It's not hard to feel ambivalent about unions and their power. For sure, unions are a net negative when viewed from a raw capitalist viewpoint. Organized labor is like a regulatory agency, limiting the power of the investor class to effect their designs in funneling the munificence of the marketplace into their bank accounts. And the drive for efficiency, a compelling value in the marketplace, gives organized labor a bad name. Always looking for an edge to force the powerful monied interest to give a little more, organized labor tends to hold onto any advantage, no matter the impediment to efficient management. And it's easy to pull a handful of "Welfare Queen" examples from the files to exaggerate the excesses of union power, making it look bloated, corrupt and maddeningly insensitive to practical concerns.
But like most human enterprises, including business and government, organizing and utilizing the power of workers is messy too, and it's easy to forget the most important benefits to all workers, union or not, and most Americans, that organized labor provides.
First, organized workers provide a counterweight in the marketplace to the interests of capital, a counterweight that has sadly lightened considerably in recent decades, leaving the business class a free hand to manipulate both markets (see Internet/Tech Bubble, 1990s; Great Recession, 2008 on) and ideology (see media consolidation, education decline and Republican/Tea Party fantasies about how the world works) to the point where we seem to have lost any shred of the humanitarian impulses that were once the bedrock of our country's identity. An organized voice for workers is a hedge against losing contact with our shared humanity.
Second, the success of organized workers in getting a bigger share of the overall economic pie in the form of higher wages and benefits provides a benchmark for the entire wage/benefit position of all workers. In other words, most non-union workers wouldn't earn as much today if it weren't for the bargaining power of organized labor fighting for their own union workers' pay, ratcheting up the pay scale of all.
And third, labor's early successes in getting such historic protections as a 40-hour work week and age limits for legal employment are often seen as anachronisms of a now long-gone era of once valorous organized labor, now corrupt and past its expiration date. But the mere presence of organized labor with all its faults has the effect of keeping the marketplace attentive to the risks of mistreating workers. God forbid, they might unionize!
Clearly, if Americans are looking for a narrative that explains the long decline of workers and middle class families in maintaining a strong presence in bargaining for their slice of the American pie, they could do a lot worse than tie it to the general decline of the power of union workers, who have chosen to organize and negotiate with the capital classes for better wages (for all of us).
Now on a personal level, in my career as a carpenter I've always resisted joining a union as I am not good at "playing the game" as is required in any hierarchy, labor or corporate or government. And I've never liked the inefficiencies and unpleasant compromises that tend to be built into union jobs as I've heard from my unionized acquaintances. But I can see through the blood and guts ugliness of union operations in real life, and I'm thankful for those who can tolerate the compromises and go out and struggle for their own welfare and wages, and in the process bring me and my fellow workers up too.
As the rhetoric and actions of a certain class of Americans becomes more and more hostile to the welfare of American workers and their struggling families, I'd say we need unions to be more powerful and more active in the marketplace to counteract the rapacious inclinations of those monied few who are grabbing for ever more of the pie.
