Continuing from Part I… The impact of neoliberal policies during Reagan’s two terms (1980-1988) ravaged the poor, working poor, and blue collar workers, including laborers belonging to unions. It has, since, only gotten worse as you’ll see going forward.
Though neoliberalism was beginning to take hold in fits and starts during the early 1970s, it was Reagan who made neoliberalism the prevailing ideology in America for the next four decades.
With the Louis Powell memo written to the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1971 imploring business to take a more active role in influencing laws and citizen’s valorization of capitalism, and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court in 1976, business interests have been shaping politics and policy in business’ favor since the 1970s. It is noteworthy that Reagan, one year into his presidency, fired 12,000 unionized air traffic controllers in 1981. He also did away with free public college as governor of California, and as President, initiated the student loan crisis we’re dealing with today. These moments are not disconnected or unrelated but speak entirely to the growing ideology and primacy of neoliberalism within our government that was initiated decades ago; that government should no longer be responsive to the people, but adhere to business and the wealthy first and foremost.
Nevermind the fact that unions were credited for helping to build America’s middle class, Reagan’s actions represented a clear and sustained assault on unionism, particularly public sector unions, and those who benefitted from them.
In 1983 A Nation was Risk was commissioned and published by the Reagan Administration with recommendations to apply a business-friendly approach to education by standardizing curriculum and initiating more standardized testing.
Timing is everything…A Nation at Risk took place at a time where the country was in an extreme economic downturn and is directly connected to the tenuous economic situation most Americans were experiencing. As such, this report was one of the first times we see public schooling explicitly linked to our nation’s economic condition. Before then, we’d been told public education was to yield critical thinkers, to prepare people to participate in a democratic society, and for personal growth and development, but here, the message was public education should serve the nation’s corporate interests and meet the desires of capitalism. This represented an enormous paradigm shift in both purpose and mission of public education.
We cannot underestimate how impactful and influential a Nation at Risk was at the time it was published. The US in the late 1970’s was coming out of a time of high unemployment, high inflation, gasoline rationing, shrinking value of the dollar, less jobs paying a livable wage, rampant outsourcing and offshoring otherwise known as globalization; deindustrialization and automation; any and everything corporations could do to shrink labor costs and avoid regulations and oversight – all to maximize corporate profits while shrinking worker power and wages – which is why we see wealth inequality explode during the early 80s until today.
Politicians and the wealthy HAD to have an explanation for the American people as to why they were having such a difficult time in their own economic situations while avoiding being held liable for why so many were suffering. Capitalism and corporate greed could never be implicated for the precarious occupational situation most Americans were in – which still holds true today. But what did make for a convenient and readily available scapegoat, was schools. “Bad” schooling was identified as the cause of people’s economic woes – and largely, that’s remained unchanged and THIS marks the beginning of what we know of the education reform movement.
The more folks blame schools for unfairness and the lack of economic opportunity, the more they won’t hold the rich, and the powerful – and the politicians who do their bidding, accountable for a reality that they, both, created and maintain. The focus is deliberately kept isolated on schools, not them… not how they profit from inequality, and not how inequality is worsening in their favor only.
For the past forty years, perhaps longer, Americans have been programmed to view our schools as meritocratic, egalitarian spaces. Through schools, students supposedly show what they’re willing to work for, which is assumed to rationalize what they deserve in their future.
It seems to make sense. If a student gets good grades and a good education – whatever that really means, they would get a good job with good pay; if they get crappy grades and a crappy education, then they should expect a crappy job with crappy pay and it is the student – the sole individual – who supposedly controls that future. Here, the individual alone, regardless of circumstance, is responsible for their own fate – and the public should not feel a sense of responsibility to others. What’s missing in all this is that schools have long been identified as spaces that reinforce social, and cultural inequality under the mirage of meritocracy…all WHILE the economy surrounding and influencing schooling, is progressively becoming more hostile to workers and potential workers. But in schools however, politicians and the affluent can keep blaming schools for the growing disparities within our society that they themselves orchestrated. It’s an effective conceptual misdirection. Schools are, and have long been, blamed for the result of decades of neoliberal policies and corporate greed that’s been crushing people. Contemporary schooling does not, and can not, make up for the realities of living in a capitalist economy.
We have to always remember, the guiding principle for corporations is profit maximization through: reducing taxation, avoiding regulations, and accessing the cheapest source of labor… all of these things have a negative impact on domestic career opportunities and income. All of this is occurring at the same time where the American workforce is more formally educated than ever! Think about how those things are existing at the same time!
Labor researchers have been warning about an over-degreed society since the mid-seventies (Freeman, 1976) which suggests that a lack of educational attainment is not why most people in our country are suffering economically; after all, most jobs that are available do not require a college degree to execute. But the over abundance of college degrees has led to an artificial and arbitrary raising of minimum qualifications to get jobs that never needed them in the first place.
The shift toward neoliberalism is about consolidating political and corporate power, shifting greater profits upward to the top, and weakening collective power and coalition building.
This reality is the root of most modern problems we deal with today and also explains the attacks on unions and why those behind the attacks are all ultra rich white guys. That the attacks on unions are orchestrated by the richest among us, is not coincidental. Unions provide greater power to workers as a collective, more than could ever be achieved as isolated individuals. Unions provide the ability to collectively bargain for fair wages and salaries, health benefits, safe working conditions and potentially hold employers accountable for not delivering on workplace promises. Unions reduce power at the top, and cut into their profit. They don’t want that.
With defined positions and standardized salary schedules across the membership, unions – for the most – equalize earnings among employees and opportunities for promotion regardless of gender or race. Unionized work in both private and public sectors is responsible for the growth of America’s middle class since WWII, with public sector work being singularly responsible for enabling Black people to access the middle class as well. The private sector, entrepreneurship was not the avenue.
Could owning one’s own business help provide a living for that person and their families? Sure, but at no time did private entrepreneurship provide Black people with the wholesale social mobility and economic advancement that work in the public sector did.
You’ll notice the decline in union membership started well before Reagan took office so allow me to briefly explain.
Two phenomena were taking place:
The emergence of Right-to-Work states as hubs for manufacturing, away from union heavy metropolises in the Northeast and Midwest like Philly and Detroit, toward more rural states without unions that could collectively bargain meant there was very little union membership or affiliation…Two, here is where we start seeing globalization through outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing jobs to places with far cheaper labor costs and far less regulatory oversight…take a look at where your clothes and electronics are made and make the connections.
As you see in the graph above, the consequences of sustained de-unionization. The lower the rate of union membership, the lower percent of middle-class aggregate income… meaning collectively less money was earned by the middle class as union membership declined.
And here we see the impact of the erosion of unions…the less membership in unions, and thus the less strength of unions, the greater share of income is shifted and consolidated toward those at the top.
Black folks have always had to contend with the systemic injustices of capitalism, while we simultaneously have to deal with centuries of injustice due to racism and racial exploitation. That dual experience is real, distinct, and unique. What unions provide for Black people is greater, not total, but greater protection from racial discrimination and the cut-throat-ness of capitalism at work. Unions are good for American workers across the board, but unions have been and are that much more vital for the professional trajectory of Black folks. And so, we have to understand that attacks on unions has everything to do with reducing economic opportunity and collective unity for everyone, and is far more consequential for Black folks who rely on unions to maintain some semblance of professional objectivity in work.
While a lot of focus on neoliberalism has been dedicated on its attractiveness to pro-corporate elites in cosmopolitan cities, we also have to recognize the growing acceptance of neoliberalism in the desegregated South (Hohle, 2012), as a form tax resistance, from White folks who refused to accept that their tax dollars would fund services and public employment of Black citizens as more Black folks gained access to everything public through federal legislation. The more the public included Black beneficiaries and Black employment, the more we see white folks attacking “Big Government” and “Big Government programs” like affordable housing, universal healthcare, and yes, public education. Public services and public spending was all good when only white people could benefit, but after 1964, we started seeing whites complain about government spending. This has everything to do with race.
The valorizing of the “private” is about race. Private connotes White and whiteness, and thus superior; on the flip side, “public” is deemed to be deficient because the public is the space that black people, theoretically, have equal access to (Hohle, 2012; Kraus, 2004). And as Black folks gained access to the public, the public was deemed “bad” as it was tainted by Black presence.
Here’s what played out when Black folks gained access to integrated public education following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954… in Prince Edward County, Virginia, rather than integrate schools as mandated by the courts, and have their tax dollars going to fund the educations of both Black and white children, the white residents petitioned to have the state pay for privately-run segregated academies for white children only, leaving Black students of that county without a public school to attend for five years! Discrimination is legal in private settings so “whites only” schools were legal (MacLean, 2017).
Was this racist? Absolutely, but this was not only a gross expression of racism, but also one of neoliberalism – privatizing and profiting off the public obligation to educate children.
This is where vouchers and school choice started.
Look here, the attacks on unions, both private and public have everything to do with white elites trying to maintain their position atop the financial and social hierarchy. Here are the racist roots of anti-unionism and the effort to prevent economic solidarity. We still have 27 Right to Work States with this, as its starting point
This is what White Southerners, and anti-union folks in the South, which brought about Right to Work laws, were trying to avoid – solidarity between white and black folks, and economic and social parity…This is a picture from the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas in 1934…women also played a crucial role in the STFU… So here, the potential to facilitate equality among poor white folks, black folks and women… and in that, shifting power from affluent whites to regular folk, created an economic problem and a threat to white primacy…
Understand, the South at the time of Right to Work’s initiation was overwhelmingly agricultural with Black folks being the ones working the land. Having the availability to organize, collectively bargain for fair wages and benefits, the ability to determine output, would have put so much power in the hands of Black folks who were one generation removed from slavery, alongside struggling white folks, could never be allowed to happen. And so, it wasn’t. This is why we have un-unionized Right to Work laws and Right to Work states.
This is to not suggest that unions didn’t have horrible practices concerning race. They did. For the longest time, Black teachers were even forbidden from joining NEA…and labor unions, particularly around construction, were notoriously awful. Here, this picture depicts Black resistance to racist labor unions. The significance here is clear. If a construction site is a union site in a union state, but Black folks are forbidden or discouraged from joining, that’s a long-term project and job opportunity that is unavailable to black folks…that’s a problem.
Things have changed somewhat in the labor unions, but racism still clearly exists within them; which, incidentally is also why labor unions, like police unions, are never attacked by politicians or in the media the way public sector unions are.
This is a graph of Black union membership compared to Black representation in the overall workforce. While those numbers look low, remember we are only 13-14% of the US population. But also recognize that Black membership in unions outpaces our participation in the workforce overall… which indicates that where Black people have the opportunity to join unions, far more often than not, we do.
Here you can see the rate of unionization has been in steady decline, but that is primarily due to the erosion of private sector unions through the use of temp workers, at-will employees, foreign labor by shifting operations overseas, and jobs being housed in Right to Work states… Still, you can recognize the highest rate of union membership has been and still is Black folks.
And here you see the rate of union affiliation among the public sector is roughly 25% points higher and has remained pretty constant through the years. And not coincidentally, what unions are most often under attack in the media and by politicians?
We’ll continue exploring this topic in Part III…
