What Would Durkheim Do?

Gordon Lafer and Doug Henwood are debating union strategy, post-Wisconsin recall. It is an interesting conversation that has spilled over several places, including Corey Robin's blog.

Henwood says something in his essay that I find completely puzzling:

The United States would be a very different country had unions—which still have a lot of money and people to work with—spent the last five years agitating for single-payer health insurance.

As someone who spends a lot of time doing union work, in addition to my regular job, I find this assertion laughable. First, if my union were to spend any significant resources on this instead of organizing our workplace and trying to improve our bargaining position, the leadership would likely be voted out in the next union election. It would be awfully hard to convince people to join the union if we couldn't point to concrete things we've done to make their jobs better. Most people, it should be obvious, won't pay union dues for social movement organizing alone.

Second, in my union chapter, there are perhaps two dozen people who can be counted on to do organizing work, and we represent about 500 full-time faculty and more than that many part-time faculty, in addition to several hundred academic staff. You do the math in terms of organizing capacity. We can barely manage to organize our campus on bread-and-butter issues. There is simply no way to do significant social movement organizing (advocating for the working class in general) without first building a significant organizing capacity based on the workplace. The sad truth is that most unions are like mine. There isn't a lot of excess organizing capacity to spend on class mobilization.

Third, such a mobilization would probably have significantly shifted public opinion on the health care issue, but so what? That would not have gotten single-payer. Some Democrats might have been embolded by that popularity, but most don't give a shit what people think. The lobbyists' money matters a whole lot more than public opinion.

If labor had done what Henwood suggests, it would have been a fool's errand. We'd probably be listening to all sorts of folks on the left talk about how irrelevant unions are as a result.

I don't know what the path forward is for labor in these difficult times. But I'm sure that such unrealistic proposals and arguments are doing much good.