The Future of the Labor Movement in Historical Perspective
Brody, David
The title of this article— "The Future of the Labor Movement in Historical Perspective" —is meant only half in jest. No one understands better than the historian that the future is beyond...
...The world being what it is, restoring that truth will not by itself do the trick...
...Did Perlman capture what unions do in WINTER • 1994 • 57 Labor Movement America...
...In a more recent study, Freeman and David Blanchflower find that this holds in international comparison as well: the costs of collective bargaining are substantially higher for employers in the United States than for those in any other advanced industrial country.' These findings sustain Perlman's notion of American job-consciousness as maximalist trade unionism...
...This is not a collective-bargaining problem for other labor movements, not even Canada's...
...nor a leadership any abler or more savvy...
...In its time, employee representation was a plausible option, and the historian can readily imagine a past in which works councils became a dominant mode of labor representation in the absence of the Wagner Act...
...The most recent research casts doubt on the linkage between unionization and higher productivity, but underscores the conclusion that unionized firms are less profitable than nonunion ones...
...A colleague and former student of mine who has been studying this subject, Alan Derickson, has been struck by an apparent anomaly: that it was the "conservative" AFL, not the CIO, that stuck by national health insurance as its star waned in the postwar reaction signaled by the Republican congressional successes of 1946...
...This is because the law is grounded in fundamental American principles of free choice and free association...
...As for the labor movement, has it come to the point where it is willing to see its functions truncated in the name of high-performance work practice...
...Michael J. Piore, "The Future of Unions," in George Strauss et al., eds., The State of the Unions (Madison, 1992), pp...
...It may be that labor people do not need to be instructed on the importance of the movement's national-union structure, although, if that had been true, we never would have seen Local P-9 out there on its own against Hormel in the Austin strike of 1985...
...the other is its grounding in basic individual rights...
...One was an encounter I had with Staughton Lynd at a recent labor history conference...
...Even if we get one under the Clinton administration, the cornerstone will still be the employment coverage that became our substitute for national insurance...
...Section 1 of our labor law still enshrines the New Deal economic thinking that made the Wagner Act saleable in 1935: "Inequality of bargaining power . . . tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries...
...In the AFL-CIO president's view, this actually constitutes an achievement...
...just the contrary...
...Lynd was advocating a shift of labor's orientation to community-based organizing— solidarity unionism, he called it...
...About the union role in workplace reform, administration leaders have become exceedingly cagey...
...Much more in the law—the basic procedure for selecting bargaining agents, for example, or the principle of exclusive representation—is there because of the same battles during the NRA period over the company-dominated employee representation plans that led to 8a(2...
...We don't have to swing all that way back to capture the essence of what Baldwin is saying to us...
...Bank of America has a plan to convert its "platform" employees—the bank tellers, loan officers, and all the others who deal with the public in its bank branches—to part-timers so as to cut out benefits...
...Underlying the problems of the labor movement is the more fundamental crisis of a working class beset by declining real income and disappearing jobs...
...There was the same split over industrial unionism in the 1930s, a Canadian version of the National Labor Relations Act in 1944, anticommunist purges in 1949-50, and in the wake of the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, the Canadian Labour Congress the next year...
...From that standpoint, employee representation was always a tainted affair, and not only because it had been introduced with transparent cynicism when Section 7a went on the books...
...When the Congress saw fit in 1935 to convey those rights to workers, it set in motion the great organizing drives that led to the unionization of American basic industry...
...What originally prompted Section 8a(2) is well known: the hundreds of employee representation plans set up early in the New Deal by open-shop companies anxious to prove to the National Recovery Administration (NRA) that workers were receiving the right to organize and bargain collectively guaranteed them by Section 7a...
...One would think that these truths would be shouted from the house tops, but we all know that, on the contrary, the labor movement is designated a special interest—Big Labor—and unions, or at any rate the people who lead them, are among the least admired in every public opinion poll...
...Facile historical parallels are not my game here...
...The ACLU could say this because while the right to organize might not itself have been specifically grounded in the First Amendment— the constitutional justification for the Wagner Act was located more prosaically in the commerce clause—it was inextricably linked to the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly...
...The other similarity between then and now is scarcely less important, namely, that the Democratic administration should not be seen as partisan to organized labor...
...The labor movement won that debate, and if we are entering a comparable period, then there is one last guidepost to be sought from the past: what the union movement brought to the struggle that enabled it to prevail over the opposition of American capital...
...The resemblance to what transpired during the New Deal is uncanny, and in two particular ways...
...LaFollette fastened on the widespread reliance on industrial spies, the stockpiling of munitions, the maintenance of private armies, and all the dirty tricks used by companies to intimidate workers and prevent them from exercising their rights...
...First, as to the outcome: medical benefits became almost universally a major component of modern collective bargaining, and as such are emblematic of the maximalist tendencies of our job-conscious brand of trade unionism...
...however important or significant the defense of religious liberties...
...This fact caused—and continues to cause—the labor movement considerable grief...
...Everything in Canadian experience argued against this—its anti-revolutionary political culture and loyalty to the British Empire, fear of domination by the Yankee colossus, and rising Canadian nationalism...
...No amount of revision of the plans, nor of NRA regulation, nor of employer reassurance, was enough to make employee representation square with the proposition that the freedom of association of workers ought not to be abridged or corrupted...
...So, are its prospects bleak...
...The workplace representation that emerged from that law met the needs of the mass-production system, which was why once the law was in place it won the assent of American employers...
...Perlman uses the term "job-consciousness," and I am content with it...
...Both wings of the labor movement—AFL and CIO—were robust advocates of national health insurance...
...they elevated labor's struggle to a battle for civil liberties...
...We have to remember that the CIO came after the Wagner Act, not before, and that it was William Green, not John L. Lewis, who was labor's voice in Washington...
...In the 1930s, however, it was labor's rights that occupied center stage...
...But that does not mean history is irrelevant...
...The record of the ACLU—it initially opposed the Wagner Act on traditional libertarian grounds—is a perfect indicator of this remarkable but little noticed shift, which was the precondition for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s...
...The key arena, says Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, is the workplace, and the goal, "high performance work practice...
...If works councils were mandated, would that not invite state intrusion into every plant in the country...
...In 1975 union membership stood at an all-time high of 22 million...
...80-94...
...Such an assignment generally gets reduced to mini-essays country by country, but I thought I could fashion an integrated account because of the single thing I definitely knew before I began to read up on Canada (so much for the notion that the Britannica is written by great "authorities")—that our national unions generally call themselves "internationals," and do so because they contain Canadian as well as U.S...
...Such cynicism is tolerable only because we have lost sight of the law's original intent, and of the essential truth still written into it—that it is about achieving "full freedom of association" for workers...
...In Western Europe, by contrast, unions generally left shopfloor issues to state-mandated works councils, labor courts, or other public agencies...
...The Wagner Act—which would settle that issue—was not administration legislation, and on the whole Roosevelt and his key people were more impediments than otherwise as the battle unfolded and the measure took shape...
...The source of this intransigence was, of course, the job-consciousness with which I began this essay...
...Lacking class politics as we do, Americans are strongly inclined to put the labor movement down as a special interest (and one that makes more than its share of enemies, at that...
...movement has its own kind of political moment, not one that it creates, but one that, when it occurs, can be seized on...
...The scary implications are captured in what auto unionists sometimes called the NRA works councils: "government unions...
...The free trade agreement, however, covers not only the United States and Canada, but also Mexico...
...But the institutional issue—the question of the labor movement under severe stress—seems more tractable, with more from the past to guide us...
...FDR signed on to Senator Wagner's bill only after passage was imminent...
...We do not need to explore much further to understand the fierce resistance American employers have always thrown up against collective bargaining: from the standpoint of profit maximization, anti-unionism is an entirely rational choice...
...The mass-production system then seemed unassailably the best there was or, indeed, could be...
...Money matters to workers, but so, at least equally, does treatment on the job...
...Perhaps it is time to think of civil liberty as protection by the state rather than protection against the state," wrote John Dewey in 1936...
...In employment law the fundamental rule ever since the decay of master-servant doctrine was liberty of contract, which for a century had provided employers with the legal basis for fending off state regulation and collective bargaining...
...That's what the New Deal accomplished, first, by attaching labor's interest to unimpeachable national economic goals and, second, by creating an environment at once sympathetic to labor's cause—without Roosevelt, make no mistake about it, there would have been no Wagner Act—yet not tainted by specialinterest politics...
...The labor movement cannot be opposed to reforms that make for better systems of work...
...The labor movement cannot feel that it has any inside track to the White House...
...Not, certainly, labor's political muscle, which was punier in 1935 than it is today...
...No other labor movement I know of has managed this feat of integrating the unions of two countries into a single institutional structure...
...But it is an illusion to believe that anything fundamental has changed when it comes to the basic relationship between labor and management in America...
...In fact, it was not opposed at the time of the Wagner Act...
...A free trade agreement unaccompanied by at least the possibility of a true North American labor movement threatens the basic premises of American trade unionism...
...Once adopted, the Wagner Act took on a kind of constitutional mantle, subject periodically to amendment (as by Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin), and over the years acquiring a massive superstructure of interpretation and case law, but in its fundamentals seemingly beyond history...
...One need only contemplate the solid front being assembled to defend management's right to fight strikes by hiring permanent replacements, a comparatively secondary issue, to realize how monumental a political undertaking it would to be accomplish real labor-law reform...
...National corporations like General Motors and United States Steel had already instituted group insurance, and for the CIO unions it was mainly a question of forcing these benefits into the bargaining arena—not an easy matter given the importance employers still attached to their welfarist programs, but one effectively accomplished once the courts ruled that benefits were mandatory bargaining issues and the Steelworkers union took a tough stand in the 1949 strike...
...the other side of the coin was that an alternative works-council system was being rejected...
...The only trick was finding the right grounding for workers' rights...
...The underlying job-conscious logic, however, had not gone away...
...that is, in extracting for workers a larger share of the returns of capitalist enterprise...
...If we can return labor rights to the same plane as civil rights, then for how much longer would Congress continue to wink at the fact that any employer prepared to use all the legal tricks an expensive union-busting law firm deploys (and who doesn't mind violating the law and absorbing the back-pay penalties) can defend his union-free environment against all comers...
...2 See, for example, Charles Heckscher, The New Unionism: Employee Involvement in the Modern Corporation (New York, 1988...
...Not long ago I contributed to a new entry on labor movements for the Encyclopedia Britannica covering North America, that is, the United States and Canada...
...Second, as to why we got that outcome: in this instance, most directly, it was due to the vacuum created by government inaction...
...High performance work practice demands the rethinking of American labor law...
...The Wagner National Labor Relations Act marks a great divide for American labor, one which we will probably never be able to re-cross...
...In the auto industry, where this went furthest, plant elections were administered by an NRA labor board, which also began to hold hearings on grievances and serve as a kind of labor court for the industry...
...Guideposts in Troubled Times Let me turn now to a more specific range of historical events that might serve as guideposts WINTER • 1994 • 59 Labor Movement in labor's time of troubles...
...What the AFL did have was a true and inflexible sense of what it wanted...
...where they are," says Commerce Secretary Ron Brown...
...Rights of Workers Collective-bargaining rights are nothing to brag about in this country either, and that brings me to a final area—labor-law reform—where I think history has something useful to say...
...And I would expect that if the movement toward a genuine common market should conclude with the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, it will be accompanied by a strong revival of integrating tendencies...
...This is the balance it must strike again in the days ahead...
...Or not...
...Not only did these revelations immobilize the open-shop camp...
...Union employers earn less on capital investment than do comparable nonunion employers-19 percent less in one survey cited by Freeman and Medoff...
...The Canadian bodies were acting in just the way, and for the same reasons, that U.S...
...collective bargaining itself remained free...
...Yes, there were early on the sympathetic sentiments and the symbolic gestures, most recently in lifting the ban on rehiring the air traffic controllers fired by Ronald Reagan in the 1981 strike, but labor and the administration are on opposite sides on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the AFL-CIO cannot count on the White House when the chips are down on the striker replacement bill...
...But if American labor law is still about the rights of workers, are we prepared to see these rights diminished so as to make room for representational forms that invite employer domination...
...Since then, the two movements have begun to disengage, but the 35 percent of Canadian membership still in AFL-CIO unions (as of 1990) suggests that integration is far from dead...
...Lynd is the grand old man of New Left labor historiography, still fighting the good fight for rank-andfile democracy as a labor lawyer in Youngstown...
...Canadian local unions almost always chose to affiliate with the (inter-)national unions of their trade, a kind of movement from below that set the process of integration into motion...
...The Wagner Act relied on that very doctrine, only stripped of the fiction of freely contracting individuals: the law says that it intends to remedy "the inequality of bargaining power between [employers and] employees who do not enjoy full freedom of association and actual liberty of contract...
...A couple of years ago I would not have thought this worthy of special comment: there has, fortunately, been nothing in our time like the structural crisis that split organized labor apart during the 1930s...
...The current controversy over the so-called adversarial system in American factories validates Perlman's insight: workplace relations are a core union-management issue precisely because they are so intrusively a function of American trade unionism...
...And where they are not, it is not yet clear what sort of organization should represent workers...
...Alternatively, are we ready to make the state the guarantor of these forms of representation...
...If the Wagner Act once settled this basic question, that seems no longer to be the case...
...Exactly how the Clinton administration will position itself we don't know, but it will have its own reasons, just as FDR did, to want to stay at a distance from organized labor in the coming battle over labor-law reform...
...Huge interests are invested in keeping the law as it is...
...The national structure in fact was the institutional embodiment of job-conscious unionism and truly an example of form following function...
...And if a process of disengageWINTER • 1994 • 65 Labor Movement ment is now contemplated, a rethinking of all the old questions will be required...
...The New Deal was such a moment...
...So far as the constitutional Bill of Rights is concerned, pronounced the American Civil Liberties Union in its 1937 annual report, "The greatest gain of all has been the establishment of labor's rights under the National Labor Relations Act...
...Since then, unions have lost four million members, and union density has declined below 16 percent...
...The powers of the state were thus mobilized to do for the labor movement what it had proved incapable of doing for itself—enable workers to organize without fear and require the employer to enter contractual relations with the labor organizations of their choice...
...Unions are O.K...
...It immediately compromised the freedom of the AFL to assign jurisdictions and of its affiliates to make contracts with employers...
...Horror stories like this could be multiplied: forced overtime is zooming, while most jobs being created are for temporaries and contract workers— "disposable workers," the New York Times calls them...
...Why should it be so in the United States...
...This is not to mention the role of the labor movement as the single most important agent for social justice in our political system, as for example, in the battle for national health insurance I just described...
...To emulate the Japanese and Germans, or to get the most out of advanced methods of production, the labor movement is told that it must abandon adversarialism and embrace cooperative relations with employers...
...The law says nothing about shop stewards, grievance procedures, or the workplace rights of workers (save to assure them that the law did not abridge their rights to confer with and submit grievances to employers...
...But if they cannot ever expect to achieve the social voice that Canadian unionists, say, have gained through the New Democratic party, the U.S...
...Reich's statement on labor representation quoted above echoes Roosevelt's own evasiveness, only FDR said it more pungently: as far as he was concerned, workers ought to be free to choose any representative they wanted, whether it be an individual, a union, the Royal Geographic Society, or the Akhoond of Swat...
...Since workplace reform is the pressing concern of the moment, we might conclude by revealing just how the law dealt with the thorny question of workplace representation...
...q Notes ' David G. Blanchflower and Richard B. Freeman, "Unionism in the United States and Other Advanced OECD Countries," Industrial Relations 31 (Winter 1992), pp...
...That exchange with Lynd made me think again about the national-union structure that is the cornerstone of the American movement— not least because his view holds considerable appeal at the moment...
...Company-dominated labor organizations— the employee representation plans— were the union-evading techniques of choice at the time the Wagner Act was being enacted...
...The line drawn between public and private is one great axis of the law...
...It just may be that Bill Clinton's will be the second administration to bring off this rarest of conjunctions in American labor politics...
...Chilling words for the labor movement...
...And, beyond that, the distinction drawn between workers and unions—a distinction that would have been utterly inadmissible to Samuel Gompers — goes a long way toward explaining why we got Taft-Hartley, massive regulation of the internal affairs of labor unions, and crippling restraints on their organizing activities under the law, as, for example, in the recent Lechmere decision denying to "nonemployee" organizers virtually any right to operate on company property...
...And from Labor Secretary Reich, who had earlier alarmed business with talk about leveling the playing field between labor and management: "The issue for me is worker voice...
...Consider one of the thorniest bargaining problems facing unions today—the escalating costs of health-care coverage...
...No reader has to be told that this is a time of troubles for the labor movement...
...61-66...
...Nothing testified more powerfully to the triumph of jobconscious unionism in 1935 than the absorption of workplace represention into the realm of trade unionism...
...After all, the national corporations already were providing for their employees through group insurance...
...That final phrase—actual liberty of contract—is a particularly delicious hoisting of the enemy on his own petard...
...But two recent episodes in my own experience have changed my mind...
...Can the labor movement favor ratification—and a labor market covering the whole of North America—if there is no possibility for the kind of North American labor movement that we know job-conscious unionism to be capable of building...
...The Clinton administration is surely right to believe that fresh thinking is called for...
...The larger implications—also no accident— can be seen in the statistical evidence gathered by Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff in What Do Unions Do...
...The contrary logic, however, was simply overwhelming...
...And what else is on-the-job protection from arbitrary treatment but a kind of industrial justice...
...For in fact the basic choices had already been made in the course of the battles over the employee representation plans, which was why, once collective bargaining began, there was so little strife or uncertainty about what to put into the first contracts: a shop-steward structure, a grievance procedure, protection against wrongful discharge, and provisions for seniority and pay equity that have since become so familiar a part of the labor relations landscape...
...Then, the big issues were consumption and deflation...
...In my response, I argued that what Lynd had captured in the early 1930s was real enough—community mobilization certainly did happen—but it had nothing like the significance he attached to it...
...I have no quarrel with schemes that truly encourage employee involvement and flexibility, nor indeed with cooperative relations between labor and management wherever there are perceived common interests...
...In any case, a historical perspective on how and why the national-union structure developed most certainly is the best antidote against the siren song of Lynd's localism...
...Let us begin with recent events...
...While that possibility was cut short in the 1930s, Lynd contends that it "remains available as a model for how there could be built from below a labor movement of a different kind...
...The best term I can find to describe this is economic justice: for what else is the claim that unions make on the profits of the firm but distributive justice for working people...
...Winning something of real magnitude like the Wagner Act in 1935, or changing it today, means somehow surmounting that fundamental constraint...
...WINTER • 1994 • 63 Labor Movement Going back to the origins of the Wagner Act offers one further guidepost worth bearing in mind now that the machinery for labor-law reform has been set in motion...
...Union people do not need a lecture on Selig Perlman in order to act in the manner he ascribes to them...
...Consider, for example, the fact that labor-management shop committees are prohibited under Section 8a(2) from dealing with the terms and conditions of employment...
...There was a time, in the waning years of the New Deal and during World War II, when national health insurance was actively debated in this country...
...today, competitiveness...
...Workers need a voice at the workplace...
...But in achieving this organized labor did not sacrifice what was essential to it as a job-conscious movement...
...No one understands better than the historian that the future is beyond knowing, that there are no laws of history or cycles that can be plotted out into the future...
...of academic freedom...
...The law was "in effect a civil liberties WINTER • 1994 • 61 Labor Movement statute...
...Workplace reform is what in the Clinton administration's mind makes labor-law reform necessary...
...Last March the new Democratic administration established the Commission on the Future of WorkerManagement Relations, the so-called Dunlop Commission after its chair, that old pro John T. Dunlop...
...In the labor upsurge of the 1930s, he argued, this was the first impulse, and but for the imposition of national structures, with their bureaucratic and centralizing tendencies, we might have had a militant and democratic brand of rank-and-file unionism more resistant to economic adversity and more capable of social transformation...
...Beyond that, however, is a second, less obvious historical argument...
...That the labor movement fought so hard on behalf of national health insurance actually marked something of a break from a tradition going back to Samuel Gompers, who had always argued that it was the unions, not the state, that should protect the American worker...
...By Perlman's definition, job-conscious unionism pushed the limits in two ways: first, in advancing the job interests of workers and second, in placing the union at the center of that effort...
...What the Clinton administration has in mind are not the interests of organized labor, or even particularly the basic rights of workers under the law, but bigger fish—nothing less than American competitiveness in the global economy...
...He left the wonking to others, but he knew how to preside over the policy fray and when to bring things to a conclusion...
...Elsewhere, as in Australia, work rules were informally regulated within the plant or, as in England (notwithstanding Perlman's Anglo-American category), through negotiation with autonomous shopsteward structures...
...387-410...
...Among my fellow labor historians, it is unfashionable to invoke the name of Selig Perlman, whose A Theory of the Labor Movement (1928) expounds the trade-union vision of Samuel Gompers...
...But bad labor relations did produce a different kind of drag on the economy...
...Powerful continuities connect past and present, and to know what they are is to have guideposts in times of trouble and confusion...
...both were subordinated to the prior right of workers to choose their representatives through the majority-rule provisions in the law...
...the institutional context within which they operate tells them to do that...
...But unions do take a bite out of profits...
...what I am after is a historical guidepost embedded in the way the Wagner Act came about in the first place...
...2 At one time, when it was a subfield of institutional economics, labor history was much concerned with the structure and government of unions, and the definitive work in that vein—Lloyd Ulman's Rise of the National Trade Union (1955)—repays close reading for its brilliant analysis of how national unions emerged in response to the developing national labor and product markets of the nineteenth century...
...Being the policy wonk that he is, Clinton appoints commissions, calls conferences, consults experts...
...Once the country decided that basic rights were at stake, the game was up for the opponents of the Wagner Act, and, by the same token, the battle was won by the labor movement...
...And just because 8a(2) is woven into the entire fabric of the law, much more is going to be at stake than the revision or repeal of a single provision...
...It will behoove the labor movement to know its history when the debate is joined...
...locals did when they submitted to national organization...
...From those nineteenth-century origins, a true binational movement emerged, with the Canadians generally marching a half step to the rear...
...They saw the logic of national structures: how else could they confront the great corporations like General Motors and United States Steel...
...I'm flexible about where that voice comes from or how it's expressed...
...The burden of Perlman's book was to argue that this was not an accidental or minor feature of American trade unionism but a fundamental characteristic...
...66 • DISSENT...
...If the recent wave of plant closings and layoffs serve any useful purpose, it is to drive home the hard truth that no firm—not even corporate giants famed for providing job security, like IBM, or even those less pressed financially, like Proctor and Gamble and Eastman Kodak— can be counted on when the market turns bad and competition gets rough...
...It was not that the drafters of the Wagner Act had no notion of how these matters would be settled...
...We've maintained our membership in the most extraordinary combination of adverse circumstances," says Lane Kirkland, by which he doubtless means the hostile politics of the Reagan era, the militant anti-unionism of American industry in those years, and, most of all, the fiercely competitive markets and This article is a revised version of the Larry Rogin Lecture delivered at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, April 8, 1993...
...Ought not those premises, just as much as jobs, be the grounds on which the labor movement takes its stand on the free trade agreement...
...The easy answer is of course that the United States lacks a national health insurance system...
...Roosevelt had a different style...
...The enabling condition was the jobconscious grounding of the national-union structure, which rendered politics essentially beside the point, and made economic empow60 • DISSENT Labor Movement erment the ultimate basis for action...
...This is not the first time of troubles for the labor movement, and its defeats and revivals are themes about which the historian ought to have something to say...
...That they did not do so stemmed at least partly from the ingrained logic that instructed American unions to maximize what they did for their members...
...The recent Electromation decision affirming 8a(2) has had a bracing effect on the emerging debate, unsettling employers and tempting some of them to think that maybe the status quo is not so hot after all...
...It is no accident that collective bargaining in America—and not elsewhere—is burdened by the issue of medical insurance...
...If we count only private employment, the labor movement is perilously close to where it was before the New Deal...
...In the Great Depression, of course, no one worried about American competitiveness...
...One concerns the structure of the labor movement...
...Listen to Roger Baldwin of the ACLU speaking in 1938: However important or significant may be the struggle for the political rights of fifteen million Negroes...
...But, beyond that, the Wagner Act was at the heart of a great transformation in the meaning of constitutional rights that took place under the New Deal...
...I would not want to defend Perlman's particular formulations, but in two ways Perlman's book still serves us well—first, by insisting on some organic link between labor movements and the working classes they serve and, second, by identifying the specific characteristics that this linkage has produced in the American movement...
...About trade-union conditions in Mexico today, the bleak facts are to be found in the report that Dan La Botz has done for the International Labor Rights Education and Research Fund entitled Mask of Democracy: Labor Suppression in Mexico Today (1992...
...The industrial unions could have left the matter there...
...And, so is something as fundamental as the emphatic commitment to collective bargaining and contractual relations...
...sweeping restructuring of enterprise that have undercut the economic grounding of collective bargaining in America...
...American trade unionists don't have—in our political system have never had—the weight to pull off a feat of that magnitude...
...branches...
...So there was no lack of effort to build a Canadian movement...
...Barry T. Hirsch, Labor Unions and the Economic Performance of Firms (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991...
...The AFL boycotted 64 • DISSENT Labor Movement those elections, even though at the time its prospects in the auto industry looked totally bleak...
...This calls for job training, gainsharing (so that workers receive 62 • DISSENT Labor Movement incentives to work harder), and above all cooperative and flexible labor-management relations...
...First, labor relations reform got attached to broader economic goals...
...For that was what the employee representation plans had come to mean by 1935—a representational system within plants posed against collective bargaining with outside trade unions...
...The state protected the right to organize and bargain collectively...
...And this leads me, long way round I am afraid, to the historical guidepost I am trying to identify...
...Today a gauge of labor's weakness is the breakdown of national unity as employers whipsaw local unions and pit them against one another at plant closing time...
...That the law is about the rights of workers is what has given it moral force, however, and it is this that needs to be recovered from the past...
...It would have been easier, certainly more politic, to have compromised over the employee representation plans, which was what FDR wanted—as, for example, when its local auto unions were offered the chance in early 1935 to participate under the aegis of the NRA in elections within a works-council structure...
...What the historical perspective I have described provides is a surer sense of labor's true course when passing circumstances (like those that prevailed during the 1980s) seem to say it should be doing something else...
...And just as it was the intransigence of the labor movement that kept the focus on free collective bargaining, so also with the rights of workers...
...The answer is a thundering silence...
...But the current crisis over American "competitiveness" has called job-conscious unionism into question...
...Roosevelt came into office with no special ties to the labor unions, no commitment to legislation for them, and, indeed, no clear understanding of what it was they wanted or needed...
...In the battle for the Wagner Act, this firmness of basic perspective made a powerful difference, not least by clarifying what was at stake in the choice of a system of labor representation...
...That translated into a union density in the nonagricultural sector of 28.9 percent, down only slightly from the peak of 32.3 percent in 1953...
...The law that was adopted stepped back from that prospect, drawing with fine clarity the line between public and private...
...Alice Kessler-Harris and Bertram Silverman, "Beyond Industrial Unionism," Dissent (Winter 1992), pp...
...Exactly that began to happen as the employee representation plans came to be regulated by the National Recovery Administration...
...the Clinton administration may be another...
...For, in fact, those local movements never believed they could survive on that basis...
...What kind of law is it that prohibits (or, more accurately, tightly circumscribes) a form of labormanagement interaction that promises to enhance high performance work practice...
...by then medical care, like old age and unemployment, had become elevated in the minds of Americans into a basic security claim...
...The stir over 8a(2) suggests a broad interest— not least from the Clinton administration and the Dunlop Commission—in alternative forms of workplace representation...
...Labor-law reform thus has come on to the national agenda, not, however, by a route calculated to give much comfort to the strategists at the AFL-CIO...
...From this complicated story we can draw two kinds of conclusions...
...Unionized employers are not put at any disadvantage in terms of labor productivity, say Freeman and Medoff...
...From that historical perspective, we can also find the means for remedying one of the great failings of the labor movement, namely, articulating its mission to the outside world...
...This is a new situation for a society that has known only sustained economic growth, and hence probably beyond the historian's grasp...
...The reason was that the AFL craft unions had a harder time figuring out how medical benefits might be incorporated into their collectivebargaining agreements...
...Repealing Section 8a(2) is also plausible, and one can imagine— our secretary of labor can certainly imagine— luxuriant new forms of representation once management is no longer required to stay at arm's length from labor organizations...
...1984...
...This is why Section 8a(2) takes the form that it does, prohibiting not only domination but any kind of employer support for labor organizations...
...The two years leading up to the Wagner Act were preeminently a time of searching debate, just what the Clinton administration hopes to call forth with its Dunlop Commission (omitting, of course, the furious industrial battles that drove the debate in Roosevelt's time...
...So we tend to forget that the Wagner Act is ultimately not about the rights of unions but about the rights of workers...
...If AT&T and the Communications Workers can work out a decisionsharing program, more power to them...
...Indeed, one of their main grievances, and a principal reason for the emergence of the CIO, was the AFL's resistance to their persistent demands for autonomous national industrial unions...
...of freedom of the press, radio or motion pictures, these are on the whole trifling in national effect compared with the fight for the rights of labor to organize...
...This relationship received confirmation from the Senate investigation launched by Robert LaFollette into the violation of civil liberties soon after passage of the Wagner Act...
...As for the side agreements on environmental and labor standards, trade-union rights are at the bottom of the barrel as far as enforcement is concerned...
...Only occasionally does an apparent anomaly arise to remind us that the labor law came out of a particular time and was premised on a specific set of industrial conditions...
...Indeed, it was over job rights that Perlman found the basis for his distinction between German and 58 • DISSENT Labor Movement Anglo-American unionism: German unions concerned themselves "only with wages, hours, and watchful scrutiny of the operations of the governmental bodies administering labor laws and social insurance . . [but] utterly failed to put in any bid for the dozens and dozens of job control rules achieved by American and English unions and designed to give the membership a right to the job, freedom from overwork and arbitrary discrimination, and the protection of their bargaining power...
...If the labor movement wants to find the language of industrial justice that it needs, it would do well to study its own past...
...At that point, 70 percent of all organized workers in Canada belonged to AFL-CIO unions...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
