The Labour Spokesman Editorial
For more than a half century it has been put about that membership of trade unions was declining globally. That was true only in some cases. For example, in India membership of trade unions increased almost two hundred percent (200%) over a five-year period, growing from just over thirty-five million in 2008 to more than one hundred million in 2013. And, for those who like to pedal that strong trade union movements hamper economic growth, note should be made of the fact that, as unions grew in strength in India, so too did the economy. The Indian economy grew at a rate of 8.5% in 2009 and 10.3% in 2010, and that was during the global financial crisis.
To the contrary, in America there have been decades of consistent and concerted efforts by right-wing individuals and organisations to roll back, and in many cases dismantle, the social and economic advances which had benefitted working class people as a consequence of President Franklyn Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’. Unions have been under constant attack, and big business exerted political and economic pressures to scale back wages and other benefits. The Ronald Reagan years were a particularly notorious era, when America’s workers and their representative organisations experienced their greatest onslaughts. They were also the most hypocritical for, even as they attacked labour movements in America, at the same time they praised Lech Walesa and the rise of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, only because they were able to use that movement in their political and economic fight against The Soviet Union.
In November 2020, two Congressmen — Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Donald Norcross of New Jersey, both members of The Democrat Party and longtime union members — announced the creation of a Labour Caucus, with the intention of representing the interests of organised labour in The House of Representatives, alongside more than 50 fellow caucus members.
Very interestingly, when making the announcement Mr. Pocan said: “There’s been ongoing organised attacks on working people on behalf of Republican legislatures and governors, including in my state of Wisconsin, for years. They destroyed public employee unions back in 2010, and then Wisconsin became a ‘Right to Work’ state. Public opinion for people having a voice in their workplace through labor unions is at almost an all-time high because people have seen those attacks have really made it harder for people to get a fair share and a fair shake in their workplace.”
Indeed, in America there is now a growing respect for trade unions and other workers’ organisations. In 2018, MIT researchers found that approximately 48% of non-union workers would join a union if they could — representing some fifty-eight million workers, nearly half of the non-union workforce. Gallup now estimates that, as of 2020, sixty-five percent (65%) of all Americans approve of labour unions, including eighty-three percent (83%) of Democrats.
Writing in The New York Post of 12 April 2021, Professor Paul Krugman, a noted economist and Nobel Prize winner, cautioned that “America needs to empower workers again.” He made the strategic observation that “We don’t need strong unions just to level the economic playing field. We also need them to level the political playing field.”
Here at home, the coronavirus pandemic has also helped to open the eyes of our workers as to just how vulnerable they are without a trade union to protect them. We have seen how businesses have callously thrown workers overboard on the flimsiest of pretexts, including many just a few months before they would have qualified for long-service benefits. We of this newspaper call on the new executive of our trades union to rise up to these challenges. You hold office to lead our efforts at re-developing our union, and the current times have presented us with a great opportunity to increase our membership, improve the organisation in every respect, and to once again provide workers with the protection of their rights and all other benefits to which they are entitled. At this time you simply CANNOT afford to fail!