In February, 2015, two-hundred members of The Philadelphia Metropolitan Regional Council of Carpenters descended on the Philadelphia Auto Show to stage a protest against the Pennsylvania Convention Center. This was seven months after the union had been excluded from employment at the Center because its leaders would not sign-on to a customer satisfaction agreement. It was a power play that Organized Labor lost decisively.
In July, 1948, when the Democratic Party last nominated a Presidential candidate in Philadelphia, the story was entirely different. The old Philadelphia Convention Hall on the west bank of the Schuylkill hosted the nominating conventions of both parties that year. The unions played a major role in the Democratic Party, occupying perhaps the most important seat at the Party’s table, their endorsements essential to any contender who hoped to run for President. They made policy in those days.
Allegedly, the 2015 protest got ugly right away. The Convention Center Executive Director ordered the security personnel to escort the protestors outside because, in his telling, exhibitors were complaining about men, many wearing hoodies with carpenters’ union logos getting into the cars on display, stuffing the glove boxes with union brochures, pulling wires, and removing fuses. According to the Center Director, when confronted, the protestors acted belligerently. The union dispatched members in groups throughout the day of the protest, and each group was escorted from the hall as quickly as possible.
When the Democrats return to Philadelphia to nominate their Presidential candidate 68 years later, the Carpenters’ Union may not even be allowed inside the building and the AFL/CIO’s endorsement will count for significantly less than when Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey were potential nominees. In 2016, the unions will still be a presence at the Democratic Party Convention, but in a very different way. Ironically, considering the stagnant income growth of working people over the last decades, the unions are one of the largest financial contributors to the Democratic Party. In these days of outrageously expensive campaigns, union dues have a greater impact than union votes.
In 2016, the Republicans will hold their convention in Cleveland. It is unlikely that the speakers will say much about organized labor except, perhaps, to insinuate that unions are “part of the problem.” Indeed, Republican legislators and Presidents have been steadily removing legal protections from unions ever since 1947, when the Republican 80th Congress passed the Taft Hartley Act, overriding a Democratic Presidential veto with the assistance of Southern Democratic Congressmen, whose direct political descendants are now staunch Republicans. It is no longer necessary for a Southern politician to cross a party line to weaken labor unions.
At the upcoming Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia, with its promised emphasis on middle class economic issues, speakers are likely to emphasize the relationship between union membership and higher wages. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, median weekly earnings of nonunion workers ($763) were 79 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($970). But, if the Democratic Party wants to attract white male voters, they will try to disassociate union participation from race and gender.
For most Republicans, the Democratic Party, the United States Government, and modern labor unions are inseparable: too ethnically diverse and too female. Often overlooked in efforts to understand Republican psychology is the shift in union jobs from the private to the public sector. This graph shows the dramatic change and is one of the reasons the modern Republican Party is as vehemently anti-Union as at any time since Ohioan Robert Taft and New Jersey's Fred Hartley co-authored the anti-union law in 1947.
Public sector jobs are increasingly held by women and minorities, thanks to Democratic fair employment legislation. Almost 40% of workers in the public sector are represented by unions. Republicans not only dislike unions because they threaten private sector profits, they dislike them because they strengthen government at the grass roots while empowering minorities and women organized as labor union members.
The days of big American factories, the times when large numbers of organized workers had the power to halt production, are long gone. No longer do thousands of workers trudge through factory gates for shift work. These days, a salaried employee is more likely to drive a car to a suburban parking lot and go to work in a cubicle. Her co-workers will be a small coterie of other individuals, men and women who are more concerned about their personal job security than their rights as workers, people whose personal stories do not include a class of people called workers.
The Democratic Party will make an appeal to the middle class when its leaders convene at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in 2016. They will emphasize the power of unions to benefit everyone, including white men. It will be one of the more difficult rhetorical challenges they will face.