The tide is turning for unions

 I hope you all enjoyed the recent Labor Day weekend. And I hope you saw the meme that goes around this time of year: “If you enjoyed having Labor Day off, thank a union.” In fact, many, if not most, of the rights and perks workers have in this country came about due to years of hard work and dedication from labor unions. This used to be widely recognized, from World War II (when posters decorated with American flags and featuring heroic-looking welders said “Free Labor Will Win”) to the 70s and 80s, when I was growing up - anyone my age or older will immediately remember the tune of the pro-union song from the ad “Look for the Union Label.” Unions took a hit in the 1980s, though, as did a lot of things from Ronald Reagan. Things largely went downhill from there for a long time. Union membership in the United States had gone from 13% at the midway point of the Great Depression (1935) to a high of 33% in 1953 but by 1983 was at 20.1%. Last year, it was 10%, a number at which it has hovered for a few years.

Nonetheless, in the past few years, unions have had an infusion of energy. There have been several high-profile, and successful, strikes, and new unions have been organized in several industries (and since 2022 Tennessee has had the biggest increase in union membership of any state in the, well, union). Most telling, perhaps, is the change in how Americans view unions today. In 2009, right after the economic crash, Americans’ approval of unions was at an all-time low of 48%, after cruising for a while at 58 to 60% before that crash. For the last couple of years, that approval rating has hovered around 70%... the highest it has been since 1964, when it was 71%, and only a little short of the all-time high of 75% from the first half of the 1950s. In this year’s poll, only 23% of Americans DISAPPROVED of unions - the lowest number since 1967.

The Biden/Harris administration has been remarkably union-friendly. Joe Biden was the first president in U.S. history to stand beside striking workers on a picket line. And standing by unions means standing by workers. It is an easily verifiable fact (I wish I could show you all the charts on here) that so-called “right-to-work” states, where state laws restrict the abilities of unions to operate effectively, are overwhelmingly the states with the lowest average income and the highest poverty rates. Thirteen of the 14 states topping those lists are right-to-work. The same holds true for the 14 states with the highest divorce rates (13 of 14 - economic issues are the number one cause of divorce). The same holds true of the 14 states with the highest percentage of uninsured people (13 of 14). The list goes on. Tennessee, by the way, appears in all those lists.

Recently, Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, appeared at a meeting of unionized firefighters and was given a standing ovation. J.D. Vance then appeared before those same firefighters and was met with resounding boos. Why? For the same reason the DNC has put up billboards that say, “Trump’s an Anti-Union Scab,” quoting UAW president Shawn Fain. When Trump was in office, he signed off on multiple laws weakening the ability of unions to protect the rights of their members. Just recently, he praised Elon Musk for illegally firing striking workers. “They go on strike and you say, ‘That’s okay, you’re all gone’,” Trump gushed at Musk in their infamous X interview. There is a photo of Trump, in 2004, crossing a picket line of striking stagehands to film an episode of The Apprentice. Beyond all that, on a broader policy level, virtually everything Trump did while in office served to benefit other super-wealthy people like himself - and now, suddenly, he and his running mate are trying to pass themselves off as pro-worker.

Meanwhile, drawing from the conservative playbook that has been used for over a century, such politicians paint anything truly pro-worker and pro-labor as communism. Listen - looking out for the little guy and making sure he or she has a fair shot and gets a square deal is not anti-American or anti-freedom. But it is, and very much so, the opposite of Donald Trump’s whole life record.

As the old labor song sung by striking coal miners in the 1930s (maybe your grandparents!) put it: “Which Side Are You On?”

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is the Tennessee Tech representative of United Campus Workers and former state president of the American Association of University Professors and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.