Tilting the Bargaining Table

I still remember the day my seamstress mother’s pay was raised to 50 cents per hour.  In the early 1950s that was an increase in our household income of about two-thirds, a major cause for celebration.  A few years later a minimum wage law would raise her pay again to 75 cents per hour, but that, while well worth celebrating, had not quite the impact of that original raise.  It had come after a hard-fought battle between the sweat shop owners of the clothing factory in our small East Texas city and the clothing workers union, during which my mother had spent many hours on the picket line.  She always credited the union as making her hard life at least minimally endurable.
Mama’s battle it turns out was occurring at the peak of the union movement in this country.  In 1954, union membership topped out at 35 percent of the work force; it would never again achieve that level, though union membership in absolute numbers would reach 21.8 million workers in 1979.  Union membership nationally has declined to 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2010, but even that is heavily bolstered by the 37 percent unionization of the government workforce (that includes state and local, teacher unions, etc., as well as federal); private sector unions are down to 6.9 percent of their workforce.  It is no coincidence that at the same time, as reported by JPMorgan Chase, U.S. labor compensation is at a 50-year low relative both to company sales and GDP.  It turns out that in 2010, 100 percent of all income growth went to the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. households.  As Harold Meyerson notes in the Washington Post, unions at 6.9 percent of the private sector workforce have lost the power to bargain effectively for higher pay.
That’s what is especially bemusing about Mitt Romney’s vow that on a first day in the White House he would issue executive orders “to tilt the bargaining table away from the unions.”  A Texan is always ready with a colorful phrase, but one is overburdened in this case; should it be “kicking a man when he’s down”, or “sucking the creek dry” or simply “trying to get blood out of a turnip?” Whatever the metaphor or simile used, it can’t convey either the antiquity of Romney’s labor-management views or the depth of vulture capitalism to which they sink.  They have the ring of sweat shop management from 60 years ago.  If he aspires to be President of all the people, he has a lot of catching up to do.