There’s an idea on the left that small businesses are bad for working people, that big corporations are easier to unionize, etc.

We should rethink this idea. That’s what @SusanRHolmberg & I argue in @thenation this week. A few points here. 1/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-labor-business-monopoly/

First, the broad trends of the last 100yrs suggest something is amiss in this thinking. The well-being of workers & small businesses has risen and fallen in tandem. The peak of unions in the 1940s-1960s was also a period of flourishing small businesses…. 2/

And then after the 1970s, unions & small businesses both plummeted. Inequality soared. 3/

You can also see this patter in specific industries. Walmart’s rise as a grocer caused a slew of mergers among supermarket chains, which then flexed their market power to push down wages and undermine unions. 4/

The result is a grocery industry today that is highly concentrated with far fewer union members and far fewer small and mid-sized businesses. 5/

It’s hard (impossible?) to organize these giant corporations partly because of their economic power. Walmart & Amazon can just shutter a location that goes union. 6/

It’s also that their economic power translates into concentrated political power, which they’ve used to weaken labor law & block government from standing up for workers’ rights. 7/

How do reassert democratic control over the economy and government? By building an alliance of working people, small businesses, family farms, and the communities they serve. We need to create a politics that unites people around a vision of freedom from corporate domination. 8/

Unions and the left understood this before the 1970s. The AFL-CIO’s political platform in these decades called for breaking up monopolies and policies to support small businesses & farmers. 9/

Unions saw themselves as broad political movements fighting to give ordinary people economic agency in all ways — to bargain collectively, to start a business, to run a farm, to have a say in government. 10/

It’s not just that labor and small businesses have common enemies. It’s that having a robust small-business sector disperses power, which has significant economic and political benefits for working people. 11/

As FDR put it, the struggle is between the large-scale “units of finance and industry on one side and the great mass of workers and small-business men on the other.”

This is the kind of politics we need to rescue democracy.
12/12 https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-labor-business-monopoly/