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    State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition
    State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition
    State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition
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    State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition

    By Nelson Lichtenstein

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    In a fresh and timely reinterpretation, Nelson Lichtenstein examines how trade unionism has waxed and waned in the nation's political and moral imagination, among both devoted partisans and intransigent foes. From the steel foundry to the burger-grill, from Woodrow Wilson to John Sweeney, from Homestead to Pittston, Lichtenstein weaves together a compelling matrix of ideas, stories, strikes, laws, and people in a streamlined narrative of work and labor in the twentieth century.

    The "labor question" became a burning issue during the Progressive Era because its solution seemed essential to the survival of American democracy itself. Beginning there, Lichtenstein takes us all the way to the organizing fever of contemporary Los Angeles, where the labor movement stands at the center of the effort to transform millions of new immigrants into alert citizen unionists. He offers an expansive survey of labor's upsurge during the 1930s, when the New Deal put a white, male version of industrial democracy at the heart of U.S. political culture. He debunks the myth of a postwar "management-labor accord" by showing that there was (at most) a limited, unstable truce.

    Lichtenstein argues that the ideas that had once sustained solidarity and citizenship in the world of work underwent a radical transformation when the rights-centered social movements of the 1960s and 1970s captured the nation's moral imagination. The labor movement was therefore tragically unprepared for the years of Reagan and Clinton: although technological change and a new era of global economics battered the unions, their real failure was one of ideas and political will. Throughout, Lichtenstein argues that labor's most important function, in theory if not always in practice, has been the vitalization of a democratic ethos, at work and in the larger society. To the extent that the unions fuse their purpose with that impulse, they can once again become central to the fate of the republic. State of the Union is an incisive history that tells the story of one of America's defining aspirations.

    This edition includes a new preface in which Lichtenstein engages with many of those who have offered commentary on State of the Union and evaluates the historical literature that has emerged in the decade since the book's initial publication. He also brings his narrative into the current moment with a final chapter, "Obama's America: Liberalism without Unions.?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateAug 25, 2013
    ISBN9781400848140
    State of the Union: A Century of American Labor - Revised and Expanded Edition
    Author

    Nelson Lichtenstein

    Nelson Lichtenstein is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is the author of Labor’s War at Home: the CIO in World War II (1982, 2003); Walter Reuther: the Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (1997); and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002), which won the Philip Taft Prize in Labor History. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. His edited books include Industrial Democracy in America: the Ambiguous Promise (1993); Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (2006); American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006); and Major Problems in the History of American Workers (2003).

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      Book preview

      State of the Union - Nelson Lichtenstein

      STATE

      OF THE

      UNION

      POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

      Series Editors

      WILLIAM CHAFE, GARY GERSTLE, LINDA GORDON, AND JULIAN ZELIZER

      A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book

      STATE

      OF THE

      UNION

      A CENTURY OF AMERICAN LABOR

      Revised and Expanded Edition

      NELSON LICHTENSTEIN

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

      Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      press.princeton.edu

      All Rights Reserved

      First printing, 2002

      Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2003

      Revised and expanded edition, 2013

      Library of Congress Control Number 2013934940

      ISBN 978-0-691-16027-6

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Goudy

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      Printed in the United States of America

      10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

      For

      the Labor Action Group

      at

      the University of Virginia

      CONTENTS

      PREFACE TO THE 2013 EDITION

      HISTORIANS ARE OFTEN SLOW on the uptake. Its takes a decade or two or three for their scholarship to reflect the headlines, election results, and the shifting social and economic statistics that signal a turn in the larger political and ideological landscape.¹ Thus in the late 1990s when I began to draft the manuscript that would become the first edition of State of the Union, many of the most sophisticated studies of American labor and the New Deal state focused on the birth of that order rather than on its demise.² My book reflected that extensive historical literature, and most reviewers were appreciative of its focus on an evolving labor question throughout the first half of the twentieth century. They also liked the attention it paid to the meaning of workplace citizenship as conceived by the Depression-era unions and to the exploration of the set of industrial pluralist ideas that had at once powerfully sustained the union idea and then subverted it.

      However, the most remarked-upon chapters in the book discussed the unexpected and precipitous demise of the trade unions during the last half century. I did not emphasize economic globalization, domestic American anti-radicalism, or rank-and-file conservatism. Instead, I first pointed out that U.S. employers and important elements in both parties had never made peace with organized labor. Business hostility to the unions was not a post-1970 phenomenon, nor was it limited to firms in labor-intensive sectors of the economy or in the American South, but it had been present since the New Deal and before. There was no labor-management accord in the early post–World War II years: at best the relationship between unions and capitalists constituted an armed truce, punctuated by frequent episodes of economically costly industrial conflict. Second, I linked the decline in trade union legitimacy to the rise of a pervasive rights consciousness in the 1960s and afterward that may well have subverted the solidarity principle upon which unionism is so ideologically and legally dependent. Once the unions came to be seen as an autocratically led special interest tangentially hostile to the rights claims of women or minorities, they were crippled in their efforts to defend themselves against those employers and politicians that sought to sap labor power.³ This preface takes a look at how those arguments have fared during the last decade, an era of remarkably fertile and expansive labor-history scholarship.

      The most controversial idea put forward in State of the Union, one that also makes a claim to explaining the decline in the power and moral authority of post–New Deal trade unionism, is the presumptive conflict I poised between the concept of rights and that of solidarity, between the civil rights consciousness that has proven so potent during the last half century and the collective institutionalism that stands at the heart of the union idea. As the former became a near hegemonic way of evaluating the quality of American citizenship, the latter atrophied. Indeed, in its most extreme interpretation, rights consciousness subverts the mechanisms, both moral and legal, that sustain the social solidarity upon which trade unionism is based.

      To some historians and sociologists, this dichotomy appeared far too stark: in the past as in the present, the relationship between the power of a modern, inclusive trade union movement and the rise of a civil rights impulse has always been dialectical and symbiotic. The argument appears in State of the Union, where I point out that the modern civil rights movement began in the proletarian North as hundreds of thousands of African American workers poured into an inclusive set of new trade unions at the start of World War II. But the ball gets dropped soon thereafter. Fortunately, a decade’s worth of new scholarship makes a convincing case for the idea that the fate of the new industrial unions and the civil rights impulse have been organically linked. Robert Korstad’s study of 1940s unionism in North Carolina, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South, found the quest for racial dignity and equality at the heart of the organizational impulse there.⁴ Likewise, William Jones and Timothy Minchin wrote that while unionism in the Southern lumber and paper industries had long accommodated itself to oppressive Jim Crow structures, the organizational space generated by even such racist institutions provided a highly useful venue whereby African American workers could make their voices heard.⁵ Conversely, in such heavily black occupations as postal work and garbage collection, a growing rights consciousness in the 1960s greatly strengthened public employee unionism and gave it a militancy that had been long absent in that economic sector.⁶ Martin Luther King understood this symbiosis, as Michael Honey reminds us in All Labor Has Dignity, a collection of King’s speeches that linked the fate of the labor movement to that of the civil rights impulse.⁷

      This same dialectic has been present among women unionists—white, African American, and Latina. Dorothy Sue Cobble identified a powerful labor feminism that animated the other women’s movement from the 1940s through the 1970s. Therefore, as Kathleen Barry makes clear in her study of female flight attendants, the new protections offered these women under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act strengthened their commitment to trade unionism and infused it with an assertive feminist consciousness that enabled flight attendants to eliminate those sexist and ageist employment criteria that deprived them of dignity and workplace equality.⁸ In a more expansive fashion, as Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein make clear in their Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State, a new rights consciousness among immigrants, the disabled, senior citizens, and among native-born Latina and African American women proved crucial to the growth of unionism among the two million workers in this chronically low-wage occupation.⁹

      But if activists and advocates sought a symbiotic unity between the worlds inhabited by both the institutional labor movement and the new civil rights impulse, the actual construction of the law, of public policy, and of the larger political culture often drove them apart. This is the thesis advanced by Risa Goluboff in The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, which argues that the legal assault waged against Jim Crow in the late 1930s through the early 1950s, not only by the NAACP but often from within the Justice Department itself, initially privileged the world of work and saw the amelioration of racial oppression as part of a social-democratic reconstruction of America, both North and South. Her book incorporates the perspective of the generation of labor and social historians who have posited the importance and power of a working-class-oriented civil rights movement in the years before 1954, a perspective celebrated by Jacqueline Hall in her classic essay identifying a long civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁰ Goluboff argues that in the late 1930s and 1940s civil rights lawyers thought litigation based on the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned involuntary servitude, might well advance, in an organic fashion, both labor rights and racial equality. But the Cold War, along with an NAACP decision to target state-sanctioned school segregation, derailed this project, thus redefining civil rights in a far narrower fashion. In contrast to the 1930s and 1940s, labor and race issues were now compartmentalized both in terms of NAACP legal strategy and, even more importantly, in the imagination of most liberals, laborites, and civil rights advocates.¹¹

      Thus, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the nation had two sets of labor laws, one having its origins in the Wagner Act, the other arising out of the judicial reinterpretation of Title VII of that 1964 law. In her Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, Nancy MacLean has demonstrated how the struggle to pass and then implement Title VII had a near revolutionary impact on employment opportunities and the character of the work regime for tens of millions of citizens, even as the American right regrouped in order to limit and delegitimize such legal and social transformations. The most remarkable chapter in MacLean’s book records the ideological transmutation of conservative ideology in the early 1970s: it is entitled Conservatives Shift from ‘Massive Resistance’ to ‘Color-Blindness.’¹²

      But if implementation of Title VII was a genuine breakthrough, and genuinely resisted, this new way of thinking about employment rights also had unforeseen and deleterious consequences for the institutional strength and integrity of the trade unions, including those that had long been advocates of racial liberalism in the workplace. Title VII and other similar laws and administrative rulings proved an invitation to judicial activism, argues Paul Frymer in Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement and the Decline of the Democratic Party.¹³ The 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Act, which made it much more difficult for judges to issue injunctions against routine strikes, and the Wagner Act that followed three years later, had seemingly rid the United States of the intrusive, anti-labor judicial policy making characteristic of the early twentieth-century Lochner era. But two generations later the courts were once again intruding themselves into the interpretation and application of labor and employment law, in part as a result of civil rights litigation on behalf of minorities discriminated against by unions and employers, and in part because of the half-century-long stalemate in the progressive reform of the labor law that congressional conservatives and timid Democrats conspired to sustain. To Frymer the federal courts had in many ways regained their position as the primary overseer of the workplace.¹⁴

      With civil rights and labor rights divided into two different administrative and judicial categories, unions were vulnerable to officials and judges with little knowledge or sympathy for the particularities of union politics and institutional structures. While the failure of trade unions to protect their minority members was not the only reason for judicial activism, it set a precedent that was repeatedly used to strip unions of power and legitimacy when other issues, involving seniority, strikes, membership, and dues, were concerned. AFL-CIO litigation costs doubled between 1966 and 1973, doubled again by 1979, and then quadrupled over the next four years. As Frymer put it, Once courts became involved in labor policy making on matters of race, it is not a far leap to where they extended this involvement to broader questions previously handled by elected officials. Courts have not only scaled back the NLRA, they have extended their influence to a wide range of employment matters, using tort and contract law to increase individual worker rights independent from legislative involvement.¹⁵

      Frymer’s story is one of how a discourse arising from the growth of a rights-conscious liberalism undermined trade unionism, albeit in an often inadvertent and unforeseen fashion. But a far more cynical and mendacious assault on union power also used language made potent by the civil rights movement—however, it emanated from long-standing Southern, anti-union business interests, which after 1955 were the chief funders and proponents of the anti-union National-Right-to-Work Committee. As Gilbert Gall and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer have shown, passage of Right-to-Work laws became a cause célèbre in the 1940s even before Taft-Hartley and Section 14b opened the door for state-level Right-to-Work statutes that proscribed the union shop and weakened trade union power, chiefly in the Southern and Western states that enacted such laws. When the Right-to-Work Committee was founded in the 1950s, it was funded by the most reactionary textile, oil, and food-processing interests. Its propaganda against the union shop was virtually indistinguishable from a larger anti-union, anti-Communist, states’ rights discourse that often evoked McCarthyite and segregationist themes.¹⁶

      In the mid-1960s, however, right-to-work advocates began to switch their source of rhetorical authority from natural law to civil rights constitutionalism. Indeed, as the legal historian Sophia Lee has pointed out in an essay on right to-work litigation, these conservative anti-union lawyers and publicists no longer described their legal struggle as one that ran parallel to that of the civil rights impulse, but rather as a legal strategy that was actually part of the civil rights movement. Soon African American litigants—representing a tiny minority of that minority, but just enough to cast a creditable cloak over the enterprise—were prominent in right-to-work publicity and court cases. The Right-to-Work Committee promised to represent workers who are suffering legal injustice as a result of employment discrimination under compulsory union membership arrangements even as they touted its mission to Protect Human and Civil Rights for America’s Wage Earners. Through the 1970s and 1980s the committee’s efforts to link this anti-union propaganda and litigation with civil rights themes became more elaborate, institutionalized, and sophisticated. Committee membership mushroomed from less than 50,000 to almost 300,000 by 1975 alone, while its network of cooperating attorneys had grown to include one hundred lawyers. Thus, even as Republican politicians were courting Southern Democrats and promising race-coded assaults on welfare and crime in the 1970s, the right-to-work movement tested a different approach, which advanced a species of rights talk originally spawned by the black liberation movement in order to achieve doctrinal victories in the courts, generate anti-union propaganda, and deploy a potent weapon against big labor, its sworn enemy.¹⁷

      Of course, such legal and ideological entanglements were but a part of the story of union decline. Equally important was direct employer opposition. In the first edition of State of the Union, I argued that while globalization and other structural transformations in the character and location of work have had a deleterious impact on union fortunes in manufacturing, the failure of unions to grow in the much larger service sector—in stores, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, finance, and warehousing—is largely a product of managerial hostility as well as the dysfunctional character of the American labor law. Even during the prosperous 1950s and 1960s the existence of a labor-management accord was highly suspect, especially if such a concordant was thought to bulwark the postwar hegemony of a New Deal political and economic order.

      This view has been sustained by a new generation of historians who are self-conscious students of American capitalism and in particular the culture, ideology, and economic programs of those in business and politics who never made peace with either the New Deal or the new unionism that arose in the 1930s and 1940s. In her Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, Kim Philips-Fein returned to scholarly notice an influential cohort of conservative activists, which even during the heyday of midcentury labor liberalism linked a set of ideologically motivated businessmen, like DuPont’s Jasper Crane and GE’s Lemeul Boulware to right-wing academics and publicists, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Leonard Read, and William J. Baroody.¹⁸ In her Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer found a similar group of activist businessmen on the local level, where hostility to both unionism and the regulatory state propelled Barry Goldwater, William Rehnquist, and other conservative Arizona notables to national prominence.¹⁹

      In my own study of Wal-Mart, I found that Sam Walton was the kind of Southern, small-town entrepreneur who never made peace with either the New Deal state or the trade unions that sustained it.²⁰ Likewise, in his Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy, Shane Hamilton demonstrates that this same kind of libertarian entre-preneurialism sank deep economic and cultural roots among the truck drivers and food processors whose links to the world of Southern agriculture made them exempt from the New Deal regulatory state.²¹ Even in the early postwar years, writes Tami Friedman, when industry moved from the unionized North to the right-to-work states of the rural South, conservative ideas about taxes, labor, and the regulatory state often moved in the opposite direction, which in effect Southernized managerial ideology in Northern communities and states where liberalism had once been most vibrant.²² Nancy MacLean has argued along similar lines in her discussion of how the growing national influence of a Southernized Republican Party has been felt in the realm of economic ideas and policy.²³

      Indeed, while we think of the South as the midcentury fount of racial segregation, many of the essays collected in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, edited by Shermer and myself, demonstrate that advocates with roots in the South, such as Sylvestor Petro, a Wake Forest legal scholar, and Reed Larson of the National Right-to-Work Committee, were pioneers in nationalizing an anti-union discourse that would become highly influential in the 1970s and after.²⁴ Their critique of the labor movement was all the more potent because it was never merely an argument for the reduction of labor costs in a single firm or industry; rather it was part of a much larger ideological attack upon the entire legal and political structures erected by the New Deal.

      The consequence of such conservative influence and ideas has become apparent both in the dysfunctional character of American labor law and in the aggressive anti-unionism that has become so pervasive among employers as well as in some state legislatures dominated by twenty-first-century Republicans. In his studies of anti-union law firms and consultants, historian John Logan has shown how the most aggressive and well-tested stratagems designed to destroy a union or keep a firm union free are put at the service of any corporate manager who can pay the sizable fees required to hire these experts.²⁵ Three of the of the best recent studies of how such anti-unionism works, all involving failed strikes in the 1990s, are found in the community studies of historians Leon Fink and the writing pair of Steve Ashby and C. J. Hawking and in Chris Rhomberg’s book on the 1995 Detroit newspaper strike. These are fully realized historical narratives, not unlike those written by scholars who have studied the Homestead strike of 1892, the 1934 Piedmont textile walkouts, and the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968.

      In all these late twentieth-century conflicts the writers uncover much solidarity, militancy, and community engagement, but in each instance, defeat resulted because the owners and managers countered labor’s solidarity and activism with an overwhelming arsenal of legal, financial, and organizational weapons. In Leon Fink’s account of an effort to organize a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry processing plan, he found that a tightly knit community of Mayan immigrants from the Guatemala highlands had generated an organization displaying the kind of solidarity and militancy of which virtually any CIO local in the 1930s would have been proud. But the owners of the poultry factory proved equally militant and intransigent, and in contrast to the 1930s, they used the administrative and legal delay permitted by the nation’s ossified labor law to outlast hundreds of pro-union immigrant workers whose ranks were in constant flux.²⁶

      That same dynamic took place among the native-born workers of the American Midwest where Ashby, Hawking, and Romberg demonstrate that creative militancy and a vast degree of inter-union solidarity existed among the largely white and heavily male blue-collar workers who sought to defend their unions and the middle-class standard of living they sustained at the A. E. Stanley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, and at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press.²⁷ But management at these enterprises proved entirely willing to provoke an epic set of strikes in order to transform the work regime and slash labor costs to their liking. As Romberg observed, the past few decades … have seen a profound reduction in the social accountability of private enterprise, not only in the news business but across the economy. Whether through collective bargaining with employees, the ethical norms of professions like journalism, or even the informal practices of corporate paternalism, the forms of institutional and cultural regulation have been sacrificed for the sake of unfettered market power.²⁸

      Of course labor historians have always recognized the power of capital and the near hegemony of a market ideology. But this has never proven sufficient to explain labor’s travail. What about the internal failures and fissures that have contributed to the demise of the power of the union idea?

      The destruction of the Communist-oriented unions has long been a favorite topic among those labor historians seeking to explain the postwar demise of a robust form of trade unionism. Mid-twentieth-century anti-Communism had many facets: it was sometimes genuinely anti-Stalinist, but far more often racist and sexist, anti-radical, anti-union, antisemitic, hostile to cosmopolitan modernism, and embodying an implacable opposition to the New Deal and all its works. In their highly textured studies of Communism and unionism in Chicago and St. Louis, Randi Storch and Rosemary Feurer found that these self-conscious radicals were essential to the creation of the vibrant insurgencies that linked community and workplace. Storch ends her book during an era of Popular Front success, but Feurer’s work is more typical, as she traces the way in which postwar corporations in the electrical products industry linked their fortunes to the Cold War military, the FBI, and congressional anti-Communists to destroy militant unionism in the St. Louis area.²⁹

      Robert Korstad’s Civil Rights Unionism also blamed the McCarthy-era onslaught against Local 22 of the Food and Tobacco Workers, which conflated Communism and interracial unionism, as decisive in destroying an important node of progressive unionism in North Carolina.³⁰ Likewise, Clarence Taylor puts a Catholic brand of McCarthyism at the heart of the sometimes antisemitic and often anti-intellectual impulse that first stymied and then eviscerated teacher unionism in New York City during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.³¹ Anti-Communism did not destroy the United Auto Workers (UAW), but Jonathan Cutler offers much evidence that a remarkably potent rank-and-file effort to win the thirty-hour workweek fell victim to a multitude of Cold War pressures, of which the effort by union president Walter Reuther to dismiss the demand as but a Communist ploy proved crucial.³² And finally sociologists Maurice Zeitlin and Judith Stephan-Norris deploy the kinds of statistical data eschewed by most labor historians in order to reach a similar conclusion: those unions most often identified as Communist-led were highly effective shop-floor advocates for worker rights and power. But as with most of the studies mentioned above, the Cold War assault proved a body blow to a vigorous form of shop representation among the key industrial unions.³³

      The conflicts described above are now more than half a century old. Few employers or conservative politicians criticize the unions as radical, much less Communist or Socialist. And for their own part, even the most militant unionists define their cause as one in defense of a middle class standard of living. Yet the unions are still under brutal attack. Indeed, in the twenty-first century the language of anti-unionism is heavily freighted toward a discourse that emphasizes organized labor’s corruption, bossism, and stolid conservatism in a world of rapid technological and social transformation. During the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act in 2008 and 2009, the main charge put forward by the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups was that the new law would enhance the power of the Washington union bosses not only in politics and direct bargaining with employers but against ordinary workers and potential union members.

      When I wrote the first edition of State of the Union, I discussed the famous Rackets Committee hearings of 1957 and 1958, chaired by Senator John McClellan, which aired many of these same charges. But those celebrated hearings are now more than half a century past and I remain puzzled at the longevity and seeming timelessness of such a critique. Fortunately, a number of historians are now in the business of historicizing both the rhetoric and the reality of union corruption and the conservative deployment of this ever-present critique. In his Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture, Larry Richards found that the rhetoric conservative writers and employers used to denounce trade unionism has remained remarkably similar for more than a century, both during eras of union strength and weakness as well as when radicals were briefly present in the leadership of some unions and during that longer set of years when they were consigned to marginality. In particularly tumultuous moments of strike activity, those hostile to the labor movement denounced the unions and their leaders as radical and subversive, but for the most part, the charges with sticking power were those that labeled the unions as special interests or self-serving monopolies and the leaders of these institutions as tyrants, despots, autocrats, feudal lords, and above all, as bosses. Employers and consumers were the victims of union power, in this imaginary, but even more oppressed were the rank-and-file members reduced to impotence and serf-like obedience by dictatorial and corrupt leaders.³⁴

      Andrew Wender Cohen helps us understand the resonance such an indictment held, not just among employers or outright conservatives, but among those who were good government Progressives and middle-class reformers. His The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy explores the service trades and craft economy of the second city early in the twentieth century. Because this world of construction sites, local cartage, and petty manufacture was so ill regulated, especially in terms of its labor relations, the trade unions of that era sought to impose on this chaotic urban economy a more orderly set of price and employment relationships. But in the early twentieth century, this effort to tame the market was but a quasi-legal enterprise, entailing a set of political payoffs, violent job actions, and other coercive efforts necessary to persuade contractors, politicians, and nonunion workers. Middle-class urbanites were often appalled, which may be one reason that when in 1925 the Chicago Chamber of Commerce labeled the entire union effort to thwart the market racketeering, the word became inexorably associated with many otherwise legal trade union activities. Ironically, the New Deal would actually codify efforts by government agencies and a new, state-certified set of trade unions to rationalize the labor market, but for many Americans an odor of illegitimacy and criminality nevertheless shadowed virtually any exercise of union power.³⁵

      Of course, there really were racketeers within the labor movement, which David Witwer historicizes in his careful studies of the Teamsters and other unions in Chicago, Hollywood, and elsewhere that were led by men who consorted with and benefited from ties to organized crime. For many immigrants and working-class entrepreneurs, unionism was a potentially lucrative business opportunity, especially if employers were willing to pay them handsomely for a sweetheart contract or other leadership betrayal. When journalists like Westbrook Pegler or politicians like those senators serving on the McClellan Committee exposed such scandals, they often did so in a fashion that framed the malfeasance to all of labor’s maximum disadvantage. The shadow of the racketeer writes Witwer, is the common assumption that most union leaders, and thus most unions, are corrupt and therefore the power of organized labor is fundamentally illicit.³⁶

      On this topic no film cast a longer shadow than On the Waterfront, which won eight Academy Awards after it was released in 1954. In recapturing the film’s backstory, James Fisher’s On the Irish Waterfront offers a probing cultural and religious understanding of the corrupt and violent world inhabited by those who labored on New York’s midcentury piers. Capturing the insular, Catholic anti-modernism that often sustained authoritarianism within the International Longshore Association, Fisher, like Witwer, shows that workers were alternately complicit and rebellious when they found themselves in conflict with a corrupt alliance of politicians, employers, and union officeholders. Anti-Communism proved one language in this battle, even in those unions, such as the ILA, where the reds were few and far between.³⁷

      All this brings us to the question of working-class consciousness, especially in the era of hard times that began during the 1970s. In the years since I published State of the Union, that decade seems to have replaced the 1960s as the era labor and social historians see as most intriguing and pivotal. This was the moment in which economic growth slowed in dramatic fashion, wages and living standards stagnated, globalization became a pressing phenomenon, and the American economy moved, in the words of Judith Stein, from factories to finance.³⁸ And it was the era in which the working class, the white male working class especially, shifted their allegiances and outlook, even when they were stiffed, as journalist Susan Faludi put it, by employers and their erstwhile political friends on the right.³⁹

      So, was there no outburst of working-class radicalism and resistance? Indeed there was, argue most of the essays assembled in Rank and File Rebellion: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s, a collection written by both participants in and historians of several of the key labor struggles that convulsed the decade. Without doubt, editors Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow remind us that the late 1960s and early 1970s were years of exceptional strike size, militancy, and internal union turmoil. White and black workers, largely male and most often in manufacturing and transport, were often in revolt against both their employer and their union leadership.⁴⁰ But why the sudden collapse of this militancy in the years after 1980? Although many of the contributors, most notably Judith Stein and Robert Brenner, acknowledge the shifting structure of the global economy and the conservative politics that flowed from that transmutation, far more energy and analysis is devoted to a critique of an all too cautious and collaborationist set of top labor leaders, the bureaucratic character of the big trade unions, and indeed, the whole structure of collective bargaining as practiced during the post–World War II era. As Cal Winslow put it in a characteristic indictment, The unions, for the most part, were obstacles in the paths of rank-and-file workers.⁴¹

      In some respects, Joseph McCartin’s Collision Course, a history of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization and the strike that changed America, runs parallel to the interpretation offered by several of the writers whose work is collected in Rebel Rank and File. Air traffic controllers, whose ranks were dominated by ex–military personnel, became increasingly militant and increasingly trade union conscious in the 1960s and 1970s. As an instance of rank-and-file mobilization, their August 1981 strike represented the triumphal culmination of two decades in which the majority of the nation’s fifteen thousand controllers achieved a consciousness of their class and a determination to engage in the kind of strike battle that was both necessary and dangerous. But their traumatic defeat was hardly the product of a cautious and unimaginative leadership. They faced instead an intransigent foe who commanded overwhelming power. President Reagan’s destruction of PATCO taught both employers and government officials that a hard line could work when a showdown came with union labor. Indeed, McCartin’s exploration of the White House archives reveals that for more than a decade after the mass firings, Reagan and his successors made opposition to any leniency for the controllers a kind of litmus test for the Republican Party and those appointed to key offices in the 1980s and early 1990s.⁴² Under such conditions the militancy of the 1970s, in both private and public employment, proved increasingly isolated and enfeebled.

      In Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, Jefferson Cowie found in the late 1960s and early 1970s much of the same kind of white working-class militancy celebrated by the contributors to Rebel Rank and File. But Cowie sees the content of that militancy in a far more problematic fashion. Not only was it divided by a set of highly polarizing ideas about race, sex, politics, and national identity, but class consciousness in the 1970s, perhaps more than in other decades, was heavily influenced by politicians and other elites who sought to imagine, and therefore tangibly shape, a working class that fit their particular strategy for winning office, power, and ideological legitimacy. Cowie’s book therefore offers excellent probes into the heart of the Nixon White House, into the machinations of top AFL leaders, into the thought process of George McGovern’s advisors, and later that of President Jimmy Carter. Moreover, Stayin’ Alive is a very good intellectual history of the decade in which social theory—the post-industrial capitalism of Daniel Bell, racial polarizations as described by Thomas and Mary Edsal, and the middle-class narcissism identified by Christopher Lasch—is shown to have had a tangible political and cultural impact. And Cowie uses the artifacts of popular culture, films like Norma Rae and Saturday Night Fever, the TV series All in the Family, which gave us Archie Bunker, and the music of Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Paycheck, to offer up an elegiac portrait of a working class in the process of fragmentation and defeat.⁴³

      To absorb the narratives of popular culture of the late seventies was to relegate the working class to faraway times and places—including the most distant, the isolated hearts of working people themselves, writes Cowie. Indeed, the runaway popularity of Johnny Paycheck’s novelty song Take This Job and Shove It captured the powerlessness of a generation of once proud blue-collar men: I’d give the shirt right off my back / If I had the nerve to say / Take this job and shove it!⁴⁴ In this hopeless, end-of-labor-history schema, one of the great constructs of the modern age, the notion of a unified, self-conscious working class crumbled, and with it the possibility of a return to anything resembling the world once created by the New Deal. The idea of a politicized working class, writes Cowie, died of many external assaults upon it, yes, but mostly of its own internal weaknesses.⁴⁵

      Stayin’ Alive won many awards but also proved highly contentious among labor historians unwilling to abandon the idea that there was such a thing as a working class or that it might well have some capacity to determine its own fate. Moreover, the book’s focus upon the fate of native-born, unionized male workers in transport and manufacturing seemed far too narrow in a society in which women and immigrants were playing a decisive role in the burgeoning service economy. This is the starting point for Bethany Moreton in her study of how millions of women and men in the low-wage, non-union retail economy have been so accommodative toward an ideology and an identity that emphasizes patriarchy, evangelical Protestantism, and Christian Free Enterprise.⁴⁶ In contrast to the masculine, cosmopolitan world of Jewish radicals and Catholic trade unionists that did so much to shape the work culture of the industrial North, Moreton uncovers a Southern, Christian, communal, post-industrial ethos nurtured by anti-union companies like Wal-Mart. Although many service occupations were traditionally considered women’s work, male refugees from farm or factory were often accommodated with low level managerial posts that gave them authority over a staff largely composed of women and teenagers, not unlike a traditional patriarchal family. At the same time, modern evangelical Protestantism, which emphasized service, sacrifice, and servant leadership, meshed easily with a managerial ideology that demanded a high degree of willing and participatory identification between employee and firm. Moreton’s schema hardly explains everything that happened to working-class consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, but it does provide a rich ideological explanation for the otherwise puzzling accommodation of so many poorly paid and episodically employed workers to their downward mobility and economic powerlessness.

      To write a history of labor in the last hundred years therefore requires both a probe into the character of working-class mentality and an understanding of the shifting contours of the economy and the structure of American politics. As the industrial unions and the construction trades have declined in size and influence, the center of gravity of American trade unionism has shifted to government employment and the service sector where a multicultural workforce and a relative de-emphasis on traditional collective bargaining have marginalized the job control and seniority issues that were once such lightning rods for racial conflict and litigation. With the strike weapon essentially dead, union density at century-old lows, and right-to-work legislation passed or on the agenda in a several Northern states, the system of industrial relations codified during the New Deal years seems at an end.⁴⁷ Thus the state and its employment policies have become a crucial terrain of struggle, but as the Boris and Klein study of home-care workers has shown, mobilizing workers as voters and gaining bargaining rights and better conditions through political means has proven highly problematic, a consequence of the fiscal austerity and growth of anti-union sentiment manifest at many levels of government since the Great Recession. This revised edition of State of the Union helps explain how the organizations that once represented so many American workers came to such an impasse.⁴⁸

      NOTES TO PREFACE TO THE 2013 EDITION

      1. The scholarship is slower than the awareness, but the latter is certainly there. See the set of politically informed reflections on their own work collected in Daniel Katz and Richard Greenwald, eds., Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America (New York: New Press, 2012).

      2. Among the most outstanding studies, see Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Joshua Freeman, In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Howell John Harris, Bloodless Victories: The Rise and Fall of the Open Shop in the Philadelphia Metal Trades, 1890–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

      3. Reviewers found the emphasis on the ideas that sustained or delegitimized twentieth-century unions particularly useful, but most had one or two bones to pick. See, for example, reviews by David Montgomery in International Labor and Working Class History (Spring 2003), 203–206; David Palmer in Labour History (May 2004), 207–11; and Kevin Boyle in Business History Review (Fall 2002), 569–72. Transatlantica, a web-based American studies journal edited in Paris, offered an extensive discussion of the book in 2003 with contributions from Jean-Christian Vinel, Donna Kesselman, Catherine Collomp, Roman Huret, and Marianne Debouzy. Go to http://transatlantica.revues.org/47.

      4. Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

      5. William P. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Timothy Minchin, Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

      6. Philip Rubio, There’s Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

      7. Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has Dignity, edited by Michael Honey (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012). And see also, William P. Jones, The Unknown Origins of the March on Washington: Civil Rights Politics and the Black Working Class, LABOR: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas vol. 7 (Fall 2010), 33–52. For a good survey of the entire post–Civil War relationship between organized labor and the aspirations of the nation’s African American working class, see, Robert Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007).

      8. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

      9. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Care Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

      10. Jacquelyn Hall, The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past, Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233–63.

      11. Risa Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). And see also Nelson Lichtenstein, "Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff’s The Lost Promise of Civil Rights," Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 35, issue 1 (Winter 2010), 243–60.

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