Nathan Newman wrote:
>If they are as bad as you make them out to be, then is the rightwing
>correct
>in their arguments over many decades that unions made unorganized workers
>lives worse off?
-How does your conclusion follow from the critique? The result of -corruption and narrow self-interest is exactly what we see: density -heading towards 0%, and a public image for union leadership that's -worse than that of lawyers.
No, the term "self-interested" implies that union actions have been designed to benefit themselves at the expense of others, the standard conservative critique of unions. Your argument around single payer was that unions deliberately walked away from the possibility of covering non-union workers (i.e. single payer) in order to serve their own self-interest. In fact, unions spend a lot of money and energy lobbying for a range of policies, from minimum wage to Medicaid to health and safety standards that, arguably, have undermined their self-interest as bureaucratic organizations, since it has provided alternative protections for workers rights outside of joining unions.
And the history of the drop in support for unions in the public mind was not some gradual process. It was tied to the rightwing attack on unions by the McClellan Committee in 57 and 58, with pro-union sentiment dropping from 76% before the hearings to just 50% afterwards. The destruction of union support with the rhetoric of "corruption" was a deliberate and successful campaign by the rightwing to destroy the union movement. You can argue that the failures of the labor movement left them open to the attack, but then you are accepting that the success of every other rightwing smear from McCarthyism to post-911 attacks on civil liberties won on its merits.
Nathan Newman
-- Nathan Newman