Barriers of Individualism in the Path of American Unions

...The labor movement has lived with that choice ever since...

...The In the Path of American Unions Australian Council of Trade Unions is not only the primary constituent of the Labor party, but is independently a principal in making national economic policy by means of an accord with the government in 1983 aimed at improving the competitiveness of the lagging Australian economy...

...None of this, moreover, takes account of the rate of attrition of 76 • DISSENT Onions in America the trade union base as industrial plants close and the service sector expands...

...This was, Lipset suggests, an exceptional event, reflecting a shift in the country to more collectivist values as a result of the Great Depression...

...Unions should never seek "at the hands of the government what they could accomplish by their own initiative and activities...

...Labor, being the legitimate and only real source of wealth, and the laboring classes the majority and real strength of every country, their interest and happiness ought to be the principal care of Government...

...4 Lipset finds a significant correlation between a key indicator of public opinion—the Gallup survey of approval/disapproval of unions, which moved from a disapproval rating of 14 percent in 1957 to a record high of 35 percent in 1981—and the decline in union density over that period...

...Plausible as these reasons may be, in Lipset's view they lose much of their force when applied crossnationally, for they do not seem to explain in any clear pattern how the labor movements of other industrial economies have fared...

...The federation is prepared to accept a storm of public criticism...

...On October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed...

...Public opinion research is no place for WINTER • 1989 • 71 an amateur: it is an uncertain science at best, and notoriously hard to interpret...

...This was true in 1929, when it seemed to many critics no more than "a life raft . . . for skilled labor," and is equally true today...

...We do not wish to raise a structure whose foundations are rotten, being built up by repeating the errors of others who have preceded us...

...The school superintendent places a notice in the local press for substitutes...

...At the very time that the union sector in the United States was shrinking, in Canada it was growing...

...And, by the same token, it never managed to reclaim the moral legitimacy given the nineteenth-century movement by labor republicanism...

...If you put first-class spinners and weavers in the same place with second-class spinners and weavers, without discrimination, it will be just like packing first quality and second quality goods in the same bale...

...From the very beginning, the movement had searched without success for an institutional strategy for labor republicanism...

...And, in any event, organized labor can lay less claim to the social-justice mantle today than it could in the Roosevelt, or even the Johnson, era...

...The "pure-andsimple" philosophy that guided them was captured most succinctly by Gompers's colleague in the Cigarmakers Union, Adolph Strasser, in testimony before a Senate committee: Q. You are seeking to improve home matters first...

...The nostrums that were forthcoming— agrarianism, eight hours, greenbackism, cooperation—never quite made the grade...

...What remains, then, are differences in national values...

...The burden of Lipset's argument, however, is not statistical, but comparative...

...Sound familiar...

...And then there is a settlement and they go back to work...

...The anchor for this broad claim is a detailed Canadian-American comparative analysis...

...In a 1976 poll, for example, 82 percent expressed positive feelings toward workers, 32 percent toward unions...

...And the effect, disastrous to a healthy republican society, was to deny to "the working class that standing in the community to which their usefulness entitles them...

...As a Notes Seymour M. Lipset, "Labor Unions in the Public Mind," in Lipset, ed., Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (San Francisco, California, 1986), pp...

...But, if the bounds of constraint do shift—as they did in an earlier Great Depression— they seem unlikely to break...

...Yet organized labor never abandoned what was essential in the pure-andsimple formulation, a truth perhaps more evident during hard going—as in the 1920s or the 1980s—than in flush times...

...For organized labor, 64 percent thought the country would be worse off, only 10 percent thought better off...

...It perhaps sharpens our sense of the quite different—and lesser—regard in which the labor movement is held in America, but not with any precision...

...In fact, business conditions in Canada—unemployment, inflation, low productivity—have been even less favorable to trade unions than in the United States, and Canada has shifted even more decisively from a manufacturing to a service economy...

...We are all practical men...

...In 1834, the General Trades' Union of Boston put forth a "Declaration of Rights" that began: "When a number of individuals associate together in a public manner for the purpose of promoting their common welfare, respect for public opinion, the proper basis of a republic[ an] form of government, under which they associate, requires that they should state to their fellow citizens, the motives which actuate them, in adopting such a course...

...Under the Australian arbitration system, it is assumed that workers will be represented by unions...

...They were productive of brilliant theorizing and flashes of popular enthusiasm, but not of practical results...

...Yet no two national movements have been more alike...

...And there was an intractable organizational problem...

...The workingman should not aspire to a collectivity uniting everyone at the level of the least, but "an even chance in the use of the only thing we all have in common, whether we be rich or poor—the use of his own time...

...In founding the American Federation of Labor in 1886, they were bent on defining a labor movement that would survive in the American environment...

...Visionary thinking was to be avoided...

...Union representation has fallen below 18 percent of the nonagricultural labor force...

...Trades-unionists opposed to the absolute freedom of contract, wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1907, were men "who have neither the ideas nor the sentiments needed for the maintenance or enjoyment of liberty...

...Later in the century, the labor injunction was justified as a legitimate protection of property rights of employers threatened by union power...

...406-20...

...endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...They are now of age and are laboring to guarantee the principles of the Revolution...

...The existence of that value system cannot, however, in itself explain the dubious regard in which trade unionism came to be held in American society...

...A movement founded on a producerist ethic had to be open not only to wage-earners, but to all "producers...

...Most provinces will certify unions on a show of dues-paying membership...

...22 percent of its value vanished in a single day...

...Every step that the workers make or take, every vantage point gained, is a solution in itself...

...He did not dismiss the possibility of larger change...

...5 The economic settings, finally, are also in many ways similar, with many common employers, a comparable level of industrial development, and many economic links...

...I look first to the trade I represent...

...In ratings of the ethical and moral practices of twenty-five occupational groups in the early 1980s, labor leaders stood at the bottom...

...The most recent estimates by Leo Troy are closer to 15 percent, San Francisco Chronicle (October 23, 1987...

...in Kochan, ed., Challenges and Choices, pp...

...The programmatic problems were equally troubling...

...The last great assault on these problems was undertaken by the Knights of Labor, which enjoyed a spectacular success in the first half of the 1880s, and suffered an equally spectacular collapse in the second half...

...By any international standard, trade unionism is powerful in Australia...

...We already behold the wealthy fast verging into aristocracy, the laboring classes into a state of comparative dependence...

...Nor is the labor movement seen as at one with the working class...

...The dominant Canadian tradition has been a kind of Tory paternalism which, as Henry Phelps Brown describes it, "stressed authority and hierarchy, but with these went solidarity and benevolence, which occupy some common ground with collectivism...

...In 1985, despite a decade of labor setbacks, 46 percent still thought so.' Thus, from a variety of angles, public opinion research draws us to this conclusion: in America trade unionism is regarded as a suspect institution to some degree at odds with the larger society...

...Even in his lifetime, the AFL expanded, grew ethnically and ideologically diverse, established links to the state, and became a significant force in American politics...

...But it is foundered even more on its own institutional weaknesses...

...The labor movement can perhaps do a better public-relations job explaining how its activities advance the cause of social justice in the country...

...And, anyway, where was the labor movement...

...7 Lipset, "Labor Unions in the Public Mind," p. 300...

...7 The discrepancy suggests a conclusion different from that drawn by Lipset, namely, that workers do not have to like unions in principle in order to opt for them in practice...

...6 Lipset's analysis is undeniably incomplete...

...We do not know whether his audience of workers found Atkinson's message persuasive...

...All of this was grounded on this rock-bottom Marxist maxim: "Economic organization and control over economic power were 74 • DISSENT Onion in America the fulcrum which made possible influence and power in all other fields...

...The amazement of Australian audiences at my tale of American teachers' strikes certainly arose in some measure from a healthy respect for the power and militancy of Australian unionism...

...This is admittedly a difficult distinction...

...Nor could there be a place for any but wage workers, organized by trades and led by fellow workers...

...The vigor of the Canadian movement can only be explained, Lipset concludes, by a more sympathetic national value system...

...The individualistic values embodied in American law, for example, kept labor in persistent legal trouble during the nineteenth-century...

...That translated into the demand for Eight Hours, which became the central goal of the National Labor Union that Sylvis founded in 1866...

...That, in marvelously succinct form, is the voice of pure-and-simple unionism under duress...

...Trade-union leaders by no means denied republicanism its centrality in American society or, indeed, in the lives of workers as citizens...

...What is left out is the element of human agency...

...What kind of people were Americans that they would scab on one another...

...Over half rated them too powerful in 1976...

...There is always, of course, the possibility that the larger environment will shift once more...

...If we lack nineteenth-century opinion polls, we have much else that suggests the resonance of labor's republicanism in the larger society...

...Australians generally knew about the PATCO strike of 1981, but discounted it as an aberration of a generally unfathomable Reagan administration...

...What would it profit us, as a nation," asked the labor leader William Sylvis in 1865, "were we to preserve our institutions and destroy the morals of the people...

...Less than two-thirds of first-time negotiations result in signed contracts...

...He finds "a dismal picture for organized labor...

...While a process of disassociation has been under way—most recently in the case of the Auto Workers—institutional structures and rules remain pretty much the same...

...To refer back to the Australian comparison: the current prime minister, Bob Hawke, had earlier served as head of the ACTU...

...The first two volumes, covering the period 1850-1890, have appeared...

...The purpose of the labor movement was to reverse this unnatural process, "until we behold our young men aspiring to the character and title of virtuous and intelligent mechanics, as the most certain means to obtain the respect and confidence of their fellow citizens...

...421-52...

...Roughly equal in the mid-1950s, both movements experienced a similar slow downward trend until the mid-1960s, then sharply WINTER • 1989 • 75 Onions in America diverged...

...And even where Lipset asserts a direct connection, much remains to be clarified...

...There is never any lack of applicants...

...6 Quotations in Lipset, pp...

...3 "North American Labor Movements: A Comparative Perspective," in Lipset, ed., Unions in Transition, pp...

...Although part of a North American movement, the Canadian unions historically showed a more collectivist bent, advocating state intervention when the AFL was preaching voluntarism, and, since the 1930s, providing the core support for the independent social democratic politics that has evolved with the New Democratic party...

...113-32...

...they will all be sold for just what the seconds are worth...

...For other illuminating essays on Canada and the United States, see pure-and-simple movement, labor has the least leeway when its power is eroding and its membership declining...

...How heavy has that liability been for the modern labor movement...

...There are no obvious ways to change this...

...The man who comprehends the use of time, and who keeps control of his own time, his hands, and his brain, will come out on top every time...

...If trade unionism is taken as a given, then strikebreaking—inherently a lifethreatening attack on a union—is almost by definition a bad thing, and especially abhorrent at the hands of public officials such as superintendents of schools...

...WINTER • 1989 • 77...

...But their response also reflected the regard they had for the labor movement...

...It is suspect, Lipset suggests, because its collective character places organized labor at odds with the value system of the larger society...

...or, indeed, as much recent scholarship would suggest, whether the textile workers did not hold a rival ethic of solidarity and mutuality...

...By "place" I mean not so much the role that trade unions play as the regard in which they are held by the larger society...

...In 1978, the Roper poll asked "whether you think the country would be better or worse off if certain groups had more influence and freedom to do what they think best...

...Union membership stands at 56 percent of the labor force...

...67-71...

...As compared to her more populous neighbor, Canada is a more elitist, communitarian, statist, and particularistic (group oriented) society...

...Q. I see that you are a little sensitive lest it should be thought that you are a mere theorizer...

...The American social structure and values foster the free market and competitive individualism, an orientation which is not congruent with class consciousness, support of socialist or social democratic parties, or a strong trade union movement...

...and Noah M. Meltz, "Labor Movements in Canada and the United States," in Thomas Kochan, ed., Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985), pp...

...He cites research that shows little impact of delays or employer opposition on election outcomes, and ascribes the low current rate of union success — 45 percent—to the declining sympathy for unions in the population as a whole...

...This incredulous reaction exposed to me in an especially forceful way what any observant American visitor to Australia quickly discovers—the immensely different place accorded the labor movement in the two societies...

...Just the reverse had happened in practice...

...And while nearly two-thirds thought labor unions exerted too much influence in politics in 1976, only four percent thought the same of "workingmen," while 53 percent thought the latter had too little influence (compared to five percent for unions...

...Until political expediency caught up with him, the future president pronounced himself "a fierce partizan [sic] of the Open Shop and of everything that makes for industrial liberty...

...How was it possible for a public official to try to break a strike...

...Ever since 1936, public opinion about organized labor has been continuously and ever more elaborately surveyed...

...William T. Dickens, "The Effect of Company Campaigns on Certification Elections," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 36 (July 1983), pp...

...For that, we must turn to more systematic evidence...

...Thus on all the issues in which labor republicanism had gone in one direction—on politics, on program, on constituency—pureandsimple unionism went in the other...

...This was the worst showing of the seven groups tested...

...Then union density began to grow, reaching a high point of nearly 33 percent in 1953...

...A Labor government has been in power since 1983...

...And then the peroration: "There is always plenty of room on the front seats in every profession, every trade, every art, every industry...

...At the AFL-CIO convention a week later, a reporter hears, amidst anxious talk about an economic contraction, some hope "that the collapse in stock prices would call into question the individualist ethos of the Reagan era and create an environment far more sympathetic to the labor movement's insistence on the importance of social solidarity...

...Out of debates within the First International, moreover, they had identified the trade union as the only effective means of fostering working-class development in America...

...8 Much of the complexity of the organizing process clearly has not been captured in Lipset's analysis...

...save our Constitution and sink the masses into hopeless ignorance, poverty, and crime...

...But the force with which he made his case bespeaks Atkinson's own immense confidence in an ethic of competitive individualism...

...Such a movement would eschew independent politics, which caused internal dissension and distracted the movement from its main tasks...

...or whether hard experience had taught them to doubt the reality of "front seats" for any of 72 • DISSENT Onions in America them, or even of the likelihood of a fair reward for a hard day's work in the mills...

...School remains at least formally open while the teachers picket outside...

...So compelling was the free labor ideology that it was appropriated by the emerging Republican Party during the sectional crisis of the 1850s...

...Since the 1950s, affluent America has drifted back to the older value system of individualism, and the result has been an erosion of trade-union strength down toward pre-New Deal levels...

...Consider the teachers' strikes which have become a familiar part of the opening of the school year around the United States every September...

...While there may be a statistical correlation, for example, it does not necessarily follow that any real relationship exists between national approval ratings of labor unions and the proclivity of workers to vote for union representation in certification elections...

...What structure would accommodate and discipline a constituency that included nearly anyone who felt like joining up...

...The Vietnam war twenty years ago, and Central America today, cost the AFL-CIO heavily among its friends without discernibly altering its public standing or even, indeed, making any dent on the Reagan administration's anti-unionism...

...Differing value systems have different organizational outcomes, says Lipset...

...For business executives, the findings were 25 percent no, 59 percent yes...

...During the 1930s, in the heyday of the CIO, the labor movement seemed on the brink of social-democratic transformation, and, after that moment faded, long remained a central actor in liberal Democratic politics...

...They thought in terms of class struggle and recognized, as J. P. McDonnell had remarked, that they faced a harder task than their European brothers because "in the United States our capitalist enemy resides in the breast of almost everyone...

...By lodging its principles in the new AFL, Gompers meant to make them the exclusive basis for trade-union organization...

...The United States is not Canada...

...Canadian labor law, moreover, is patterned on the National Labor Relations Act...

...Canada never had a liberal revolution...

...45-65, and "Discussion," pp...

...I look first to cigars, to the interests of men who employ me to represent their interests...

...and the yellow-dog contract, by the equally fundamental right of contract between consenting individuals...

...Or listen to Edward Atkinson, a Rhode Island manufacturer, explaining to an audience of workers twenty years earlier why it was against their interest to form a trade union...

...In one respect, Canadian law has been seen by critics of the NLRA as much more favorable to union representation...

...The difference with the United States is perhaps best captured by how trade unions are treated under the labor laws of the two countries...

...To relate this scenario to an Australian audience, as I had occasion to do several times during a recent semester at Sydney University, is invariably to evoke titters of laughter or a shocked silence, followed by a flood of questions...

...442, 443, 452...

...The nineteenth-century labor movement thus attached its cause to the country's republican heritage—to equal rights, to citizenship, to the vision of a virtuous society of independent producers...

...the others mandate very quick elections...

...The Australian comparison is no more than a device for bringing my subject into focus...

...There is, in fact, a particular history of how the American labor movement tried to define its place in the larger society, and of why this resulted in the hostility recorded in modern opinion polls...

...But the Republican party, if long on rhetoric, came up short when confronted by a demand that would have to be paid for out of the pockets of capital...

...John J. Lawler and Robin West, "Impact of Union Avoidance Strategy in Representation Elections," Industrial Relations, 24 (Fall 1985), pp...

...In the early labor conspiracy cases, the main charge was unlawful coercion of individual workers who were unwilling to abide by union standards...

...Its national existence, indeed, derives from its rejection of the American revolution...

...But if Lipset is right, collectivist values are no longer in the ascendant...

...The AFL-CIO estimated in 1983 that it had to organize over a million new workers each year just to stay even...

...I am perfectly satisfied to fight the battles of today, of those here, and those that come tomorrow, so their conditions may be improved, and they may be better prepared to fight the contests or solve the problems that may be presented to them...

...Consistently, opinion polls register concern over the power of the labor unions...

...Values for the most part do not have direct consequences, but are mediated through the many institutional and social/economic forces acting on trade unionism...

...We are going on from day to day...

...They have common historical roots...

...We ought to try to have a good image," commented one AFL-CIO official, "but give me a choice between the role of public opinion and the role of increased power, and I'll take the power...

...Union organizing expenditures, for one thing, have declined relative to the size of the nonunion sector...

...Labor is prior to, and independent of capital," said Lincoln...

...At some fundamental level, the crisis of American trade unionism derives from the dubious regard in which it is held by the larger society...

...For a time, David Montgomery has argued, the labor movement assumed that the political struggle against slavery marked the opening stage of a larger battle for the achievement of its own republican vision...

...Fortunately, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, expert in this area, has recently published a detailed survey of how labor has fared in public opinion polls...

...The union sets a strike date...

...It was Gompers's genius to see what had to be done, 2 and he can scarcely be faulted for the choice he made...

...If Gompers's approach was well-calculated to build a viable trade-union movement, it did so by distancing that movement from traditional republican values...

...For many years, the Fourth of July was a workers' holiday, celebrated by them with such toasts as: "The Working Men, the legitimate children of '76, their sires left them the legacy of freedom and equality...

...Canadian unions mostly began as the "international" segments of American national unions...

...Mainly German Marxists, they were not locked into the tradition of republicanism...

...Stuart B. Kaufman, ed., The Samuel Gompers Papers (Urbana, Illinois, 1986...

...These rights were expressed not through Atkinson's competitive individualism, but were linked instead to a producer ethic...

...The ills of our social and economic system cannot be cured by patent medicine," Gompers wrote...

...q Christopher Huxley, et al., "Is Canada's Experience 'Especially Instructive...

...We are fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years...

...5 Lipset, "North American Labor Movements," pp...

...With the Fathers of our Country," the Boston unionists continued, "we hold that all men are created free and equal...

...How was an exploitative industrial order to be transformed into the cooperative commonwealth...

...Lipset's point can be readily demonstrated in the historical record...

...Labor's tendency, doubtless more reflexive than calculated, to try to regain the moral high ground by taking on the Americanist coloration of its adversaries—for example, by its embrace of anti-immigration nativism in the 1890s, or by Gompers's strident patriotism during World War I, or, to some degree, by the militant anti-communism of the Cold War era—has never paid off...

...In more radical moments, he could still speak of trade-union unity as "the germ of the future state...

...Its natural venue was politics, but in a system dominated by two mass parties little scope could be found for independent labor politics...

...8 See, e.g., Richard B. Freeman, "Why Are Unions Faring Badly in NLRB Elections...

...And his fellow Republican William Evarts: Labor is "the source of all our wealth, of all our progress, of all our dignity and value...

...315-34...

...Why was there no sympathy strike to keep the schools properly shut down...

...Nor is it clear that worker preferences are the decisive factor...

...Here, then, was a central paradox of American labor history: To embrace the republican values of the larger society was to have a labor movement that would not work...

...I do not mean to suggest that history stopped with Gompers...

...Enormous, if one accepts the argument advanced by Lipset in a companion essay to his public-opinion analysis...

...they will get there by using their own brains and their own hands...

...The clerically led French Canadians were equally impervious to the French revolution...

...In the United States, there are normally long delays which enable employers to mount anti-union campaigns...

...There has been no lack of explanation for labor's dramatic decline since the mid 1970s—the deregulation of major markets, the shift to a service economy, the faltering competitiveness of the manufacturing sector in an increasingly internationalized economy, a labor law inimicable to labor's organizing efforts...

...At this juncture, there occurred one of those rare moments in which the history of a social movement is made by conscious choice...

...But there is still no escaping the force of his thesis...

...Time will tell...

...But not as the basis for the labor movement...

...But such thinking had to be put aside...

...In fact, a sharp divergence obtains here...

...A. Yes, sir...

...in the 56 percent affirmative responses to the statement: "If there were no unions, most employers would move quickly to exploit their employees...

...It is of course an echo of the opening words of the Declaration of Independence...

...560-75...

...287-322...

...Public opinion polls show a significant discrepancy between negative attitudes to unions as institutions and valuations of the need for unions — e.g...

...and it is not Australia...

...2 For instructive reading on this point, see the edition of Gompers's papers now being published...

...There is a long and fascinating history of experimentation with labor parties stretching back to the workingmen's parties of the 1830s, but it is a history of nearly unvarying failure, in which the NLU's National Labor Reform party was but the last...

...In 1981, the approval/disapproval rating of labor unions (55 percent/35 percent) stood at the lowest point since the Gallup poll first asked this question in 1936...

...By most accounts (if not Lipset's), employer opposition has been highly effective, not only during representation campaigns, but also in resisting good-faith collective bargaining after unions have won representation elections...

...Lipset, however, minimizes the significance of these problems...

...3 Until the 1930s, trade unionism had normally been confined to about ten percent of the nonagricultural labor force...

...in Lipset, Unions in Transition, pp...

...Remember . . . that all popular governments must depend for their stability and success upon the virtue and intelligence of the masses...

...Q. I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends...

...The key actors were a small circle of trade union radicals, among them Samuel Gompers...

...A. Well, we say in our constitution that we are opposed to theorists, and I have to represent the organization here...

...The central thrust of American labor law, on the other hand, is to determine whether or not workers want union representation...

...Thirty years after expelling the International Brotherhood of Teamsters on grounds of corruption, the AFL-CIO has readmitted that most powerful and unrepentant of American unions...

...A. We have no ultimate ends...

...432-33...

...There are men in this audience who will fill some of those seats, but they won't be boosted into them from behind...

...In a 1979 poll that asked whether it would be acceptable for a labor leader to become president, 53 percent said no, 30 percent said yes...

...And to have a movement that would work required some degree of disengagement from those American values...

...In so doing, of course, he boldly exposed to public view his pure-and-simple brand of labor movement—in which economic power was everything, in which organization served above all as the basis of economic power, in which the cement of organization was the immediate interest of the members...

...The National Labor Union foundered on the discovery of this harsh WINTER • 1989 73 Onions in America truth...

...registration involves only the question of which union is appropriate for a given group of workers...

...Canadian union density currently stands at 40 percent, well over twice that of the United States...