Blaine Rummel: For Unions, It’s About Freedom
By Blaine Rummel
It was 2011 and public support for unions hovered near a dismal and historic low of 48%, according to Gallup. Public service unions in particular were in the fight of our lives, with anti-union Republican governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich and even professed pro-union leaders like New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo using labor’s weakened position to strip away public workers’ rights and negotiated benefits.
Amid these attacks, top staff at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) gathered to hear from one of union world’s most respected public opinion gurus on what to do about it all. His message was bleak: organized labor was widely considered an institutional dinosaur, and he couldn’t in good conscience advise even his pro-union political clients to use the word “union.”
Thirteen years later, the script has flipped. Gallup now has public approval for unions at 70% – among the highest levels of support since the mid-1960s. There are many reasons for this, including deep cultural shifts implemented by union leaders like AFSCME’s Lee Saunders. As a veteran labor communications professional who has strived to rethink and invigorate labor’s image among union members and the general public, I will lift up just one: unions have embraced freedom.
I first experienced the power of freedom as a values frame in 2005 during my first organizing campaign with AFSCME – a successful effort to organize thousands of public service workers in rural and suburban Oklahoma. These workers, who tended to be quite conservative philosophically, agreed that no matter your individual opinion about unions, surely public service workers deserved the freedom to decide for themselves whether to join one. This is a right not afforded to public service workers under federal law, as it is for most private sector employees.
Several years later, the lessons learned in Oklahoma were applied to Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker rammed through the union-busting Act 10, which he attempted to sell as a necessary economic austerity initiative to combat budget shortfalls caused by the Great Recession.
But the tide of public opinion turned, as people learned that Act 10 would not just gut public budgets but also the very freedom for public service workers to unionize. A growing number of “It’s About Freedom” signs dotted a crowd of more than 100,000 people outside the Capitol building in Madison. And a front-page headline in the February 15, 2011, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blared: “Rights, not benefits, at issue.”
Had Wisconsin law afforded voters the freedom to overturn Act 10 directly, I’m confident it would have been tossed, as Ohio voters did by a two-to-one margin with Gov. John Kasich’s similar Senate Bill 5.
In subsequent years, pioneering research by Lisa Grove, Celinda Lake, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and others expanded and sharpened the freedom frame. The freedom to take kids and parents to the doctor. The freedom of knowing you can’t be fired because the boss is in a bad mood. The freedom to retire with dignity. And just as important for a movement that prizes unity and strength in numbers, knowing that members have the freedom also to be themselves – solidarity without conformity.
Their findings could not have come at a more critical time, as many unions were about to face an existential threat: an extremist Supreme Court majority that sought to “defund and defang” public service unions – and yes, those were the words of the State Policy Network, a coalition of right-wing, anti-worker think tanks.
The case was 2018’s Janus v. AFSCME, and I had the privilege of leading America’s largest public service unions’ campaign against it. Though the legal arguments against the plaintiff were clear and compelling, the Supreme Court right-wing majority’s political motive was clear early on, and our more urgent need was to reframe the debate in a way that allowed labor to emerge stronger than before.
This meant making freedom the watchword once again: the freedom to join together in strong unions that improve not only the lives of nurses, teachers, first responders, and other public service workers but also the health and safety of the communities they serve. And it was clear who wanted to deny Americans that freedom: the wealthy, anti-union special interests who were spending millions to make their agenda the law of the land through the Supreme Court.
Though the Court’s ruling was unsurprisingly anti-union, the public made its own decision about whose narrative it believed, as unions experienced supercharged growth in support during this time. The billionaires and big corporations had hoped that the Janus decision would be the death knell of public service unions. Quite the contrary: we emerged stronger for it.
In a dramatic reversal from 2011, growing public support for unions has been crucial in passing several pro-worker laws at the state and federal levels in recent years. That has meant stunning improvements in wages and benefits for working people, and it has created favorable conditions for the hardest work that unions do – organizing. But someone recently asked me to identify a big reason for the turnaround unions have experienced. And for my money, it’s about freedom.
Blaine Rummel is the Communications Director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union of 1.4 million public service workers.
