Here is a picture of the decline of America in one graph:

[Jackpine Radical]

Wage growth, benefits, length of the work week, proportion of GDP owned by the working and middle classes--all kept moving in worker-friendly directions as long as unionization was on the increase. Then came 1980, and the election of Ronald Reagan, who broke the air traffic controller's union (PATCO), and set the trend for a downward spiral ever after. Note that the election of Clinton in 1992 may have slightly slowed the decline for a brief while, but certainly didn't reverse it. The joke is not just on the blue-collar work force; the fortunes of the white-collar crowd have pretty much followed the same trajectory, although all too few of them realize the link between their own welfare and that of the people they see as professionally "beneath" them.

[Brickbat]

1. When people talk about "the good old days,"

they conveniently forget that 38 percent of the workforce was unionized in the 1950s -- getting union and non-union people the wages and benefits needed for a family to live off one income if they so wanted. If the conservatives want people to stay home with the kids, they should support jobs that a family can live off of.

[dragonlady]

9. Part of the conservative plan is to keep us overworked and stressed out

That way most people don't have the energy, time, or clarity of mind to pay attention and really think about what's being done to our country.

[JonQ]

32. Also in the 50s

we were pretty much the only industrialized nation left unbombed.

That helped.

[pundaint]

43. So if taking out a country's industrial is bad

Would NAFTA then be some sort of weapon of mass destruction used against the middle-class by our Wall-Streed overlords?

[WinkyDink]

47. You could say that, yes.

[taggline]

48. Hell yes!!!

[Hippo_Tron]

64. And we still had an under class, it was just mostly one race

[dysfunctional press]

60. they also avoid the topic of the top marginal tax rates of the time.

for them, it's mostly about returning to the glory days prior to civil rights legislation.

[yurbud]

61. I think we need a slightly more radical solution: co-ops instead of corporations

[FreakinDJ]

2. The current recession is the "Cause and Effect" of that trend

[Greyhound]

3. True, and I'll never forget nor forgive the other unions that failed to support PATCO.

I don't think it was coincidence that this failure to support fellow workers was done after the leadership of most of our unions were replaced with the new "executive class" of officers. Commonly college grads with MBAs paid for by their working class families that had no clue about the work or the businesses. Who's ambitions were not to get a better deal for their members, but to make a killing for themselves.

If unions are (nearly) dead, it was a suicide.

[Brickbat]

5. PATCO endorsed Reagan.

They weren't exactly innocent victims.

[Greyhound]

10. Oh yes, they jumped right on that band-hearse along with the rest of them.

Perhaps more than an indictment of greed, the Raygun election was an indictment of the American people. Were we always so willing to fuck ourselves and our neighbors in pursuit of useless crap?

[Jackpine Radical]

12. Did people really know what they were voting for when they elected the Ray Gun?

Recall the times. Nixon had resigned in disgrace, Ford went down after pardoning him, Carter's Presidency was (unfairly, in my opinion) labelled a failure by the media, Iran was holding Americans hostage, Ray Gun's people (notably Bush the CIA Don) were negotiating with the Ayatollah to make sure those hostages stayed captive, we were in the throes of Kissinger's energy crisis, and America felt (was encouraged and indeed instructed) by the media to feel helpless, hopeless, and off-course. They voted for the guy who brought them all those happy fantasies of better days ahead.

[Greyhound]

21. In so far as they voted to avoid the reality they lived in, I say that yes they did.

I was very young but already addicted to politics. I remember listening to the campaigns and saying that there was no way people were stupid enough to buy his blatant bullshit (remember I was still very young).

We all know how wrong I was.

[Jackpine Radical]

22. Yes, and I was hoping the Republicans would be stupid enough to nominate him

because I thought Reagan was the only one Carter could beat.

To this day, I get nervous when people start talking that way about the likes of Sarah Palin.

[Greyhound]

26. Good point. Do you think we might end up with another John Anderson

after what Obama is doing?

Edit: John not Jack

[Sherman A1]

44. Recall that Carter faced a significant primary challenge

in that election that weakened him. I recall those times as well and they were not the best, inflation was high as I seem to remember and Ray gun sold us a bill of goods with his slick "hollywood" style.

On election night when the results were clear I turned to a friend and said the word "Dig" because I knew St. Ronnie was going to get us into war.

[Sinti]

58. Perfect puppet

Already knew how to act, kinda, knew how to sell himself and sell everyone else a scapegoat for everything that was wrong (the democratic process and GOVERNMENT).

And he brought us a replacement for the people who got turned off of politics from RFK's death through the 70s with the rise of the theocratic numbnuts we're having to deal with now all over the place, in both parties, and throughout the superstructure.

[JHB]

52. Reagan also sold his tax cuts with a bait & switch...

At the time, the conventional wisdom said that a big reason we were falling so far behind Japan and Europe was that many of our factories were outdated, prewar facilities, whereas everyone else had gotten their industry blown to bits in WW2, and were able to rebuild with more modern, efficient factories.


The Reaganites claimed that money freed up by the tax cuts would be used to update our industrial plant to better compete with them. Instead it went into bidding up Wall Street stocks and "Mergermania", and the only "new industrial plant" built was in Mexico and other places outside the country with lax environmental and labor laws & enforcement.

[Hippo_Tron]

66. Sure they did

Raygun (and Nixon before him to some extent) was when a large number of working class white people decided that welfare queens and "family values" were more important than actual economic issues.

Yes, the Democratic Party became less economically populist when the New Deal Coalition broke up. The New Deal Coalition was also full of bigoted assholes. When those people decide that economic issues are more important than resisting social change then the Democratic Party will go back to being more economically populist. Until then they will court middle-upper class white people who used to vote Republican.

[NNN0LHI]

53. Which other unions endorsed Reagan Greyhound?

[Greyhound]

67. I don't remember which, if any, endorsed him. My comment was about the unions not supporting

the other unions during the early stages of the assault on labor. Everybody let the other guy take the hits hoping they would be spared and this could only happen because so much union leadership had been replaced with people that knew nothing about where they came from or what they were fighting. College grads simply out to make a name and friends for themselves so they opted for the easy way.

[billh58]

56. I was the

PATCO representative for Honolulu TRACON in 1981, and while attending a strike planning meeting on the Mainland the day after the PATCO president, Bob Poli, endorsed Raygun someone shouted out from the back of the room, "Who in the hell was the bozo that endorsed Bonzo?"

The back story is that Poli had met with Raygun in Florida a few weeks earlier, and Raygun promised to "address the issues of the air traffic controllers, including pay parity, the high number of health-related retirements, and the out-dated equipment they were being forced to work with on a daily basis." The FAA had been refusing to address any of these issues during contract renewal negotiations, and we were at an impass. Raygun was aware (as was the FAA) that PATCO was openly planning a strike for sometime during the summer of 1981.

Raygun "addressed" the issues by firing 14,500 air traffic controllers, and did absolutely nothing to address the faults in the air traffic control system for the entire eight years he was in office. On a side note, the only other Union which honored our picket lines was the Flight Attendants Union, while the pilot's Union (ALPA) decided that they could do without us.

In the end, however, being fired by Raygun turned out to be a good thing for me, as it most likely saved my life, and gave me opportunities that I would not have found otherwise. Other controllers were not so lucky, and there were numerous family breakups, and more than one suicide. Most of the controllers that I worked with were eventually re-hired after President Clinton lifted the ban Raygun had placed on them.

Almost 30 years later, the ATC system remains unstable and unreliable for the most part, and the controllers that replaced us are all nearing retirement. As usual, the FAA is about 10 years behind the power curve.

[Brickbat]

57. What a complete and utter nightmare.

And you're right, the problems the ATC system has now are directly traceable to Reagan.

[JHB]

51. And usually they "faced off" against...

...another set of MBAs on the corporate side, who also had no clue about the business or product and who were taught that maximizing your dollars is the first, last, and only consideration.

Guess who they had more in common with?

[Deja Q]

4. Corporations said unions were no longer needed. People believed it.

Like Microsoft's customers, people are chumps. Or are treated as such.

[Enthusiast]

39. Oh yes, the benevolent

corporations would look after our best interests after the demise of unions.

[liberalmuse]

6. I always knew it started with Reagan.

I was not political when I was 16, but I knew we were fucked after he was elected. You could feel it. I remember his speech where he told Americans we were much to good to have to conserve energy. The only good thing that came from Reagan was Ron and Patti.

[HughMoran]

7. That scumbag Reagan

...may he rot in hell.

[abq e streeter]

8. +1 ( and I suspect , a hell of a lot more than that)

[Lugnut]

37. +2 n/t

[mdmc]

46. +3

[reggie the dog]

50. I would love to piss on his grave

[Vidar]

11. K&R

[malaise]

13. Perfect

Thanks

Rec

[Autonomy]

14. And global warming is caused by the lack of pirates

What a BS thesis, and easily disprovable. Your graph shows the height of union membership as being the exact same time as the stagflation era of the 1970's, and the 1990's economic boom as being relatively low on union membership. The economic picture is a lot more complex than a graph of union membership. In fact, the union membership has not changed much since the 90's, but the overall economic outlook has done a 180. There's something approaching a 0 correlation between your premise and your graph.

[dschis]

35. No it's not

There is more, but you're over complicating it

[Joe the Liberal]

15. HA! there is constant steady decline during the Reagan years, what a coincidence. n/t

[anigbrowl]

16. where are your other numbers?

I think you're onto something with "Wage growth, benefits, length of the work week, proportion of GDP owned by the working and middle classes", but if you don't include those numbers for comparison then it's so much hand-waving. Supplying detailed stats for one part of your argument and not for the other doesn't really make your case.

[Jackpine Radical]

20. I was trying to make a brief comment, not write a Masters thesis.

[anigbrowl]

63. Arguments backed with facts are generally a lot more compelling.

I don't disagree with you idea, but I think the onus is on you to back it up with some actual data rather than offering one statistic which you say explains everything.

[Dreamer Tatum]

29. All those numbers are moving in the same direction, so you don't really need them

The case is made pretty well.

What I'd be interested to see is the relationship between these numbers and the extent to which real wages have fallen.

[anigbrowl]

62. That's not very convincing.

If you're going to make an argument based on statistics, the most effective way of doing so is to actually supply those statistics.

[bvar22]

17. Hey!...Whatever happened to...

..EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) AND the "renegotiation of NAFTA" (Obama)?

The Democrats OWN the White House.
The Democrats OWN the Senate.
The Democrats OWN the House.
The Democrats OWN a huge popular mandate for "CHANGE".

Why don't they do something for Americans who Work for a Living?



"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans. I want us to compete for that great mass of voters that want a party that will stand up for working Americans, family farmers, and people who haven't felt the benefits of the economic upturn."---Paul Wellstone

[SammyWinstonJack]

55. Because it's in THEIR best interest NOT too, that's why.

x(

[Swamp Rat]

18. Wow, that almost fits with this:

You can see how Bill Clinton slowed the decline in your graph, and the fact that his knuckles do not drag on the ground is why he does not appear in my pic. :)

[lib2DaBone]

19. Our parents fought hard for what little gains we made...

Unions gave us a 40 hour work week, heated workplaces, and pay for overtime worked. Unions fought hard against asbestos in the air and killer chemicals.

Then came the Republicans.. who figured out they could play the labor arbitrage game.. and pit poverty depressed workers against American workers and pocket the difference. As always.. the Republican motive is MAKE A BUCK ON THE BACKS OF OF THE POOR.

It doesn't matter if the third world produces lead paint or poison drywall.. Goldman Sacs profit is the name of the game. BTW.. who is in charge of our "Recovery"? If you said Goldman Sacs.. you get 2 points.

Maybe one day soon.. American workers will wake up and realize how badly they have been screwed. In the mean time.. we get Sarah Palin....and Faux News.

[Autonomy]

23. The decline in union membership since the 1970's

is most likely the effect of the loss of manufacturing jobs nationally, and nothing more. Not that Reagan didn't try to bust unions, but I don't believe he succeeded more than once, and to do that he used "national socialism" (aka fascism).

[tonysam]

25. The PATCO breakup was a landmark because what Reagan did was give

the go-ahead to companies all over the country to bust unions with impunity. Before that, companies would negotiate with the unions.

THAT'S the significance of the PATCO strike and Reagan's busting it up.

[Autonomy]

27. I wouldn't call it impunity

Reagan's use of Taft-Hartley was based solely on the fact that PATCO was a union of government employees, who were legally bound to arbitrate, and not allowed to strike. (The "fascism" is rooted in Taft-Hartley, and Reagan's willingness to use it.) However, private employers are still subject to the courts' decisions, and they often lose.

There might be a small contribution to the decline of unions in that history, but I would bet the farm that there is a much higher correlation between decline in union membership and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

The irony: guess who PATCO endorsed in the 1980 presidential election. Yep, Ronald Reagan. :p

[Autonomy]

28. duplicate

duplicate

[Fearless]

24. Everything is cyclical.

There will come a point where our nation's workers will be fed up. We haven't reached that point yet apparently.

[bertman]

30. I certainly can't disagree or quibble with the graph. It speaks volumes. But I do have

a question about the marginalization of unions and how it happened. I believe there was a concerted effort by Big Bidness to do everything in its power to kill unions. I also believe that unions themselves helped the process along. Anyone who was living during the 60's and 70's probably remembers the degree of influence that the Mafia had in the major national unions, the Teamsters being the most well known. It was part and parcel of the labor movement in those years that the mob was involved and was using funds from the unions' pension plans. There were numerous murders of legitimate union officials who opposed the mob takeover of their unions. Nowadays you rarely hear about any of this. But it's my opinion that a lot of American working folks were turned off by the mob ties to unions and were more easily persuaded to see unions as a good thing that had gone bad.

Any thoughts?

[Autonomy]

31. You're correct

The problem with unions is the problem with all organizations: they became the problem they were created to fix. Not that there is not still a need for unions; there is, but it's like a pendulum: it swings too far one way, and the owners abuse the workers; it swings too far the other way, and the unions abuse the workers and the owners. Greedy people will always find a way to feed off society.

So, yeah, the Mafia, Reagan, conservative courts, and just plain old greedy people hurt the unions. Also, federal and state regulations and laws do some of the job that unions were invented to perform.

Also, unions exist to help union workers, not all workers. They have a vested interest in not allowing just anyone into a union, as that would decrease pay for those already there. Unionization was never more than a stopgap solution to the problem of the powerful abusing the vulnerable.

edit to add: the Teamsters were another major union that endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980. :p

[laughingliberal]

36. Unions may have a vested interest in not allowing just anyone in

but I believe the presence of unions in a field in an area benefits all the workers. I only lived in one city that had any unionized nurses and it was only 1 hospital in town whose nurses were unionized. Every time their contract came up and they got a raise and increase in benefits, the other hospitals in town would follow suit within 3 months.

And, considering the kind of criminals workers are up against these days, we might want to look at some mob representation. Ok, maybe not.

[bertman]

38. LOL. Yeah, maybe not! You are right about the rise in wages and bennies IF it's a

union state. Now it's not as prevalent and has less impact, but it was good while it was going strong.

[Altoid_Cyclist]

45. I hated unions and what some of the union bosses stood for back then.

When you saw what people like Hoffa and W.A. "Tony" Boyle did as representatives of their respective unions, it was hard for me to understand why we needed unions and their ties to the Mafia.

I agree with you that this was the image of unions while I was growing up. They shot themselves in the foot by forming partnerships with organized crime just to pad their own wealth.

Tony Boyle epitomized what I thought all unions were like back then.
The fact that I grew up in PA and was exposed to TV and newspaper reports almost every day after the Yablonski murders influenced me to a great extent.

Now however, I have a little more respect for the modern unions since they were some of the most ardent critics of the Idiot Son.

In case anyone out there is too young to remember Tony Boyle and what he did:

The killers slipped into the house at night, cut the telephone wires and set to work. The daughter was shot first, then the wife, who was trying to hide under the bedclothes. Snapped awake by the shots, the husband was reaching desperately for his own gun when he was cut down by a deadly volley of five bullets.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,907883,00.html#ixzz0X0B95zRc

[DU GrovelBot]

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[Dinger]

34. K & R To JR : )

[Oldtimeralso]

40. K & R and proud to help union solidarity n/t

[BrklynLiberal]

41. There was a show on FSTV about a theater group in SF.

They showed part of their latest play which was about labor. One of the points they make is that labor made a BIG mistake in the 1950s when it let go of its militant recruiting of members and became willing to sit down and "negotiate" with employers to such an extent that it lost most of its power....and gave back so much of what it had fought for.

Once the unions started to lose power, it became inevitable that the middle class would suffer.

Between Unions and the GI BIll.....They were the Foundation of the middle class.


SF Mime Troupe
855 Treat
San Francisco, CA 94110
The San Francisco Mime Troupe does not do pantomime. We mean 'mime' in the ancient sense: to mimic. We are satirists, seeking to make you laugh at the absurdities of contemporary life and at the same time, see their causes. We’ve done shows about most of the burning issues of our time, generally shows that debunked the official story. We perform everywhere from public parks to palaces of culture, aiming to reach the broadest possible audience.

[cadaverdog]

42. Co-incidentally, I just finished viewing my dvr copy of

the Independent Lens production; "Butte, America." It aired recently on PBS and I recommend it highly to anyone who is serious about the history of unions and corporations in America.
It is in no way a polemic for unions, but certain conclusions are inescapable after watching this thoroughly engrossing and informative hour.
And President Obama is no FDR, sad to say.

[reggie the dog]

49. divided we fall, united we stand

world workers unite!

[WillyT]

54. And Here's A Related One...

:shrug:

[snot]

59. self-delete

[Spider Jerusalem]

65. Not really, I'm afraid

you want to know what's driven the decline of America? Several things, a) peak oil (US domestic supply peaked in 1970 and has been declining since); b) the death of American manufacturing in the face of cheaper foreign imports from first Japan and then China (which has more to do with cost of labour, raw materials and production for foreign manufacturers vs American ones, and also to do with the exchange rate of the dollar vs historically cheap foreign currencies), and c) the economic instability of the 1970's decoupling of the dollar and other world currencies from the gold peg and the oil price shocks caused by OPEC for political reasons, first, and later by world oil demand hitting a wall of supply inflexibility. You can't expect a nation that can't compete in a global marketplace on production and materials costs to maintain a strong working class, nor can you expect a nation which lacks the raw materials to feed its voracious appetite to consume to sustain itself on domestic industry. The decline of the American working class is pretty self-explanatory against the backdrop of the global economy and increasing globalisation and free trade in the post-Communist era.