Why the Labor Movement is Dead

The 21st century isn’t going to be dominated by workers and employers, work, such as it will be after automation, will  be dominated by makers/doers and creators/designers all working in concert with/around ever larger corporations. This means that workers will be increasingly isolated and essentially “solo-preneurs” who control their own destiny but also lack a safety net that can seriously jeopardize them and their families.

Many US presidential candidates, especially Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are citing the decline of the labor movement as a leading cause of the decline of the Middle Class. No one can argue with their reasoning. Wage stagnation charts and union membership numbers correspond together very nicely. But after thinking about this and looking at the facts, something is very clear: the labor movement is dead and there seems to be little hope for it’s survival or revival.

How did we get here?

Brief History of the Labor Movement

The situation of workers at the onset of the industrial revolution was fairly horrible. Cramped, unsafe factories, a lack of entrances and exits (think fire safety) and lack of safety protocols on machines, made working on 19th century factories in any industrialized country a very perilous life. While it is important not to romanticize the pre-industrial era, many of the possibilities of injury or death were far different and less likely in the cottage/small artisan environment that dominated goods and services before 1750. As people urbanized and factory work became more and more common, burgeoning newspapers were filled with horrific stories of factory workers being permanently maimed or killed due to the working conditions that they endured. To add insult to injury, the pay was notoriously low. Even in today’s money many jobs were only $2-3 a hour and many jobs were piece-work jobs where the workers were paid by the amount of product (or product part) they produced per day, often cents per item. The practice persists in places like China and Africa to this day. Agriculture was no better with workers getting paid by the day or by the bag of harvested item (vegetables, cotton, and so on). Employment in these low-paying and unsafe settings was far from reliable. Business owners hired and laid off people as needed by the business cycle and their ability to move goods or services. This often left towns jarred back and forth by whether the local citizens could afford to live there or not. Whole families were often uprooted by men needing work. By the 1880s, the situation had reached a fever pitch. Strikes resulting in violence like the Ludlow massacre brought the need for regulation to the national spotlight and by World War I, worker protections had become more common and by the 1930s, things that we now take for granted like a 5 day, 40 hour work week, and decent pay had become fairly commonplace thanks to unions, strikes, and national backing of those policies by the Progressive Party. In the early days of the 20th century the party had significant clout in national political affairs from 1890 to the Great Depression. When World War II ended, there were certain protections, standards of safety, pay, and regular hours that workers expected from their jobs, especially in non-professional jobs in factories and shop floors across America.

The Corporatization of Everything

Corporations are the new landed aristocracy and their economic output will never be able to be matched. Much like how the landed aristocracy kept artisans in business in pre-industrial days, corporations wield the same kind of ability to move wealth. In this system, contracted labor and skills will become more and more prevalent and important. It will be important to negotiate certain protections and abilities within individual contracts rather than any kind of collective bargaining without massive unionization. If we want any of this to change then it has to happen at the government level in terms of how service providers and contracted labor are treated. This also may be cause for more things to be handled by society rather than to rely on employers which will for current legal purposes cease to exist. This change means that we will have to re-constitute our social safety net with higher taxes on actual income, interest, and wealth rather than employer based solutions for things like unemployment insurance, healthcare, and other things that we have relied on employers to provide in the 20th century. However, corporations are not institutions for social good, they are legal mechanism to ensure capital generates a return for its shareholders and nothing more. This attitude has infected every part of American life. While companies have reached for higher and higher profits, the people to get squeezed the most are workers. Labor, once a fixed cost, is now a fungible cost that companies work to keep low with flexible, on-call scheduling, and reducing/eliminating benefits of almost every kind. For contracted labor, which accounts for 36% of jobs, work is entirely at the mercy of the clientele.

Organization is Hard

In the 19th century, workers could organize because they were in a central location. There was the shop floor, the factory, the mine and so on. When the desire to unionize arrived people had a common location with which to meet and a common enemy. In the modern economy, workers are decentralized and diffuse with no common enemy. This makes organization of any effective kind much more difficult. Take Uber for example, if Uber “employees” (drivers) wanted to unionize where would they organize? How would they get their message out to enough drivers to actually begin the process? If these workers could overcome these hurdles they would then have to organize a strike but considering Uber’s HQ is in San Francisco and they are spread all over the country, a central strike as a direct action would be difficult to organize on account of the distance. What’s worse, is that thanks to the ability to quickly hire on more workers, Uber could replace any striking workers within a few weeks with only minor interruptions in service. 19th and 20th century labor movement tactics just aren’t relevant in a modern “sharing” or “part-time” economy. In fact, these terms aren’t even helpful any longer. The ideas of hours worked, pay by hour, and other sorts of terminology and ideas that have been foreign to the upper-class for some time, now seem clunky, dated, and out of step with how we need modern work performed and where corporations are moving. We can bemoan the changes but the reality is, they are happening.

Where Does that Leave Us?

That leaves us with a diffuse, decentralized, individual workforce that is unable to work together for the common good. The only solution? Massive, public collective action. This is where the last gasps of the labor movement may prove helpful. Traditionally, unions have been surrounded around certain trades, professions or factories. Now, unions need to do something similar but look more like a trade-guild similar to what dominated Europe in the 17th century right before capitalism began to take hold out of mercantilism. Groups of people can organize and work collectively and in solidarity with one another to create guilds of workers. These can be by location, profession, or other organizing principle. In short, workers across classes, profession, and locations will need to band together and resolve to work together, as a team, in order to demand proper wages, benefits, and other things that we all need. This may seem impossible, but this is exactly what workers in the 19th century faced. They too were isolated but they managed to cause tremendous change. With the internet, existing trade unions, if they want to survive at all, could look to bring new members into the fold from the creative classes, retail workers, fast food workers, warehouse workers, and others who all need to band together for good hours, proper working conditions and a lifestyle that we can all be proud of to live in. Without these changes the union is soon to be a forgotten relic of the 20th century leaving workers in the 21st century very disheartened, isolated, and at a serious disadvantage.

What do you think the future of unionization and work looks like? Comment below!