American democracy is endangered by inequalities of wealth and political power, and only the labor movement can save it. This is the bold, central message of Jane McAlevey’s forthcoming book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (Ecco/HarperCollins).
In the early 2000s, McAlevey led the revitalization of the Nevada branch of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU). After that she earned a doctorate at the City University of New York. In A Collective Bargain, her third book, she argues that unions were once a bulwark against excessive inequality, and that the weakening of U.S. unions has enabled inequality to surge — ultimately threatening democracy itself. She asserts that “unions alone have the potential to match the power of giant corporations and massive wealth and solve the many social problems we face now.”
“This book is about how unions can get us out of the mess we’re in today,” McAlevey writes, explaining that the foundation for the middle-class “American Dream” was built by a high-participation labor movement between 1935-1947. After that, anti-union forces — including corporate leaders and the southern Jim Crow power elite — coalesced to blunt the strength of unions. Their first offensive was a post-World War II legislative and judicial attack that contained union growth. The second was a strategy of union rollback, implemented in the 1970s, that involved globalization of jobs and aggressive smashing of existing unions.
Globalization and union-busting dismantled the highly unionized industrial base in Wisconsin and many other states. Once union density in manufacturing was diminished, highly unionized public employees were the next target, with state-level legislation such as Wisconsin Act 10 in 2011. McAlevey incorporates another Wisconsin example into her book, the Supreme Court’s 2018 Epic Systems decision, which she argues is central to understanding how the legal system continues to weaken worker protections.
The solution she proposes is rebuilding strong unions with the ability to engage in high-participation strikes. To make this point, she draws on the example of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, who in January 2019 incorporated parents and the community in a successful six-day work stoppage. “Unions prove that in today’s strategic sectors — chiefly the service sector, where schools, universities, hospitals, and health care systems are growth industries — workers still have power,” McAlevey writes.
A Collective Bargain helps explode myths about what happened to unions, and provides a framework for discussing the importance of organized labor in saving and fortifying our democratic society. “Unions,” McAlevey says, “have so much value not just to build the power required to undo the rot of democracy and rampant income inequality, but also to teach Americans how to unite again.”
Jane McAlevey and Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale will lead a discussion titled “As Go Unions, So Goes the Republic: The Labor Movement and the Political Future” on Nov. 6 at the Madison Labor Temple (1602 S. Park St.).6:30 p.m. Don Taylor is a professor at the UW-Madison School for Workers.
