Organized Labor and the Congressional Democrats: Reconsidering the 1980s

Abstract

What happened to the power of labor unions in Congress in the 1980s? For many authors, the answer is straightforward: a decline in political capacity and an ensuing exclusion from the policy-making process. Declining union representation in the workforce, economic restructuring, the decreasing credibility of liberal policies, increased business spending on campaign finance and political mobilization, greater suburbanization, the growth of Reagan Democrats among union voters, public animosity toward special interests, and, of course, Republican presidential victories: all contributed to a decisive decline in union power. Yet, important as all these factors may be, there is good reason to believe that the situation of unions in Congress during the past decade was considerably more complicated than this roster of adversity would suggest. This article argues that energetic and well-coordinated political activity by unions, combined with important changes in the institutional and political setting in Congress, actually allowed unions to offset many of these difficulties. One result was a level of influence well beyond what we would expect on the basis of the usual accounts of unalleviated union decline. The conventional view argues that the Democratic congressional leadership turned its back on the labor movement during the 1980s. There is no chance that Democratic elected officials in the foreseeable future will permit a declining labor movement with little public support to regain the influence and stature it had in Congress in the mid-1960s, Washington Post reporter Thomas Byrne Edsall insisted in 1984.1 Similarly, University of California at Berkeley Business School Professor David Vogel argued in 1989 that not only has union membership been declining steadily but, even more important, ties between trade unions and