President Obama says the big problem in Washington is that politicians focus on pleasing special interests at the expense of the general public. But his curious definition of "special interests" exempts one key political force: organized labor.
Even during a recession, the public is ambivalent toward organized labor. In September, a Gallup poll found that 48% of Americans approved of unions. This was an 11-point drop from the previous year's approval rating and the lowest recorded since Gallup started asking the question in 1936. In 2008, just 12% of all workers belonged to unions, and the number of unionized private-sector employees was even smaller, at 7.6%.
So why, then, does organized labor hold more political power today than it has in decades?
In part, it's thanks to Obama. The president has put on his Santa Claus cap and lavished unions with gift after gift. Days after taking office, he issued three executive orders reversing Bush-era labor policies. In February, he approved a stimulus bill that contained "buy American" provisions. In a move that would have made Jimmy Hoffa proud, the $400-billion omnibus spending bill that Obama signed into law in March eliminated funding for pilot programs allowing Mexican trucks in the United States as mandated by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In June, the president oversaw a restructuring of General Motors that left the UAW owning 17.5% of the company. The union is GM's second-largest shareholder (the largest is Uncle Sam). Early in September, in a speech to the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, Obama said he was "standing behind" the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to organize by seriously diminishing the secret ballot in union elections. And on Sept. 11, the president imposed a 35% tariff on Chinese tire imports, a policy straight from the wish list of the United Steelworkers.
Now, a cynic might say that Obama feeds labor a steady diet of goodies in order to secure its backing for healthcare reform, or maybe to reward it for its efforts in the 2008 election. But it's just as likely that Obama thinks higher unionization will lead to middle-class stability.
The problem with this argument is that despite the recession, the middle class has done pretty well during the period of low unionization. Don't take my word for it. When Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, ran the Congressional Budget Office, he released studies that showed the average income of the poorest families grew by 35% between 1991 and 2005, and there was no substantial income volatility recorded between 1980 and 2003.
