The conservative case for unions
On a spring morning last year, two men from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum met at a Manhattan diner for brunch and, somewhat to their own surprise, discovered they agreed on a way to address that problem. One was Eli Lehrer, who co-founded and runs the R Street Institute, a free-market-oriented, Republican-leaning think tank in Washington. Lehrer believes the time has come for the American right to reconsider its decades-long war on unions. Their collapse, he says, has fueled the growth of government and of the welfare state, which has stepped in to regulate workplaces and provide job security as unions have died out.
His unlikely dining companion was Andy Stern. As the president of the Service Employees International Union from 1996 to 2010, Stern had become the labor-movement equivalent of a rock star by more than doubling the union’s membership. Unions, he thinks, cannot survive unless they innovate and change, but laws intended to protect and preserve them get in the way. “Anytime anybody gets creative, these laws stop us,” he said when I spoke with him and Lehrer recently.
The laws he refers to are hard-won federal enactments dating back to the early decades of the last century. The most foundational is the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which has not had a major revision since Dwight Eisenhower was president. The law, along with a complex superstructure of regulations and court rulings interpreting it, sets out how and when private-sector workers can organize, mandates how companies recognize and deal with unions, dictates the bundle of services and benefits unions can provide, and precludes many other forms of employer-employee interaction.
Rigid and archaic as that structure may be, to many on the American left, it is sacred writ. They regard it as a form of life support for unionization. Stern and Lehrer, though, believe the status quo has become something more like a death grip. Imagine that American retailers were locked by law into doing things the same way they did them in the 1950s, and you can see the problem.
Stern and Lehrer joined forces to argue their case in the journal National Affairs. “The fundamental federal rules governing employer-worker relations were written for a different era,” they explain. For example: “Right now, union officials can face criminal charges if they sell anything to employers—even services like a health plan that employers might be willing to spend good money to buy in a free and open market.” In creating legal barriers to change, labor law’s ossification has stifled fresh thinking. David Rolf, the president of Service Employees International Union 775 (which represents home-health-care workers in Washington State and Montana), told me, “If you’re a union leader—if you’re one of hundreds of people like me around the country—the reality is that your range of motion is very constrained. We’re so conditioned to the parameters of our model that most of us can’t even think about doing different things.”
Efforts to revise labor law at the federal level (most recently, during President Barack Obama’s first term) have gone nowhere. That seems unlikely to change anytime soon. So Stern and Lehrer propose a workaround. Why not give states the authority to grant labor-law waivers that would allow experimentation? If an employer and a union came up with an interesting model that met certain guidelines, they could try it. In education and health care, state waivers have sparked all kinds of experimentation. They might do the same for unions.
The Stern-Lehrer waiver idea is a no-brainer if we want to address the deeper causes of the malaise and distemper afflicting America’s lower-middle class. Although income stagnation is certainly one culprit, another, perhaps still more important, is the decline of the civic organizations and social institutions that help people feel connected and efficacious. Service fraternities, volunteer clubs, youth groups, churches, political parties, widespread military service, unions, and the rest—in their prime, all fostered social interaction and face-to-face collaboration, cultivating a sense of social cohesion even when times were much tougher than they are today.
