Stanford Politics

On Wednesday, the Democratic congressional leadership announced a new plank in their “Better Deal” platform aimed at strengthening the labor movement. Like the other “Better Deal” policies, which include populist proposals on minimum wage reform, anti-monopoly legislation, and lowering the price of medications, any pro-labor bill is doomed to fail in the Republican controlled Congress. But the new initiative could mark the beginning of a long overdue effort to repair the tattered relationship between the Democratic Party and America’s working people.

Since its heyday in the mid-20th century, the labor movement has increasingly fallen victim to cunning Republican maneuvering and Democratic neglect. In the last few years, states that were once strongholds of organized labor like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana have seen Republican lawmakers strip unions of key legal protections and fundamentally weaken their organizing capacity.

These days, the most immediate threat to the labor movement is the onslaught of “right-to-work” legislation making its way through state legislatures. Right-to-work laws — or as they’re known to union advocates, “right-to-work-for-less” — prohibit unions from charging fees of non-union workers, allowing free-riders to enjoy the benefits earned through collective bargaining without supporting the unions themselves. In their new plank, the Democrats claim that right-to-work has deflated union membership by 10% in affected states — a serious blow to union capacity that has already resulted in lower wages and benefits across the board.

In January, Kentucky became the 27th state to enact right-to-work as a statewide policy, and the fifth in the last five years. While a similar legislative effort failed in New Hampshire in February, Missouri will put the issue to a public vote next year, after a successful petition campaign prevented the governor from signing right-to-work into law in August. The momentum clearly belongs to the right, leaving Democrats on the defensive.

Thus, it’s significant that one of the main components of the Democratic party’s new plank is a proposal to ban right-to-work altogether. While it’s still a progressive moonshot, it’s important that the next generation of young Democratic politicians — many of whom probably can’t remember a time when unions were powerful political forces — have something to advocate for, and that workers have someone fighting for them in Washington.

The Democrats also need to recognize that the Republican campaign against labor is not only an assault on working class Americans, but a means of undermining a significant pillar of Democratic support and organizing capacity. Union workers have traditionally provided disproportionate levels of both policy and political support to the Democrats, and organized labor has long been a staunch ally of progressive causes like welfare and civil rights.

Democratic neglect has thus handed a huge advantage to the Republicans, who are already reaping the rewards. In states where recent right-to-work laws have sapped union resources, like Wisconsin and Michigan, large numbers of blue-collar workers turned to Trump in 2016, helping carry his campaign to surprise victories which swung the election. The results were a wake-up call if there ever was one.

Yet for all the Democrats’ soul-searching since last November, there’s still a real chance that the party is learning the wrong lessons from their loss. Take, for instance, the hysterics around the party’s supposed disconnect with the white working class, which have led some strategists to propose centrist tactics, like stepping away from social issues, to win them back. This impulse is self-destructive, and also misses the crucial point: the Democratic Party hasn’t just lost touch with white workers, they’ve lost touch with the entire working class. Appeals to conservative anxiety aren’t going to fix that.

Finally, if the Democrats don’t step up to the plate, the labor movement seems ready to move on without them. Last week, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution stating their intention to explore third-party politics and a pivot toward grassroots ballot initiatives, like the (thus far) successful campaign against right-to-work in Missouri. The resolution cited both major parties’ neglect of working people in favor of corporate interests, essentially accusing Democrats of catering more to Wall Street than the labor movement.

They’re right. And as the tide continues to turn against unions at the local level, the Democrats can expect their losses to mount on a national scale. If they want to win back the support of the labor movement and start winning elections, they need to act fast, before right-to-work becomes the national norm. If they fail, organized labor may become damaged beyond repair, leaving the party — and the country — to suffer the consequences.

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Benjamin Sorensen, a senior studying political science, is a weekly columnist for Stanford Politics. The views expressed in ‘Beyond the Beltway’ are his and not those of Stanford Politics, a non-partisan publication.