Happy International Workers Day
A Very Short Story
Hug a Union Member. Better yet, join them on the picket line.
Once upon a time, a significant portion of prosperity was shared with workers. We were by no means a perfect union, but we showed that thriving markets with vigorous investments in public goods, an expanding safety net, and strong worker bargaining power through unionization and good wages were a reliable path to shared prosperity.
But then came the theologies of Milton Friedman, with Ronald Reagan donning the mask as their greatest gladiator. They cut taxes for the rich, thinned out the social safety net, and set about attacking unions and suppressing wages.
This sapped our impulse to share. Later, the productivity slowed, but not as much as the sharing did. So the rich got richer, and everyone else spun their wheels.
A New Day Starts to Dawn
Eventually, a more scientific approach to economics started pushing aside some of the old orthodoxies that had blinded earlier boffins. New champions emerged–including an improbable politician–a moderate but union-loving septuagenarian from Scranton.
Mr. Biden took a regular recovery that started under his predecessor and supercharged it, ignoring economic orthodoxy and doing his darndest to run the economy hot.
Unionization picked up, and for the first time in my middle-aged existence, we saw significant wage gains at the bottom of the economic ladder, especially among people of color, and especially as we ran the economy hot for longer.
The gains remain fragile, and they have also brought backlash.
A Fundamentalist Revival?
In places like Seattle, which had been seen as a stalwart for progressive liberalism, the theologies of Friedmans fundamentalists struck back and are actively working to bring back the old orthodoxies.
Rehashing tropes from Reagan’s heyday–like complaints about government overspending from waste, fraud and abuse, curtailing labor protections for vulnerable workers and aiming for low taxes for the rich, the new city council teed up an economic agenda entirely at odds with the Biden Administration’s.
It is an agenda designed to push us closer to the ugly graphs at the top of this post.
The rest is still unwritten.
How it goes is up to you, and us—together. Because if there is one thing that the workers movement has taught us, its that we can only win when we lock arms together.