Involvement of labor crucial for democracy to endure, study shows

Democracy’s survival needs labor unions.

A study of different countries’ experiences drifting from democracies to authoritarian regimes shows that the success of resisting that result dramatically improves with the involvement of organized labor.

Overall, the success of preventing democracies from becoming dictatorships is about 50-50. However, a key factor in helping democracies survive is unions’ participation in civil resistance, according to research by Tarso Ramos, who explained the history last May at a City University of New York conference, “Labor in the Age of Authoritarian Politics.”

Ramos, a long-time analyst with Political Research Associates now with Future Currents, specializes in the study of Right-wing movements, and he found that with union involvement, societies successfully saving democracies increases from 50% to 80%.

Ramos drew on previous work by Erica Chenoweth of Harvard’s Kennedy School and co-author Maria J. Stephan of the Horizons Project, work that tracked more than 100 years of mass campaigns against authoritarianism. They showed that nonviolent civil resistance was twice as effective as armed struggles against aspiring dictatorships. Also, democracy movements that mobilized at lest 3.5% of a population never failed to protect democratic norms.

Scot Nakagawa in the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook Substack site attributes a few important factors:

* Unlike legal challenges, political efforts and protests alone, unions – especially through workplace actions – are powerful. As the late Gene Sharp of the Albert Einstein Institution asserted in his pillars-of-support theory, “authoritarian power rests on the cooperation of the governed, and the most consequential form of cooperation is economic,” Nakagawa wrote. “Regimes need revenue, production, logistics, public services. Workers control all of it.”

* Civil resistance needs organizations, and labor is capable of mobilizing a lot of people on short notice.

* Unlike the Right’s tendency to divide the population by race, religion, gender, geography, “the Other,”  etc., “unions organize across every one of these divisions, because workplaces are already diverse,” Nakagawa says. “Diverse participation as the single most important predictor of success.”

* Unions have experience taking collective action against power – and taking sustained action for a while through various tactics: work to rule, slowdowns, and sick-outs, declining optional overtime work, boycotts, (direct or informal), and labor’s ultimate tool, a strike.

* Finally, unions can draw on their history, legitimacy and popularity despite years of attacks, whether by employers or governments. When facing accusations that protestors are paid actors, mythical “Antifa” forces, “outside agitators” or extremists, unions stand their ground.

“When working people across multiple industries join a movement that [attack] narrative collapses,” Nakagawa says. “The broader public sees people like themselves standing up, and the regime’s framing loses its power.”

That’s why public support for labor unions in the United States is at an historic high, with Gallup reporting 68% approval last year, maintaining a five-year trend of 67%-71% support, levels not seen since the 1950s.

“Without active central participation by working people in the organizations that represent them, we don’t win,” Ramos says. “Or it’s a coin toss whether we do.”