Today is primary day and 3.5 million Flori

Friday, August 31, 2007

Conversations on Organized Labor

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers endorsed Hillary Clinton (and Mike Huckabee) at their conference this week in Miami. That's a problem.

Matt Stoller on Open Left points to a consistent problem: This is why labor can't get traction. It doesn't matter to their leaders that Clinton employs a union-buster as her chief strategist, they want a winner.

I've long understood the problem of the "labor movement" to be its undying loyalty to a dying Democratic Party. (See Organized Labor Stares Down Own Mortality in The Evening Bulletin from PA) Unions barely even organize the unorganized anymore -- their "growth" strategy in a post-industrial economy rife with NAFTAs, WTOs, CAFTAs, etc., is to re-organize the already organized by raiding other unionized workers and holding elections to switch their bank accounts over... Union membership since the effective days of Reagan, the original union-buster, has dropped from 20% to around 12%.

If organized labor would take a page from independents, whose ranks have grown during the same time period from 8% to 43%*, they might decide to become less "organized" and more independent. That would do for a start.

* According to a September 3, 2006 Washington Post article, A Nation of Free Agents, by Marc Ambinder: "Independent voters comprise about 10 percent of the electorate, but the percentage of persuadable independents has shot up to about 30 percent. In the 27 states that register voters by party, self-declared independents grew from 8 percent of the registered electorate in 1987 to 24 percent in 2004, according to political analyst Rhodes Cook. Consistently, about 30 percent of U.S. voters tell pollsters they don't belong to a party."

* And the most recent USA Today/Gallup poll puts self-identified independents at 43% of the electorate.

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