Is Scott Walker right that America is headed toward a stable non-union equilibrium?

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If not unions, what?

Feb 21st 2011, 20:38 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

MATTHEW YGLESIAS draws some insightful general lessons about unionism in America from his father's experience as a member and officer of the Writer's Guild of America. He concludes:

I think the classic postwar American dynamic of an economy with a large minority of the workforce unionized is fundamentally unstable. In the long-run the two equilibria are toward a non-union economy or else toward the Nordic model where virtually everyone is in a union. In the latter case, I think the unions become organizations of a more political character than anything else. In theory, Swedish labor unions could use their dominant labor market position to increase workers’ compensation by making Swedish firms less profitable than non-Swedish ones, but that would be bad for everyone. What you get instead is a kind of Mirror Universe version of the Chamber of Commerce, a politically powerful institution interested in maximizing the income growth of the median Swede rather than the median Swedish CEO.

I think this is a plausible broad-strokes picture. But what are we to infer from it? Left-leaning commentators pine constantly for the all-but-universal unionisation equilibrium, yet this seems no more likely to come to pass than the libertarian night-watchman state. There is no path from here to there. Both are pipe dreams.

Speaking of dreaming, one senses that progressive pulses have quickened lately due to the pro-union throng in Madison, as if success in persuading Wisconsin's duly elected democratic body to reverse course would somehow lead to some sort of cascade that ends in a revitalisation of unions as a political and economic force. But victory in salvaging for Wisconsin's state employees a package of legal-cum-political advantages over those with competing claims to state revenue seems to me to have approximately nothing to do with the prospects of private-sector unionism. And, of course, the sine qua non of the Wisconsin staredown is the unprecedented unpopularity of government-employee unions. Whatever the outcome in Madison, the fact that the whole thing is plausibly good politics for Governor Scott Walker bodes ill for those who dream of Sweden.

Which brings me to my question for progressives. Supposing that Mr Walker and not the SEIU is the vanguard of history—supposing that America is headed toward the stable non-union equilibrium—what is the next-best scenario from a progressive perspective? What is the answer if resurgent unionism is not? Is there one? I hear plenty of progressive rhetoric to the effect that only a rehabilitated union movement can save America from plutocracy and middle-class stagnation, but my sense is that this is a lot like conservative rhetoric to the effect that only a return to constitutional principles will save America from sclerotic socialist decline. Do progressives, like their conservative counterparts, really believe their own hype?

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