When two Harvard researchers went to Western Pennsylvania, they discovered a lost world of thriving main streets, stable families, and densely woven social networks — with powerful unions at the center of community life. But that world was in its heyday 75 years ago. Today it exists only in the memories of old-timers, like the ones who shared their stories with the two researchers, Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol.
Skocpol, a former president of the American Political Science Association, is one of the leading lights of her profession. She’s best known for her 2003 book Diminished Democracy, which charts the gradual decline of membership-based voluntary organizations in the United States and their replacement by top-down advocacy groups that have minimal opportunity for an individual to contribute. But the research project that led to their book Rust Belt Union Blues started with Newman, her student, who had written a senior thesis about changing political views among union members.
Newman and Skocpol chose Western Pennsylvania as a fruitful place to dig for answers to a question that has occupied political scientists for decades: “Why are America’s working class voters turning away from the Democratic Party?” Western Pennsylvania was once highly unionized, a mighty region of steel and coal, and solidly Democratic. But a wave of plant closures decimated unions and working class communities starting in the 1980s, and they’ve never really recovered.
The shift by working class voters toward the Republican Party has been steadily under way for generations. Newman and Skocpol think they have at least part of the answer: Working class people turned away from the Democrats at the same time their unions declined. But in the book that came out of their research, Rust Belt Union Blues, they say the cause and effect aren’t what you might guess. It’s not that unions have fewer resources to get the word out to fewer people about endorsed candidates. Unions still communicate to members about which candidates and parties have been allies. But members today are more willing to ignore or contravene those union appeals, which they once accepted. The reason, Newman and Skocpol think, is that unions are no longer central to workers’ lives in the same way they were in the mid-twentieth century.
In their research, working class is defined as workers who are in occupations that don’t require a college degree.
Among supporters of the Democratic Party, it’s common to hear that if working class people vote Republican, they’re voting against their own interests, because the Republican party has traditionally been the party of the wealthy and big business. Lainey and Skocpol say that analysis is misplaced, because it misses something crucial about voting behavior: Voting is more about social identity than it is about policy. It’s about “how people see themselves within their communities and their perceptions of who is and who is not on their side.”
In the mid-twentieth century, a dominant social identity in Western Pennsylvania was that of the “union man.” (“Man” here is intentional; before 1960 most unions had either no women at all or less than 10%.) The union man was loyal to his coworkers. He was proud of his work. He provided for his family. And he had a keen historical awareness, both knowledge and appreciation of the fact that he benefited from the struggles of those who came before him.
“The union man of the mid-twentieth century was not a disaggregated bunch of white male lone wolves, but rather a dense social web of interconnected workers, family members, and neighbors,” Newman and Skocpol write. “Voting Democrat was not just about particular issues for unionized workers; it was in large part … about who they were.”
The flavor of that world comes through again and again in more than 50 hour-long interviews Newman conducted with union workers and retirees in 20 Western Pennsylvania counties. Back in the day the retirees remember, a union man who voted Republican would have been thought of as a traitor to his community, a management suck-up or a company man.
In the mid-20th century, union membership was a very strong predictor of voting behavior. In 1952, 60% of union members identified as Democrats, and most of the rest labeled themselves as independents who in practice leaned Democratic. Those leanings persisted even into the 1980 and 1984 elections. Even as recently as 20 years ago, Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania were more likely to deliver majorities for Democrats for president. But by 2016, the statistical correlation between union density and Democratic votes for presidents was weak, and today, a person’s race and whether they live in an urban or non-urban area is a better predictor of how they’ll vote.
What happened in the 50 to 75 years since unions were at their peak? Newman and Skocpol think blue collar workers have not shifted their cultural outlooks very much. But union density peaked in 1954, at 35% of the workforce. After decades of offshoring, deindustrialization, mechanization, deregulation, and vicious anti-union campaigns by employers, today it’s 10%. And just as important, Newman and Skocpol argue, union membership has lost much of the central role it once played in working class identity.
The centrality of unions to mid-twentieth century life in Western Pennsylvania shows up again and again in the archival research Newman and Skocpol did in union newsletters and labor presses. They found that the unions of the mid-twentieth century were a social and moral force at the heart of family and community life. Union halls were the site of weddings, banquets, and scout troop meetings. Union newsletters reported when members got engaged or had a baby. Unions sponsored softball teams, bowling leagues, and hunting clubs. The hosted alcoholism support groups. They raised money for charities like United Way. When members were laid off, they organized union food pantries.
As labor declined, other movements have filled the gap. Newman and Skocpol found that in Western Pennsylvania, gun clubs and megachurches have come to replace union halls as places where people gather and socialize, and both of those tend to nudge participants in the direction of voting Republican.
One of the book’s more interesting findings is that union culture has held up a lot better in building trades unions like IBEW. That’s because members of unions like IBEW have a much more meaningful connection to their union than today’s members of industrial unions like United Steel Workers.
Newman and Skocpol don’t have any roadmap to return to the lost world of the mid-20th century. But they think Democrats would do well to commit to reestablishing a long-term presence in areas like Western Pennsylvania that the party has abandoned, and foster more face to face group ties of all kinds. Meanwhile, they argue, union leaders should prioritize reengaging members socially — a union needs to be about more than just dues and a contract. If unions can become the heart of organized working class communities once again, they can bring to birth a new world.
