For a country that has a Labor Day, a Labor Memorial Day, and plenty of celebrants of International Workers’ Day, one might be forgiven for thinking that the United States is a strong pro-union country. It’s not, but Labor does have resources and leverage, even if it only represents about six percent of the private sector workforce. Labor Day marks the end of summer for most people and the beginning of the fall campaign in election years for politicos. So, let’s take a look at Labor and this year’s election.
First, let’s start with some bad news. For the past four years we’ve been hearing people assign the cause of Trump’s victory to one group of voters or another. Much of the political conventional wisdom has blamed low support from white working class voters, others pin it on low African American turnout compared to Obama’s, and still others consider the “haters” to be the bloc that made the difference (you’ve heard me mention this again and again). The truth is that all of these things had impacts that led to Trump’s victory. But, there is one bloc of voters that also contributed to his shocking win in 2016: union voters.
FiveThirtyEight has noted that: “According to the CCES, Obama won union voters by 34.4 percentage points in 2012, but Clinton did so by only 16.7 points in 2016. That roughly 18-point swing was worth a net of 1.2 percentage points for Trump in Pennsylvania, 1.1 points in Wisconsin and 1.7 points in Michigan based on their rates of union membership — and those totals were larger than his margins of victory in those states.” Trump has bragged in the past that he won back union voters to the same margin as Reagan first won them over. This is not a complete lie, like most of what comes out of the president’s mouth or mobile phone. But, it is a little deceiving. Trump’s margin of the union vote was similar to Reagan’s in 1984. But, with the very deceptive exception of 1992, the Republican share of the union vote has held steady (with small, but clear drops) since Reagan’s reelection. In 1992, the Republican share of the vote dropped significantly, but only because about half of the typical GOP union voter supported Perot that year (and a significant, but much smaller, proportion did again in 1996).
One of the real challenges for Democratic candidates goes way back to the grand bargain struck between government, labor, and capital in the early postwar era. To understand that, we need to consider Labor’s participation in politics prior to the New Deal era (1933-1940). There were two national labor federation in those days, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The AFL’s Samuel Gompers considered politics to be divisive and argued for staying out of it. The AFL largely represented craft unions and was fairly conservative. More radical union activists organized the industrial workforces along social unionism lines in the early 1930s. The sit down strikes organized by members of the United Auto Workers (but not sanctioned by the union) and other direct action forced President Roosevelt to take action. While governors were calling up the National Guard to break the strikes, Roosevelt agreed to support the Wagner Act to regulate labor relations among certain workforces at the national level (e.g., farm workers were exempted to win over Southern Democratic support and public workers were also exempted – later to be covered by state laws).
After the war, the AFL and CIO began working towards a merger (which finally occurred in 1955). There was a conflict between the business unionism orientation of the AFL and social unionism orientation of the CIO. Looking at the two models, government and especially business preferred the business unionism model. What business interests wanted was for unions to keep the advocacy and organizing to wages and terms of conditions of employment at specific union workplaces and to refrain from expanding their efforts to the social conditions of workers, union and non-union alike, both inside and outside of the workplace. And that’s what business go. Labor’s compromise in the grand bargain was to ditch social unionism in favor of business unionism and eject communists from the CIO unions. By “communists,” they meant pretty much everyone on the anti-capitalist Left – especially socialists. Government would agree not to interfere with the “right to organize” (which was already in the Wagner Act). But in a democracy policy can change with election results and they did. Not only did the federal government roll back union rights in the Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Acts, but finally Reagan reneged on the deal when he fired the air traffic controllers and business has followed suit since then. Labor, however, made almost no changes in the preference of business unionism over social unionism for 20 years afterwards – and most unions today still embrace business unionism, even though the most active organizing is being done by social unions such as SEIU and UNITE-HERE.
That’s the historical context in a nutshell (read Kim Moody’s An Injury to One: The Decline of American Unionism for a good history of the this era). Now, let’s consider two questions:
Who do union members vote for?
Who do unions endorse, why, and how many resources they devote to candidates?
The overarching question is: What impact will Labor have on this year’s election? Labor has a big impact on elections particularly because it can produce resources for campaigns in terms of money and volunteers. Depending on the union(s) involved and the location, Labor can also provide a reliable bloc of voters. However, the impact of resources is more reliable than the voting bloc as a significant percentage of union households support Republican candidates. The impact that labor has also includes the labor affinity groups who have taken leadership roles in GOTV activities among labor and community members. For instance, the Arizona Wins Coalition which not only includes labor organizations like UNITE-HERE, but labor-community advocacy groups like CASE and activist groups that represent the issues of low-income and immigrant workers outside the workplace like LUCHA.
There are 42 national unions (often strangely called “internationals;” it is strange because US unions don’t represent anyone outside of the US, although the UAW does have a close relationship with its sister union in Canada) that have endorsed Biden. In addition, two other major labor groups have also endorsed. The AFL-CIO, which is the federation for most labor unions in America, and the Association of Retired Americans, an organization of retired trade union members affiliated with the AFL-CIO (which also includes non-union, community-based members) Eight unions have endorsed Trump, and all of them are law enforcement unions (and half are Locals).
We don’t have polling data (that I am aware of) on presidential preference in union households ahead of the election this year. We are going to have to wait until we get exit polling (or other survey) data after the election. What we do know is that there is a disconnect between the support unions give candidates and how union members vote. Although it hasn’t always been this way, the Republican Party is hostile to Labor from top to bottom. Consequently, these days unions give little if any support to Republican candidates. This can change at the local level, and Locals are more likely to support a Republican for, say, state representative or even Congress than national unions are to support any Republican. However, a lot of rank and file union members do vote for Republicans. Why is that?
The answer can vary according to occupation. For instance, in the building trades (which evolved from the “craft unions”) the reason a lot of workers join unions is simply to find opportunities to work. So, the organizing principle for many trades is not only getting people jobs with good pay and protections, but putting up roadblocks for entry to keep the supply of labor tight (and help raise wages or otherwise leverage their solidarity). Workers in the trades are far less likely to be interested in economic issues that are outside the collective bargaining relationship – like pensions for the general public, universal health care, and minimum wages. Those issues are only important to the building trades within collective bargaining for their members. So, if general welfare economic issues are unimportant to union tradesmen, you can imagine that social issues are simply off the table. And this is where the GOP has cleaved support for the Democratic Party among union membership. A union carpenter has everything he needs economically within the scope of the collective bargaining relationship, so it is harder to get him to pay attention to income inequality and affordable health care than it is to abortion, gay rights, gender equality, and racial justice.
Still, between 55-65% of all union households continue to vote for Democratic presidential candidates. So, even in the trades there are members who vote Democratic. But, it is in other occupations and industries that we see strong support for Democratic candidates among the rank and file. This is one of the strengths of a union like SEIU. Not only does the union provide financial and logistical support to Democratic candidates, but its members are a reliable voting block for endorsed candidates.
It is also true that local unions (“Locals”) and state federations differ from place to place. A Laborers’ Local in New Jersey may be very conservative compared to a Laborers’ Local in California. And, in fact, the reverse can be true at the same time (i.e., progressive and conservative Locals in both states). When it comes to the rank and file, the Local is more important than the state fed or international.
(The table above was put together by FiveThirtyEight.)
Overall, Clinton lost union votes in 2016 while Democratic candidates since 1992 had steadily increased those numbers. Why? Perhaps it is the “haters” phenomenon after all. Why wouldn’t the haters exist in union households any more than they would in non-union household? That probably explains some of what happened there. But Clinton v Trump is not the same race as Obama v Romney. Romney was running as an establishment Republican and Team Obama had successfully defined him as your typical boss. Trump, on the other hand, attacked everything about the establishment Republicans and that had appeal to a portion of the union household demographic. While many union voters may have personally disliked Clinton, she may have run into trouble persuading these folks because of her connection to the neo-liberal (and anti-labor) policies of her husband in the 90s. Even still, Clinton won 55% of the union household vote – but only 40% of white male union members (losing this demographic by double digits to Trump), almost a 12% decrease from Obama. In fact, the only demographic that supported Clinton nearly as strongly as they supported Obama was nonwhite women (yet there was still a decrease for Clinton).
We don’t have much of an idea how union members will vote in 2020, but Biden is considered a much stronger and genuine supporter of Labor than was Clinton. What we can do is take a look at the contributions that unions are making in this cycle. You can see from the table below that most of the money being donated is going to “outside groups.” These are independent expenditure PACs and other non-campaign groups that are participating in the election through advertising, phone and text banking, and other persuasive and get out the vote activities.
Fifteen percent – or $7.5 million – went to GOP candidates. The remainder has been spent on Democratic candidates or party organizations. For the outside groups, almost all of it went to liberal organizations while the Plumbers spent over 13% of its outside group contributions on conservative organizations. The Carpenters have given the most money thus far in 2020 and over a fifth has been for Republican candidates. This is consistent with what we know (or think we know) about the voting tendencies of rank and file carpenters. With a few other exceptions, most of the unions overwhelmingly favor Democrats. Two unions have almost evenly split their donations – Air Traffic Controllers and Air Line Pilots. This is consistent with not just how those unions have endorsed in the past, but makes sense in the context of their industry, which is heavily regulated by the federal government.
Why is union money important? Aside from helping campaigns defray the cost of advertising, polling, and professional staff, unions can offer campaigns a number of volunteers from their membership, staff, and allies to walk turf on canvasses, staff phone banks, and conduct visibilities. They can also help campaigns by offering union halls and offices for activities such as staging canvasses and conducting phone banks. Labor leaders and organizers can also be important points of contact between politicians, parties, allies, and supporters. Unions and related affinity groups are important organizing entities for Democratic campaigns.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much data about voting preferences among union members to understand how the campaign to win their votes is going. The support of internationals only tells us so much. A lot more union money was spent in 2016 than has been spent thus far (so expect to see more money put into the race over the next two months), but that money did not win the election. In fact, the margin between Democratic and Republican candidates for president was the closest it has been since 1984. So, again we see that the actions of the internationals do not necessarily translate into union votes for favored candidates. Considering that Biden is leading by 7.5 points overall, we can assume that some of these union households will come back to the Democrats. By how much and what impact it has is something we probably will not know until after November 3rd.
Enjoy your Labor Day! And remember, unions didn’t just bring you the holiday – they brought you the weekend. Every weekend, every single week of the year. That’s what organizing can do. It can also win elections!