Mark Schmitt worries over at the American Prospect that the U.S. labor movement is so weakened that we are in danger of constructing an effete liberal coalition of "minority, professional, and younger voters" lacking white working class voters. I'll leave it to others to parse the polling data on voting patterns and instead challenge his argument on the weakening centrality of the labor movement to the Democratic coalition. Let's start with his major piece of evidence:

Labor's lack of clout to pass EFCA in even the most overwhelmingly Democratic -- and progressive -- Congress in decades is an indication that we already have a successful progressive movement in which labor plays only a modest role.

So what does this say about the centrality of labor in the last seventy-four years in which no other major pro-labor law reform was passed, despite many years when Democrats had even greater numbers, as during the Great Society? In fact, we had quite large numbers of Democrats in the past vote for the viciously anti-labor 1947 Taft-Hartley law (creating "right to work" rules and massively limiting union organizing and strikes) and the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act (restricting union picketing and negotiating rights). In fact, when EFCA comes to a vote, it will no doubt have a higher percentage of Democrats taking a pro-labor position than any other labor legislation since the Wagner Act.

Now, Schmidt is right that unions represent a far smaller percentage of workers than they once did, but then so do the French unions (who actually have fewer union members as a percentage of the workforce than US unions). Which emphasizes that it depends partially what you do with your membership as much as the total.

And US unions are probably more effectively mobilizing their members for political action today than they have in decades. Unions in the U.S. may "only" represent a bit more than 15 million workers, but that's still far more than almost any other institution in American. Yes, AARP's official membership may be higher, but not only do union members pay dues on a scale orders of magnitude higher (raising literally billions of dollars per year for the union movement), but unions can directly reach members day-to-day through in-workplace stewards systems and other mechanisms of organizational involvement.

That ability explains both the political funds contributed by members to union PACS (which are voluntary contributions on top of regular dues) which make unions to this day the top collective givers to Democrats-- of the top twenty PAC federal contributors to Dems in the 2007-2008 cycle, 19 out of the twenty top PAC givers to Dems were union PACs, giving from a low of $1.77 million by members of the National Air Traffic Controllers Assn up to $3.72 million by members of Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Business obviously gives more overall, but labor through both direct contributions and manpower on the ground still plays a key role.

And let's be clear-- Barack Obama is possibly the most unabashedly pro-union President since at least Harry Truman. His appointments to the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board are extremely strong advocates of workers rights and, unlikely Bill Clinton for example, Obama in his campaign argued:

We're ready to play offense for organized labor. It's time we had a president who didn't choke saying the word 'union.' A president who strengthens our unions by letting them do what they do best: organize our workers.

Obama may not be fighting as hard for the Employee Free Choice Act as many would like, but he is unafraid to publicly identify himself as being in favor of workers forming more unions.

So all of this is hardly a party where labor lacks influence.

If John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton all failed to enact labor law reform, then using its passage or non-passage as a barometer of union influence is a mistake. If labor law reform fails, it won't be because labor lacks clout compared to other parts of the progressive coalition, but rather that labor's opponents are far wealthier, powerful and determined to defeat them. Any measurement of influence has to compare not just the advocacy and support on one side, but the strength of the opposition faced on the other. And the reality is that the business community would readily allow cap-and-trade, health insurance reform and almost every other liberal proposal to pass rather than allow EFCA to be enacted.

Yet there is still a moderate chance that some version of EFCA gets enacted in this Congress-- a notable achievement after, to repeat, seventy-four years of labor laws either getting worse or staying in their same anti-labor rut since Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin. That Arlen Specter defected to the Democrats and has strengthened his support for passage just indicates that in a prototypical "working class" state like Pennsylvania, labor influence can push a Senator's political self-interest towards a pro-labor position.

Is all of this enough? Of course not. Other liberal groups, as Mark urges, should take working class and union concerns more seriously, both out of justice and through recognizing that strengthening unions will strengthen the overall progressive movement that much more. And unions can do far more themselves to effectively mobilize their own membership and undermine the "Joe the Plumber" silliness in favor of getting real working class voices into political campaigns and the media.

But honestly, I've been hearing about the slow death of unions for over twenty years now (and others have heard it even longer) and while there are lots of problems and challenges, the labor movement in practice (as opposed to nominal numbers) and even more so the coalition relationships between labor and the rest of the progressive movement is far stronger today than when I started as a union organizer two decades ago.