Why collecting and analyzing data is necessary for democracy: Labor data is suppressed

A small labor kerfuffle:

Eight workers in Lincoln, NE quit 

their jobs at a BK there because 

the pay was too low to live on --

that is the message they left on the sign

Context

One of the hallmarks of authoritarianism, demagoguery and abuse of the public is the shield against reality that opacity plus dark free speech affords. When there is no data about a situation, demagogues, tyrants, crooks, liars, kleptocrats, plutocrats, and the like (collectively, the "thugs") do not hesitate tell people things that are false. Thugs just make stuff up with no moral or other qualms about the real situation or actual truth. Since there is no empirical evidence to contradict a thug's lies or falsehoods, irrational emotional manipulation and self-serving motivated reasoning, the uninformed public tends to be more easily misled compared to a more informed public.

Decades ago, the FRP (fascist Republican Party) realized this truth about the usually pro-democracy, anti-thug aspect of undistorted empirical data. Starting at least as early as the Reagan administrations, the FRP started targeting and suppressing federal government data collection and analysis activities. Loss of data made the lies, falsehoods and nonsense that the FRP was telling the public impossible to refute on the basis of evidence. Debate began to degenerate into competing opinions instead of at least modestly evidence-shaped debate. Over time, irrationality increased and rationality decreased. That helped nudge American society into the toxic garbage that passes for politics today. That is especially applicable to America's modern radical right and the FRP, which has advanced to a mindset that  is now open to not just suppressing data, but also denying inconvenient data when it is available. 

The next step in this intellectual progression will be fabricating data when real data is too inconvenient. Arguably, that line has already been crossed in the form of various debunked lies and conspiracy theories that the FRP routinely poisons political discourse with. I expected the election "audit" in Arizona to finally cross the line from data suppression and distortion to data fabrication. That didn't happen in terms of lying about vote counts. Nonetheless that audit farce included a blast of fabricated reasons to distrust the Arizona election results. Maybe faux audits in states such as Texas will cross the line and finally come up with altered vote counts as faux empirical data to buttress the "stolen election" lies.

The key points are obvious: Data is powerful. Thugs need to suppress, distort or fabricate data to advance their run at power and/or wealth, the most common political, social and commercial goals of thugs.

America's labor situation: What's the data?

The September issue of The Hightower Lowdown, a solidly liberal source, published an interesting article about collecting labor statistics entitled, We’re humans, not corporate cogs. THL writes:

The corporate hierarchy has long tried to diminish labor activism in the US by insisting that strikes and other workplace agitations have never had broad support or impact because they are fundamentally un-American. The corporatists cluck that from the get-go America’s cultural zeitgeist has been grounded in veneration of individualism, appreciation for the financial blessings of the corporate order, and the rejection of collectivism.

No matter how hard corporate mythologists try to deny it, labor uprisings are natural expressions of people’s maverick spirit, and they’ve been both a constant and an essential force in the democratization of American society. Our nation–born in bloody rebellion–was never likely to create a “yes, boss” workforce meekly serving the corporate order. Indeed, the story of US labor is the epic tale of widespread, aggressive labor rebellions, with generations of workers in every economic sector in every region of the country confronting, organizing, protesting, boycotting, striking, and otherwise agitating for a little more economic fairness and a bit bigger say about working conditions.

Unfortunately, our educational and media Powers That Be don’t celebrate that story. Instead, they ignore, minimalize, and whitewash the frequency and intensity of the agitation–in hope that workers won’t grasp the democratic possibilities of such activism.

Consider this rather basic question: How many labor actions have taken place in the US so far this year?

Most people: “Dunno. I didn’t hear of any.”

Mass Media Establishment: “We focused on one— that bruhaha in Alabama over unionizing Jeff Bezos’ Amazon warehouse.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (official keeper of worker stats): “We’ve counted eight.”

Actual Number: 640. That’s just the January to September count of labor uprisings documented by Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker shows union actions against corporate powers in nearly every state, with especially strong activity (more than 100 actions) in the South, which media keep portraying as solidly anti-union.

Well, golly, a spread of zero to 640 is more than a minor statistical discrepancy. So what’s going on?

The article goes on to argue that: 

1. Public ignorance is almost entirely due to the MSM's failure to treat workers and unions as newsworthy, and accordingly they have eliminated the “labor beat” and ignore labor news; and

2. The discrepancy between the official Bureau of Labor Statistics number and reality is deliberate and political. 

THL points out that the BLS used to provide an honest count of labor incidents, but in 1982, “the virulently anti-union Reagan presidency slashed the agency’s funding and staff, so it now only reports strikes, lockouts, etc. involving more than 1,000 workers.” That political cutoff effectively ignores most labor actions. That can be considered to be a lie of omission. It intentionally misinforms the public and lawmakers. 

THL comments:

For example, as the August Lowdown reported, since May 1, ExxonMobil has locked out 650 steelworkers in Beaumont, Texas. Those feisty workers are taking a momentous stand against outrageous corporate greed, but under BLS’s arbitrary 1,000-worker rule, they don’t count. Almost no major news outlet, national or state, has even reported that the lockout is happening. 

Just 10 years ago, Gallup polls found that not even half of Americans approved of labor unions, but a steady rise in favorability has pushed that number to two-thirds. (That’s fast approaching the 72% level Gallop registered in 1936 at the start of our modern organized labor movement.) Even 45% of today’s Republicans approve of unions, 15 points higher than a decade ago.

Moreover, the “representation gap”–the difference between the number of workers who would like to be represented by a union and the number who are–is the widest in decades. More than half of Americans say they would now vote for a union in their workplace, but current labor laws are so stacked against organizing that only 10.8% of US employees have one.

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to argue that collection and reporting of data is as important to defend democracy and usually inherently anti-authoritarian and anti-thug as described here?

2. Since the BLS labor statistics have been poisoned by thugs since 1982, can one reasonably argue that both the Democratic Parties and the FRP are both inherently hostile to labor's concerns, maybe with the Dems being less virulent?

3. Is it unfair, inaccurate or otherwise unreasonable to call demagogues, tyrants, crooks, liars, kleptocrats, plutocrats, and the like thugs, and if so, is there a better collective label?