Union strategies

...But such routine functioning will itself collapse unless infused with a far larger purpose...

...Indeed, a central theme in the book demonstrates the extent to which the demise of the union idea in the 1950s and 1960s created an ideological and institutional vacuum in which a rights-consciousness legal regime substituted itself for the "industrial jurisprudence" that had once seemed such a promising road to workplace justice...

...But whatever the exact political strategy, Eviatar devalues left-wing values and visions, subordinating them to the mundane but necessary work of the existing unions, who offer tangible benefits for hard-pressed workers...

...This was as true in the 1950s, when the unions stood at their numerical apogee, as it is today when the only people left to defend them—or offer a semblance of constructive criticism—are those who see a reconstructed labor movement as the kernel of a new society...

...Two years ago a living-wage campaign paid off with a modest wage increase for the lowest-paid, largely African-American employees...

...From the Progressive Era through the New Deal and into the 1960s and beyond, the labor movement—in its better moments—has sought to link firm-centered bargaining to a larger and more inclusive political project...

...She argues that unions are pretty much stuck with a labor law, an existing system of collective bargaining, and a political process that is far from ideal, but labor partisans can't simply junk that whole system...

...This was the function of the TaftHartley Act...

...In the Progressive Era the push for a set of state-mandated labor standards was particularly useful to working-class women...

...Eviatar seems to think that I am a proponent of this shift...

...NELSON LICHTENSTEIN teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...When it came to safeguarding a worker's dignity and income, a new generation of liberals and radicals thought Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act far more inclusive and potent than the desiccated provisions of the Wagner Act...

...A reform strategy needs to reckon with political reality," she writes, arguing that my formulation that labor should function as "an independent, and sometimes, as a disloyal, component of the Democratic coalition" is a prescription for Republican rule...

...At the teach-in and in a campaign that lasted five years, the word "union" was hardly mentioned...

...Employers and conservatives hated such linkages...

...In State of the Union I remind twenty-firstcentury readers that collective bargaining and contract unionism have always been but one path toward a solution to the century-old "labor question...

...But gradually we legitimizized the idea of an independent employee voice, and we generated a symbiotic organizing culture that linked employee wage and welfare issues firmly to the racial and gender concerns that university administrators themselves often recognized as legitimate...

...more important, there is no union tradition, no occasion for singing "Solidarity Forever" or the Joe Hill ballads...

...moreover, even for those white male workers who benefited from this system of "free" collective bargaining, danger loomed...

...Eviatar mistakenly asserts that I held the purge of the communists the most important consequence of that 1947 law...

...In the 1960s and afterward public employee unionism could never have flourished without a new understanding of workplace rights that arose out of the black liberation struggle...

...They must defend and deploy what is most useful, even in the mundane world of contract renegotiations and grievance arbitration...

...TaftHartley's anticommunist provisions did fragment the left and chill internal union debate, but I take pains to argue that most employers considered the elimination of union radicals a secondary issue...

...But Eviatar takes exception to much of what follows...

...A transformation in law, political culture, and social commitment requires an ideological advance guard that can give meaning, animation, and purpose to votes, strikes, and grassroots mobilizations...

...Actually, it recognizes that the system is rigged against a third party, which is why it is so important that labor carve out a distinctive profile in the political culture...

...The Charlottesville experience may not be a model for the nation, but because Eviatar thinks such consciousness raising ineffectual, I'm happy to record our accomplishments...

...They wanted to isolate unions by coercing them into a collective bargaining regime that was "free" of any social or political resonance...

...True, they weren't reading Seymour Martin Lipset or Dwight Macdonald, but one thing those on the left have learned from the conservative ascendancy of the last twenty-five years is that hegemony is hard work...

...This does not mean that the day-today work of the unions, including collective 76 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 bargaining, should be cast aside...

...Eviatar caricatures key elements of the book, so in this rejoinder I'll restate the argument and then deal with the real differences between us...

...A central purpose of my book was to demonstrate how and why the union idea needs a genuinely radical defense that links it to an expansive understanding of citizenship, egalitarianism, and democracy...

...IN HER REVIEW of my State of the Union: A Century of American Labor ("A Dearth of Inspiration," Spring 2002), Daphne Eviatar offers a tough-minded critique of a book she labels "utopian" and out of touch with "political reality...

...This was a defeat, and Eviatar seems to accept much of my analysis: union parochialism represented a repudiation of the larger, societyshaping ambitions of the pre–World War II unions...

...Because capitalism is an inherently unstable and ever-changing system, firm-centered bargaining regimes undergo periodic economic and organizational crises, as we have seen during the last thirty years...

...Taking their cues from the resurgent civil rights movement, such judicial liberals as Hugo Black and William 0. Douglas devalued solidarity and collective action, opening the door to the anti-union zealots of the National Right To Work Committee and likeminded libertarians...

...C. Wright Mills had a phrase for such dichotomous thinking: "crackpot realism...

...America never really had a "labor-capital" accord, which is why industrial conflict was intense and continuous, as Jack Metzgar documented in his splendid memoir of that era, Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered...

...She particularly dismisses my critique of those liberal academics and radical intellectuals who took this union defeat and turned it either into a celebration of mid-century American pluralism or a rationale for abanDISSENT / Summer 2002 • 75 ARGUMENTS donment of the whole labor metaphysic...

...The union inaugurated a straightforward organizing campaign that promptly failed...

...We made "Workers' Rights are Civil Rights" the ARGUMENTS theme of a big labor teach-in that put Julian Bond and Richard Trumka on the same podium...

...Eviatar is contemptuous of such campusbased events and of the intellectuals who often organize them, but in Charlottesville we developed a textbook example of how a rightsconscious culture and the union impulse may be fruitfully intertwined...

...So the next time, we linked our organizing effort to the ideas and legacies that had emerged out of the civil rights movement...

...Radical intellectuals and academics who project a wholesale transformation of American labor relations are either impractical or irresponsible, the latter evident in the Naderite sabotage of a Gore victory in the 2000 election...

...This became clear to me during the decade I taught at the University of Virginia...

...And this year, a spirited group of clerical workers, followed shortly thereafter by an equally determined teaching assistant cohort, affiliated themselves with the Communications Workers of America...

...THIS BRINGS US to Eviatar's unhappy view that any fundamental reform of the industrial relations system is wishful thinking...

...They now sign their letters and e-mails "In Solidarity," which itself represents something of a cultural revolution in that college town...

...I was insufficiently aware of this in the early 1990s when we invited the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees to campus...

...Far more important was the proscription of supervisory unionism, the curbs on inter-union solidarity and political action, and the expansion of the right of managers to intimidate their employees in union organizing drives...

...Fortunately, thousands of young people have joined the union movement in the last few years, in part because a number of high-profile unionists have given the left some institutional breathing room...

...in the 1930s and 1940s, strikes, electoral mobilizations, and White House-mediated negotiations with pattern-setting firms generated an expansive system I call "politicized bargaining...

...Neither group will soon win a collective bargaining contract in anti-union Virginia, but something even more important has been set afoot...

...In Charlottesville there is no labor law for public employees...

...What evidence do we have that wage laborers or union leaders of the time were paying such intellectuals any mind...

...But partisans of a union revival would be equally foolish to ignore the overwhelming legitimacy of contemporary America's rights-conscious political culture...

...However, the book is critical of this turn, not out of some neoconservative hostility to affirmative action or "rights talk," but because this model of workplace justice, which is so dependent upon legal authority and government policy, will prove divisive or ineffectual unless animated and institutionalized by employees acting in some kind of collective, democratic fashion...