Union Efficacy: Political Aspirations and Cultural Failings

    In the present contest for the Democratic nominee, there have been efforts to secure the endorsement of unions. The unions' leaders often claim memberships of upwards of a million, assisting with advertising and organization on behalf of the endorsed candidate. Yet in many states, union members have endorsed the losing candidate. I shall argue that union leaders’ inability to galvanize support of their members comes from the fact they rarely become cultures.

    Union leader's concerns may be far too left-wing to gain traction. At least this is clear: union leaderships do not always have the support of its members, and political action is a case in point.

    The inability of union leaders to galvanize support for a candidate is significant. The socialist ideal, going back to at least Marx, is that working together results in a collective consciousness of the proletariat. How we earn our bread, if held in common, is supposed to bonds us together.

    We find, however, that certain demographics tend to vote in blocks, as women; young or elderly, rich or poor, as well as based on ethnicity and race. African-Americans tend to vote as a bloc; their experiences, concerns, and aspirations often are very similar: they have a collective consciousness, in the Marxist sense. Though participating in the same mode of production may have been a cohesive force in agrarian societies, it rarely does so in industrialized ones.

    Unions have tried to breed a collective consciousness that approaches culture with little success, and the reason is thus. The ties that have bound people together are related to religion, geography, ethnicity, and race, not where we work. What binds a group together is, negatively, the collective fear of a common threat, and positively, shared values expressed in an organic way of life. Work, unlike culture, is something in the modern industrial context, done for remuneration, not because it expresses, or leads to, our deepest beliefs. Union membership rarely engenders a worldview.

    A union endorsement is a benefit, but unlikely to be of substantive help either. The reason, I have suggested, is that unions have not formed cultures and have not led to a collective consciousness.