Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker came to Burlington last May, protesters greeted him with a sign proclaiming, “Get up, get down, Burlington’s a union town.”
No, it isn’t. Nor is Vermont much of a union state. Of its 291,000 workers, only 10.5% belong to labor unions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s one of the lowest unionization rates in the Northeast and the second lowest (after New Hampshire) in New England.
So the 10,000-member Vermont AFL-CIO may have taken a risk a couple of weeks ago when it chose a Progressive Party organizer who helped co-found the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective as its president, along with a new slate of leaders vowing to be more aggressive both in organizing members and influencing politicians.
That Anarchist Collective ceased operations some years ago, and the new AFL-CIO president, David Van Deusen, said he’s not really an anarchist, more “a libertarian out of a general distrust of unchecked political power.”
But he has been and remains associated with the Progressives, and some of the most influential Democrats who dominate the Legislature find Progressives more annoying than Republicans. Besides, Van Deusen also calls himself “a socialist on issues relating to the general public well-being,” meaning he’s all but guaranteed to arouse fervent opposition in some circles.
Vermont is a liberal state, but its dominant liberalism is decidedly upper-middle-class, educated, polite if not downright goody two-shoes. Vermont liberals are environmentalists, civil rights advocates, antiwar campaigners, devotees of diversity. It’s no accident that this is one of the states that just celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day.
That other kind of liberalism – less refined, class-conscious, focused on bread-and-butter issues – has not been as visible. Van Deusen plans to change that, and he may just have the resources to do it.
It isn’t just that participation in last month’s state AFL-CIO convention was the biggest in 20 years, union leaders said. It’s also that from school teachers in West Virginia to ride-sharing drivers in California to fast food employees everywhere, workers have been demonstrating renewed energy and militancy to combat low wages and poor working conditions. There’s no reason to think Vermont is exempt from these stirrings.
Nor is there any reason to be surprised about its emergence. Income inequality exploded over the last few decades for many reasons: technology, globalization, trade policy, tax policy. But nothing has shown a closer correlation to the growth in inequality than the decline in the power of organized labor.
In 1983, almost 18 million Americans – more than 20% of the work force – belonged to unions. Last year, there were 14.7 million union members, slightly more than 10% of all workers, with both the raw numbers and the percentages falling almost every year.
It was in the early 1980s that income inequality began to accelerate, reaching its highest level in more than half a century last year, the Census Bureau reported last month. That was also about the time organized labor’s power began to wane as employers took advantage of low-cost foreign (and immigrant) workers to replace or intimidate union members.
Organized labor bears some responsibility for its decline. As is true of all institutions, many of its leaders have been narrow-minded and incompetent, and a few of them have been corrupt, all of which tarnished labor’s public image. But unions have also been weakened by government policy: relatively “free trade” for the goods provided by industrial workers (but not for the services provided by professionals); labor laws that allow management to violate them without meaningful consequences; regulators who prefer not to regulate.
One result of both these policies and labor’s own shortcomings has been that unions have failed to organize workers in non-union companies. This is the failure that Van Deusen wants to reverse. To do so, he is planning to cut back on the labor federation’s legislative lobbying and divert those resources into organizing.
“We have a stable of four organizers ready and able to go,” he said, and he hopes to have more next year, when the AFL-CIO will ask the affiliated unions within the federation to expand their organizing efforts.
Those separate unions, Van Deusen said, will make most of the decisions about where to organize. But he said likely targets included ski areas and other resorts, building contractors, and municipalities.
But Van Deusen doesn’t just want Vermont unions to have more members. He wants those members to be politically more aggressive, to be “willing and able to go above and beyond and take action on issues that don’t have anything to do with their specific contract.” He wants union members to be pressuring lawmakers on issues such as raising the minimum wage, requiring family and medical leave, misclassifying workers as independent contractors.
In short, his members would be his lobbyists.
Innovative and ambitious plans. Whether they are realistic plans remains to be seen. Van Deusen and the other new AFL-CIO leaders were chosen in what seems to have been a bitterly divided convention, so it isn’t certain that the federation is united behind them. And the AFL-CIO does not dominate Vermont’s labor scene. Whoever leads it has to arrange alliances with the teachers union, which has more members, and the Vermont State Employees Association, which has almost as many. The interests of all three are not always identical.
If nothing else, though, it will be interesting to see whether Van Deusen and his associates can enliven Vermont’s organized labor scene. Aside from the teachers and the state workers, unions have been at most a modestly influential factor in politics and in the Legislature. Considering what is happening elsewhere in the country, it is no surprise that someone is trying to change that.
