Nelson Lichtenstein's State of the Union
Eviatar, Daphne
LONGTIME LABOR supporters may remember the Joe Hill ballads or Ralph Chaplin's anthem "Solidarity Forever," but years ago, the unions stopped singing them. While gospel hymns and blues ballads...
...A once impassioned cause that evoked images of placard waving marchers demanding human dignity has degenerated into a bureaucracy of union officers in business suits who lord over small but lucrative fiefdoms and an apathetic membership that's content to let the institutions do their bidding for them...
...but they're not widespread radical politics...
...Recall Roosevelt's indictment of the "unscrupulous money changers" in his first inaugural address...
...But who is going to bring about that transformation...
...That's a whole lot better than what's available to the burger flipper at the fastfood joint...
...But that would require a European-style social welfare system, stateadministered job security, and a labor party that backs industry-wide union actions...
...But, remarkably, he never acknowledges the enormous gulf between American political culture seventy years ago and today...
...A rigid legal frameI I2, n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOOKS work calcified the labor movement and weakened its ideological bedrock, thwarting its ability to expand beyond that narrow scheme into a vibrant and durable political force...
...Hammering out the details of a cost-of-living wage increase or employer contribution to a health and benefit fund is not going to yield catchy tunes or spiritual hymns...
...expected the United States to develop into a Europeanstyle social democracy with government regulation tempering corporate greed...
...Lichtenstein's utopian approach may be provocative for academics, but it's dangerous for union members...
...A collective bargaining agreement today is what separates the union member from the at-will employee at Burger King...
...Inspiration is important, but it's ephemeral without a legal structure to bolster it...
...Today, the employment-discrimination laws and the principles underlying them are unquestioned...
...In the early 1990s, the Service Employees International Union started its successful Justice for Janitors campaign and a few years later won the right to represent close to seventy-five thousand home health workers previously deemed independent contractors...
...By contrast, the movement toward civil rights in the workplace has been brisk...
...The political energy that fueled organized labor in the 1930s simply doesn't exist at the dawn of the twentyfirst century...
...As Lichtenstein points out, our twoparty political system doesn't lend itself well to labor's interests...
...What evidence do we have that wage laborers or union leaders of the time were paying such intellectuals any mind...
...These days, your average wage-earner is more likely to be shouting out the Wal-Mart company cheer—a sinister development Barbara Ehrenreich documents in her recent book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America—than singing any union songs...
...The problem with this book is that it's not clear what exactly Lichtenstein is advocating...
...To Lichtenstein such legalisms are a travesty...
...their political consciousness is formed by the watered-down nightly news of General Electric's NBC or AOL-Time Warner's CNN...
...But for the most part, he blames the legal framework forged under the New Deal...
...Of course unions should aggressively try to organize new workers, and, as Lichtenstein emphasizes, linking racial and gender equality to workplace and political rights can help...
...Under the Teamsters' contract, the package handler gets not only job security, but 114 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 BOO KS health benefits and a small but steadily growing hourly wage...
...Industrial capitalism had wrought unregulated workplaces offering long hours, low pay, hazardous conditions, and angry workers...
...In 1947, a Republican-dominated Congress anxious to curb labor's burgeoning power passed the Taft-Hartley Act...
...By the 1940s-1950s, the idea of "industrial democracy" had practically vanished from political vocabulary and union discourse...
...Most of Lichtenstein's prescriptions, tossed into the book's last chapter, are difficult to discern...
...If unions would just get some of that old-time militancy, they could re-ignite the movement...
...Is he suggesting we scrap the collective bargaining system...
...But this is not the time to discredit the basic bargaining rights and job protections unions have already won...
...What happened to the union spirit...
...The collective bargaining process is a failure, for it eschews the larger political questions that unionism originally intended to address...
...Sure, the American labor movement would be more effective if it were broader and more influential...
...Yet violating workers' right to organize yields minimal, if any, financial penalties and barely a mention in the mainstream press...
...Lichtenstein lays out a host of possible explanations, including the actions of unions themselves, which were not exactly models of diversity and inclusion...
...Their violation costs employers multiple millions of dollars and widespread condemnation...
...In Los Angeles, Latino workers are organizing like nowhere else in the country...
...The result is a passive membership and a stagnant labor movement...
...Now we have George W. Bush promising tax cuts for the wealthy, not Franklin Roosevelt pledging job security for the poor...
...Unions grew to represent one in three workers by 1953...
...For the first time, the federal government set minimum wages and maximum hours and granted the right to organize and bargain collectively...
...But if the NLRA framework has encouraged bloated union bureaucracies with a narrow political reach, it's also the only set of laws that provides employees the critical right to organize, bargain collectively, and enjoy the benefits of enforceable contracts...
...Such "wishful thinking," says Lichtenstein, coupled with the emergence of a related notion that work itself would lose its importance, endorsed the view that revolutionary change in relations between labor and management was no longer necessary...
...To Lichtenstein, Taft-Hartley's "best-remembered consequence" was "the purge of the Communists from official union posts...
...Such details, however, are less important to Lichtenstein than ideas: "If questions involving the dignity and value of work are to return to the top of the national agenda, then the organizational shape of the American trade-union movement is actually of far less importance than the ideas and ideology, the inspiration, that sustains it...
...Offering arbitration to enforce contract details, the labor movement "is like a giant bar association of non-licensed attorneys," laments labor lawyer and writer Tom Geoghegan, whom Lichtenstein quotes in agreement...
...Militancy and democracy are fairly easy to understand, but exactly how unions can exert real political influence is an extraordinarily difficult question that goes to the heart of the problem this book attempts to address...
...Lichtenstein's response to this critical dilemma is characteristically vague...
...Fortunately, buried within Lichtenstein's dense narrative lies the basis for a more perDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 113 BOOKS suasive answer...
...Union officials end up spending far more time administering benefits than organizing new members or politically mobilizing the ones they have...
...And by narrowing its concern to implementation of a particular, firm-limited contract, the union's role becomes insular and bureaucratic...
...So which is it: expand and enforce existing labor rights or scrap the system...
...Although labor has long asDISSENT / Spring 2002 n I 1 5 BOOKS sociated itself with the Democratic Party, the Democrats' failure to push progressive social welfare legislation and labor law reform has called into question that longstanding allegiance...
...Unfortunately, American workers are not reading liberal academic journals and magazines...
...It's hard to disagree with the thrust of this argument...
...In 1941, as Lichtenstein notes, Franklin Roosevelt exalted "Freedom from Want" to the level of the classic American values of free speech and religion...
...Taft-Hartley excluded supervisors from unions, prohibited organization of independent contractors, allowed states to pass "right-to-work" laws that outlawed closed-shop agreements, and expanded employers' abilities to challenge union representation...
...Liberals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...In major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, one sees unions playing significant roles in local politics, espousing both civil rights and worker rights to galvanize a diverse urban labor force...
...But to him, liberals' growing view of unions as "little more than a self-aggrandizing interest group" and radicals' critique that labor had squandered its political potential were "far more demoralizing and, in the long run, politically and jurisprudentially consequential" than were right-wing politics...
...As part of a campaign to raise the pay of the predominantly African-American non-union housecleaning staff, students and faculty argued against paying market wages, invoking the state's history of slave labor and chanting, "Workers Rights are Civil Rights...
...Lichtenstein acknowledges that a postwar conservative backlash imposed some practical restrictions on unions...
...To Nelson Lichtenstein the death of union crooning reflects the dearth of inspiration that afflicts the labor movement today...
...I i ICHTENSTEIN argues that unions should adopt new organizing methods and repoliticize as in the 1930s...
...It's a slide that's all the more difficult to understand because it accelerated just as the civil rights movement was on an upswing...
...Rather than see union potential for spearheading progressive change, academics and journalists embraced the apolitical collective bargaining scheme and the model of "industrial pluralism" that supported it...
...The labor question," writes Lichtenstein, "no longer seemed much of a question at all...
...Unions can revive their previous political prominence by acting more strategically, he says...
...A reform strategy needs to reckon with political reality...
...He concludes unions need more "militancy," "union democracy," and "politics...
...The arbitration process, although somewhat unwieldy, is the only thing that enforces it...
...It also shifted the focus away from organizing, ultimately narrowing labor's political reach...
...It's an attempt to provide a new answer to the old question: Why the labor movement's demise...
...With a collective bargaining agreement, even a parttime package handler for United Parcel Service can force the company to justify a dismissal...
...For example, he proclaims that the "ideological task that lies before workplace Democrats is to make union organization rights as unassailable as are basic civil rights...
...If the campaign did nothing more than raise consciousness, then although worthwhile, such "successes" hardly support scrapping the hard-fought legal protections unionized workers have won...
...If unions didn't need to worry about organizing each company, contesting employee dismissals, and ensuring the dispensation of health and pension benefits, then perhaps it would be...
...And, in a major economic blow to unions, it allowed employers to sue for damages for business or property damage caused by a strike or work stoppage...
...Lichtenstein labels as outdated and obstructionist the entire legal framework dating back to the New Deal's National Labor Relations Act (NLRA...
...It's also confusing for the reader...
...To anyone who's ever tried to organize a union or defend its actions, Taft-Hartley's restrictions have concrete consequences on the shop floor...
...Lichtenstein describes how C. Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, and Harvey Swados came to see unions as "repressive, ethically and morally claustrophobic" institutions that had failed to bring about a desperately needed transformation of American working class life...
...A "Second Bill of Rights"—to a job, health care, education, and a reasonable income—became another rallying cry...
...Alas, when the merged AFL-CIO finally got around to publishing its first songbook, the time-worn union tunes were pushed back to make room for "The Star Spangled Banner...
...But that's the least of Taft-Hartley's problematic legacies...
...management always retains the upper hand through control over production—whether decisions about relocation, the use of new technology, or mass layoffs...
...And the politicians of the day were on their side...
...In recent years, we've seen union leadership taking tentative steps in just that direction...
...By the 1960s, at "the very moment in which a rights-conscious revolution began to transform American political culture," the labor relations model laid out in the New Deal era was nearing "an ideological dead end...
...116 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...HOW DID THIS happen...
...He never tells us...
...If so, what would replace it...
...it gave their officers vast powers over huge benefits funds, which encouraged corruption...
...University professors...
...The idea of collective bargaining between one union and one employer is clearly an antique notion," writes Lichtenstein...
...But it's not a very convincing explanation for labor's decline...
...Law professors Katherine Stone, at Cornell, and Joel Rogers, at the University of Wisconsin, for example, have made similar arguments...
...Collective bargaining between one union and one employer assumes a level playing field that doesn't exist...
...Although Lichtenstein acknowledges TaftHartley's importance, he's most disturbed by its symbolism...
...They accepted the turbulent ideological conflicts in Europe to mean that socialism in any form was hopeless, rejecting the broad range of ideas employed by fascist and Stalinist regimes in Europe in favor of more limited progress through interest-group politics...
...With a quarter of the workforce out of a job, Americans came to question the very foundations of capitalism...
...The collective bargaining system turned unions' focus inward...
...In Lichtenstein's mind, thinkers such as Daniel Bell, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Robert Dahl dealt labor a critical blow...
...Unfortunately, collective bargaining is not an act that inspires...
...But a contract does provide minimal rights and protections for the employees who labor under its auspices...
...Lichtenstein—who wrote an acclaimed 1995 biography of former United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and has written and edited several previous books on labor—takes on this "great contradiction in American democracy" in his most recent book, State of the Union...
...Lichtenstein seems to be imagining a revolutionary transformation from our rights-based American society to one of class-based political action...
...Lichtenstein is not the first person to suggest that the system arising out of the New Deal has constrained union activism...
...America's laissez-faire system had caused havoc, sparking radical demands for a "living wage" and "industrial democracy...
...But what happened to the workers' wages...
...Interest-group politics could handle society's problems just fine...
...That includes pushing for liberalization of labor laws to expand unions' ability to organize and workers' right to protest...
...Lichtenstein begins, appropriately, in the Progressive era, when "the labor question" seemed a burning one...
...Rather than being predictable party stalwarts, labor should function as "an independent, and sometimes as a disloyal, component of the Democratic Party coalition, at least until a reassessment of its political options can take place...
...In New York, unions dominated by women and minorities, such as Hospital Workers Local 1199 (now part of the SEIU), have won strong contracts and played a powerful role in local politics...
...Intellectuals of the day encouraged this fettered view...
...This backlog of "mini-lawsuits" has become the substance of "industrial self-government...
...Presumably, Lichtenstein means labor should occasionally support Republicans, or perhaps thirdparty candidates like Ralph Nader...
...But it was the Great Depression that ignited the movement...
...Perhaps Lichtenstein believes radicalism will grow out of campus teach-ins...
...But those who would brush it aside should be able to at least suggest something that might feasibly take its place...
...Political support for the American working class reached an unprecedented level, marked by anticapitalist rhetoric that's unimaginable today...
...For now, at least, that's the most tangible thing the union movement in this country has to offer...
...There's an argument to be made that supporting a third party in the long run will win labor more influence...
...But if that's what Lichtenstein is advocating, he at least ought to acknowledge that the result the last time around was disastrous: a conservative Republican administration that's implemented large-scale corporate tax cuts, rolled back worker and environmental protections, and installed right-wing judges with life tenure...
...It's also far more efficient than the court system...
...It is not enough...
...Radical intellectuals likewise abandoned previous aspirations for the labor movement as a vehicle for meaningful change...
...This is an interesting analysis, even if at times it reads like an encyclopedic entry on twentieth-century intellectuals...
...Beginning in the 1950s and taking off after adoption of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, "rights consciousness," Lichtenstein explains, has come to replace class consciousness...
...DAPHNE EVIATAR is a New York-based writer and a former labor lawyer...
...Management theorists like Peter Drucker saw the future in the reorganization of the corporation...
...Lichtenstein discusses one, for example, that he helped organize at the University of Virginia...
...Yes, current work conditions are lousy—wages have stagnated, workers are insecure, and income inequality is staggering— but the situation is still far from that of the wholly unregulated economy that sparked the Great Depression...
...Lichtenstein points out that since John Sweeney was elected president in 1995, the AFL-CIO has stepped up organizing, included more minority and women leaders, and opened its arms to new immigrants...
...But in Lichtenstein's view, labor's very growth held the seeds of its decline...
...And it's barely answered...
...These are all encouraging steps...
...Unions, many believed, would not only boost wages and consumption, but provide workers a valuable voice on the shop floor...
...The response was the New Deal...
...It also gave the National Labor Relations Board broad powers to enjoin union actions and outlawed critical union weapons—most notably, the secondary boycott...
...That's simply not the American way...
...Lichtenstein describes the teach-in as "notably successful...
...still, Lichtenstein sees the postwar period as one of "retreat and defeat...
...This view, according to Lichtenstein, "would have a vast influence on the academy, among social movement activists during the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the judiciary, where a discourse of `rights' soon came to have a powerfully corrosive impact on the legitimacy and integrity of the union idea...
...What happened to the singing...
...With job insecurity and wage inequality on the rise, and a resurgence of patriotism post—September 11, this is surely a good time for unions to tap into existing energy and frustration to renew support for labor's cause...
...Labor contracts are "unworkable" "legalistic documents," he suggests, quoting a Chrysler shop steward...
...While gospel hymns and blues ballads were giving spirit to the emerging civil rights movement, the old songs that had once filled union halls were all but forgotten by the 1960s...
...And on college campuses across the country, at least some students are protesting the injustices of the unregulated global labor market...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
