Via Aaron Sojourner, here's a surprising chart of public opinion:
After the Great Recession, big business remained unloved by the American public but labor unions went in the opposite direction. On a scale of 1-100, they are now at their highest level since polling on the question began.
This is roughly confirmed by GSS polling, though it's worth noting that the y-axis is cut off in the chart above, which makes the change look bigger than it really is. Still, it's a bit of a surprising result. Are unions really making a comeback? We can hope.
Big Business now mostly means Woke Tech, which conservatives despise, and the high-profile union campaigns are against Woke Tech, so conservatives are rooting for them.
Big Lincoln Fowler energy.
By which I mean, Colectivo Coffee* has always sucked shit.
*I still call it Alterra.
I wouldn't exactly call the progressive left fans of "Woke Tech," either. If the right wants to join us in taking Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, Musk and others down a notch by encouraging their workforces to unionize, though, happy to have them along...
I don't think we should be even thinking about equating public support for unions in general with unions actually coming back. It may be a prerequisite, but there's hardly a magic threshold of support where, once it's crossed, the other barriers and forces acting against unions just disappear.
+10
Agreed. Something having broad popular support =/= politicians being willing to cross major corporate donors/lobbyists to do anything about it. Increasing unionization will involve federal laws and regulations that limit corporations' union-busting tactics and right now, things are going in the opposite direction (witness the recent case before the SCOTUS about whether ranchers can prohibit union reps from having contact with farm workers in the fields because its private property).
Could it be that unions have been gone long enough that people forgot their excesses and downsides and, after decades of Labor getting short changed, are now focused on the positive side of them?
Not to go all Marxist on y' all but the ruling class always go overboard and that usually lead to a backlash...
I would not be surprised if there is a real and persistent rise in public opinion about union, but that doesn't mean they're making a comeback. From the latest BLS data:
In 2020, the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--the union
membership rate--was 10.8 percent, up by 0.5 percentage point from 2019, the U.S. Bureau
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to
unions, at 14.3 million in 2020, was down by 321,000, or 2.2 percent, from 2019. However,
the decline in total wage and salary employment was 9.6 million (mostly among nonunion
workers), or 6.7 percent. The disproportionately large decline in total wage and salary
employment compared with the decline in the number of union members led to an increase
in the union membership rate. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data
are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million
union workers.
The most striking thing about that chart is how closely attitudes towards the big business and labor unions have correlated for 48 years! This does not make sense to me.
Then, suddenly, labor is at an all time high and big business is at an all time low.
Another striking thing to notice is the amount of suffering that can be withstood. Unions ameliorate suffering to a great degree. Does the suffering cause the solution? Probably. Humans are notoriously awful at avoiding it.
Marco Rubio is supporting workers' attempts to uniomise at Amazon- because he doesn't like the Washington Post's anti-Trump position, and wants to attack Jeff Bezos. If it was Walmart, he'd be screaming about communists and socialists who hate America.
Not sure how he thinks unionized Amazon workers are going to put any kind of dent in Bezos's wealth and power, but ok. Bezos opposes the union on principle: he's a dick. If Amazon unionized and won all kinds of raises and benefits, Amazon's long-term stock price probably wouldn't rise as high, making Bezos just *slightly* less rich than God.