The Decline of Labor

...Computer technology now allows banks and major corporations to have work forces in Ireland, Barbados, and Singapore process the personal checks of New Yorkers and the medical claims of union members covered by commercial insurers and to maintain the circulation files of major publishers...

...Higher raises for teachers may seem easy to justify...

...Gone is the operating premise about the role of government in American life...

...How, after four years of Reagan, could some 40 percent of organized workers and their families vote for one of the most openly anti-union presidents in recent memory...

...Bound by its own historic suspicions of state involvement in the economy, labor made few sustained efforts to develop a coherent industrial policy in either the corridors of power or in the public arena...

...but the hope that this success would rejuvenate labor's spirit has proved elusive...

...This failure was long understood as the consequence of an unholy, regressive alliance between southern Democrats and northern Republicans...

...Bell also argued that labor's failure, evident even in 1959, to organize the whitecollar sector would continue...

...The ugly open fight within labor's family that enveloped all sides in the Hormel strike is another example...

...He also argued that the potential increase in membership in distribution and transportation would benefit such unions as the Teamsters...

...But by the Reagan years that distinction no longer held true...

...Even if it lost in the immediate moment, the fact that organized labor transcended its tendency to equate the needs of its ever-diminishing membership with those of all working people would have provided a foundation for further education and activity...

...Given this evolution in production, blue jeans or steel beams produced abroad could be more than competitive on the American market...

...Unions traditionally fight for their members, but in this context the flourish of combat was counterproductive...

...Answers to such questions do not encourage optimism...

...In order to stay competitive within capitalism's global framework, fundamental changes were required, lest more jobs be lost...

...Liberalism had a clearly identifiable premise: government had an important role to play in social and economic life...

...The public emphasis on the old, hoary slogan, "Tax the rich," actually worked to undermine the possibility of using that very crisis to (re-)build a broader coalition of working people...

...To continue in an adversarial mode and engage management in direct conflict promises little success...

...Still more disturbing is that the losses since 1988 have cut into the core of the union's membership, affecting production workers with significant levels of seniority...

...That American corporations used this transformation to further weaken unions in their industries and to undercut hard-won gains in wages and work conditions is true...

...Organized labor's absolute and proportional decline over decades in which the labor force itself grew dramatically suggests that the hoped-for resurgence does not lie in awaiting a liberal-populist reprise of the 1930s or "waiting for Lefty...

...But it is not at all clear that accommodation with management will bring better results...

...but it is not the only truth...

...In the absence of a public consensus that would provide, under government aegis, joint labor-management oversight of basic industrial policy—an absence with roots in American political culture far deeper than Ronald Reagan— "free market" concepts dominated the (de)regulation of this transformation...

...The key to this change lay in what the Japanese were able to achieve: high quality goods, with low production costs, and the ability, with WINTER • 1992 • 87 The Bodine of Labor highly flexible structures and work rules, to adapt quickly to changed demand...

...If only by default, labor may be one of the few national institutions able to serve as the incubator of a new liberal coalition...

...These statistics, essentially replicated four years later, suggest that the problems of building coalitions even within labor's diverse membership will be incredibly difficult...

...These twin losses, coupled with a sluggish economy, produced the inevitable: in an industry with serious efforts at cooperation, General Motors announced last summer that it would close two more plants by 1993, at a cost of an additional 3,500 jobs...

...During the 1960s, however, that situation began to change...

...The tensions that exist between publicand private-sector workers need discussion, as do the effects of the public sector's political decisions on the private sector's economy...

...They hope to achieve there what has been lost in the economic struggle...

...Reagan created obstacles, but he possessed no supernatural powers...

...Unable to stem the loss of membership or to achieve labor law reform under any administration from Harry Truman to George Bush, labor has endured—barely...

...86 • DISSENT The Decline of Labor The expansion of unionization among government employees, following John F. Kennedy's 1962 executive order allowing them to join unions, temporarily masked a disturbing BLS finding: between 1968 and 1970, union membership in manufacturing had declined by more than 45,000...

...The manufacturing sector lost ground to the white-collar and service sectors, with a consequent loss of jobs in the most unionized sector of the economy...

...Central to this divisiveness within labor, as in the larger society, has been the issue of race...

...they have organized as much of their potential as they can...

...Itself a coalition of tendencies, the CIO, in tandem with the Democratic party, provided the organizational WINTER • 1992 • 89 The Decline of Labor focus for these newly mobilized workers who were shedding many of the ethnic differences that had, in the 1920s, hampered unionization...

...There are many Jim Slatterys who now respond in ways dramatically different from what their predecessors did in the 1930s or 1940s...

...absent is widespread support for a variety of social programs...

...As of summer 1991, American auto producers continued to lose market share to Japanese models...

...Critics who yell foul at management's hard-ball policy forget the intense antagonism that has usually marked American industrial relations...

...Farber found that, among nonunion workers, job satisfaction increased and/or these workers remained unconvinced that unions could offer solutions to what dissatisfactions they had...

...As Thomas and Mary Edsall have written: "The original strength of Democratic liberalism was its capacity to build majorities out of minorities...

...Perhaps the most important difference between the 1930s and the 1990s is that in the 1930s the economy sat on the edge of an enormous industrial expansion that produced goods, services, and new jobs in unprecedented numbers over the following decades...

...For too long each side squared off across the rhetorical divide of class conflict, with a weakened labor movement, not surprisingly, faring poorly...

...Yet the domestic auto industry and the UAW remain highly vulnerable to competition, especially from Japan...

...A depressing moment, to be sure...

...Both trade unionists and unorganized working people, especially in the private sector, have been quite vocal in their communities (New Jersey, for example) in resisting new taxes or transfers of what they perceive as their diminishing resources to poorer residents...

...In many congressional districts there are more small businessmen and women than there are members of labor unions...

...The failure to follow the 1981 Labor Day demonstration in Washington with continued activity in cities throughout the country is noted as one example of how the leadership failed...

...They do not fear retribution from labor or from Democratic party leaders for violating party discipline...

...The nature of production may be changing, but unions must focus their energy on workers' relationship to production nonetheless...

...a sharp, informed analysis of the inequities in determining winners and losers in this quite real fiscal crisis across all segments of the city's people might have been the trenchant, underlying message...

...This is the end of the relationship between the Democrats and the labor movement," Robert Purcell, regional director for the Communications Workers of America, announced...

...In auto, for example, a decadelong experiment with labor-management cooperation has been quite successful in preserving some jobs, increasing quality, and streamlining production...

...The UAW lost over three hundred thousand members between 1980 and 1988...

...profound gaps between white- and blue-collar workers would make it almost impossible to achieve an alliance...

...Under both Democratic and Republican administrations labor has lost ground...

...Had the unions used that moment to raise in public discussion and at union meetings the interdependency of all working people, a different political vision might have emerged...

...I'm not sure we ever had a lot of friends among the Republicans," was the reply...

...In any case, these alliances quickly broke down...

...Even more difficult were the alterations in basic industry...

...For if labor's decline is of recent vintage, as many believe, the turnaround, however complicated, is also close at hand...

...By 1980, when Courtney D. Gifford edited the BLS volume, the percentage of union workers had dropped to 24.7...

...That labor by itself cannot dictate public policy should not paralyze these efforts...

...There is an assumption that if leaders would only listen to their rank and file, grounding themselves again in the militancy of the American working class, a revitalized labor movement would, in time, vanquish employers and Republicans alike...

...In an increasingly international market, American industrial producers often found themselves at a competitive disadvantage: either they continued to lose ground to the imports, attempted to transform their production methods in the Japanese image, or sought relief in protectionist trade policies...

...By the 1980s, when a structurally weakened labor movement faced Ronald Reagan, plant closings and demands for concessions accelerated the decline...

...Labor could have taken a giant step toward being perceived, for the first time in a generation, as a positive force in the lives of unorganized working people...

...Purcell's comments reflect more than personal pique...

...In contrast, less than 10 percent of blacks list themselves as Republicans...

...Organized labor has suffered its worst decade since the 1920s, as intense employer opposition, encouraged and supported by conservative national administrations, left the labor movement reeling, its membership falling, its morale plummeting...

...Hammered out during a time of American economic dominance, this "contract" has clearly become a casualty of the economic restructuring...

...While the slogan contained a certain elementary truth (tax laws are not equitable), it appeared to deny the economic restructuring that has transformed the tax base in cities and states...

...of those between twenty-six and thirtyfour, a paltry 15 percent...

...But if we are going to get hurt, we'll take a lot of people down with us...

...Organizing drives in Los Angeles during the 1960s and in Houston in the 88 • DISSENT The Decline of Labor 1980s simply petered out...

...Production can be shifted, strikebreakers introduced, new technologies substituted...

...In auto, for example, any tendency toward "Japan-bashing" quickly gave way to cooperative efforts between Japanese and American manufacturers...

...Labor's response to this change proved inadequate, as indeed did management's as well...

...The social context of this four-decade decline challenges a central assumption of the cyclical theory...

...We have to face it: labor's central problem has to do with the fact that, whichever way it turns, it faces bleak alternatives...

...It is not as if all these whites are racists, although racism does explain a good portion of this reaction...

...This has greatly strained labor's traditional coalition politics...

...But lest one think that this signaled the long-awaited return of "Lefty," a reporter asked Purcell whether labor had many friends among the Republicans...

...Is there anything, then, that might be done...

...But there is another option, one that would both recognize the seriousness of the crisis and begin the revival of labor's self-esteem...

...Labor's valued post-1945 "social contract" with employers now seems a product less of a permanent social change than of a particular historical moment...

...Although during the 1950s the reunited labor movement was widely recognized as an important force in the nation's political and economic life, the BLS did not see this trend as an aberration...

...A decade later, following a period of unparalleled economic expansion, the BLS reported an even lower figure, with only 27.4 percent of the work force organized...

...The Democrats did as well as they did within labor largely as a result of the black vote...

...While public sector unions continued to grow during the 1980s at a good rate (Service Employees International Union increased by 17 percent between 1980 and 1987), unions in the private sector hemorrhaged...

...The effect on labor's electoral efforts is troublesome...

...It is not irrelevant that black unionists make up an ever larger percentage of public-sector workers or that the recipients of such government programs are widely, if erroneously, perceived as the black or Hispanic poor...

...Even victories, such as occurred in the Pittston coal strike, left an odd taste...

...nor should the seeming invincibility of that Republican ascendancy bring only gloom...

...The United Mine Workers and their allies won a major victory to maintain the status quo...

...It is foolhardy to predict the future, as the pundits who predicted labor's continued decline in the spring of 1933 discovered...

...To call for a broad public debate within the house of labor, a debate premised on the recognition of that interdependency, is not to suggest that labor cede its efforts at organizing...

...But today liberalism as a political movement is adrift, discredited in the popular culture and lacking within itself a defining premise...

...Even when the economy recovered from the recession in 1979-1982, these unions failed to revive...

...Competing business interests (and not just the Reagan administration) made protectionism a highly controversial public policy...

...The current level of union strength, at some 16 percent of the work force, is often considered the consequence of Republican policies, employer resistance, and the somewhat inept response of labor's leadership...

...In such an atmosphere, coalition building frequently falters or is never attempted...

...Bell pointed to the difficulties of organizing small remaining unorganized workplaces in the industrial and service sectors and thought that economic realities would limit labor's expenditure of vast sums of money for small potential returns...

...A recent study by Hank Farber of Princeton University suggests why...

...National leaders and staff experts play an important role, but without a broader involvement the contradictory attitudes within labor will find few avenues for resolution...

...Second, in the last ten years, with the emergence of political action committees, the Democratic party is less dependent on the contributions of organized labor than it was fifteen years ago...

...Liberalism as a political movement was ascendant, spurred by the horrendous unemployment and the inactivity of the Hoover administration...

...This was a small figure, to be sure, when the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Steelworkers (USW) had a combined membership of over 2.6 million, but ominous, nonetheless, in a decade of economic growth...

...Such efforts will not secure labor from further immediate erosion but they may provide ideas necessary for a rebuilding in the future...

...At the nonunion transplants, wholly owned subsidiaries of Japanese corporations, production increased, quality was high, and a relatively satisfied work force has, to date, rejected union organization...

...For forty-four years the labor movement has been unable to repeal the most offensive aspects of the Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman's veto in 1947...

...In the 1984 national election, which saw the reelection of Ronald Reagan in the wake of the PATCO strike and other overt anti-union policies, slightly more than 40 percent of trade unionists voted for the Reagan-Bush ticket...

...The decline of unionization in industrial production continued during the 1970s...

...at its worst, it confuses the role of the union with that of the consumer culture...

...Many of the hopes for regeneration draw strength from blaming Reagan, Bush, and, to some extent, union leaders for labor's precipitous decline...

...Finally, this public recognition of that interdependency may provide a way to address more frankly the divisive issue of race within labor's ranks...

...Here too, however, labor's position is far more tenuous than it once was...

...This is essential for labor's own self-education, for the last thing labor needs at present is (understandable) anger and misinformation...

...The experience of the municipal unions in 1991 in New York City's ongoing fiscal crisis may be instructive here...

...To attempt to regain that position of importance labor needs to encourage the development of an inclusive social vision within its own ranks that may then serve as a basis for appealing to nonunion workers...

...More than a third of the decline occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, decades of broad economic growth and, for the 1960s, of liberal Democratic ascendancy...

...Perhaps, but I fear not...

...Such a vision would, to be effective, publicly recognize the scope of the economic transformation already accomplished...

...Instead, it noted that "in recent years" these figures had consistently "moved slowly downward...

...Nor is it necessary for labor to transform itself organizationally to initiate this debate...

...Poised as we are at a moment when the strength of the contemporary labor movement is fast approaching its pre-1918 level, the specter of widespread skepticism is the most frightening possibility...

...What then is the nature of this structural change and how does it affect the possibility of a resurgence...

...Those firms able to compete in the revamped international market demanded free trade so as not to be excluded from lucrative foreign markets...

...If Bell is right—and I think his analysis holds up remarkably well—then a structural transformation occurred over these last decades that undermines the hope that time is on "our" side...

...To all this he added the limits imposed on collective bargaining by the necessity of tying wages to productivity (which, as John Hoerr makes clear for steel, was not always achieved) and the changes occurring in the working class as it increasingly went from a proletariat that worked for hourly wages to a "salariat, with a consequent change in the psychology of the workers...

...Those who would look to the 1930s, explicitly or not, as a model for reforminthe-making, would do well to consider some important components of that decade...

...The fact that liberalism has always been a practical political philosophy underscores the very crisis labor confronts today...

...In that same period the Steelworkers lost 58 percent (over seven hundred thousand) of their members, the Machinists lost 32 percent, the Carpenters 22 percent, and the Electrical Workers 23 percent...

...If, for example, teachers and hospital workers, social workers and janitors, jointly discussed both their needs and the effects of such demands on others, including the recipients of their services and working- and middle-class taxpayers, two possible results might have emerged...

...Long before liberalism imploded upon itself, many of these workers already thought it was a bankrupt political force...

...When broken down by race these figures reveal that more than half of all white union family members pulled the lever for Reagan-Bush in 1984...

...In existing shopsteward councils, in the infrequently used one-to-one programs between stewards and the rank and file, and in labor and laborcommunity coalitions already in place the structures exist to generate a discussion of possible responses...

...Rather, as Daniel Bell argued in 1959 in his prescient book The End of Ideology, when labor had then organized about 30 percent of the work force: "But in organizing this 30 percent, they have reached a saturation mark...

...Political rhetoric is no substitute for the necessary ward and precinct captains committed to a specific social program...

...Affirmative action, welfare, the problems of the underclass, urban crime—these and other issues have effectively, if viciously, been used by Republican candidates to make serious inroads into traditional liberal constituencies, and specifically within labor's ranks...

...Given that raises and improved conditions for pupils in the schools could not both be achieved in the same fiscal year, the teachers' demands appeared to many, working people as well as middle class, as narrow, selfish demands from relatively wellpaid city workers...

...There exists an enormous capacity for human initiative even in the worst of times...

...When labor did join with industry, moreover, the uneasy alliance most often assumed a defensive, nationalist posture, demanding a protective tariff high enough to prevent "dumping" of high quality, low-cost products...

...However understandable may be the urge to protect one's members, labor in New York nonetheless lost the opportunity to claim a more important goal in speaking for a common good and a common vision...

...but that growth would be offset "by the shrinkage in the industrial work force" overall...

...Tactically, New Deal liberalism, while containing within it many tensions and contradictions, possessed a central vision...

...diminished, too, is the belief that organized working people represent a progressive force in the society...

...Ethnic and racial divisions abound and, in some quarters, even to hint at the potential for uncovering common ground is cause for scorn and rejection...

...Through both Democratic and Republican administrations, in the heyday of liberalism as in the depths of Reagan's reverie, labor has been unable to amend what its leaders have called a "slave labor bill...

...Labor's voters, generally held to be liberal and progressive (even if historically some 30 percent voted Republican), formed the backbone of the Democratic party...

...Simultaneously, some public-sector workers in New Jersey were so infuriated with Democratic cuts in social spending that they threatened to run independent, union slates in the legislative elections...

...This, in turn, supports the belief that, following the darkened 1980s, the 1990s will emerge in a CIO-like flourish...

...It was within this framework that the CIO flourished...

...One is that the number of workers who are members of labor unions has dramatically declined...

...While the UAW leaders claimed that GM was "dishonest, callous and just plain dumb," and called for restrictions on imports, the underlying reality was worse...

...In the 1984 national election, labor's problem was not just that 40 percent of its members and their families voted Republican...

...Such an effort would have the additional benefit of directly involving a larger portion of labor's own members in developing specific policy responses...

...Rather, as Jim Sleeper has argued in The Closest of Strangers, white workers themselves are hard-pressed economically, threatened by crime and neighborhood decay, and have received little understanding from liberals...

...Democratic congressional representative Jim Slattery of Kansas, who authored legislation in April 1991 that ended the rail strike over the opposition of the unions, expressed some of these new attitudes in explaining his bill: I consider myself to be a representative of the blue-collar workers of America...

...90 • DISSENT The Decline of labor Since 1964 white men in general, northern and southern, workers and employers, have left the Democratic fold in large numbers...

...Offering credit cards, for example, in an effort to gain the confidence of nonunion workers is at best a timid response that diverts attention from the depth of the problem...

...In the last two years of that decade, Courtney estimated, the UAW and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers (ACTWU) each lost over 9 percent of their members, the steel workers' union lost 3.7 percent, and the United Rubber Workers 15.2 percent...

...What does such a vote indicate about labor's internal composition...

...It might be useful for labor to take this moment of structural change and organizational weakness to reassess its vision of a possible American future...

...and out of those ideas an WINTER • 1992 • 91 The Decline of Labor alternative public policy position might have emerged...

...The former has little ability to punish while the latter has no defined position on labor policy that would provide a reason for such discipline...

...One foundation for the reversal of this situation may rest, paradoxically, in the recognition that no quick or immediate solution exists...

...But there are two basic factors to keep in mind...

...These raises in turn established the plateau sought by other city workers, with the painful result that whatever shreds of broader political vision labor could claim lay tattered in the streets...

...92 • DISSENT...

...At a minimum such an attempt will provide labor with an understanding of the present depressed circumstances that will guard against greater demoralization...

...while the UAW remained unable to organize the Japanese "transplants" that increasingly dot the American landscape...

...As labor has never been a majority force in American society, the inability of liberalism to maintain coalition politics is of profound importance...

...As Vaclav Havel wrote: "No political defeat justifies complete historical skepticism as long as the victims manage to bear their defeats with dignity...

...Although national leaders can and should encourage such discussion, it is at the local level where the critical change must occur...

...A historically informed analysis of the situation confronting labor, however, undermines easy confidence that the 1990s will duplicate the experiences of the 1930s...

...In steel and rubber, the conditions are actually worse because neither union has been able to achieve the security the UAW obtained for its members...

...In any case, the loss of union jobs remained a constant...

...The central problem that the union movement faces is not that the employers did not play fair...

...Rather, it is to argue that those efforts will not, on balance, be successful without an effort to reposition labor at the core of working people's lives...

...In its 1960 report the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted that the figure for union density (the percentage of workers organized in the nonagricultural work force) had dropped 2 percent from its historic 1953 high of 34.1 percent...

...These issues of industrial policy are simply too critical for labor not to develop regional and national voices projecting an informed social analysis...

...By 1988, according to Courtney Gifford, less than 10 percent of the working class under age twenty-five held union cards...

...Simultaneously, in steel, auto, rubber, textile, and other industrial sectors, American producers lost technological leadership and market share to foreign imports, primarily from Japan and Germany, but with Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan highly competitive as well...

...The transformation of work and the demands of international competition have produced structural changes in the economy...

...In a popular adaptation of cyclical theories of reform articulated by Irving Bernstein, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Kevin Phillips, many in labor have come to see this decade of pain as a harbinger of regeneration...

...As the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) emerged victorious from the Coolidge-Hoover decade of anti-unionism, so too would labor lay the foundation of renewed growth and vitality...

...It is a profound irony of present circumstances that a labor movement that has been for so long pragmatic and narrow in enunciating its interests must now expand its vision if only to protect that narrower set of interests...

...It is to preserve and restore central aspects of that "social contract" (livable wages, affordable medical insurance, pension and vacation benefits, and so on) that leads many to turn to the political arena...

...Although nationally the Democratic party still maintains a lead by a small margin, the Republicans have edged ahead for the first time in two generations among white voters and among all voters under forty...

...Over the last half century liberal legislators and trade unionists joined to support a governmental social program...

...but if they come at the expense of classroom size and the quality of instruction for the overwhelmingly nonunion working-class children of New York's public school system, these increases pose a long-term problem for the teachers' union, for the labor movement, and, not least, for the children themselves...

...The history of the past forty years, alas, suggests the opposite...

...Indeed, the UAW seemed to have recognized these realities in the last contract round when it bargained for income, rather than job security, in the form of extensive financial benefits for displaced workers...

...To achieve such a vision it is not necessary to transform the labor movement into something it traditionally has not been...

...There are some who argue that, painful as the Reagan-Bush era has been, it did not usher in a new domestic order...

...Since 1988 eight GM production plants have closed, directly as a result of Japanese competition...

...Its claim of justice for one segment of the work force, moreover, rang hollow for the overwhelming majority of workers who fell outside such union contracts...

...Labor lost another 15 percent during the stagflation of the 1970s, despite the Democratic return to power in the wake of a discredited Republican administration...

...As for organized labor, it has had neither the energy nor the vision to address these issues within its ranks Thus, at a time when the need is greatest, the ability to build liberal coalitions is weakest...

...Share the pain" might have been the slogan...

...But as communities across the nation have lost important portions of their tax base because of economic restructuring, the pressure on city and state governments to raise taxes has intensified, especially in light of federal cuts in social services...