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Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, joins legislators, advocates and others in the state Capitol in May to advocate for a statewide paid sick leave law.
(Denis C. Theriault/staff)
By Tim Nesbitt
Oregon's labor movement engineered a mini-New Deal in Salem this year, with the passage of laws that mandated sick leave benefits and launched a process to establish retirement plans for virtually all workers in the state. Next up, almost certainly, will be an increase in the state's minimum wage, either through legislation next year or a subsequent ballot measure campaign.
Whether you agree with all of its components, this is what a working families' political agenda looks like. And the way in which a coalition of unions and community groups advanced that agenda reminds me of a time when activists vied to "put the movement back in the labor movement" - a slogan born of frustration with the parochialism of unions focused on serving their own members in isolated bargaining units. But it has new resonance now, and we can expect to hear variations of this theme at the union picnics that will draw politicians to Portland's Oaks Park and other venues around the state for Labor Day 2015.
This is not just a story of the unions that brought us the weekend generations ago suddenly returning to a missionary view of their cause. Oregon's unions also brought us the minimum wage increases that voters enacted as ballot measures in 1996 and 2002. Advocacy of that kind has always been part of labor's DNA. But, as I noted in a prior column, changing circumstances are forcing unions to look beyond 20th century labor laws to deal with the challenges of a 21st century economy. That means more legislating than bargaining and more emphasis on political campaigning than workplace organizing.
The circumstances behind this shift in labor's activities are evident in the distress that more and more working Americans are feeling about the loss of good jobs, the erosion of family-friendly benefits and the shrinking of the middle class. That's the acknowledged problem statement for progressives. But the failure of unions and their traditional bargaining structures to solve this problem - or even to hold on to labor's share of an expanding economy - is less openly acknowledged but equally troubling.
There was a time as recently as a decade ago when labor's strategy to rebuild the middle class was based on reinstating old labor laws, organizing smarter and bargaining harder. But that didn't work. Labor law reforms stalled even in a Democratic Congress. The forces of globalization and technological displacement continued to reshape private sector workplaces, making site-based and job-specific bargaining units increasingly anachronistic. Then a disastrous recession decimated jobs in traditionally unionized industries. Less than 7 percent of private sector workers in the U.S. are now union members. And, even union stronghold states like Michigan and Wisconsin have passed so-called right-to-work laws that limit the ability of unions to finance their operations.
But, in most blue states and in national elections, labor's political clout remains formidable, at least for now. With this clout, unions can muscle through political agendas that not only resonate with voters (providing a positive feedback loop for politicians who champion labor's causes) but make a difference in the lives of working people. To try to make jobs better for any of significant number of low-wage Oregon workers through workplace elections and collective bargaining would be a fool's errand for Oregon's unions, whose traditional organizing efforts have been netting them at most a few thousand new members a year. But the sick leave and retirement benefits mandated by the Legislature this year will reach hundreds of thousands of Oregon workers, as would a further increase in the minimum wage.
This is the new calculus for progressives who are searching for ways to mitigate growing inequalities of income and wealth in our society and rebuild a thriving middle class. But they are unlikely to succeed by mandates alone. The original New Deal advanced not just with mandated labor standards and social insurance programs but with publicly financed, job-creating investments and a new framework of labor laws that enabled workers to organize and wrest gains from an expanding economy. The new New Deal is taking us back to a future of more expansive government mandates but is still searching for a way to promote job creation and enable working people to make jobs better in their own workplaces. The greater challenge is not putting the movement back in the labor movement but putting labor on a new footing as well.
Tim Nesbitt writes on public affairs, has served as an adviser to Governors Ted Kulongoski and John Kitzhaber, and is past president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. He writes biweekly for oregonlive.com and The Oregonian. He can be reached at nesbitt.columns@gmail.com.