If you had been in Madison, Wis., this past Presidents Day for the protests by organized labor against Gov. Scott Walker, you could have eaten free at one pizza joint. The tab had been picked up by union sympathizers from more than a dozen countries and all 50 states.
With uprisings in the Middle East and the American Midwest running side by side on the evening news, filmmaker Michael Moore circulated a video of an Egyptian trade union official named Kamal Abbas that was addressed to the protesters in Madison.“I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us,” Abbas said.That is what trade unions do better than almost anyone: They stand with each other. And if the cause they believe in is sufficiently just, and they can feel the winds of public support at their back, no cartoonishly evil governor or captain of industry can withstand their collective might.Of course, as we’ve also been learning, if they stand together and the public isn’t paying attention, they can negotiate some impressively hefty pensions and benefits. The governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, complained on MSNBC's “Morning Joe” last week that his predecessor “sat around and said kum-ba-yah” with unions as they did a sweetheart deal that added to his state's fiscal crisis. Later that day, a prankster released audio of a phone call he'd placed to Walker posing as arch billionaire David Koch, so Christie might as well have stayed home.Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Unions now represent less than 12 percent of the American work force. In the private sector they cover just 7 percent of jobs. Consumers long ago endorsed the idea that cheaper labor makes for cheaper goods and services. The favorability rating for unions has fallen to a historic low of 45 percent, according to Pew Research Center.So why, in a poll released last week, did 61 percent of Americans say they opposed Walker’s plan to cut back on the unions’ power? Just a guess, but those people probably doubted their taxes would go down because labor got a haircut. Further, I suspect most of us have associated labor unions with safer, better-paying jobs since we were schoolchildren (taught by unionized teachers).Those memories are likely to grow sharper in the next month. This is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire — the spark, quite literally, that led to the creation of the urban labor movement.On March 25, 1911, an angry, fast-moving inferno burned through the Triangle Shirtwaist factory on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, killing 129 women and 17 men. Half the victims were teenagers. Fueled by huge stacks of cotton and tissue paper, the fire took less than 20 minutes to burn out the eighth and ninth floors. Fire ladders went only to the sixth floor, and supervisors had locked an escape door. Dozens of women leaped to their deaths.One of the vivid firsthand accounts in Monday’s PBS “American Experience” program on the Triangle disaster is of a fireman looking up in horror as “the last workers trapped against the blackened windows burned before our very eyes.” Then the windows gave way. At first, spectators thought they were seeing bundles of flaming fabric fall to the street.The PBS special is affecting, much more so than the overly talky HBO documentary on the fire airing next month. PBS also takes more liberties with the facts. In 1909, about a year earlier, the Triangle ladies had led a walkout that quickly spread to other Garment District shops. Crucially, some of New York’s leading aristocratic women, such as Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P.), joined them.In the PBS retelling, the strike leaders had warned ominously of conditions at the Triangle shop. In fact, according to David Von Drehle’s 2003 account, “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America,” the walkout was mostly over pay and hours. Workplace safety became an issue only in hindsight. The owners prevailed in that dispute by a strategic masterstroke: They offered higher wages and shorter hours but refused to allow collective bargaining. This drove a wedge between the workers, who were dead set on unionizing, and their Republican matrons, who distrusted organized labor and its “fanatical doctrines of socialism,” as Anne Morgan put it.The fact that 100 years later, the governor of a state as rich in union tradition as Wisconsin could try the same tactic suggests that collective bargaining is far from secure in its support. Next time, someone with more media savvy and less hubris could link this abstract unionizing principle to, say, soaring health care costs. The burden remains on labor to justify its need for a right afforded to so few. At the end of the HBO film, the case is made by Bruce Raynor, head of Workers Unite, the successor to the union that organized the lady garment workers after the Triangle Fire.“Workers need to be protected,” Raynor says, “whether they’re in Bangladesh or Brooklyn, whether an oil rig, a garment factory or a coal mine.”If unions want taxpayers to continue to stand with them, those are ultimately much more compelling images than of chanting teachers in Rust Belt rotundas.Where to watch•“Triangle Fire” airs at 8 p.m. Monday on PBS•“Triangle: Remembering the Fire” airs at 8 p.m. March 21 on HBO
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