Unions and Democracy: Theda Skocpol
November 16th, 2023
”Unions used to be one of a whole series of interlocking organizations that workers and their families participated in, not just at work.”
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University and co-author of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working-Class Voters are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. We learn how unions are true laboratories of democracy and why their demise has eroded our democratic culture.
Unions were at the heart of local communities well beyond bargaining for contracts. They were part of recreational and social life, and even the churches were aligned with unions. There was a sense of solidarity for fellow union members, pride in their work, and a natural alignment on politics. If elections are about voting for who is on your side, then politics is partly about who we are — and who they are. American democracy is at an inflection point and the question is whether the news who are engaged are willing to practice and defend democracy.
Learn More About Theda:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/thedaskocpol/home
Follow Mila on Twitter:
Sponsor:
Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight! Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful.
Follow Future Hindsight on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/futurehindsightpod/
Love Future Hindsight? Take our Listener Survey!
http://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=6tI0Zi1e78vq&ver=standard
Take the Democracy Group’s Listener Survey!
https://www.democracygroup.org/survey
Want to support the show and get it early?
https://patreon.com/futurehindsight
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Theda Skocpol
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
-
Theda Skocpol Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting future hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful, all lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
When we think about unions today, we think about the writers and actors strikes, the averted a strike by UPS workers over the summer, the efforts to unionize at Amazon warehouses and Starbucks coffee shops and, of course, the United Auto Workers. We don't think much about the time when the labor movement was strong and unions were dioramas of democratic society. They were not only a way to bargain collectively, but a way of life where you had each other's backs and you were in solidarity with your community in all realms of your civic life. In a way, unions are the true laboratories for democracy. And so the demise of unions over the past five decades wasn't just bad for wages and job security, it degraded the Commons.
To look at the repercussions of the downfall of unions and what we can learn for our own democracy practice today, we're joined by Theda Skocpol. She's the Victor S Thomas Professor of Government and sociology at Harvard University and co-author of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party. She was on the show back in 2020 with Caroline Tervo, with whom she co-edited Upending American Politics.
Theda, welcome back. Thank you for joining us.
Theda Skocpol: [00:02:01] Yeah, it's really nice to be here again.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:04] So last time you were on the show, we talked about grassroots organizing on the right and the left and the capacity of people to work together to effect an outcome. You argued that politics is best understood as organized teamwork, and
from your new book, it's clear to me that unions are the ultimate teamwork organization. They're a microcosm of a rich civic life. I didn't quite understand the social dimension of union membership until I read your book, where you take a close look at the communities of western Pennsylvania. Tell us more about the social and community ties of unions. What did it look like in the heyday of Big Labor?
Theda Skocpol: [00:02:44] This book, which I did with my partner Lainey Newman, started out as her senior thesis, and she comes from western Pennsylvania and comes from a family that included union members there and in other regions. I also grew up in Michigan, south of Detroit, where as I was growing up, it was sort of taken for granted that unions were a presence in the community, that union leaders were people that the television stations would regularly go to, to hear their opinions on public affairs. And so our book is an attempt to understand what changed from that peak of at least US union presence and its strong presence in the blue collar industrial labor force in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and the recent times where unions, as organizations are much dwindled, particularly among industrial workers, and a lot of the remaining union members, even those who are still union members in the same industries, are voting for Republicans in the Donald Trump era, where once they used to take it for granted, as one interviewee told us, nobody would think of voting for Republicans. So. As we looked into what had changed, we realized that the standard accounts of unions as collapsing, as big organizations with lots of dues paying members and financial clout that they gained from member dues, clout in elections from their sheer numbers. But it wasn't the only reason that the union presence in workers' lives and in the lives of their neighbors and families virtually collapsed. Laney, in particular, was at home in western Pennsylvania during the pandemic, and she had a chance to interview on Zoom and later on in person, many retirees who could offer vivid pictures of what life was like at the height of the labor movement and what it is now. And we realized, both from those interviews and from our own individual travels in the communities of western Pennsylvania and other areas of the Rust Belt, that unions used to be one of a whole series of interlocking organizations that workers and their families participated in, not just at work, not just to bargain for contracts, but for a recreational life. Social life. Their churches were usually aligned with unions. They were at the heart of local communities. And so that was the insight that got us going. And the book fleshes it out in a whole series of other ways and talks about the consequences of that kind of social underpinning withering away or disappearing in many parts of the United States.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:44] Well, this strong social underpinning and the idea of having each other's backs wasn't just that you were side by side with someone who might save your life in a dangerous job, to everything that you just mentioned, but it's also that there was a recognition that the unions were the best way to get improvements in working conditions and job security. They were in it together against the company. And today when people talk about solidarity, it feels really abstract to me personally. But here in the examples in the book, it seems quite concrete. And there was a real loyalty to each other and to the union. But because of the decline in industry, now workers have perversely, in a way, switched their loyalties to the company. How has this shift contributed to the demise in solidarity?
Theda Skocpol: [00:06:38] Well, once the steel industry contracted to a huge extent, the remaining plants feel like a very fragile job situation to many workers, who often drive in from long distances. And so they're susceptible to the kind of messages that I think a lot of big employers have been putting out for a long time, that "your fortunes are our fortunes," and "we're the ones who can try to get a bargain in Washington, D.C.," or "we've got to have the economic resources rather than you, so that we can invest in your future." Now, they don't always invest. So I don't think it would be fair to say that working people of any background simply trust employers. But they did learn in many of the Rust Belt areas after the 1980s that they couldn't count on the Union to survive with enough strength to, for example, persuade politicians to protect an industry. Now, you know, the UAW is a little bit of an exception. They actually did work with the Obama administration to persuade the federal government to bail out what was left of the auto industry. And I think that has probably is part of the reason why the UAW is strong enough to mount a fairly strategically creative strike now. One of the things we found out as we worked on this book is that it makes a very big difference what the industry is, what the geography is, what the racial composition and the gender composition of the workforce is, and just how the union is structured. So we make a big point of comparing the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Steelworkers. They were both a big presence in western Pennsylvania. They still are to some degree, but they're structured very differently because electrical workers work on projects and move around. They're not as embedded in workplaces that are in particular medium sized mill towns. And their union has come up with creative ways for decades to connect to the personal and family lives of workers who may not all be working with each other all the time or in the same
location, whereas the steelworkers were much more based on workplaces that stayed there and that were part of a neighborhood that was right around the plant. So when that went away, some of their ways of doing things didn't adapt very well to the new realities.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:13] Mm hmm. Yeah. I thought that was really interesting, actually, the history of the Electrical Union, because it's centered around the craft as opposed to the plant, like the United Steelworkers. And you write that the members of this union continue to vote reliably Democratic and even self-described as progressive. So what can you tell us about their experience and their practices, and how that could be a template for the future of working class politics? And, you know, it's different, obviously, than the steelworkers.
Theda Skocpol: [00:09:41] Yeah, I mean, I want to be careful because we don't have good enough data to tell union by union, industry by industry, how workers are voting, because I think their unions may take internal polls. We didn't have access to much of that, except some illusions that some of our interviewees made. But we did use what data we could, and it looked as if the electrical workers are sticking with Democrats a little bit more in this period. They're organized around skills, and they work on projects, and those projects move from location to location. So a given working man, or these days a working woman, may very well work with different people in different periods of time over the years. The union seems to have adapted to that by having a newsletter that tell the stories about people's personal and family lives, and their kind of triumphs in their social life in a way that communicates to a dispersed workforce where the teams are forming and reforming. And we suspect that that way of doing things may be more appropriate for a lot of unions now. And think about the the irony here. Historically, craft unions were always considered more conservative. Because they were built around a skill, and they tended to be historically less willing to accept newcomers into their ranks than even the industrial unions. But now the tables may have been turned because the conditions for communicating and work and doing politics are different, and the old underpinnings of very localised unions have eroded.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:24] Yeah, well, talking about the social underpinnings of local unions, social cohesion is so important. And in the absence of the local union's strength, which is, you know, in union halls and union advocacy, which has become centralised
when industry essentially fell very hard, and/or disappeared entirely. There were other social cohesion opportunities in megachurches, in gun clubs, which were permeated by the NRA. So in your mind, which factor has had the most impact in the breakdown of the solidarity among workers and the erosion of community among all of these other factors?
Theda Skocpol: [00:12:11] For the steelworkers in particular, the decline of the sort of locally tight knit web of not just the union and union halls, which were places where people held weddings and social events, as well as bargaining sessions. We found a pamphlet that told us where all the union halls were in 1960, so we could track how many of them have disappeared. Well, that would be virtually all of them. And we did a little bit of tallying where the new gun clubs are in the same region. And I had data on where the Tea Parties emerged around the time of Barack Obama's presidency. And, you know, people don't stop wanting to interact with one another and socialize with one another. I do think family life has changed in ways that are really a part of this story, because where working men -- and they were mostly working men -- in the 50s and 60s and 70s would, you know, hang out at the local ethnic hall or bar after work and continue to interact with one another. Nowadays, even if those bars and ethnic halls were there, which they are not, they probably would be going home because the gender division of labor in the paid workplace and at home has changed. But leaving that aside, I mean, I think a lot of working people, often driving considerable distances, go to gun clubs and megachurches and they find a chance to socialize there, to engage in recreational activities, to worship. A lot of megachurches have specialized groups that are part of them that meet. It's not just one big congregation. And of course, these are the institutions that right wing Republicans have increasingly woven their own ties to. Politics is partly about who we are and who they are. It's also, the we comes from, who you interact with. That's the insight that carries over from the work I've done before on things like the Tea Party and voluntary associations of many kinds to this study of unions, which are a particular kind of membership group in a more fighting context, because they are pushing for advantages in their workplaces. But they were a huge community presence, and that community presence is just not there. And so working people have sought out other outlets, and those outlets happen to be linked to people who are spreading very conservative messages, even radical right wing messages.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:43] Yes, even radical right wing messages. They are everywhere now. They're ubiquitous. I would say that my main takeaway when it comes to politicking is that changing people's hearts and minds is all about investing long term in local communities, having a presence, and really being enmeshed in social life. And you just made a mention that people don't hang out anymore on Fridays after work to have a drink. They go home, take care of the kids. So I'm curious about the overall effect of Americans not being very socially or civically interconnected anymore on democracy writ large. How does a lack of social involvement affect our politics and our willingness to participate in democracy?
Theda Skocpol: [00:15:29] Well, I think there are social involvements, and part of what we're arguing in this book is that new ones have taken the place of old ones, and they happen to be linked to more conservative or right wing politics in this era. But it is probably true that individual families and individual people are more isolated now, particularly since electronics have taken over everybody's life and everyone is sitting around staring at screens. I think it makes democracy more abstract for people, and one of the things that we know in the social sciences is that the more abstract the arguments, the more they can tend toward the right. That's been known in public opinion studies for a very long time. If you ask Americans back at the dawn of public opinion in this union era, do you believe in the free market or individual freedom or government control? They'd all say, you know, the free market and individual freedom. But then you ask them, do you want investments in education, social security, health care, unemployment insurance? They'd all say yes to that. So it's easier to be concrete and specific if you're interacting and thinking about real world problems or real world enjoyments. So that means Democrats have got to find a way to be everywhere and not just arrive two months before the election. I think that lesson is being learned. It's hard, but I think that you're seeing in some key states like Georgia and Wisconsin and in some Union states like Nevada, you see the learning that you have to be there all the time. You have to be prepared to kind of be with people in their local challenges, their family challenges. And the messages are just sort of inserted, by the way, they're not delivered in some kind of separate package. I actually don't believe most people approach politics by studying issues. I think they look for who seems to be on their side. And that explains the mystery of how Donald Trump, who is not on anybody's side -- let's face it; and lots of people sort of know that. Americans are not fools. He's not on anybody's side but himself, and he's a real estate and kind of showman from New York.
How could he persuade people in western Pennsylvania that he was on their side? Well, for one thing, he went there. But he also knows how to signal a certain kinds of anger, resentment and moral commitments that people say, "well, yeah, he understands." I've had people in interviews say to me, "well, I know he's not going to be able to build the wall, but he's trying."
Mila Atmos: [00:18:11] Right, right. Well, when I was reading this section about some of the people that you interviewed saying, you know, he may be telling us a lie, but at least he's talking to us. And it felt a little bit like a sad love song, you know, tell me lies. Stay with me.
Theda Skocpol: [00:18:24] You know, Lainey's interviews found a lot of that. And I think that a lot of not just blue collar workers, but a lot of Americans back in 2016 decided Donald Trump is brash and rude, and we don't necessarily approve of that. We don't want our children to do that. But he's telling it like it is.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:44] Yes.
Theda Skocpol: [00:18:44] And I don't think we should be surprised. I think people in general, that's what they want out of politics. First of all, they want a sense that the leaders are headed in the direction they want to go and that they understand the challenges they face.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:59] Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:03] We're taking a short break to hear about our sponsor, Shopify,
and we'll be back with Theda Skocpol shortly.
Watson and Crick. Socrates and Plato. But what about the perfect duo when it comes to growing your business? That's you and Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch of your online shop stage to the first real life store stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere from their all in one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system, wherever and whatever you're
selling. Shopify has got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers, with the internet's best converting checkout: 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. Sell more with less effort thanks to Shopify Magic, your AI powered all star. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, and Shopify is the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Plus, Shopify's ward winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. What I love about Shopify is how no matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase. Go to shopify.com/hopeful now, to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com/hopeful.
And now let's return to my conversation with Theda Skocpol.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:16] It is unlikely that Western Pennsylvanians are going to change back into the blue column anytime soon, especially since you also just mentioned that Democrats are increasingly perceived as being urban, and also, I think, are signaling that they like, read books and go to college as opposed to going hunting and fishing necessarily, which of course is not true. I know lots of Democrats who go hunting and fishing, but to be clear, job security and a living wage, those are for everybody. And so you mentioned just now that some Democrats have learned their lessons in places like Nevada, Wisconsin. What should be a priority for the Democratic Party in order to recapture this demographic? Or maybe what have you seen that you feel they're really doing right, right now, in these places?
Theda Skocpol: [00:22:00] Well, you know, even in Pennsylvania, which I've studied Pennsylvania quite a bit. A fair number of the chapters in Upending American Politics, which we talked about last time, were about Pennsylvania. Even in Pennsylvania, if you contrast the Hillary Clinton campaign to the Biden campaign, I mean, Biden comes across and makes a point of coming across as having grown up in Pennsylvania and nearby areas, having been part of a working class community. And he talks that way, I think pretty authentically. I mean, he slurs some sentences and he always has, and that gets a lot of attention in the New York Times. Endless attention. But I think for regular people who hear him, they think, "well, yeah, he at least understands the the kind of
community we live in because he came from there and he speaks about that." His campaign also made a point of going to western Pennsylvania and to northeast Pennsylvania around Luzerne County, both of which are kind of industrial areas in decline, where the Democrats have suffered massive losses to the Trump Republicans. And so Biden ended up losing those areas by less than Hillary Clinton lost them. Well, that makes a big difference if you lose by less in dozens of counties, it adds up. And furthermore, Erie County actually barely went back to Biden. So it's not just Allegheny, it's Erie too. I think the being there is partly that a campaign better make sure it's there. When I was doing interviews after the 2016 election, people in various parts of the country told me Hillary Clinton's campaign never came here. At the last minute, they sent some young man from Brooklyn who told us to do the wrong thing here. And that theme I heard in different parts of the country, in medium sized cities that were in sort of industrial decline. So when you hear exactly the same words, you have a feeling maybe that's what really happened. So that's part of it. But I think the places where the Democrats have been able to rebuild the most or gain to a surprising degree, as they did in Georgia, it's by being there year-round, by tapping into local networks. Find out what the local networks are, whatever they are. Find a way to be part of them. That's the lesson. And I know it sounds naive, but it's kind of obvious in a way.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:35] Yes, it is obvious.
Theda Skocpol: [00:24:35] Those are the people that folks are going to listen to, and they don't listen to a speech. They pick up ideas bit by bit. And of course you have to do that, especially now, because Democrats are competing in a, if I can speak in my partisan identity, are competing in an environment that's dominated by right wing media, which is a big factor in all of this, and it hands out division and hatred and fear 24/7.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:02] Yes. So much. I want to pivot here a little bit to the current ongoings in the union sphere. 2023 has seen its fair share of union strikes. And I'm thinking here of the successes of the averted strike by the UPS union and the resolved strike of the Writers Union. When it comes to UPS, of course, the US economy relies so much on parcel service delivery, and COVID made that reliance even more intense. So clearly there was high motivation to avert their strike altogether, and writers were able to get higher wages and some concessions from the studios on artificial intelligence. So
what do you make of their success, and how do you think it shapes public perceptions about unions?
Theda Skocpol: [00:25:47] Well, I've had to pull together some of this for a lecture I gave in the class I teach with Mary Waters at Harvard American Society and Public Policy. And, you know, unions are doing a lot more. Public opinion is shifted. It's now much more favorable to unions. More Americans saying that unions are important, that they make things better for employees and wage earners than any time since decades ago. Now, that shift in opinion is more among college educated people than it is the non-college degreed people that are often thought of as the core of the unions that Lainey and I wrote about in Rust Belt Union Blues. But overall, public opinion does matter. There have been more union organizing efforts than ever before. There have been more strikes and more favorable election results for union organizing efforts that have gone to elections. However, the percentage of the labor force that's in unions continues to go down. It has gone down again in the last year, even as all these other indicators of union promise go up. And I think part of the answer to why that could be is that a lot of unionizing efforts now are among professionals and college educated people in smaller workplaces. Now, that's obviously not true for like Amazon or the big transportation companies. And I do think that this UAW strike is extremely important, not because the auto industry is going to be employing anywhere near as many people as it employed years ago. I mean, the need for paid labor is simply going down and a lot of these manufacturing industries. But if that strike is not successful, at least partway in reaching the full range of goals, and it looks like it will be, but it's it's not settled yet. And during all of this, my understanding is that autoworker jobs are going to the South into non-union states. And that has always bedeviled the American labor movement. I mean, we talk about the heyday. The heyday was one third of the labor force in unions in the 1950s. That's so far under Scandinavia, Britain, a lot of other countries. We just have to remember the fact that states have so much say over whether unions can organize successfully has always been a big problem, and the prospect that you're going to get pro-union labor organizing legislation through the US Congress is about the same as the prospect of getting anything else through the US Congress. Zero.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:37] Practically Zero. Not just practically. Truly zero. Well, you know, speaking of the UAW strike, you know, you mentioned the relative strength it has because of the auto bailout under Obama. And, of course, we know that President
Biden went to the picket line in Michigan in September and that the president of the UAW, Shawn Fein, refused to meet with the former president. And he said, I'm going to quote him here, "I don't think the man" referring to Trump "has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for." You know, you said it depends on whether it is even partway successful. What would be in your mind a successful outcome of the UAW strikes? Because, of course, you also just mentioned the befuddlement of how states can allow right to work laws, and that all the foreign cars that are made in the United States are made in right to work states. And so those, of course, continue to be in production. But Ford is not. And so how do you square that circle as a union worker, as an auto worker, and maybe as as a public?
Theda Skocpol: [00:29:51] Well, I don't think the circle is going to be entirely squared, but I think that the UAW is going to succeed in getting a pretty major wage and benefit hike out of this. They'll get far more than the employers wanted to dole out. I think probably some of the questions are how the electric car investments and how I use is regulated. It's impossible to regulate that completely. Even if the companies agree to something, they can get around it. You know, I actually think that that one has to hope that the UAW does pretty well that the strike ends before it does too much damage to the macro economy, and that the Democratic Party and Joe Biden are reelected. Joe Biden is a throwback to an earlier age. He is a solidly pro-labor president, and there are a whole series of things they can do and are doing that will give a little boost to whatever unions can bargain for, especially in the area of whether new investments go into plants that do or do not resist unionization. So I think that could unfold. But American politics could not be more uncertain right now.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:08] For sure. Well, there is a point to be made that when you raise wages in union jobs, it raises wages even in non-union jobs. And I know this was true during the pandemic when people started demanding $15 an hour in minimum wage. You know, you had a hard time hiring people for less, even if it wasn't on the books.
Theda Skocpol: [00:31:30] I agree, and I think that happens even in areas where unions are not there. We know, there's good research, that shows that unionization raises wages and benefits in the region. But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised in the auto industry if the UAW gets a pretty good deal in Michigan, in the northeast in general, that you see some people leaving some of those southern areas to come north, and that
could result in raises in those areas. Even if there's no union, I think there are spillover effects. There's good scholarship on that.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:03] Right, right. Well, so we are a pro-democracy podcast. So we're always thinking about practicing democracy in our daily lives and recognizing that we cannot go back in time. What are the key things from the heyday of the labor movement days that make democracy a lived experience and that we can adapt today and going forward?
Theda Skocpol: [00:32:26] Well, I think we've talked about some of them. Building relationships and making sure that those relationships are across different spheres of people's lives. That's so much better than trying to deliver messages in the abstract. And we know that from research on organizations, and we know that from research on politics. So that's number one. You know, democracy is difficult. And one of the things that the union story underlines for me, that I've really sensed in other spheres as well, is that people need something to oppose in order to define who they are. That is not a popular message in academia. I'm surrounded by people who think that it should be all Kumbaya, that we should love everyone the world over and include everyone at every moment. Obviously, we want to make sure we're including those who have been excluded or are vulnerable, but it helps to define something that you're opposed to at the same time that you're defining what you're for. I don't think that's going to unfold the same way outside of a union context, but social movements often do that. You know, in some ways, the Republican Party extremists these days. They've abandoned any pretense that they're about fair elections, or everybody can participate. So they make easy villains. Take advantage of it. That's what I say. Not in a mean way. There's no need to be mean. But...
Mila Atmos: [00:34:11] But it's clear. It's clear. It's clear Republicans today are essentially anti-democratic.
Theda Skocpol: [00:34:18] Most of them. Not all.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:19] Most of them not not all, not all. This is true. And especially, I think at the state level, there are a lot of Republicans who still, you know, work across the aisle, depending what state you're in.
Theda Skocpol: [00:34:27] Well, the other lesson that's obviously true, and that is state level politics matters. And I think, you know, one of the things about the heyday of the labor movement is that they got too focused on the federal government. And then I think when unions went into decline, they tried to maintain their lobbying staffs in Washington rather than their roots locally. That was a mistake, because you really have got to be able to contest state legislatures, for example. I mean, that lesson gets driven home all the time, and not just in the labor sphere. So...
Mila Atmos: [00:34:58] Yeah. Otherwise we wouldn't have right to work laws in some states. Yes...
Theda Skocpol: [00:35:02] Not just some states, a lot of statees.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:04] Many states. A lot of states today. I know when you talked about it in the book, it started as just these two states, and now it's almost everywhere. Almost everywhere is also, of course, not correct, but it's much more common in states across the United States today. So I wonder, is there something that you learned in doing this book that you didn't already know?
Theda Skocpol: [00:35:25] You know, Lainey comes from a union region and a union family. So I think she had a sense of some of the things. But both of us learned a great deal from the fact that she could sit down with so many older workers and get their reflections on how things had changed. And I have to say that as a scholar, both in this research and in the Tea Party research, I did earlier in the work that I did on the various resistance groups during the Trump era, I've learned that it's just very valuable to combine the big picture, which you have to document through, you know, statistical studies and national surveys, or at least regional surveys to combine that with listening to what people have to say. Because a lot of times people will put you on to things you just didn't imagine before. And one of the lessons of this research was about race. We deliberately studied an industry and a region that has been overwhelmingly white the whole time. Women and African Americans are a greater presence in the steelworkers over time. But it's an overwhelmingly white guy industry, then and now. And as we did this research, we had a lot of colleagues who would say to us, well, isn't it all about race? Aren't they all turning to Donald Trump or Republicans, away from Democrats
because of race? Well, there's something to that. I mean, the perception that Democrats are in the cities and are doing things for people of color and privileged people who live in cities. You can resent both at the same time. And I think they do in many cases. But it isn't only that. And one of the interviewees told Lainey that he had talked to a friend in West Virginia who said, yeah, he was part of the union. He'd learned through the Union to fight with his brothers. No matter what color. We're in it together. We have to work together to get where we want to go. And then he laughed and he said, "but if I weren't in the mineworkers, I'd be in the Ku Klux Klan." That sticks with me, because I think there's a tendency now that we're awakening more and more to race in America, to turn it into one big, unchangeable attitude. People are racist or they're not racist. Well, everybody in America has racial stereotypes floating around in their lives. And there's no way that the steelworkers of western Pennsylvania are more racist now than they were in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. But you can have countervailing loyalties, countervailing lessons that can reduce, if not eliminate, but reduce the relevance of those racial fears and resentments. So I think that's a very important insight.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:35] Mm hmm. Yeah, I totally agree. When I read that anecdote in the book, I also thought that's fascinating that this person would deliver that in the same sentence, in the same story, to say the union has mitigated his racism. And if it weren't for the union, he'd be and the Klan. But the other thing here, what I'm hearing, and I also read numerous times in the book, is that really the workers stood together and the villain was the company in a way. You know, they stood together in order to fight being exploited by the company. And I think nothing has changed there in a way. You know, the companies are still trying to get the workers to work for less money so they can continue to make more money and do more stock buybacks and other things like that, that benefit the bottom line of the shareholder or management as opposed to the everyday worker.
Theda Skocpol: [00:39:24] Well, one thing that came out very clearly in the interviews was that at the heyday of the union movement, it was awareness of those struggles in the here and now, but also a sense of history. The first generations of kind of highly unionized workers had either in their younger years or in their families, they remembered the stories of what it was like before there were any unions at all in those industries. So that was very striking. We really did get a sense of history, as well as pride in your work and a sense of solidarity. We're all part of this. And so, you know, that
offers some possibility of hope for now, because you are hearing unionizing workers and union workers now saying enough is enough. You know, inequality keeps going up and up. They keep making money and they take it all for themselves. That's a big theme in the auto workers strike. So we have gone through a period in the late 20th and early 21st century of just astonishing inequalities in where the fruits of the productive economy go. They're going to the top. They're going to financiers. I have enough of a sense of American history to remember from my readings that originally it wasn't so much working men against business owners. It was working men against financiers. So I think financiers make a very good demon. And it happens to be true.
Mila Atmos: [00:41:00] Yes. Financiers make a very good demon. This is true. I mean, just talk to Robert Reich. He will tell you that every day, all day. But we always ask our guests how we can add another tool to our civic action tool kit. And we have heard several times on the podcast that the best pro-democracy action we can take is to join an organization. Obviously, being part of a union would accomplish that immediately. But beyond that, what are two things an everyday person can do to strengthen our participation in civic life?
Theda Skocpol: [00:41:32] This is what I would say to college educated people. Now, college educated people are the problem actually, because those of us who make our careers through higher education tend to think that we've put in a lot of work as individuals, and we're smart and we've achieved what we achieved kind of on our own with the help of a few self chosen partners. We also live lives that are much more apart from everybody else. I was thinking about over the course of my life when I was growing up in Wyandotte, Michigan, my father was a high school teacher. He was probably making less than some of the unionized workers in the local plants. And then we had the kind of values that middle class people have about education. But we weren't a lot better off or thinking of ourselves as in a different world from our union worker neighbors. Well, I mean, now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the only time that my husband and I interact with people who are not in the college world or the college educated world are when our son was growing up through children's activities, we were fortunate to live in a multi class town in a multi-ethnic town. So that was a great place to get to know people from different walks of life and the other places. We go to a diner every morning at 6:00 and the regulars are a mix of people. And I learn an enormous amount from just taking part in the informal conversation. There is no censoring of
speech. It's a very good thing, because nobody's worried about exactly what words you're saying. And people from very different occupations and very different ethnicities and races walk through there. The local police and the firemen come. So we have a sense of kind of how people look at things that you can't get any other way except by being there. And we're there every single morning of the year except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:47] Hmm. Yes. Make community where you are. Very important. So, looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Theda Skocpol: [00:43:56] Well, I do think that there's a surge of new engagement happening. People are paying attention. But the United States is at an inflection point and it could go different directions.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:09] Yes, it could. It could go in different directions. But I also agree that people are paying attention and that I think a lot of people are willing to get engaged or have been willing to get engaged since the election of Donald Trump. I think a lot of people felt like, oh, wow.
Theda Skocpol: [00:44:23] That's for sure. The question in the United States is always whether the ones who are engaged and are willing to practice and defend democracy live in the right places, because we live in a political system where the minority can win.
Mila Atmos: [00:44:38] Yes, indeed we do. We just had Steve Levitsky on with his book on the Tyranny of the Minority, and it was really eye-opening to understand how the counter-majoritarian institutions in this country enable a minority rule, essentially. So. Well, thank you very much, Theda, for joining us again on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Theda Skocpol: [00:44:59] I enjoyed it a lot and hope all your listeners keep being engaged.
Mila Atmos: [00:45:04] That's good advice! Thank you again.
Theda Skocpol is Victor S Thomas Professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and co-author of Rust Belt Union Blues: Why Working Class Voters Are Turning Away from the Democratic Party.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Neal Rickner. He's the chairman of the American Values Coalition, an organization that is growing a community of Americans empowered to lead with truth, reject extremism and misinformation, and defend democracy. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Seriously. We do! And actually quite a lot of people listen to the show there. If that's you, Hello! If not, you'll find punchy episode clips, full interviews, and more. Subscribe at youtube.com/FutureHindsight.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:46:21] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.