politics

When Gallup pollsters asked voters just before Labor Day which side of the dispute between the UAW and the Big Three they sympathized with, 75 percent said they were with the union. Just 19 percent lined up with the corporations. A Morning Consult survey conducted last week found 2-1 support for the UAW, and noted that even the union’s boldest proposals—such as the demand for a 32-hour workweek—attracted significantly more support than opposition.

That’s a big deal. It confirms data showing that the general popularity of unions is rising, and that the American people have come to believe that unions benefit both their members and those who aren’t in unions, that labor organizations improve the standing of unionized companies, and that strong unions are good for the US economy. Indeed, on that last measure, Gallup found: “A record-high 61 percent say unions help rather than hurt the U.S. economy, eclipsing the prior high from 1999 by six points.”

Importantly, these numbers also tell us that when unions make big demands, and when they aggressively advance those demands in order to counter corporate spin (as the UAW has done with a savvy social media campaign and unity-building op-eds written by Fain with allies such as US Representative Ro Khanna), the American people will recognize organized labor’s “asks” as fair and necessary.

That’s a point Senator Bernie Sanders made when he argued in a statement ahead of the UAW strike: “Despite what you might hear in the corporate media, what the UAW is fighting for is not radical. It is the reasonable demand that autoworkers, who have made enormous sacrifices over the past 40 years, finally receive a fair share of the enormous profits their labor has generated.”

Media outlets and politicians—not just anti-labor Republican zealots such as former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker but also new Democratic centrists who have sought to align their party more closely with Wall Street and corporate interests—have for years tried to tell us that unions are relics of the past. A 1991 Harvard Business Review article spelled out the pro-business line with an argument that knowing managers “believed that the rules of the economic game have changed.” The article continued:

Competition is global, technological innovation continuous, the work force increasingly professional. In such an economic environment, unions are ill-suited to meeting the needs of either workers or companies. At best, they are an irrelevance—a leftover from a previous industrial era. At worst, they are an obstacle to making companies and countries competitive. Little wonder, then, that unions are on the wane.

That sentiment took hold over the ensuing decades and infected media coverage of labor disputes, even as unions grew in popularity. So it comes as no surprise that during the current negotiations, Fain found it necessary to deconstruct media coverage, placing an emphasis on the fact that car prices have soared not because of workers’ pay demands but because of record profiteering by the auto companies. “You don’t hear the media wringing their hands over how Big 3 profits are driving up the cost of cars. You don’t see big splashy nightly-news segments on how consumers will be impacted by companies choosing to spend billions on executive salaries, stock buybacks and special dividends,” said Fain. “No, you only hear these concerns when the working class stands up and demands a fair share of the value we produce.”