The union movement and the progressive movement just suffered a crushing loss at the Boeing plant in South Carolina yesterday. As Julie Johnsson and Josh Eidelson detailed in this Bloomberg story, the 3000 Boeing workers faced a massive, coordinated assault by not only Boeing management but the whole political class in South Carolina.
And the almost complete progressive media and political leadership apathy to the fight at Boeing enrages me. Despite a Presidential campaign during and after which everyone said you need to pay attention to working class industrial workers, workers in a right-to-work state like South Carolina stood up to megacorp Boeing-- and were left largely on their own as not only Boeing but the whole business and political class threatened them with retaliation and destruction if they voted yes for the union.
Unsurprisingly, in the face of threats of retaliation and jobs being sent to China and a half million dollar advertising barrage treating them as economic traitors to the state, most of the workers got scared and voted no in the end.
Here you had a company using threats of moving jobs to China-- a perfect opportunity to mobilize nationally and demand Trump put up or shut up and tell Boeing to stop such threats -- and you had mostly crickets among progressive media and activists.
And I have serious rage at everyone who endlessly talked about how Obama was the candidate of business and didn't help workers. You know who cared about union workers at Boeing? Obama. When Boeing first tried to move operations to South Carolina, the Obama NLRB filed unfair labor practices against Boeing and tussled with then-governor Nikki Haley over promoting the move as an anti-union attack. (The administration would drop the charges later at the urging of the IAM union based on settling overall contract negotiations-- and in the face of worries about hostile court actions).
I give props to the twelve U.S. Senators, including Bernie Sanders, who sent a letter to Boeing condemning the anti-union campaign- see here -- but where were the legions of Bernie-supporters who endlessly lectured Clinton for her supposed silence on labor issues during the campaign?
National support for the campaign would have mattered since workers voting on the union needed to know that if they got a union, they would have national support in what would be ongoing battles not just with Boeing but with their own state government. Boeing is a federal contractor and has to worry about public opinion, so that national support matters.
But instead, they were left largely on their own, mostly in a national silence.
Having a 3000-person labor beachhead in anti-union South Carolina would have made a big difference, not just for those workers, but for workers throughout the region. As Josh notes in the linked story, other workers were looking to the Boeing vote on whether to try forming unions themselves.
And politically, it's a statistical fact that the higher the union density in the state, the higher percentage of workers, especially white workers, who end up voting Democratic at election time. That is first because local unions supply a lot of the cash to support local progressive candidates but it's also because they help frame local politics in terms of working class issues and concerns and drive the debate in ways that help progressive candidates.
You can't just love the working class when it serves rhetorical purposes, but ignore all the day-to-day fights that matter. This was indisputably one of the labor fights that mattered and most of the progressive media and progressives on social media just downplayed it or ignored it altogether.
This is just a massive political fail for the whole progressive movement.