The Progressive Labor Agenda Is Popular. Are Insurgents Running On It?
By C.M. Lewis and Kevin Reuning
Incumbent Democrats have good reason to be worried.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset primary victory over Joe Crowley, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in House leadership, signaled that the Left is no longer content to settle for the incrementalism of the Democratic old guard and that the base is willing to buck the familiar.
Although the Left’s political influence is still limited in the grander scheme of American politics, organizations like Brand New Congress, Justice Democrats and Democratic Socialists of America are utilizing the 2020 campaign as an opportunity to push for left-wing politics. And as with any attempt to change the status quo, this comes with significant pushback, including attempts to blacklist anyone helping to challenge incumbent Democrats.
But what does all this actually mean for policy? We decided to measure that by assessing differences through a core issue: organized labor.
We picked it for two main reasons. First, tackling income inequality—particularly through strengthening organized labor—has been a key position in the Left’s resurgence. Second, unions are arguably the most powerful organized institutions that undergird Democratic and otherwise left-of-center politics. When these two things are taken into account, and you throw in the ongoing strike wave, it’s no surprise that organized labor has been front and center in the Democratic political discussion in a way it hasn’t in decades.
So one would expect progressive insurgents running against staid old guard Democrats to highlight their ideas on labor and their union bona fides.
To test this we measured both incumbents and their primary or presumptive general election challengers by their record on labor policy. We started by identifying their position on the progressive labor policies that we previously found to be widely popular along with other mainstream progressive policy proposals. In sum we looked at the following categories:
Expanding Union Rights?
Raise the Minimum Wage?
Federal Jobs Guarantee?
Worker Representation on Corporate Boards?
Card Check Elections?
Ban Right-to-Work?
Ban Bad Actors From Federal Contracting?
Ban Forced Arbitration?
Just Cause?
Federal Right to Strike?
Resolve First Contract Disputes?
End Domestic Worker Loophole?
End Agriculture Worker Loophole?
Worker Misclassification?
Sectoral Bargaining?
Repeal Taft-Hartley?
After collecting data, we used a latent variable model, commonly used to identify the broad ideology position of elected officials. This allows us to estimate candidates and incumbents on a scale of labor progressivism. The results are surprising.
Based upon our research on candidate platforms, stated policy positions, and the voting records and public positions of the incumbents, we established that the majority of incumbents have a measurably better public position on organized labor, with the notable exception of TX-25, WA-6, NJ-6, WA-10, OR-5, NE-2, and TX-10. The NY-10 race—which features Lindsey Boylan, a New York politician with close connections to Andrew Cuomo—is particularly noteworthy, as Boylan falls well short of incumbent Jerry Nadler on union issues (Editor’s Note 12/14/2020: Since publication Lindsey Boylan has reported being sexually harassed by Andrew Cuomo).
As the plot shows, incumbent Democrats have reliably co-sponsored and voted for key proposals backed by organized labor, such as the Employee Free Choice Act, the Raise the Wage Act, and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. In other words, there’s a baseline of support organized labor can count on from Democrats: and with the exception of Heidi Sloan (TX-25), Rebecca Parson (WA-6), Russ Cirincione (NJ-6), most progressive challengers are failing to stand out from baseline Democrats on labor.
Of course, this only tells part of the story.
Whether a legislator will put their name to legislation or vote “Yea” doesn’t accurately capture how prominently labor unions feature in their politics: a more qualitative measure that marks the difference between a “labor vote” and a “labor champion.” It also doesn’t capture tangible displays of support for labor—such as walking picket lines. Although it’s difficult to assess that, we scraped social media for all of the candidates to assess how prominently labor features into their messaging, as a percentage of their total Twitter output since June.
Here, the story is different: progressive challengers make out significantly better than they do on strict policy proposals, and in some cases fare far better than incumbents. Part of this reflects a generational difference—Twitter is a key part of modern governance and campaigns, and not all incumbents have caught up with the times. But that limitation aside, it’s a valuable measure of what they’re signalling to unions and how they’re positioning their politics.
Conclusions
Based upon our polling, we believe progressive Democrats should explicitly adopt core, popular proposals from the progressive labor agenda, particularly two issues with overwhelming support among Democrats and majority support among independents: ending at-will employment and replacing it with just cause employment and banning issuing federal contracts to bad corporate actors that pay low wages, bust unions, or outsource jobs.
Labor unions are a crucial constituency for Democratic and left-of-center politics, and research demonstrates that they’re one of the core organized vehicles that build and turn out the Democratic vote. Very few Democrats can politically survive open opposition from organized labor, and only a handful of Democrats will openly buck unions on core issues behind which the labor movement is united. Although that rarely means Democrats truly and consistently champion labor—those are few and far between, like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown—it means that in exchange for support at election time, Democrats largely vote in line with key labor priorities.
The result: an incumbency bias among labor, making the task facing insurgents that much harder.
It’s important to note that it’s almost certain that most, if not all, of the challengers running for office would offer just as much or more legislative support to organized labor than the incumbents, whether or not they’re on the record. Very few Democrats—only six, including Derek Kilmer, opposed by Rebecca Parsons—defied the party and voted “no” on the Raise the Wage Act, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. There’s no reason to believe progressive challengers would offer less support than that offered by the overwhelming majority of Congressional Democrats.
But given the reality of near-certain support for labor from incumbent Democrats with established clout, insurgents seeking to court labor support (or at least convince unions to stay on the sidelines) need to make clear that they do more than support baseline policy proposals. That means positioning themselves as champions of labor’s agenda—not just another vote.
C.M. Lewis (@thehousered) is a staff union representative for the Pennsylvania State Education Association and a member of the Strikewave editorial team. Sign up for Strikewave here.
Kevin Reuning (@kevinreuning) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.