In Blue Cities, Abundance Will Require Fighting Labor Unions

Some of "The Groups" are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.

Dear readers,

Yesterday, I interviewed Rep. Ritchie Torres at WelcomeFest, an annual conference for centrist Democrats in Washington, D.C.

Midway through our conversation, we were interrupted by protesters from Climate Defiance, who have apparently moved on to Gaza as their cause of the day. One of the protesters kept screaming that Rep. Torres should be sent to The Hague for his pro-Israel politics.

On Wednesday, Rep. Ritchie Torres and I were briefly interrupted by climate Gaza protestors during our discussion at the WelcomeFest conference in Washington D.C. (Photo: Ben Dreyfuss)

But I wasn’t there to talk with Torres about Israel. We were focused on the problems facing Democrats in deep blue jurisdictions like his Bronx congressional district — which voted for Kamala Harris by 48 points, down precipitously from the 71-point margin Joe Biden put up there in 2020. Torres said Democrats need to show urban voters that they can address their needs on crime, migration, and cost of living — and that Democrats need to embrace “abundance” as a policy vision.

One thing I asked him about was the conflict between abundance and labor politics. As I said to him:"When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver." This drew quite a bit of ire from the online progressives who were following this conference with, at least to me, a surprising level of interest.

Rep. Torres demurred a bit¹, and was ready to blame politicians for folding to The Groups, but not to engage with my point about labor unions. Since I’m right, I want to lay out a few of the examples I gave Torres of labor² standing in the way of abundance in New York:

• At the behest of the Hotel Trades Council, New York City has prohibited the construction of new hotels citywide, except through the granting of highly scrutinized, case-by-case special permits. This law, passed in 2021, has had the intended effect of driving up hotel rates at existing hotels, which employ workers from the union. That’s good for the hotel unions — it makes the properties where their members work more profitable, which means there’s more money for them to haggle over with owners in contract negotiations. But it’s bad for workers in New York’s theater and restaurant industries, for New York businesses that need to put their employees up in hotels, and of course for tourists who would like to visit New York. And, it undercuts tax revenue from that lost tourism — an estimated $7 billion in revenue by 2035. The city council has also largely prohibited Airbnb in the city, again producing benefits for hotel owners and hotel unions but hurting the rest of the tourism industry.

• New York’s MTA is perpetually hard up and unable to afford to expand service. In part, that’s because it’s hampered by costly and antiquated work practices demanded by the Transport Workers Union, like continuing to operate most subway trains with two-person crews — something few systems around the world still do. On the capital side, the MTA’s egregiously high construction costs have many authors, but one is massive overstaffing at the behest of the construction trades. As The New York Times reported in 2017: “Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.”

• One aspect of our housing production policy is tax abatements for certain new residential construction, especially when those projects contain income-restricted affordable units. But in recent years, this policy — now known as 485-x — has been reworked to add new favoritism for construction unions, imposing a wage floor on large projects unless they are 100% union or have a project-labor agreement. The unions like this policy because it creates jobs for their members, but for developers, it makes the program less financially attractive and therefore it is less effective at producing new housing.

Of course, there are a lot more examples I could have pointed to. The most obvious is the extended COVID closures in New York’s public schools: Teachers’ unions lobbied to keep their members at home, diminishing the quality of education services provided to New Yorkers. More recently, teachers’ unions successfully obtained a new state law mandating class-size reductions in city schools. Evidence of educational benefits from class size caps is weak, but smaller class sizes make teachers’ jobs more pleasant and force the city to hire more teachers who will be members of the union. The expense of complying with the cap is a major burden on the city’s budget, crowding out spending on other programs, and the city may also need to impose new enrollment caps on the most desired schools in order to comply with the law — the opposite of an abundance policy.

Zooming out, my broader point is obvious: the job of a union is to advocate for the interests of its members, and those interests are not necessarily the same as the interests of the broader public. This is particularly the case with public employee unions, since the public is represented on the management side of the table when public workers’ contracts are negotiated. Progressives understand this disconnect when the union at issue represents police, yet police aren’t the only public servants whose own interests diverge from the public’s interest in receiving the best possible services at the lowest cost.

Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.

So while I think the people complaining about my comments have bad ideas about policy and politics and should not get control of the government, I do think they are correct to identify “abundance” as a threat to their own (wrong) vision of what the Democratic Party should be for. One thing the abundance movement asks Democrats to do is to scrape the toppings off the “everything bagel”: that is, set specific policy goals and pursue them without weighing down every program with ancillary objectives demanded by every interest group in the coalition. Don’t assign climate goals to your rural broadband project, et cetera. Well, in a lot of cases, the toppings we need to scrape off those everything bagels were ordered by unions.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. You can watch his response here.

2. Notice, by the way: Sometimes even a union whose members aren’t especially likely to vote Democratic.