Beyond Industrial Unionism

...This theory holds that job holders and residents of the communities where plants are located have a stake in the corporation no smaller than that of share holders...

...Unions were strategically decisive in the development of the New Deal and post–New Deal programs because they placed the interests of their members within the context of the larger society...

...Working with groups within and outside the corporations, they develop a new conception of the welfare state that will once again connect the labor movement to the larger society...

...By the 1930s, as industry developed new techniques for maximizing production and efficiency, both the issues and the workers changed...

...The increasingly female composition of the postindustrial workforce and the accompanying growth of female membership in unions constitutes a second factor in the changing social world...

...Primary among these is designing services for the modern family that have long been abandoned to impersonal bureaucracies and politicians...

...Recognizing that what constitutes a "family" is a work-force issue, they will participate in redefining it...

...It also impoverishes a large sector of the public whose voice trade unions could effectively represent...

...First, class consciousness provides a poor basis for organizing workers...

...If work became more routinized and less intrinsically satisfying, more affluent working-class families could nevertheless believe that they were participating in the American dream of unbounded opportunity...

...To understand that new social reality, unions must come to grips with what has permanently changed...

...Most workers were poor and tended to live together or in contiguous neighborhoods...

...The service economy raises new issues about the quality of life, particularly about the capacity of individuals or families to glean satisfaction from individual consumption...

...The good life in a postindustrial world also requires access to good neighborhoods and to such community and social services as health care, education, recreational facilities, and sanitation...

...Goaded by the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the AFL slowly altered a long-standing hostility to government intervention on behalf of workers and, at first reluctantly, then with increasing enthusiasm, supported programs that would protect all Americans from the pains of unemployment, old age, disability, and desertion...

...Total family time WINTER • 1992 • 63 Beyond industrial Unionism devoted to wage work has increased dramatically...

...Work may still be the place where unions organize to defend workers, but in the new reality the main way forward for unions must be through politics...

...Unions found they were losing touch with their members once they left the factory gates...

...Unions that can link workers who provide social services with the consumers of those services create a natural alliance...

...And this in turn rests on such values as cooperation, trust, loyalty, honesty, and generosity...

...How are membership and confidence to be restored...

...Recent stagnation of real family income has not changed this new social reality...

...This will become increasingly necessary as the expansion of the service sector, where women are most often employed, moves the terrain of struggle from the workplace to the community...

...It struggled for a "family" wage, a limit on the number of working hours, and the ability to WINTER • 1992 • 61 Beyond bidusirial Unionism confront irrational work rules...

...Around those new social policies—around the construction of a new welfare state, if you will—trade unions have the opportunity to win a broader constituency...

...Unions have successfully used pressure on trustees to settle major strikes...

...How to improve the quality of those services and distribute them fairly must become one of the central problems for unions if they are to thrive in postindustrial capitalism...

...Though many have criticized this historic compromise, Gompers's acknowledgment that the dignity of workers was rooted in industry's willingness to share profits helped to found the first sustained labor movement in the United States...

...Well-paid male unionists resisted changes in lifestyle called forth by the need for dual incomes and working wives...

...As technology and international competition shift mass production industries to the developing countries, the significance of assembly line workers among labor's membership recedes...

...Formidable obstacles lie in the way...

...He agreed that the purpose of business was to make profits, but insisted on the right of workers to a reasonable standard of living...

...Reclaiming the moral authority of labor's voice will require unions to involve themselves in new areas...

...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript—the mails aren't always reliable...

...Having created a "private" welfare system that provided social benefits equivalent to Western European standards, they resented the poor whose welfare seemed to promise higher taxes that would 62 • DISSENT Beyond Industrial Unionism undermine their living standards...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...At the same time, the use of computers enables industry to organize new and more flexible modes of production that use part-time and immigrant workers...

...When the American labor movement consolidated itself in the late nineteenth century, it was guided by the interests of skilled, white, male craft workers who saw themselves as independent artisans...

...Finally, unions need to challenge narrow definitions of corporate profitability and responsibility, insisting that governments treat corporations as social institutions whose activities loom well beyond their immediate economic domain...

...The corporation, he argued, consisted of "the management and the board of directors, operating as trustees for members of the enterprise as a whole—not just stockholders, but workers and consumers too— and with due regard to the interests of society as a whole...

...A broad range of depression-buffeted people applauded these new efforts...

...Where the dominant American ideology asserted a faith in individual advancement, the trade union movement saw limited job options and unequal power in the workplace...

...Today the majority of workers are not poor, and many share neighborhoods and schools with middle-class professionals...

...Union pressure, as historian Richard Hofstadter noted, gave the Democratic party a social democratic flavor never before felt in American politics...

...In the global economy, which relies on highly mobile capital, they threaten the hardwon fringe benefits that constituted the private insurance systems of fortunate workers...

...In the skilled craft unions the result was job protectionism that subjected them to attack by a growing civil rights movement and reduced the credibility of the labor movement as a moral voice for less privileged workers...

...Dependence on the wages of the female wage-earner, partnered or single, has permitted many working-class families to enter the middle-income world and find greater economic security...

...Daniel Bell suggested this in his 1973 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society...

...So far, the results have not been auspicious...

...Faced with dramatic reductions in the proportion of workers who produce goods, union leaders are confronted with the task of organizing a new generation of service workers...

...but it did succeed in maintaining the craft worker's sense of dignity...

...To ensure that they could pursue their skills with dignity, unions sought to control hiring, training, and standards of quality...

...The key to a new trade-union strategy lies in articulating new definitions of social responsibility that mediate between community and individual rights, between family responsibility and women's rights, between corporate social responsibility and property rights, between fairness and individual merit...

...Unions must also turn their attention to the communities in which workers reside...

...Industrial unionism earned attention by accepting managerial prerogatives in exchange for rising real wages and good fringe benefits...

...Propelled to meet these needs, the labor movement split...

...Fundamental to these changes are shifting notions of family and community...

...THE EDITORS 66 • DISSENT...

...But now they seem to have stumbled...

...The disturbing questions faced by the new worker involve not only how to increase income or resolve work-related disputes but how families will survive the hurdles of schooling, health care, environment, and sometimes the violence and drugs that endanger neighborhood life...

...As Douglas Fraser commented sadly, leaders could not move too far ahead of their membership...

...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...By the 1970s, white workers worried more about the "new immigrants," frequently black and Hispanic, who threatened the "stability" of their neighborhoods...

...Paradoxically, then, the very success of unions in winning higher wages led workers to interests transcending the workplace concerns on which trade unions had thrived...

...But labor has overcome such obstacles before...

...The model comes close to that of most Western European nations that typically hold managers and boards of trustees responsible for negotiating social issues...

...The great historical swings in the labor movement illustrate why and how this happened...

...Already many liberals seem to have tacitly accepted their absence from the social debate...

...Only collective action, unionists believed, could improve the quality of life of ordinary people...

...Industrial unionism, which remained job-centered, could no longer speak to the concerns of new and more diverse organized workers whose political passions were more readily mobilized outside rather than inside the workplace...

...No dot matrix submissions, please...

...Or take a chance and send us your article...

...Autos, televisions, VCRs, and microwave ovens can be consumed individually without undermining the quality of the product...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...As the price of mass produced goods has fallen, they have been made available to ordinary workers...

...And because they excluded most of the new semiskilled operatives as well as virtually all of the unskilled, they included few women or people of color...

...Unions that take on these challenges leave the industrial union phase behind, at least in part...

...But in the end they enabled the labor movement to develop what UAW president Walter Reuther later called "a whole new middle class...

...Consequently, work no longer defines a worker's class identity in such a way as to encapsulate all other major social and political issues...

...The now-defunct Progressive Alliance attempted in the late 1970s to address such social issues as plant closings...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...Their quality depends on how those services are collectively produced, distributed, and consumed...

...The resulting changes encourage new forms of managerial control that threaten to marginalize unions...

...In an earlier period, despite racial, ethnic, and gender divisions, workers shared a common economic experience that reinforced class identity...

...Nor can traditional collective bargaining as it emerged in the 1940s meet the challenges of the service economy...

...This generation of workers sought the traditional satisfactions of work outside the workplace, hoping that enhanced incomes would buy them improvement in the quality of their lives...

...Still predominantly white and male, the industrial work force now had a greater share of immigrants and their children, of women, and of people of color...

...These were not, by and large, women who moved from industry to services...

...In the spirit of these proposals, community involvement accepts responsibility for a broader range of issues than WINTER • 1992 • 65 Beyond industrial Unionism those encompassed by the workplace...

...Many craft unions were tied to immigrant communities, where they bridged the work interests of members and the larger community...

...These economic objectives were not immediately apparent, partly because they were consistent with a growing popular Keynesian consensus that linked workers' higher wages and job security with sustained economic growth and prosperity...

...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...

...The process of community involvement requires unions to participate in creating what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called "social fronts" that link workers and their unions to community groups that address family and community problems...

...Rather, it builds on the initiatives that some unions have already begun to take...

...Though women have been in the workplace for some time, bringing the family and its problems with them, their increasing presence in unions has encouraged attention to the connection between work and family life...

...Rather, they were married women or single parents entering the labor force for the first time...

...Like the unemployed white auto workers who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, most workers now are likely to construct their political attitudes in response to experiences outside the workplace...

...Dissolving the barrier between the public and the worker must become one of the unions' major tasks...

...As in her work life the emphasis moves from the quantity of goods produced to the quality of the services she can provide, so in her private life the emphasis shifts from the quantity of goods she can buy to the quality of her life and that of her family...

...AFL unions saw workers in the various crafts and trades as wage workers...

...Higher standards of living seemed to open opportunity to women as well, encouraging them to enter the labor force in support of family life...

...In the past the role of the union, as a class-based institution, has been to articulate a concept of solidarity...

...Yet in recent years, unionists have backed away from the collective values they once nurtured in an effort to promote individual well-being instead...

...To do so, they shed ideas of self-employment and began to associate with the new American Federation of Labor (AFL...

...Others, such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), have begun to set up community offices to address nonwork concerns directly...

...Her sense of dignity resides not only in the conditions under which she works but in her ability to serve her clients effectively...

...By some estimates, about two-thirds of new members are female, with women now accounting for 37 percent of all members—up from 24 percent in the mid seventies...

...But the demand for new benefits, whether provided by government or employers, is not enough...

...For only through politics can the problems of postindustrial America be addressed, and only through politics can trade unions reach the larger constituency they need in order to change both their fortunes and their public image...

...The trade-off worked reasonably well in the forties, fifties, and sixties...

...They occupied a maledominated world, focused on male pride in the workplace and male support of the home...

...Instead they bewailed the appearance of an increasingly unequal society whose more privileged members resisted sharing with the working and nonworking poor...

...Though these problems cannot be resolved by collective agreements negotiated at the bargaining table, failure to address them makes unions seem largely irrelevant to millions of actual and potential members...

...Once again unions are called upon to speak to the needs and interests of a changing work force...

...These issues loom ever larger as government reduces its social welfare functions and family, church, and other voluntary associations struggle in vain to fill the gap...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...This approach offers unions a credible voice in healing racial divisions and in bridging the gulf that isolates the poor from mainstream workers...

...But the spread of these "democratic goods" offers only limited satisfaction...

...What needs to be done...

...When corporations fail to meet their social responsibilities, they undermine the stability of communities, subvert trust, and weaken the social services on which quality of life increasingly depends...

...The internal tensions of unionism increased in the 1960s and 1970s...

...The central need for labor in the postindustrial era is once again to become the voice of the majority of working people...

...they're the author's responsibility...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...In the end, the labor movement they created could protect neither the craft workers' traditional work habits nor their control over the process of work...

...A generation after Walter Reuther announced the advent of the middleclass worker, his successor as UAW President, Douglas Fraser, lamented the conservative middle-income automobile worker who voted for Ronald Reagan...

...And public sympathy with trade unionism is at a low ebb...

...A major result of these changes is that a spontaneous unionism ignited by class identity can no longer work...

...Unlike the old worker who dealt primarily with machines, the new one deals with people...

...It can overcome them again if it gives voice to a coherent set of programs and values that can reach the new service worker and command the support of the larger society...

...If sometimes belatedly, they have transformed themselves over the past one hundred years from craft-centered organizations with guildlike characteristics to powerful enterprises for organizing mass-production and semiskilled workers into huge industrial unions...

...But just as the transformation of the work force from craft to industrial production challenged the union movement to organize in new ways, to seek new goals, and to form new political alliances, so postindustrial capitalism requires a new direction for trade unions...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...The problems this created became apparent in the 1980s...

...For example, they might renegotiate benefit packages tailored to married couples so as to acknowledge the existence of some three million gay and lesbian parents as well as countless nonmarried couples with and without children...

...Indeed, families are working as much today as they did during the nineteenth century, and the women in them are facing time pressures that reopen questions about work and family life...

...But dependence on the incomes of female wage earners also ties work more closely to family...

...Workers are an integral part of the consumer society and have accommodated to its values...

...More recently, the AFL-CIO has begun to offer individuals who do not belong to bargaining units alternative ways of identifying with a union...

...The decline of the labor movement had begun...

...Continuing to seek a middle-class lifestyle for their members, unions tried to achieve the appearance of upward economic mobility within a job context that was still circumscribed...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...

...The shifting political perspectives of these workers restricted union leaders from advancing a social democratic agenda...

...The "human resource managers" of America's most competitive industries speak today about the values of cooperation and participation to enhance worker productivity and innovation...

...In effect, they rejected "Solidarity Forever" for the strident individualism of Frank Sinatra's "I Did It My Way...

...Threatened by a loss of autonomy at work and then by the advance of mass production techniques, craft workers banded together in an effort to control the pace of change and to maintain some influence in new manufacturing processes...

...Within the AFL-CIO executive council a subcommittee led by the president of the ACTWU, Jack Sheinkman, has begun to develop a theory of "stake holders" rights within a corporation...

...At the very least politics is the only way that the public can learn about the connection between unionism and democracy and therefore change the legal environment to one that nurtures unionism...

...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...

...Women who moved from unpaid household work to paid work fueled the shift from an industrial to a service economy...

...All workers depend on a variety of neighborhood amenities and supports, and ultimately on government support to provide economic security...

...The dual-income family poses crucial questions of how to care for children, of pregnancy and parenting, and of the quality of leisure time that directly affect the workplace and that frequently require governmental action...

...For example, teachers unions link wages and working conditions to the improvement of education, and social service workers link their organizations to underprivileged clients...

...Through the 1960s the wages of unionized workers outpaced those of the nonunionized...

...Some unions are beginning to work on this...

...To do so, unions must be closely involved with their members in such issues as education, housing, poverty, and crime...

...Nor is this concept entirely inconsistent with the longterm interests of modern corporations that have increasingly discovered that productivity depends on the effectiveness of local schools and on family stability...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...Today unions need to assess their new constituency in the light of economic and social changes and open-mindedly explore the kinds of social policies that will meet the new needs of a transformed working class...

...Having lost touch with the larger sense of collective responsibility that had given unions their moral voice, union leaders found themselves unable to mobilize a working class...

...They provided workers with access to a middle-class world of consumption and lifestyle, including suburban housing, paid vacations, old-age pensions, and options for educating their children...

...Finally, the function of the corporation and its responsibilities to the larger society have changed...

...This is not a radical 64 • DISSENT Beyond Industrial Unionism proposal...

...If the old craft union responded to the needs of a skilled and relatively insular male worker and the industrial union spoke to the desire of the mass production worker for a higher standard of living, the unionism of the 1990s has little choice but to address the "quality of life" issues raised by a heterogeneous group of twentieth-century workers...

...But to cling to it today will place unions in increasingly marginal positions...

...Transcending the private insurance system that trade unions helped create over the last fifty years, unions should make efforts to reach the unorganized...

...Faced with a rapidly consolidating industrial sector, AFL president Samuel Gompers adopted a twopronged strategy...

...Less concerned with skill or craft issues in their increasingly routinized workplaces, this new generation of workers demanded job security through seniority, wanted protection against speed-ups, and sought wages with which to purchase an increasing variety of consumer goods...

...These include an unsympathetic government and increasing hostility from business, as well as the continuing transformation of the American economy and the structure of the labor force...

...Unions must mediate between family and employer, providing members with such necessities as child-care, counseling services, and access to social services...

...In the 1970s and early 1980s, an increase in union membership among women partially compensated for the decline among men...

...Success rekindled the possibility of achieving the American Dream...

...In 1988-89 the Coalition of Labor Union Women featured family issues in a year-long campaign to encourage unions toward imaginative solutions...

...Even those who were somewhat better off found their life chances limited because their world was segregated by residence, education, and income...

...In their view, much of the distinction between management and labor no longer applies, and traditional unions have become irrelevant...

...The 1984 election pointed up the unions' loss of a moral voice...

...It finds an echo in political and social institutions such as municipal governments, colleges, foundations, and churches that have already begun to use their positions as stockholders to influence corporate policies...

...Unions have already responded to the influx of women by placing such issues as parental leave, flexible benefits, pay equity, and reduced hours of work on their agendas...

...Mass production created new groups of industrial workers whose skills were easily replaceable but whose numbers gave them a certain amount of power...

...Forty-five percent of white male unionists in that election voted for Reagan, compared to only 5 percent of black male workers...