Labor Unions Are a Driver of Abundance, Not an Obstacle

But portraying progressives’ concerns as simply a matter for interest groups ignores the positive impact of those groups and risks steamrolling their concerns, and that’s perhaps especially true when it comes to unions. In a piece for The Roosevelt Institute, Kate Andrias and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, two scholars at Columbia University’s Labor Lab, outline how unions could help an abundance agenda: They have the construction expertise that big projects require, can organize their members to support projects and complete them quickly, and can be voices for the working class throughout the process to make sure the community shares equally in whatever abundance results. As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote in March:

Klein and Thompson point out that it costs twice as much to build a kilometer of rail in the United States as it does in Japan or Canada, and that union density is much higher in the latter two countries. Consequently, they argue, unions can’t logically be the problem…. Still, not talking much about unions isn’t good enough. The authors of these books ought to consider unions part of the solution to housing affordability. Boost wages, and people can buy houses.

In the U.S., union density was at its highest in the 1950s, a time when the nation was transformed from coast to coast by ambitious, landscape-altering infrastructure projects like the Interstate Highway System. It was also an era in which the government aggressively built and maintained housing for lower-income and working-class families and found new ways to invest in education and health. Union density has declined since the Reagan revolution, when business interests aligned with Republicans to chip away at labor’s political and economic power. Since then, wages in the country have grown more unequal and the political will for big, government-funded projects has diminished.

Highways also are a cautionary tale. In building the Interstate system, the U.S. made the country dependent on cars, reducing the availability of public transit in most places and springboarding us into our climate-disaster future. Local projects, like many of the highways built in New York City, decimated vibrant, middle class neighborhoods and contributed to the decline in population—and thus in property tax revenue—that weakened public services like the subway. History is littered with the kinds of projects people thought were forward-thinking and good, only to cause intractable social problems later. These examples are why we have the review processes and community hearings for capital improvements today.

In their heyday, unions brought the working-class on board with decisions by people in power, while also negotiating tradeoffs to ensure that their communities would benefit more than they suffered. They helped to create one of the most robust middle classes in the history of the world (with the critical caveat that women, Black Americans, and marginalized groups were often excluded). But as unions have declined, and Republicans have waged war on government policies that spur economic mobility, much of the world’s wealth creation of the past few decades has been concentrated at the very top. There’s certainly an abundance of it, as TNR’s latest issue makes clear; the challenge facing Democrats is how to redistribute it to build the things—yes, more housing, better trains, clean energy—that we can all agree would make the country a much better, and fairer, country.