Matt Sinovic

Today and continuing through this weekend, families and friends will gather to spend time together and remember everything we have to be grateful for. We should be especially mindful of our good fortune, and remember those who have helped provide for us as a community.

Even as too many are out of work, underemployed or working for low wages, we have a lot to be thankful for. Unfortunately, the result of the midterm elections will mean fewer prominent voices speaking out for working families, but one constant will remain: the voice of labor unions.

Now more than ever, we should be thankful to labor unions and their members for standing up for the middle class.

Unions make the middle class strong by ensuring workers have a voice at work and in our democracy. Unions work on behalf of their members, who make up the fabric of our communities. Union members teach our children, they fight fires and police our streets. Union members are nurses, caring for us when we’re sick. Union members are government employees, sanitation workers, food and water quality inspectors, plumbers, carpenters and telecommunication workers. Union members keep our neighborhoods safe and communities strong, often doing jobs that we take for granted.

Unions are the only institution organized by, and represented by, America’s workers. It is their job to improve the quality of life for working families across our country. Corporations will try to squeeze every penny for their bottom line. Governments will try to slash public budgets, reducing pay for teachers, firefighters, police officers and nurses and cutting critical jobs along the way.

Even the most well intentioned corporations or governments aren’t required to be responsive to workers. Unions are the only ones fighting day in and day out, on behalf of America’s working men and women.

Some argue that the time for unions has passed. On the contrary, at a time when middle class families are struggling to recover from the Great Recession and when CEO pay has increased 937 percent since 1978, we need to strengthen unions, not attack them.

We should all be thankful for their passionate advocacy, especially considering the historical success of unions. Unions helped create the 40-hour work week. Unions fought for public education for all children, not to mention putting effective child labor laws in place. Unions fought for sick leave, paid vacation and weekends without work.

If you’re able to take paid time off over the Thanksgiving weekend, you can thank a union for that, too.

The success of unions has also been an indicator of success for our nation. As union membership expanded in the middle of the 20th century, the middle class expanded and income inequality was on the decline.

When union membership began to decline, wages stagnated and executive pay began to spike exponentially. Today, the average CEO makes 296 times the average worker (in 1978 a CEO made 30 times the average worker).

Union decline was no accident: It was the result of relentless right-wing corporate attacks. In the late 1970s, the U.S. began bleeding manufacturing jobs — a loss of 2.4 million jobs between 1979 and 1983.

Corporations responded in a number of ways. One was to insist that, in the words of a 1974 BusinessWeek editorial, “Some people will have to do with less ... so that big business can have more.”

Instead of finding ways to reinvent themselves and their companies in the face of a changing global economy, corporate interests instead decided that they needed to take more from their workers and weaken labor unions, who fought for the interests of everyday American workers.

The tea party conservatives elected to Congress will continue their attempts to turn back the clock to a time when employers were able to exploit workers for profit by exposing them to low wages, long hours and unsafe conditions. Although there will be fewer reasonable voices in office to stop them, thankfully unions will continue promoting policies for the benefit of workers.

Faced with this new challenge, I’m confident unions will do what they do best: They will represent the interests of working families all across this country.

This holiday season, we should be thankful for all that we have. But we should also support our friends, family and neighbors who belong to labor unions, standing side by side with them to fight for the middle class.

THE AUTHOR:

MATT SINOVIC is the executive director of Progress Iowa, a statewide organization focused on research, education and advocacy regarding Iowa public policy. Contact: matt@progressiowa.org.