When you zoom out from anti-union legislation, the picture grows clear

Yahoo

05-02-2025

What we are seeing now with the consolidation of wealth and power at the top began in earnest with the election of President Ronald Reagan. Here, Reagan signs legislation in June 1982. (National Archives from Collection: Reagan White House Photographs)
Over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about something state Rep. Michael Granger, a Milton Republican, said about an organized labor-related bill he's sponsoring.
'We need this to make sure unions aren't just perpetually protecting their little fiefdom and saying, 'This is our little workplace and we own it forever.'' He was talking about House Bill 735, regarding recertification votes for state public employee unions – or, as Granger refers to it, 'term limits for unions.'
I get why he filed the bill. Union busting is kind of a pastime among many Republicans in New Hampshire and the nation at large, because collective bargaining runs counter to conservatives' deification of the free market. Also, HB 735 serves as companion legislation of sorts to a bigger bite at the anti-union apple – a renewed effort by Republicans to finally make New Hampshire a right-to-work state. But the sneer and snarl coloring Granger's statement is still quite something – and should probably stand as a red flag for anyone laboring under the misapprehension that Donald Trump's GOP has the interests of the working class at heart.
What I mean is, 'fiefdom' is an odd word choice to describe the collective bargaining of 21st-century workers – the tech-era peasant class.
In my experience as a former union member in a struggling industry, I can tell you that protecting a 'little fiefdom' was not exactly how we saw things. 'We're trying to get the best bad deal possible' is what my newspaper guild president said nearly 20 years ago during particularly challenging negotiations. With my small family at its very beginning, I remember worrying constantly about what would become of me, of us, and also grateful that my co-workers – the negotiating team – were fighting for me, for us, to get that best bad deal. In the end there were a few rounds of pay cuts, buyouts, the move to a terrible health care plan, longer workweeks, and dozens of other sacrifices – but even with my nonexistent seniority I stayed employed thanks to the guild's work. As a new dad, I promise you that was victory enough.
Had I been a union member during better times in a healthier industry, I think the goal would have been the same but with a slight shift in language: 'We're trying to get the fairest deal possible.' Negotiations always happen within the employer's budgetary reality and the realities of the industry as a whole. While times have changed since the days of the Homestead and Pullman strikes, and since Upton Sinclair brought turn-of-the-century industrial horrors to America's collective awareness, the need for unions will be present as long as there is a working class.
As Frederick Douglass said: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.'
But for those who argue that the free market provides all a hard-working person needs, the rebuttal begins with the skyrocketing CEO salaries in the United States.
'The median pay package for CEOs rose to $16.3 million' in 2023, the Associated Press reported last summer. 'At half the companies in this year's pay survey,' the story continues, 'it would take the worker at the middle of the company's pay scale almost 200 years to make what their CEO did.'
That is a huge – and growing – level of inequality. And I imagine the gap would close a bit if more than 9.9 percent of American workers were members of a union.
In looking at the inequality of labor income in his 2017 book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century,' economist Thomas Piketty writes: 'Since 1980, however, income inequality has exploded in the United States. The upper decile's share increased from 30-35 percent of national income in the 1970s to 45-50 percent in the 2000s – an increase of 15 points of national income.'
To put it a little less technically, Piketty writes: In the United States, 'income from labor is about as unequally distributed as has ever been observed anywhere.'
But even more pressing than chipping away at that gaping and unreasonable inequality is the everyday worker dignity at the center of collective bargaining – fair wages, fair benefits, and fair working conditions.
I truly believe more employers than not prefer to have happy employees who feel valued. In fact, that has largely been my experience, and I'm grateful. But broader context is needed to fully grasp the purpose of never-ending efforts to bust unions. History professor Colin Gordon touched on it in a column from The Conversation published by the Bulletin this week: 'The lineage of conservative responses (to FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society) has been largely an assertion of business power. Whatever populist trappings the second Trump administration may possess, the bottom line of the conservative cultural and political agenda in 2025 is to dismantle what is left of the New Deal or the Great Society, and to defend unfettered 'free enterprise' against critics and alternatives.'
It's really not all that difficult to connect the dots. We are in a period where a decades-long effort beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980 to consolidate power at the top – from the multimillionaire supermanagers right on up to a far-right billionaire playing at president – is reaching its apex.
So maybe one New Hampshire House member's apparent contempt for the working class, echoing through his support of yet another anti-union bill, seems minor on its face. But viewed as part and parcel of broader aims, it should become clear soon enough who all of this is really serving.
And it's not us.