Reinventing the Labor Union

...Racism, along with other forms of ethnocentrism, will continue to exist, and antidiscrimination laws will have to be enforced against bigots—forever...

...Part of the decline can be attributed to strategic mistakes on the part of labor leaders...

...Under pressure from the black civil rights lobby, the government refused to add a "multiracial" category to the U.S...

...One in three Latinos, and more than half of Asian-Americans, marry outside of their categories...

...Nevertheless, for three decades the greatest passion in the Democratic Party was associated with issues like affirmative action, multiculturalism and feminism, not issues like the minimum wage...

...To test this idea, the AFL-CIO's Dean has set up a nonprofit temp agency that pays for health care, sick leave and training...

...But why should white Americans be penalized in applying for college, jobs, or government contracts, to the benefit of Latin Americ an or Asian immigrants who have came to the U.S...

...And campaigns to unionize workers in nonunion service sectors ranging from janitors and health aides to high-tech professionals will meet determined opposition at every step from employers who preferadocile,poorly paid work force...

...To regain its lost importance in American life, though, organized labor must go beyond defending its position in old sectors like manufacturing (important as that may be) to demonstrating its relevance in the service sector where four out of five Americans now work...

...But its main cause was the collaboration of business executives and politicians since the 1970s in a campaign to weaken organized labor where it already exists, and to make unionization arduous in sectors and regions of the country where organized labor has little presence...

...Unions would thus fill the role played in our economy by temp agencies —with the significant difference that the workers would be far better treated...

...In the period from the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act until the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, liberalism became identified with advancing the concerns of nonwhites (of all classes) rather than those of wage earners (of all races...

...The justification of race-based public policy has been weakened, too, by the post-'60s immigration...

...One was the fact that civil rights leaders were disproportionately from affluent families whose members would not have benefited from undertakings confined to low-income whites and nonwhites...

...In the case of black Americans, the victims of centuries of oppression in the United States, an argument could be made in favor of some kind of compensatory treatment...

...the only debate is over the extent to which it should be accompanied by tax breaks for business...

...Today the Republican majority itself is sponsoring a minimum wage increase...

...At the same time, the waning of the Rockefeller Republicans has made prolabor conservatism a contradiction in terms...

...The other third parties that claim to be populist—the Greens, the New Party— are in fact mere splinters of the far Left...

...Another reason was cost, because extending programs to the white poor (the absolute majority of poor Americans) would have been far more expensive than limiting them to blacks and Latinos...

...census...

...Even in the New Deal era, the labor wing of the Democratic party was only one part of a coalition that included the racist Southern social elite...

...This is very far from what the original advocates of affirmative action for black Americans had in mind...

...In the United States, however, the national parties have usually been formed on the basis of regional, religious and racial antipathies, rather than along class lines...

...With respect to economic policy if not social issues, the Republican Party is slowly returning to something like the Modern Republicanism of Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Finally, a rising rate of outmarriage on the part of minority groups is profoundly undermining the legitimacy of racebased public policy by blurring the distinctions among the "races" that the U.S...

...Strategists in both parties counsel their candidates to woo affluent "new economy" professionals, who are thought to hold the balance of power in elections...

...Whatis needed is the re-creation, in anew form, of something like mid-20th century New Deal liberalism...

...The last time the minimum wage was raised, Newt Gingrich warned that the economy would be devastated...

...The first of these factors—the decline of identity politics—is slowly altering American progressivism...

...Another possibility would be a populist movement capable of frightening both parties into reforms that help working-class Americans...

...Critical among them are the decline of identity politics, the discrediting of conservative economics, and the gradual adaptation of organized labor to the service economy...

...Unlike campaigns to extend or defend racial preferences that by their very nature alienate the white majority, the living wage campaign unites Americans across racial, ethnic and religious lines— while drawing a new line between the wage-earning majority, and rentier and professional elites...

...But at some point in the 21 st century our archaic system of racial classifications, inherited from white supremacists with a few cosmetic changes (like the conversion of "Oriental" to "Asian and Pacific Islander") will no longer correspond to the reality of the transracial American melting pot...

...Republicans appealed to their traditional social values...

...But the struggle will still be difficult, and the outcome remains in doubt...

...voluntarily in the years after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s...

...From the 1970s to the 1990s, conservative foundations paid for efforts by black activists to promote black-majority Congressional districts, on the assumption that ghettoizing black voters would create more conservative white districts...

...But the race-neutral integrationists lost the debate to the proponents of race-based policies: busing, racial gerrymandering of Congressional districts, racial preferences in college admissions, hiring and government contracting...

...Huey Long and the Townsend movement in the 1930s have been given credit by some historians for pressuring Washington into passing Social Security and other New Deal reforms...

...government still officially recognizes...

...Ironically, in places like California, preserving affirmative action would require systematic discrimination against Asian-American immigrants and their descendants in favor of Latin American immigrants and their descendants...

...In sum, the decline of divisive identity politics and the exhaustion of Right-wing economic radicalism has made the revival of prolabor reformism easier than it was a decade ortwo ago...

...They may have been right...

...From a high point in the 1950s, when about a third of Americans belonged to unions, membership in unions has dropped to around 15 per cent in the 1990s, with much of that small percentage accounted for by public sector unions like teachers...

...The categories will be abandoned, and when they are, race-based public policy, if it has not already been jettisoned, will cease to exist...

...The Reaganite radicals of the 1980s were animated by two themes—the need for tax cuts, at the expense of a balanced budget, and the need to roll back the Great Society and the New Deal...

...That capital has long been exhausted...

...For openers, it will require the revision of Federal and state labor laws to permit multiemployer bargaining...

...But today the one potentially populist movement with national influence, the Reform Party, is in a state of collapse...

...More important, a new emphasis on class rather than race would not necessarily hurt disadvantaged black and Latino Americans, if one believes the major problems they face are low wages, inaccessible health care, poor public education, and a political system rigged in favor of the well-to-do...

...Democrats appealed to these swing voters by stressing the defense of Social Security and other mainstream entitlements...

...Rustin also favored this "color-blind" or "race-neutral" approach because he wanted to preserve the fragile alliance between black Americans and the labor movement...

...Meanwhile, in dozens of cities and states, activists are engaged in campaigns for a "living wage" that is higher than the minimum wage...

...It appears, then, that only a revitalized labor movement can be the vehicle for a new politics of the wage earning majority...

...Whereas the "culture war" politics of the Right unites the top and the middle against the bottom, the "economic justice" politics symbolized by the living wage campaign has the potential to unite the middle and the bottom against the top...

...Then there was the role of Machiavellian conservatives...

...A new politics based on the interests of the wage-earning majority probably cannot be realized, however, unless the American labor movement play's a leading role...

...Fortunately a new cohort of labor leaders, including Amy Dean, head of the Silicon Valley office of the AFL-CIO, and Sara Horowitz of Working Today, are proving that they are up to the challenge...

...Proof of this can be found in the current debate over the minimum wage...

...Today only marginal candidates like Ross Perot and Patrick J. Buchanan make the interests of workingclass Americans central to their campaigns...

...For example, given that many workers are now employed on a contingent basis by a number of successive employers, something like the "hiring hall" long used in the construction industry may be more relevant than the site-based factory union of the past...

...But there are signs that this familiar pattern is fading...

...While paying lip service to former President Ronald Reagan, the Republicans of the 1990s have discreetly distanced themselves from these two positions...

...The task, although difficult, has been made easier by the discrediting of conservative economics...

...For the most part liberal Democrats still sided with organized labor and supported such reforms as universal health care that would benefit all American workers...

...I do not mean to suggest that reinventing unions will be a simple matter...

...As we have learned from H. R. Haldeman's diaries, President Richard M. Nixon supported racial quotas as part of a cynical plot to pit white union workers against black Americans...

...Yet, the minimum wage was raised (albeit to a fraction of its level in the 1960s, in constant dollars) and the economy boomed...

...It is possible, of course, that some different institution could represent the economic interests of the majority of Americans whose education ends with high school or a few years of college...

...The disproportionate, though by no means universal, success of Asian-Americans in the academy and the economy has further refuted the contention that white racism will prevent nonwhite Americans from advancing unless the rules are rigged in their favor...

...For their part, centrist New Democrats like President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have gone out of their way to court business executives and professionals, at the expense, if necessary, of organized labor...

...It is true that organized labor continues to be an important constituency of the Democratic Party...

...Far from being a setback for American liberalism, that turn of events may revitalize it...

...Whatever demagogues like the Reverend Jesse Jackson say, the abolition of race-based college admissions does not strike most Americans as "turning back the clock" to the days of Bull Connor...

...The rollback of affirmative action, byjudicial decrees and popular référendums, is forcing progressives to take a second look at race-neutral reforms of the kind advocated by liberal critics of race-based policy in the '60s and '70s, In retrospect, affirmative action and multiculturalism depended for their legitimacy on the moral capital of the Civil Rights Revolution...

...many experts maintain that racial gerrymandering made it easier for conservative Republicans to capture Congress in 1994 and to hold it until now...

...During the '60s, liberals disagreed about what should follow the abolition of formal segregation in the United States...

...Some, like Bayard Rustin and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, thought black poverty was related more to matters of class and subculture than to ongoing white discrimination, and should be addressed through economic policies and entitlement programs that would benefit the white poor as well...

...When living wage initiatives are put on the ballot, as they were in Washington State in 1998, they tend to pass with widespread popular support...

...But the civil rights model of American progressivism is obsolete...

...One of the most promising ideas being floated by younger labor leaders and prolabor intellectuals is the notion of reinventing the union...

...Of late, however, certain quiet changes have been under way in the country— changes that have the potential to restore something akin to pre-'60s labor liberalism in a new form suited to a new century...

...The race-conscious model prevailed over the race-neutral alternative for several reasons...

...Concluding that they were no longer welcome on the Center-Left, many working-class whites, both women and men, defected to the Republican Party or joined the ranks of independent voters (who currently outnumber self-identified Democrats and Republicans...

...An even more radical idea is the proposal that unions take over responsibility from corporations for providing lifetime health benefits, pensions and even periodic retraining...

...For one thing, conservatives would be denied one of the key "wedge issues" they have used to pry workingclass whites away from progressives...

...In other democratic countries, social democratic parties have championed the interests of wage earners...

...The angry public reaction to the government shutdown engineered by Congress in 1995 marked the highwater mark of antigovernment radicalism...

...Whatever one thinks of the balanced budget deal (some argue that the budget is not really balanced at all), the effort marked the defeat of the supplysiders by traditional Republican fiscal conservatives...

...But since the 1960s identity politics, promoting the concerns of various racial or gender groups—nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians—has tended to eclipse the class-based politics of left of center New Deal liberalism...