Tag: labour economics

What does the enthusiasm from top Democrats about the strike, and others like it, say about the party’s relationship to unions right now? But labor’s in a position now to make them prove exactly how serious they are about that support, and I think that’s why we’re seeing what looks like a surge of enthusiasm from this year’s crop of candidates. Ed: Well, there’s a supply as well as a demand side to this phenomenon: all these candidates pursuing a fixed quantity of labor resources and endorsements. But is that renewed attention simply a result of the party’s leftward drift, or is it because labor has actually gotten more powerful too? Members have told me that their fellow workers didn’t need a lot of convincing to stay in their unions after Janus. Unions promise workers a way to better their conditions. Ben: You wrote that unions may take a while, perhaps a long while, to endorse a Democratic candidate. I’d say the other front-runners to be the labor candidate are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, who’s really working hard to position herself as a pro-teacher candidate. Ed: That’s especially interesting insofar as AFT is a union whose membership skews pretty heavily female. Sarah: There might be an interesting gender divide within the labor movement this year.

Following the 2016 presidential election, unions witnessed a barrage of attacks on the labor sector. Most notably, the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME gave public workers the choice to opt out of unions and not pay membership dues. Many labor organizers predicted the adoption of such “right-to-work” laws would be a death call for unions, which have already seen their share of workers decline over the last 35 years. The AFSCME and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) did lose a vast majority of agency fee payers, or employees who opted out of union membership and still paid union fees before the SCOTUS ruling, according to analysis by Bloomberg Law. Overall, union membership stayed steady and financial consequences have yet to be seen. Despite recent blows, unions have dug in and continue to wield financial influence. On the political front, contributions from labor groups continue to play a significant role in elections. Contributions to federal candidates, parties and committees from the labor sector hit a record high in 2016 to the tune of $218 million. Since 1990, the total amount of contributions from labor increased by more than 300 percent.