Mother Jones: Unions Are Dying. What Will Replace Them? [View all]

[theHandpuppet]

I can appreciate Drum's musings though I find them really depressing. I don't see the question as one of how to replace unions but how to revitalize them. Thoughts?

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/02/unions-dying-income-inequality

Mother Jones
Unions Are Dying. What Will Replace Them?
—By Kevin Drum
Thu Feb. 27, 2014 8:09 AM GMT

(excerpt)
This is where I depart a bit from both Soltas and Wasser—in emphasis if not in detail. Their focus is primarily on what unions do specifically in the workplace: balancing power between employers and workers and providing a voice for workers that management can hear. Both of those are important, and both are problematic: You can reasonably argue about whether they're a net positive, or whether unions are the only way of obtaining them. But I view the primary strength of unions differently: They're a broad-based force that represents the interests of the middle class in the American political arena. Here's how I put it a couple of years ago after a quick review of the ways in which the past three decades have been disastrous for American workers:

This didn't all happen thanks to a sinister 30-year plan hatched in a smoke-filled room, and it can't be reined in merely by exposing it to the light. It's a story about power. It's about the loss of a countervailing power robust enough to stand up to the influence of business interests and the rich on equal terms. With that gone, the response to every new crisis and every new change in the economic landscape has inevitably pointed in the same direction. And after three decades, the cumulative effect of all those individual responses is an economy focused almost exclusively on the demands of business and finance. In theory, that's supposed to produce rapid economic growth that serves us all, and 30 years of free-market evangelism have convinced nearly everyone—even middle-class voters who keep getting the short end of the economic stick—that the policy preferences of the business community are good for everyone. But in practice, the benefits have gone almost entirely to the very wealthy.

…The heart and soul of liberalism is economic egalitarianism. Without it, Wall Street will continue to extract ever vaster sums from the American economy, the middle class will continue to stagnate, and the left will continue to lack the powerful political and cultural energy necessary for a sustained period of liberal reform. For this to change, America needs a countervailing power as big, crude, and uncompromising as organized labor used to be.... MORE