to influence elections and shape policies like taxation, health care and infrastructure spending, rather than confronting employers directly. At a moment when the voting machine has replaced the picket line as the last bastion of union strength, right-to-work advocates hope to weaken what remains of the movement’s clout. Without a strong voice representing them, Michigan workers will remain outmatched in what was already a tough defensive battle for economic security.

In Michigan, it’s no longer a given that a blue-collar job is a ticket to the middle class. The scribbled names on the 211 Bar wall might well be the last traces of the disappearing world of the once prosperous Michigan worker.