--- On Thu, 5/21/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Card Check Is Dead
> Unions are surprisingly bad at politics.
>
[WS:] Surprisingly? I'd say there is nothing surprising about the weakness of labor in the US - it has always been like that.
I recently re-read an excellent book by Theda Skocpol "Social policy in the United States in Historical Perspective" where she provides a rather convincing, imho, explanation of the relative absence of labor-friendly policy in the US. Among the key reasons she gives are:
1. The relative strength of the courts and the judiciary vs. other branches of the government - the judicial system of the US has a strong pro-capitalist bias, which means that any pro-labor measure, even if it is passed by legislature, is likely to be defeated in courts; therefore, expending political capital on such measures has been viewed, according to Skocpol, as a waste of time;
2. The relative strength of the political parties vs. government bureaucracy - this, according to Skocpol leads to a significant discretion in political party control of the federal social programs, which political parties use to political patronage (aka "pork and barrel" or "machine politics.") Political patronage, in turn ties together narrowly defined interest groups within confined geographical areas, which otherwise might have contradicting programmatic agenda on a national level (e.g. unions and employers hoping to reap benefits of certain federal programs.)
3. The relative weakness of federal bureaucracy in the US (except Department of Defense, I may add) - Skocpol argues that government bureaucracy was often on the forefront of social reforms that benefited labor (social policy is a prime example) because such reforms entailed certain benefit to the polity as a whole (e.g. national mobilization for the war effort, muting social conflicts, or simply more efficient functioning of the state bureaucracy). Since the power of federal bureaucracy in the US was relatively weak, as compared to many Western European countries, the chances of a successful implementation of social reforms were much smaller in the US than in Western Europe.
The key to this argument is that capitalist opposition toward pro-labor social policy was pretty much constant in developed capitalist countries - so it cannot explain variations among these countries in terms of their policy outcomes. What differed was the strength of the judiciary, government bureaucracy, and political parties - and these political differences explain, Skocpol argues, different policy outcomes.
If this is true - blaming Obama for the failure of this, or any other pro-labor policy measure is at best misguided. Blame the biased judicial system, the pork-and-barrel party system, and populist hatred of "the gummint" instead.
Wojtek