The End of Unions?

By Digby | Sourced from Hullabaloo
Posted at May 28, 2011

Here's yet more evidence of liberalism's rousing success rate in the age of the conservative movement. Harold Meyerson writes:

Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement. 

“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.

They're now trying to form a bloc of voters to pressure congress rather than organizing into a union which just seems so ... well:

The SEIU’s program — like its semi-counterpart in the AFL-CIO’s Working America program, a door-to-door canvass in white working-class neighborhoods — will surely help Democratic candidates, despite the frustrations that nearly all labor leaders feel toward the party. But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.

I suppose that might work in the shadow of Citizens United but it seems like a long shot.It does explain why the Republicans are going even more nuts than usual to enact vote suppression laws though. 

When all is said and done this whole thing may just end up being a fight for basic democracy. Can you have worker's rights without it?