Why Is There So Much Hate for Working People?

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Even with the real-estate and stock markets rebounding, Castelli says, employers are still demanding concessions on the grounds of hardship. This affects public workers too—the Oakland strike happened after the city demanded further givebacks on top of the $122 million municipal workers agreed to in 2009—but it’s worse in the private sector. “Since the bottom dropped out of the economy, the private sector has gotten nothing,” he says. “Corporate America wants people to be contract workers, or part-time.”

Unions once provided a “virtuous circle of upward benefits,” says Zweig, pushing up wages, rights and benefits for everyone, but if only public workers are getting that, it’s easy to resent them, to ask “why should these people get that on your nickel?”

Antilabor forces are quite happy to encourage that resentment. During the New York subway strike of 2005, Mayor Bloomberg charged that the union was being “selfish,” hurting busboys, garment-industry workers, and owners of mom-and-pop businesses who didn’t get paid if they couldn’t come to work. Stereotyping union public-school teachers as “lazy, pampered bastards” helps the well-financed charter-school movement’s efforts to privatize education, notes Allan Ruff, a historian of social movements and a longtime Wisconsin activist.

“A lot of people don’t understand the union movement,” says Antonette Bryant, head of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555, which represents BART train operators and station agents. “We’re fighting for everybody. We are taxpayers ourselves. We’re not some elitist group. We’ve banded together for a common goal—better wages.”

Education about the labor movement has been diluted, she says, so people don’t understand that as unions erode, so do wages for everybody.

“The question should be ‘Why don’t we have what they have?’”

Social movements

The debate over whether unions should primarily serve their own members or work for greater social change is as old as the labor movement. After World War II, American unions largely dropped class-struggle ideology, partly because the government forced them to purge Communists and “fellow travelers” and partly because they could share in the expanding postwar prosperity.

Ruff cites the “Treaty of Detroit,” a landmark 1950 agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers in which the company agreed to accept the union shop, raise wages, and provide pensions and health insurance, while the union agreed not to challenge the company’s power over how the workplace was run. This model helped American workers enjoy unprecedented prosperity for a few decades. But the purge of radical elements and the focus on short-term economic gains separated organized labor from the great social-change movements of the later 20th century, as well as splitting the U.S. left from its working-class base.

“Unions themselves have not been big champions of workers outside their own membership,” says Zweig. In his own union, the United University Professions, he says, the former president responded to proposed cuts in the New York state university system’s budget by drafting a statement that said, “our interest is in protecting our membership.” “How about protecting public higher education?” Zweig responds.

That’s not absolute, he clarifies. Though many building-trades locals remained segregated until the late 1960s, the UAW strongly supported the civil-rights movement. But the failure to deal with broader concerns, he says, is “coming back to bite the labor movement in the butt.”

The turning point came in the 1970s. The low unemployment of the 1960s encouraged union demands that squeezed profits, and the large and militant protest movements of the era seriously scared the nation’s ruling elite. Factions in that elite began planning ways for the empire to strike back, and Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 gave their counterrevolution its opening. Reagan’s mass firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981 abrogated the Treaty of Detroit model and inaugurated a new era of class warfare from the top down.