Labor's wobbly last bastion

It has long been an axiom of the labor movement that it's easier to organize in the public sector than in the private sector. But public-sector unions are under attack in states where organized labor is relatively strong, such as Wisconsin and Ohio, and the axiom is on the verge of being upended. What happened, and what does it portend for the American labor movement?

Because public employees work for elected officials whom they can hold accountable at the ballot box, unions have traditionally encountered less resistance to organizing in the public sector. Moreover, state and local governments did not adopt many of the most regressive judicial interpretations of the National Labor Relations Act, which have severely eroded private-sector union membership.

As a result, unions have represented more than a third of the public-sector workforce since the late 1970s, while private-sector union membership has declined from nearly 20 percent to less than 7 percent last year. But as long as elected officials tolerated - or feared - public-employee unions, labor could lean on the public sector for a disproportionate share of its strength.

Then came the Great Recession. The economic turmoil that began in 2008 revealed that the public and private sectors aren't completely separate when it comes to collective bargaining. Rather, public-sector organization depends on robust wages in the private sector.

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In the face of revenue shortfalls resulting partly from declines in private-sector payrolls, governors of all political stripes are (rightly or wrongly) blaming their states' massive budgetary problems on benefits that unions bargained for, such as pensions. During good times in the private sector, this sort of political finger-pointing is not only less plausible, but also less necessary, because states and local governments have more revenue to meet their obligations.

Even in economic expansions, however, public- and private-sector unions remain interdependent. Despite at least two major booms during the 1980s and '90s, the country's heavily unionized manufacturing sector eroded rapidly, and high-wage manufacturing jobs were replaced by service-industry positions paying an average of 23 percent less. So even as state governments extended their obligations to public-employee unions, they were being deprived of the income-tax revenue they needed from the private sector. While the law recognized a line between public- and private-sector unions, the globalized economy did not.

The high unemployment that has accompanied the Great Recession helped sweep into office a slew of conservative Republican governors and state legislators who are hostile to collective bargaining in any context. For them, the recession's effect on state revenues has become a convenient excuse for political revenge against unions that generally supported Democrats. For instance, in a fit of post-election vainglory, Ohio Gov. John Kasich suggested that the state teachers' union should take out full-page ads apologizing for its criticisms of him during the campaign.

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Of course, most Republicans are more circumspect. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin frames his proposal to curtail state and local workers' bargaining rights in terms of the need to bring more "certainty" to the budgeting process. Walker and other Republicans have also engaged in a new type of class warfare pitting government workers against their private-sector brethren, portraying the former as greedy and overcompensated.

This rhetoric offers no vision for raising workers' standards of living. Instead, it proposes a kind of Dickensian equality in which public- and private-sector workers both regress toward the same reduced standard of living. Moreover, anti-union Republicans fail to acknowledge their own role in reducing prosperity in the private sector and therefore the tax revenues flowing into the public coffers. That is, by making organizing more difficult for private employees, these politicians have denied private-sector workers the wage premiums often associated with union representation.

These machinations of revenge and regress reveal yet again that the public sector is not promised to organized labor. Power that rests on politics can rise or fall according to changes in the political winds. The challenge for the modern labor movement is to refortify private-sector unions, which in turn will raise private-sector wages and the income-tax revenues that fund the demands of public-employee unions.