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American unions are waging epic battles today against the most serious assaults they've encountered in more than half a century, and they've had some major successes. No one could have predicted that union members and their supporters would flood state capitals in the way they have, or that polls would show Americans support collective bargaining rights for public employees by a 2-1 margin.
The Republican governors who've gone after the unions -- Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich most prominently -- have seen their poll ratings tank. The political consequences of their ideological overreach may cost the Republicans dearly in the Midwest, and after the next election cycle, the laws repealing collective bargaining rights for public employees may themselves be repealed.
Yet labor's mobilization, however impressive, is still a defensive one. Even if the status quo is restored in the public sector, where roughly 3 in 10 workers are unionized, that won't do much to help workers in the private sector, where the rate of unionization has fallen to just 6.9% and wages, not surprisingly, have not risen since the late 1990s. With the laws protecting labor organizing so weak that employers violate them with impunity, it's hard to...