The case for unions in 2025
Michael Podhorzer wants you to know that living in a state that values unions is healthier than living in one that doesn’t.
Writing at Weekend Read in April, Podhorzer said that “those living in states with so-called right-to-work laws, which makes it nearly impossible to organize collectively, can expect to live two fewer years and earn $10,000 per year less.”
According to Podhorzer, cancer death rates in right-to-work states are 20 times higher per 100,000 than in non-right-to-work states. Lung disease is 10 points higher while infant mortality rates are also higher.
As of 2021, child poverty was a tick higher in RTW states, and eighth graders were less proficient readers.
There are more uninsured in RTW states, and pregnant women are less likely to see a doctor before delivering, according to the figures provided by Podhorzer, former political director for the nation’s largest union grouping, the AFL-CIO.
For sure, these dismal statistics spring from conditions that sometimes go beyond the RTW divide. But, they can be significant nevertheless for what they tell us about the political and policy implications of robust union membership.
Podhorzer is an unapologetic champion of unions. In his April 18 post, he wrote, “Healthy democracies require more than free and fair elections; they require citizens who are practiced in the habits of democracy.”
He emphasized: “The benefits of unions to democracy accrue from allowing working people to organize themselves collectively and democratically to act on their own behalf.”
Here, without saying so, Podhorzer reaches back to the 1930s, during the height of union organizing. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was the embodiment of the union movement during these halcyon years, a roaring lion whose advocacy on behalf of working people won him many friends, and many enemies, including in Fayette County and the rich coal fields spread across western Pennsylvania.
By lifting miners out of economic “peonage,” the mine workers’ union played a role indispensable to democracy. Collective bargaining gave workers a voice that resonated far beyond the negotiating table. It provided dignity. It provided miners standing in the larger society that they would not otherwise have had. It provided hope for the future
American unions emerged from the Lewis years stronger than ever. Nine years after the end of World War II, union membership represented 34% of the workforce.
Today, Podhorzer tells us, total union membership in raw numbers is nearly as high as it was then – 14 million now, 16 million in 1954. Today’s membership represents just 10% of U.S. workers.
Podhorzer traces the bulk of this decline to the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which passed a Republican Congress despite a veto by President Harry Truman.
Anti-union policies, Podhorzer argues, became “much more politically viable” in the 1970s with a confluence of factors, including stagflation and the breakup of the Democratic party coalition. The emergency of what was dubbed free-market economic thinking was yet another factor.
According to Podhorzer, Ronald Reagan was bad, but Donald Trump may be worse. Trump’s “war on unions” has had many casualties. Perhaps most grievously, a Trump executive order ended the “union rights” of “a million federal workers.” In addition, Trump has fired members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunities Council, and other federal regulatory agencies charged with protecting workers’ rights.
“If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Ride Share Drivers’ Union,” Podhorzer notes, stating an unassailable historical reality.
Writing this spring in The Atlantic, Podhorzer argued that meeting the challenges of this time and place requires “recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: That the fate of workers everywhere is the fate of workers everywhere.”
“It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was very much different back then. But, for better or for worse, it was also much the same.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dock.l.robbins@gmail.com.