MRZine: What’s the Matter with U.S. Organized Labor? An Interview with Robert Fitch
Michael D. Yates: Robert, let’s start off with a question not directly connected to your book Solidarity for Sale. Some commentators say that today labor unions and labor movements are irrelevant for working people. Do you believe this? If not, why do you think labor unions and labor movements are important?
Robert Fitch: American workers are like the owners of a family car whose wheels fell off long ago. Each family member has gotten used to relying on their own two feet; they scarcely remember what it was like being able to ride together, relying on the power of their commonly owned vehicle.
Very few Americans experience the power of a union anymore. U.S. unions today represent just 7.8 percent of all private sector workers. Organized labor can’t stop wages from falling; hours from increasing; jobs from being offshored; or health and pension benefits from disappearing. Conditions in unionized garment and meat-packing factories here have regressed to the point where they actually mirror those described in muckraking exposes of a century ago. It’s the lack of countervailing union power that best explains the widest income inequality in the advanced industrialized world, the most limited workers’ rights, and what is easily the meanest and the crummiest welfare state. In Europe, where unions are on the defensive but haven’t lost the capacity for large-scale resistance, labor activists refer ominously to “The American Disease.”
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