In Which the Superb Tom Edsall Gets One Big Thing Wrong About Unions.
Thanks to Bill Londrigan for sending us this.
By ROBERT KUTTNER
New York Times contributing columnist Tom Edsall is a national resource. In column after column, he provides encyclopedic research both scholarly and journalistic, extended interviews, astute insights, and hard questions for progressives on politically urgent topics.
His most recent column, on the political consequences of the decline of unions, is no exception. As Edsall demonstrates, the Republican right’s strategic war on unions has been devastating to Democrats, since union members and union families, with their sense of solidarity and better understanding of how capitalism works, are more likely to vote for Democrats than demographically similar nonunion families.
Edsall was not exaggerating when he wrote that the right has a better appreciation of unions than the left. Thus, the systematic union bashing. In Wisconsin, as Edsall shows, courtesy of Scott Walker’s anti-union crusade, the union share of Wisconsin employees was cut from just over 15 percent as recently as 2008 to just 8.1 percent by 2018.