The Breakdown of Labor's Social Contract
Brody, David
Historical Reflections, Future Prospects In 1950 John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and leading operators representing the entire softcoal industry negotiated the...
...Never mind that in later years a darker side to the law would be revealed and the wisdom of departing from Gompers's anti-statist principles called into question...
...And in a variety of ways—in the agency-shop requirements in the major provinces (as compared to the right-to-work laws in many states) and in limitations on the freedom of employers to move from unionized sites—Canadian law signals the legitimacy of collective bargaining...
...This is happening partly because of a new spirit of entitlement to state-mandated due process and anti-discriminatory rights, and even more because of the injury that cost-cutting programs and corporate restructuring in its various guises has inflicted on the privileged status of white collar and semi-professional employees...
...After half a century of secular decline, the demand for coal began to rise, but almost exclusively from the electric utilities, which were consuming 80 percent of output by 1980...
...But, at a more fundamental level, the labor movement—both the AFL and CIO wings— was unerring and, at the critical junctures, astonishingly successful in advancing its tradeunion interests...
...This was true for the industrial workers of the 1930s and true likewise of the incipient movement for employee rights to which Heckscher calls our attention...
...In the American case that is an unarguable truth...
...By the same token, something like them in new forms will have to take shape to bring into being the next expansionist period...
...And if the gap between institution and environment was wide enough, then it would follow—as indeed Drucker says—that "the labor union will have to transform itself drastically...
...Individual unions have responded with varying degrees of flexibility and resourcefulness...
...At the time, the Wagner Act represented a remarkable triumph for American trade unionism...
...Empowered by the Wagner Act, the industrial unions then seized that system, gave it contractual form, and, in short, made themselves the institutional embodiment of the job interests of the mass-production workers...
...No two movements could have been more alike in institutional makeup and historical experience...
...The AFL-CIO remained steadfastly nonpartisan, although, as compared to the old AFL, with far more potent force and in firm alliance with the Democratic party...
...How can we be moving at once toward a cooperative labor-management system and also toward a deepening crisis over employee rights...
...But its roots are, as she argues, already well established in the history of craft unionism and, indeed, Cobble's insights derive from her historical study of organized waitresses...
...The rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively are much more effectively protected under Canadian law because of swift certification procedures and the mandatory signing of first agreements...
...The way Peter Drucker initially defined the question—are unions becoming irrelevant?—embodied the most important part of the answer: namely, it identified the unions as the problem...
...Surveys show a startling rise in the levels of dissatisfaction in all categories of white-collar employees in recent years...
...If that is true, then of course not much can be learned from labor's past...
...3 Involvement, commitment, flexibility—these are the watchwords of the new industrial relations, and they are required, Ben Fischer tells us, "by very new forces in the patterns of ownership, management and market behavior, along with radical new technology...
...Nor was it ever in a position to make or break the key developments in law, economic policy, or workplace relations on which labor's future depended...
...There has emerged what the Canadian scholar Christopher Huxley and his associates have called a distinctively Canadian "labor regime...
...Whether the existing unions are incapable of transformation, as Heckscher is inclined to believe, seems to me something of an open question: after all, old-line AFL unions like the Teamsters, Machinists, and Meat Cutters proved extraordinarily resilient once challenged by the CIO, and current unions are much more flexible jurisdictionally than those of the 1930s...
...It is at the workplace...
...Why should we believe that the succeeding regime will not in its turn set in motion a process that, like the one we have just surveyed, will end with a new adversarial system, a postmodern version, so to speak, of what Sumner Slichter half a century ago called industrial jurisprudence...
...But, as she rightly notes, an increasing portion of the service sector is made up of workers ranging from highly skilled contract computer programmers to part-time, mostly female clericals who lack that relationship...
...a formal procedure for adjudicating grievances arising from those rights...
...What has become more favorable is, in the broadest sense, political...
...This, in turn, prefigured the Keynesian economic policy that underwrote the New Deal collective bargaining system...
...The modern movement represents roughly the same proportion of workers in the sectors of its historical strength (that is, as of 1950...
...In Canada, on the other hand, the two-party system itself came under attack, initially by the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in the western provinces and then more decisively with the formation of the New Democratic party (NDP) in 1961...
...An alternative human resources management system . . . gradually overtook collective bargaining and emerged as the pacesetter by emphasizing high employee involvement and commitment and flexibility in the utilization of individual employees...
...As an economic regulator—a mechanism for stabilizing a highly competitive, overdeveloped 32 • DISSENT Labor's Social Contract industry—the BCOA-UMWA agreement had effectively been superseded...
...At the same time, the New Deal moved to mitigate the market pressures that had driven their anti-unionism...
...Corporate commitment to this formalized system was imperfect, however, and broke down entirely in the early years of the Great Depression...
...the obligation of good-faith bargaining imposed on employers...
...The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had very much the same cachet for the 1920s that GM's NUMMI plant has today...
...3 Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Robert McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (New York, 1986), 226-27...
...Under Lewis's incompetent successors, beginning with the corrupt Tony Boyle, the UMWA never had a chance...
...There were, moreover, compelling reasons, almost systemic in nature, for the formalization of work rules...
...In the massproduction sector, the question was no longer whether managers had the authority, but only how they exercised it...
...The attack on that system has powerful programmatic implications...
...The Wagner Act contained an explicit economic rationale: collective bargaining would give rise to the mass purchasing power necessary for sustained economic growth...
...So, in thinking about prospects for its future recovery, we have to turn to the best historical instance we have of how trade unionism has triumphed in the American environment —the 1930s...
...It signifies the political weakness of organized labor that this modest strengthening of union protections stands so little chance of passage...
...exclusive representation by the certified bargaining agents...
...Whatever the particularities, the recent economic revolution has been remarkably consistent in its impact on the labor movement: in the private sector, collective-bargaining systems are everywhere under siege, and anti-unionism is resurgent...
...And, from that perspective, there seems to have developed a broad consensus about the locus of that fatal disjuncture...
...By way of explanation, the sociologist Seymour Lipset and others point to collectivist values inhering in the Canadian political culture that accord legitimacy to the labor movement and shelter it from the marketdriven anti-unionism rampant in the United States...
...Time-and-motion study meant objective— that is, testable—standards for the pace of work...
...On top of this came a crisis over productivity, induced by the clash between union work rules rooted in the premechanization era and the rationalizing demands of an increasingly capital-intensive industry...
...What is happening in the United States is after all part of a global phenomenon, affecting, if not necessarily to the same degree or in precisely the same ways, the labor markets of all the advanced industrial economies...
...The ERP scheme, as it evolved from its transparently cynical beginnings, became attractive to many in the administration, including Roosevelt himself, as an alternative to collective bargaining...
...In a striking reversal of historic trends, it is the service sector that is lagging in an economic recovery...
...It was 40 • DISSENT Labor's Social Contract because the contrary happened in the 1930s— because welfare capitalism failed under the stress of the Great Depression—that the occasion was provided for the rise of the industrial unions...
...Recall the moment at which industrial unionism crystallized during the 1930s...
...The structure of the industry was transformed by the entry of conglomerates: by 1976, only three of the forty largest coal producers remained under independent management...
...Those who have focused on the workplace (as Drucker himself did not) draw the same conclusion...
...5 The foregoing quotations, which could be duplicated many times over, fairly convey a broad consensus of what might be called "progressive" thinking (including inside the labor movement) about the obsolescence of the contractual system of workplace relations that took shape under industrial unionism...
...With the onset of the Great Depression, the balance of forces in the United States shifted dramatically...
...2 Readers who are curious about my own views on the history of American labor politics are invited to see my essay in Jack Greene, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York, 1980...
...labor...
...But for Canada as a whole that was decidedly not the case...
...To see what actually happened let us return to the coal industry...
...Canadian labor threw off the nonpartisanship fostered by the AFL-CIO linkage and entered into a robust social-democratic thirdparty politics...
...It was a triumphant moment for Lewis, culminating an entire career of dogged effort at constructing a collective-bargaining system that would stabilize the cutthroat soft-coal industry...
...The manner in which performance is sought contrasts drastically with yesterday's strategies...
...The decisive moment came in 1902, when the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC—the Canadian counterpart to the American Federation of Labor) expelled the Knights of Labor bodies and adopted the AFL principle of opposition to dual unionism, thereby granting the Canadian branches of the U.S...
...in accounting for this calamitous decline, my premise is that the operative forces are economic...
...But these transforming events were not of labor's making...
...And through the Wagner Act, against all odds, the labor movement prevailed...
...During the battles over employee representation of the NRA period, the terms of a just workplace system took shape and gained the broad assent of all parties (including, in large measure, management...
...419-36...
...Output per miner jumped from 6.77 to 12.83 tons during the decade, so that, despite steeply rising wages, labor costs actually fell by 8 percent...
...and a structure of shop-floor representation to implement the grievance procedure...
...7 In this discussion I am focusing on what Dorothy Sue Cobble has recently characterized as "worksite unionism," in which job rights are defined in relationship to a particular site and employer...
...in any proper history, all this would have to be fully explicated...
...labor took a historic misstep, and should have followed the Canadian example...
...There are, too, quite striking parallels in how the labor movement responded to adversity...
...In this sense, labor's past is deeply and irrevocably implicated in whatever future it has...
...it joined the New Deal, advocated market regulation, participated in the workplace struggles of 1933-36...
...In the 1960s, a political divergence occurred no less remarkable than the divergence in the institutional fortunes of the two movements...
...In The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Thomas Kochan and his fellow authors write: Over the course of the past half century union and nonunion systems traded positions as the innovative force in industrial relations...
...The type of work being performed by workers is changing...
...At both moments, the crisis confronting the labor movement came not primarily from these mature sectors, which, even totally organized, could by themselves not have sustained a robust national movement, but from the dynamic new sectors of economic growth seemingly beyond the reach of trade unionism...
...A dwindling share of the Canadian movement-35 percent or less by the late 1980s—retains ties to the AFL-CIO, and the sense that the Canadian movement has a separate destiny is palpable...
...The answer, at its most basic, would have to be that past experience no longer applies...
...To adapt to the new industrial relations, says Ben Fischer, "will dictate a redefinition of what is a union...
...In 1970, the United States was at the bottom end of the scale, but it shared the 30-39 percent decile with six other countries...
...Embattled as it is, the labor movement hears on all sides today calls for an end to "adversarialism...
...In the areas of its historical strength—construction, mining, and transportation— it represented in the range of 25 to 30 percent of eligible workers...
...But what it did have was an acute and true sense of what, as a job-conscious labor movement, it wanted from that environment...
...No one would argue, however, that the obstacles facing organized labor seemed any less daunting in 1929 than they do today...
...Employers today feel free to thwart unionization and, perhaps even more important in the current economic climate, to break out of established contractual relations—hence the current eagerness of the AFL-CIO for legislation prohibiting the permanent replacement of strikers...
...In 1929, of course, the dynamic core was the technologically advanced massproduction industries...
...The vaunted Canadian militancy against concessions was well grounded in a markedly more favorable bargaining environment...
...Heckscher sees signs of an emergent movement, still inchoate and divided among many interest groups, but acting "on a single premise: that corporations, while they may have property rights, have no right to abuse their employees...
...From the 1960s onward, the Canadian unions entered a period of sustained growth, more than doubling their membership in twenty years and, by the early 1980s, boasting a unionized sector approaching 40 percent—this in stark contrast to the devastating spiral below 20 percent in the United States...
...To achieve these results, corporations have enlisted a sophisticated human-resources science that Kochan, Katz and McKersie assure us has mastered the mysteries of employee motivation...
...This consensus, in turn, signified an enduring social contract between labor, capital, and the state that at long last put behind the country a century of endemic industrial strife...
...The Canadian industry boomed after the 1982 recession...
...The Canadian Auto Workers split off from the UAW citing the responsibility that they had "to play a lead role" in fulfilling "a Canadian labour movement programme...
...In Canada, on the other hand, the collective bargaining process is closely regulated by conciliation requirements, strike votes, and prohibitions against stoppages during the life of 34 • DISSENT Labor's Social Contract contracts (with mandatory arbitration of grievances required...
...There was something very particular—and prescient—about how Drucker put that question...
...The emerging post-Taylorist system of industrial relations is characterized by what Charles Heckscher calls "managerialism," whose aim it is "that every employee be a manager, involved in decisions and contributing intelligently to the goals of the corporation...
...That tendency no longer governs...
...in others, as in autos, steel, clothing, and shoes, from foreign competition...
...So labor's crisis has brought the movement to a juncture where this question is seriously contemplated: should institutional change be undertaken of the scope needed to promote a shift from adversarial to cooperative workplace relations...
...And, in the strip-mining fields of the west that produced a quarter of the nation's coal by 1980, there was a new and potent nonunion sector to contend with...
...In the meanwhile, the AFL-CIO fell on hard political times, becoming more marginal to electoral politics after the collapse of the Johnson administration in 1968 and reduced increasingly to fighting for its own sectional interests rather than for the larger social-justice objectives that since the New Deal had animated labor's legislative agenda...
...The rise of industrial unionism enables us to identify the enduring historical determinants of the fate of organized labor in the American environment...
...Rank-and-file fury over job insecurity and intolerable speed-up forced management's hand during the NRA period...
...Amid widespread workplace strife, output per worker in the underground mines plunged during the 1970s...
...4 The conclusion drawn by a distinguished panel of business and labor leaders for the Economic Policy Council (1990) is that 38 • DISSENT Labor's Social Contract a "them and us" system of workplace relations [is] simply inadequate in today's social and economic environment...
...The early and persistent tendency of Canadian local unions to affiliate with the emerging national trade unions south of the border—not the contrary impulses of Canadian nationalism— was the determining fact in the evolution of Canadian unionism...
...His error here is absolutely fundamental, masking as it does a vital continuity between past and present...
...The crisis over job control touched off by Taylorism had passed by the 1930s...
...But even the most inventive of unions—for example, the Steelworkers in the face of its industry's extraordinary collapse in the early 1980s — could not prevent the deep erosion of their membership bases...
...It was a bystander in the cataclysmic economic collapse that set things in motion and a very minor player in the emergence of the New Deal and upsurge of rank-and-file militancy...
...With output and employment on the rise—the Canadian share of North American production expanded by 25 percent during the decade—Canadian auto workers were spared the plant closings and draconian cost-cutting demands confronting their U.S...
...Section 7a was part of the industrial recovery legislation that, through codes of fair competition, enabled industries to cartelize their depression-ridden markets...
...For auto, an economic explanation might suffice...
...The breakthrough of the 1930s, of course, came from an entirely different direction...
...Indeed, it had taken shape in the course of their efforts to implant the employee representation plans (that is, company unions) that employers hoped would satisfy the requirements of New Deal labor policy...
...Yet no other labor movement has been so hard hit as the American by these global developments—at least, as reflected in the numbers...
...The more apt historical question runs the other way: why was Canadian labor so long in finding the empowering political role it currently enjoys...
...Consider what the Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) found in surveys among managers at about two hundred companies over a thirty-year period from the 1950s to the early 1980s: those who rated their companies favorably in terms of fair application of policies and rules dropped from almost 80 percent to less than 40 percent, those who felt secure in their jobs declined from nearly 100 percent to 65 percent, those who thought their company was a better place to work than when they had started stood at a little higher than 25 percent...
...The labor movement cannot itself define those aspirations, nor very much influence the processes that give rise to them...
...Since 1973, manufacturing productivity has increased even more slowly than in the United States, the unemployment rate has run almost consistently higher during the 1980s (it currently stands at 10 percent), and, as in the United States, the downward pressure on wages has been (in the words of the Canadian scholar Daniel Drache) "far-reaching and broad-based...
...For such workers, the challenge to the labor movement is to come forth with a new institutional form that Cobble calls "occupational unionism...
...But we need to specify quite precisely the historical discontinuity that must occur: namely, that the new industrial relations not give rise to a crisis over industrial justice...
...In short: no other labor movement stands so exposed to the forces of its economic environment...
...And thereafter, with certain deviations, the two movements came close to having a unitary institutional history, with the Canadians generally marching a half step to the rear...
...At its best," concludes Heckscher, "the managerialist order offers genuine improvements in the situation of employees as well as in the effectiveness of the orgnization...
...The high-wage structure stimulated the mechanization Lewis had long championed...
...Yet, despite its far reach, the law was specifically circumscribed, setting collective bargaining in motion but leaving the process itself within the realm of contractual freedom...
...The performance of the Mine Workers by no means represents the norm...
...Consider, moreover, the diverging fates of Canadian and U.S...
...The Steelworkers emerged with its union-management relations largely intact, but with a membership cut in half: in basic steel, production jobs shrank from half a million in 1975 to 120,000 in 1990...
...And if Heckscher's managerialist order lives up to its promise, what incentive would their employees have for joining a union...
...Once almost fully organized, the UMWA represents fewer than 15 percent of the nation's miners, and, despite Richard Trumka's robust leadership and the courage of the Pittston strikers, today faces a bleak future...
...brothers and sisters...
...5 "The Common Interests of Employees and Employers in the 1990s," Report of the Economic Policy Council Panel of the United Nations Association (New York, 1990) [introductory pamphlet...
...For relatively mobile workers such as these, industrial justice would have a quite different content, arising in varying degrees from their concerns with occupational identity, control over the labor supply, portable rights and benefits, and peer determination of performance standards and workplace discipline...
...In some industries, as in communications, the airlines, and trucking, labor's problems stemmed from government deregulation...
...2 If we can agree that, at least after the triumph of the New Deal, the fundamental conditions of American politics did preclude the Canadian option, that will suffice for my purposes...
...The AFL never had the power to shape the environment within which it operated...
...In the context of the mass-production systems at the cutting edge sixty years ago, the efforts of organized labor to jump on board bear a striking similarity to the anxious receptivity of today's trade unions toward a more flexible and mutualistic system of labor relations...
...What the AFL had on its side, in the long, dispiriting battle over Section 7a, was an absolutely clear and unwavering conception of what it wanted: a system of state regulation that conformed to its conception of collective bargaining through trade-union representation...
...WINTER • 1992 • 41...
...Notes Quoted in Christopher Huxley, David Kettler, and James Struthers, "Is Canada's Experience 'Especially Instructive...
...It is their employees who have to be persuaded, and, if and when that time comes, what will persuade them will be the only kind of appeal that has worked with American workers since the days of Samuel Gompers: namely, the identification of the union with their demand for industrial justice...
...As the NDP made headway—its progress capped by the capture of Ontario in the 1990 elections—Canadian unionism not only gained political muscle but increasingly became a progressive force in the nation's political life...
...But it does not actually matter very much whether established unions do it, or whether new institutions emerge, or, as happened in the public sector, professional associations evolve into unions, so long as the end result is trade unionist in function...
...Thus there emerged the key elements—the legal framework, the market regulation, an agreed-upon workplace regime—buttressing the modern collective-bargaining system...
...A voluntaristic labor movement would not have had it otherwise...
...Corporate employers would have much preferred to operate this regime under nonunion conditions...
...Should that movement reach crisis proportions, however, the stage would be set, so to speak, for the next CIO.' American industrial relations have arrived at an odd juncture...
...Everything in the law's provisions was keyed to promoting collective bargaining: majority rule in the selection of bargaining agents...
...in Seymour M. Lipset, Unions in Transition: Entering the Second Century (San Francisco, 1986), p.114...
...That its roots may have been somewhat different from those animating the incipient movement that Heckscher describes seems to me not especially germane, so long as we are not prepared to deny that injustice can be as potent a conception for industrial workers as for middle managers and semiprofessionals, and as potent if it arises from the factory regime as from a sense of legal entitlement (although, with the adoption of Section 7a, there developed in the minds of industrial workers as well a strong sense of legal entitlement...
...In these sectors, no amount of union enthusiasm for cooperative relations and employee involvement is likely to persuade employers that collective bargaining is preferable to a union-free environment...
...This is quite different from the premise that fueled industrial unionism," Heckscher adds...
...The Canadian comparison suggests the insulating powers of a more favorable political culture...
...The AFL never had the power during the NRA period to impose collective bargaining on unwilling employers...
...In flush times, these state restraints might seem burdensome (in practice, of course, they become incorporated into the bargaining stategy of the parties) but, under adverse conditions, they preserve the collective bargaining process itself...
...In politics, for example, there were comparably desperate initiatives: the abortive entry into the Democratic nominating process in 1984 has a counterpart in the farmer-labor insurgency within the party primaries that petered out in LaFollette's Progressive ticket of 1924...
...This is best observed in the battle over New Deal collective bargaining policy...
...Under its guidance, a wide range of programs have taken shape—all-salaried compensation, profit-sharing, work-sharing, flexible work schedules, payment for knowledge, autonomous work teams, ingenious systems of communication and grievance handling...
...The historic linkages between the two movements are disintegrating...
...Wages rose from $14.75 a day in 1950 to $24.25 in 1958, and royalty payments of 40 cents per ton financed a generous welfare-and-retirement fund...
...Indeed, if one credits the influential argument of the Regulation school of French political economy, a new stage of late capitalism has set in worldwide, displacing the regulated national economies of the postwar era with a global economic order characterized by capital mobility and competitive labor markets...
...At 17 percent in WINTER • 1992 • 33 Labor's Social Contract 1985-86, it stood in a class by itself, eleven points behind the next most laggard movement...
...Finding the common interests of employees and employers, of unions and managers, and developing a process for overcoming the division between workers and managers, is the critical challenge that labor and capital must address in the decade ahead...
...How that contradiction is resolved remains to be seen, but on its resolution probably rides the future of the American labor movement...
...and elsewhere, from construction to retailing, from a host of other destabilizing market and technological changes...
...For the next decade, the BCOA-UMWA agreement worked as Lewis had intended...
...By no means...
...Yes, the labor movement played a role...
...In 1929, organized labor was an arrested movement...
...And there was an eerily familiar retreat in the 1920s from adversial unionism, evident not only in the sharp decline in strike activity but more significantly in the AFL's conversion to cooperative labor-management relations...
...The depth of labor's crisis is best captured in the numbers...
...But retreating from "them and us" as a basic orientation is a different matter...
...At that time, 70 percent of all organized workers in Canada belonged to AFL-CIO unions...
...Back in the darkest days of the 1982 recession, the business analyst Peter Drucker wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal (September 22, 1982) entitled "Are Unions Becoming Irrelevant...
...This is reflected in the bargaining rights granted public employees, who are organized at twice the U.S...
...It suggested some fundamental disjuncture: the industrial order had gone off in one direction, the labor movement in another, and, in so doing, was in danger of becoming "irrelevant...
...Insofar as the outcome favors managerialism, to that extent labor's prospects are surely foreclosed...
...Where tasks were subdivided and precisely defined, for example, job classification necessarily followed and, from that, the principle of pay equity...
...Much the same could be said for the labor-process sources of anti-unionism...
...This key linkage survived the early demise of the National Industrial Recovery Act...
...internationals a virtual monopoly over trade-union representation in the TLC...
...Employers were deprived of the enormous power advantage they had long enjoyed in the struggle over collective bargaining...
...Drucker's question has had a remarkable resonance: it defines the dominant strain of current thinking about the problems of American labor...
...Dorothy Sue Cobble, "Organizing the Postindustrial Workforce: Lessons from the History of Waitress Unionism," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 44 (April 1991), pp...
...Almost all the articulate members of the community now accept the same objectives in industrial relations, variously called maturity, industrial stability, responsibility, or statesmanship...
...In resisting that claim, the AFL faced a hard, WINTER • 1992 • 37 Labor's Social Contract uphill struggle...
...There had been a prior period of struggle driven, as now, by a deepening sense of industrial injustice among factory workers...
...Corporate employers argued that labor's rights could be fulfilled through employee representation plans (ERPs), that is, by a system of works councils...
...The 1950s marked the apex of the historic tendency toward an integrated North American labor movement...
...It bears repeating that, after all, the "adversarial" work-rules system now so roundly condemned was adopted not in opposition to, but directly in conformity with the logic of the mass-production regime...
...Economists estimated that the union impact on wages—the 30 percent of earnings beyond what the labor market for miners would have commanded—exceeded that of any other basic industry...
...The labor movement will not prevail by trying to persuade nonunion employers...
...Insofar as this means responsiveness to the logic of a post-Taylorist system of production, the advice is sound, and altogether consistent with historical experience...
...It cannot be said that the economic environment for collective bargaining is more favorable in Canada than in the United States...
...The source of that appeal is the abiding job-consciousness of American trade unionism...
...For one thing, corporate industry seized the initiative, put the ERPs into place unilaterally in 1933, and thereafter largely defined the terms of the debate...
...In 1970, membership in the private sector stood at an all-time high of seventeen million...
...There is much to be said for this as a basic explanation, but the fact is that although Canadian statist tendencies go far back (for example, to MacKenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigative Act of 1907), the legal and political climate was no more favorable to trade unionism, nor was the unionized sector larger, in Canada than in the United States up to quite recent times...
...Both Cobble and Heckscher offer imaginative prescriptions for the labor law and institutional changes needed before the white-collar private sector can be organized...
...But what does the history I have described say about the labor movement as the agent of its own revival...
...The social contract of the postwar era is, for practical purposes, dead...
...By the mid 1980s, union density in the private sector had fallen to roughly 17 percent, and membership was down by five million from the 1970 high mark...
...With macroeconomic policy (as specified by the Employment Act of 1946) responsible for long-term demand and price competition firmly controlled by the restored oligipolistic structures or, as in the transport and communications sectors, by direct state regulation, the market-driven basis for American anti-unionism had seemingly run its course after World War II...
...The BCOA-UMWA structure still exists, but, with only twenty signatories to the 1988 contract, scarcely matters for the industry...
...An astonishing degree of unanimity in our judgment of industrial relations" now existed, remarked the Cornell scholar George Brooks at a 1961 symposium...
...But there is no automatic or universal translation of market competition and structural change into trade-union decline...
...How are we to account for this remarkable divergence of institutional fortunes...
...In its decline, as in its moment of collectivebargaining triumph, the Mine Workers Union is emblematic—again, to an exaggerated degree— of what has happened to the labor movement in recent years...
...Between 1933 and 1936—before collective bargaining began— all the elements of the modern workplace regime were more or less in place: specified, uniform rights for workers (beginning with seniority and pay equity...
...Historical Reflections, Future Prospects In 1950 John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and leading operators representing the entire softcoal industry negotiated the first National Bituminous Wage Agreement...
...As in coal mining, transforming changes have everywhere swept across the economic landscape...
...The catalytic element sparking Canada's modern "labor regime" is to be found in the country's changing party system and in a new path taken by Canadian labor...
...WINTER • 1992 • 39 Labor's Soda' Contract But there are contrary facts to consider...
...There was the same split over industrial unionism in the 1930s, a Canadian version of the Wagner Act in 1944, anticommunist purges in 1949-50, and, in the wake of AFL-CIO reunification in 1955, the Canadian Labour Congress the next year...
...4 Ben Fischer, Speech, August 14, 1989, reprinted in Daily Labor Report (September 19, 1989), D-1...
...For what I want to argue is that American labor's recent decline should not be seen as a contingent event, one that, with better leaders or better policies, might have turned out differently, but rather that, given the changes in the U.S...
...The explanation would seem to be that basic structural forces are in contradiction: postindustrial technology demands involvement and commitment from employees, but the competitive market and corporate restructuring now deny to all but the most sheltered firms the means for assuring the job security and predictable treatment on which employee commitment depends...
...The current recession, moreover, suggests that their troubles may not be short-term...
...Brooks's conclusion was very like Francis Fukuyama's famous response to the end of the cold war in our own time: the triumph of the postwar settlement meant the end of labor history...
...It became, in effect, the Canadian wing of the American movement...
...Indeed, that is precisely what Ben Fischer does say about "the new face of much of industrial relations": it "is not a replay of history...
...But it does not explain how, in the absence of such a culture, the American movement made headway in the past...
...6 If the managerialist order at its "best" becomes the norm, what are the prospects for the labor movement...
...unionism in these years...
...6 Charles Heckscher, The New Unionism: Employee Involvement in the Changing Corporation (New York, 1987), p. 85...
...That may sound like an odd claim, given the notorious failure of the AFL to surmount the jurisdictional impasse over industrial unionism that split the movement in 1935...
...With the formation, after the 1950 agreement, of the Bituminous Coal Operators Association (BCOA), Lewis had the industrial partner he ardently desired...
...First, the state began to protect the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining, initially under Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and then decisively with the passage of the Wagner Act (1935...
...Lt us assume, for the sake of argument, that the mass-production regime to which that adversarial system was responsive is in fact coming to an end...
...Nor can we expect that they will be when—if—another historic moment like the 1930s arrives...
...This is "the most striking difference," remark Huxley and his associates in the essay referred to earlier—"the increasing importance of more adversarial and political unionism in Canada, marked above all by the interdependence and mutual aid between key unions and the New Democratic party, and analogous developments in Quebec...
...The critical question really is not how successful the existing unions can be at transforming their relations with organized employers...
...The essential developments at the time in politics, market structure, and workplace relations have to be taken as autonomous events...
...Among clerical workers, ORC figures indicated an approval rating of company fairness down from 70 percent in the 1950s to 20 percent in 1979...
...But when that strategy failed, they were prepared to have the workplace regime incorporated into contractual relations with independent unions under the terms of the Wagner Act...
...Are we to conclude that U.S...
...What was at issue, once Section 7a was adopted, was really a competition between rival conceptions of labor organization...
...That translated into a union density of 29.1 percent, down only by six points from the peak of 35.7 percent in 1953...
...The exchange was entirely deliberate—representational rights for workers as a price for market 36 • DISSENT Labor's Social Contract controls for industry...
...What we can hope is that the labor movement will know how to seize that moment, and that depends, as it did in the 1930s, on a sure sense of its jobconscious character...
...It assumed the mantle of what the Canadian scholar Pradeep Kumar calls "social unionism...
...Of fifteen industrialized countries, only in three others did the percentage of organized workers actually fall between 1970 and 1985-86, and nowhere with anything like the magnitude of the American decline...
...Proponents do indeed make that assumption...
...From these events there issued the particular conditions making possible the unionization of the mass-production sector...
...labor's right to strike specifically guaranteed...
...Without penetretating the new dynamic sectors, as it did in mass production fifty years ago, the labor movement can look forward only to stagnation and decline...
...Increasingly, the Canadian branches have been inclined to go their own way, either by asserting more autonomy or, like the Canadian Auto Workers in 1984, by declaring their independence...
...But for union successes in the public sector, a phenomenon that began in the 1960s, the labor movement would be down perilously close to pre–New Deal levels...
...L this achievement resides the essential historical continuity on which I am insisting: that what made trade unionism compelling to American workers in the past—and is likely to do so in the future—was its job-conscious capacity to link itself to their aspirations for industrial justice...
...economy, its decline was historically determined...
...rate and are identified with the militant wing of the Canadian movement...
...No sooner had Lewis retired in 1960 than the economic underpinnings of his grand strategy started to unravel...
...Today it is the whitecollar consumer and business services...
...The comparative history in which I have indulged does pose an inescapable question on the American side: what was there about the nation's politics that denied such an empowering role to U.S...
...Nor was much help forthcoming from the New Deal...
...Internal labor markets implied uniform rules governing layoff, recall, and even promotion...
...Today, union representation in the private sector stands at 12 percent...
...The BCOA-UMWA agreement was emblematic, if in exaggerated form, of the industry-wide bargaining systems that took wages out of competition, linked rising earnings to productivity gains, and integrated collective bargaining into the regulated national markets of postwar American capitalism...
...But, inviting as that question is, it is not one that can be pursued in WINTER • 1992 • 35 Labor's Social Contract this essay...
...New modes of flexible production and knowledgebased operation, they argue, require an abandonment of the Taylorist reliance on hierarchical control and a rationalized division of labor...
...The elemental events were, first, the rise of the New Deal and, second, the rebellion of the industrial workers...
...In Canada corporate employers—even those with nasty records south of the border—do not sing the praises of a union-free environment, and, of course, there is no Canadian counterpart to the action by the Reagan administration breaking the strike of air traffic controllers in 1981...
...It would be hard to say whether the changing complexion of the modern movement, which is already more than half white-collar, gives it any relative advantage over the 1929 movement, where the craft/industrial mix had shifted much less—only a quarter of the organized came from the manufacturing sector—but also with class barriers not so distinct between the organized and unorganized...
...Although production declined by 20 percent, coal prices remained stable...
...In the United States, the legal framework for collective bargaining has deeply eroded since the days of the Wagner Act...
...The best union leadership in the world would have been pressed to manage these problems...
...It is, of course, the breakdown of these sustaining elements that accounts for labor's recent decline...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
