Kamala Harris is not doing well with Union voters

As the election mercifully comes to a close, I’ve been following the polls to see how Kamala Harris is doing with union voters in swing states and nationally. This is what I found:As the chart above shows, union voters have increasingly turned away from the Democratic Party in many swing states since 2008. Of immediate concern, Harris appears to be trailing Joe Biden’s level of union support in crucial swing states like Michigan and Nevada, hovering around 50% in Pennsylvania.

What is the cause of Harris’ troubling lack of union support (if the polls are to be believed)? While some media reports have suggested that this may be motivated by racism and sexism within the ranks of the labor movement, I would be surprised if it is worse than the general population of voters (and unions tend to promote higher tolerance and the to reduce wage gaps between men and women and races). .

Another line of thought outlined in a provocative article by Eric Levitz op Vox (with a paywall, but worth $5) argues that “the Democrats’ pro-union strategy has been a failure.”

To prevent the Democrats’ working-class support from further declining, the thinking went, the party had to deliver for existing unions. . . . The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In the first major piece of legislation of his presidency, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to the union’s 350,000 members. The president also appointed a federal union board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers and aligned Democratic trade and education policies with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And while he failed to pass major changes to federal labor law, it wasn’t because he tried. According to the assessment of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden is the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

However, Levitz concludes that “the political return on Democrats’ investments in organized labor has been disappointing.” Examining a range of academic studies on union voting behavior, Levitz notes that the ability of unions to shape the political identities of union members has diminished or been exaggerated.

This point was also vividly illustrated in Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s wonderful book Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters Are Turning Away From the Democratic Party. They show how unions played a key role in the social life and community of union members, creating a solid political identity aligned with the Democratic Party. As the social footprint of unions declined (aided and abetted by Democratic support for trade policy), the right filled the political vacuum with gun clubs and Tea Party social gatherings.

There’s another reason for the apparent divide between Biden/Harris and union voters: Biden’s labor reforms benefited unions. institutional, but many of these policies have not (yet) had a tangible impact on the working lives of the vast majority of members.

For example, Biden’s overhaul of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has the potential to be transformative for union organizing, but few union members know what it does or why it matters. The NLRB is not present in their working lives, except for the small number of union members involved in an unfair labor strike or organizing their workplace through the NLRB. There is also a delay in Biden’s key labor legislation, such as the union construction jobs that will be created under project labor agreements in the infrastructure legislation.

I am very sympathetic to the line of thought that Harris is losing working class votes (including union members) because she is failing to loudly embrace and promote populist economic policies. I found the writings of people associated with the Center for Workers’ Politics and Ruy Teixeira’s articles on Liberal patriot (minus the cultural conclusions) very informative.

There may be a clearer answer to the union voting problem. In one Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll conducted from October 16 to 20 in the seven swing states, voters were asked the following question: “When you think about your personal financial situation, would you say you would be better off under the Biden administration or were you better off under the Trump administration? ?”Union households think they were better off financially under the Trump administration than under the Biden administration, by a margin of 11%. By the way, union voters in the poll narrowly preferred Harris to Donald Trump, by a margin of 50%-46%.

Were union workers better off economically under Biden or Trump? According to one school of thought, employees suffer from a kind of false consciousness. Here’s how a recent one New York Times article asked the question:

Have Americans’ salaries kept pace with the cost of living in recent years? It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. According to most Americans, the answer is a clear “no.” In polls and interviews ahead of the presidential election, people of virtually all ideologies and income levels say inflation has made it harder to make ends meet, eclipsing the wage increases they have won from their employers. According to economic data, the answer, at least at first glance, appears to be yes.

I spent some time poring over the reams of economic data from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to determine how real wages of union workers (wages adjusted for inflation) fared under Biden versus Trump. After struggling to get a clear answer, I realized that this is a very complex question and there are many methodologies and indicators you can use.

The Brookings Institution has an informative article that explains the complexities of the real wage issue and concludes that “different ways of calculating real wages can lead to conflicting conclusions about whether wages have kept pace with inflation.” In addition, Brookings has an online interactive tool that allows you to run different scenarios using different economic indicators.

Nevertheless, I chose the BLS’s Economic Cost Index because it breaks down wage and salary data by union and non-union workers and has a handy index that adjusts for inflation. According to the BLS:

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) measures the change in hourly labor costs for employers over time. The EBI uses a fixed ‘basket’ of labor to produce a pure cost change, free from the effects of workers moving between occupations and industries, and includes the cost of wages and salaries as well as the cost of benefits.

Adjusted for inflation, wages and salaries for union workers (excluding benefits) across all sectors fell under the Biden administration (Q1.2021 – Q3.2024) and rose under the Trump administration (Q1.2017 – Q4.2020).Here are real hourly wages and salaries of unions and non-unions over time:An important qualification for this data, which some economists point out, is that the ‘pandemic and the downturn have led to a spurious increase/decrease in average wages due to compositional effects, as low-wage workers lost disproportionately many jobs in 2020 and regained it. in 2021.” In other words, average real wages rose under Trump because many unemployed low-wage workers were not included in the payroll data.

But as the Economic Policy Institute noted, “Union workers had greater job security during the pandemic. . . (and) industries with lower union membership tended to experience greater job losses during the pandemic.” Thus, the wage experience of union members may differ from that of non-union workers.

Still, the decline in real wages for union members under Biden — at least according to the Employer Cost Index — helps explain why many union voters in swing states think they were better off financially than Biden under Trump.

Of course, inflation was a result of the pandemic and broken supply chains. Given the divided Congress and lack of control over monetary policy, I’m skeptical that Biden could do much about it. However, based on the Employer Cost Index, real wages for union workers did indeed decline due to the debilitating impact of inflation.

Additionally, union wages are stricter than non-union wages due to collective bargaining agreements (many of which have no cost-of-living increases). So when inflation soared under Biden, union workers were tied to contracts that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be renegotiated to make up for the increase in the cost of living. The downside is that unions negotiated big wage increases in the last round of negotiations, and many union workers will likely see significant increases in real wages during the next presidential term (and hopefully Trump won’t be around to take credit for that ) .

Whatever the cause of Harris’s declining support among union members, it is critical for the labor movement that she wins. As I have argued elsewhere, the labor market is only one or two bad election cycles away from an extinction-level event. The labor movement needs four more years to capitalize on Biden’s labor reforms, organize more members into unions, and rebuild its political power to enact policies that address the real economic concerns of the working class. That won’t be possible under a Trump administration.