Right-Wing Counterfactual: Could Auto Workers Have Sent Their Children To College Without Unions?

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Dorian Warren, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University raised an interesting counterfactual in the video above from the Melissa Harris-Perry shown on MSNBC this morning. Prof. Warren, when commenting on the tendency of the outsourced US economy to generate low-paying service sector jobs, said that it was collective action after WWII that turned low-wage factory jobs into high-paying industrial jobs that built the US middle class. These were the jobs that allowed auto workers to send their children to college.

The right-wing (particularly in Wisconsin) has been arguing that the US would be better off without unions. If this is the case in the 21st Century, it should also have been true in the last half of the 20th Century. Every person in the US middle class whose working-class parents sent them to college should ponder the counterfactual of a union-free US economy and what their personal histories would have looked like if the right-wing had realized their dream after WWII.