Calling Joe Hill

In the face of the Bush administration’s threats to impose sanctions against West Coast dockworkers under Taft-Hartley and the Patriot Act provision, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is prepared to mount a coast-wide strike against stevedoring companies that are demanding steep concessions from workers.

The union will most likely defy the president and close the ports, an action profoundly reminiscent of the strike by the United Mineworkers, under the leadership of John L. Lewis, who in 1943 stopped digging for coal. Lewis drew jail time, and maybe James Spinosa, the ILWU president, will too.

In the aftermath of the organizing campaigns that brought millions of industrial workers into American unions during the Great Depression and World War II, sociologist C. Wright Mills announced that labor leaders had become “new men of power.� During World War II, Sidney Hillman, president of what was then called the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, was one of the most powerful figures in the Roosevelt administration. The Democratic Party prospered on the basis of labor’s vote and, most important, unions established what became known as the American standard of living which, among other benefits, brought to workers a level of consumption of goods and services previously unknown in American history.

But by the 1960s, union power had begun its long slide. In 1953, one of three workers in private sector enterprises were in unions; today only one in 10 working in private firms belongs to a union. Except for the dramatic rise of public employees’ unionism, organized labor has lost so much ground that many economists believe unionism is fated to return to the margins.

In “State of the Union,� a richly documented and well-written book, Nelson Lichtenstein, who teaches history at UC Santa Barbara, traces the rise and decline of American labor, primarily since the Great Depression. He begins the story with the New Deal’s struggle to overcome the economic crises of the time. From 1934 to 1936, workers conducted general strikes in Minneapolis and San Francisco, a national textile strike and sit-down strikes (factory occupations) in Cleveland and in the Akron, Ohio, rubber industry. In fact, the famous General Motors sit-down strike occurred before the New Deal Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which established a series of procedures to determine whether a union had the right to represent a particular group of workers and barred so-called “company� unions because they were controlled by the employer.

Without the benefit of legal protections, workers had to resort to militant action to gain a foothold in the American workplace. But following the conventional wisdom, Lichtenstein believes unions were able to overcome stubborn employer resistance to independent labor organizations only when the government stepped in to protect their rights. Lichtenstein holds that during the 1930s, unions looked to the state for solutions to their problems and that this dependence on government action was desirable and necessary.

He does not consider the argument that the National Labor Relations Act was a response to significant evidence that--working outside the New Deal framework--union organizers, including many communists and socialists, secured the right of workers to form “unions of their own choosing,� free of management interference and manipulation.

But organizing workers in America’s largest corporations meant that the most impressive aspect of labor’s struggle for recognition was that it challenged management’s unilateral right to control the shop floor. The unionization victories were first steps in labor’s quest for full citizenship beyond the right to vote. Lichtenstein argues that unions sought to establish a new “industrial democracy,� which acknowledged the worker’s voice in all aspects of production and corporate functions.

Indeed, in the first decade of labor’s insurgency, unions demanded, and won, the ability to contest workloads, have a say in the introduction of new technologies and prevent management from firing activists and other workers without cause. Union power grew through World War II: Its ranks swelled by more than 4 million members, largely because of the labor movement’s ability to pressure the Roosevelt administration to bring such longtime anti-union companies as Ford Motor Co. and the so-called little steel producers into line.

But management staged a post-war counterattack. Over President Harry Truman’s veto, a newly elected conservative congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Taft-Hartley barred Communists from holding union office; banned the so-called secondary boycott, which permitted such unions as the Teamsters to assist strikes by refusing to bring trucks across picket lines; mandated an 80-day “cooling-off period� when the federal government believed a strike might hurt the national interest; and reinstated the employer’s right to seek a court injunction to limit picketing.

Mineworkers’ Lewis called the amendments a “slave labor� act, but Lichtenstein believes labor was already too weak and compromised to win repeal. Labor was compromised by an internal struggle within the Congress of Industrial Organizations between the communists and anti-communists over whether to support the Cold War aims of the United States government. But the real explanation of organized labor’s failure to mount a major campaign for repeal of Taft-Hartley is that unions were well on the way to becoming junior partners to the largest corporations and to the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy.

Union weakness after 1947 has dominated most of the discussion of postwar labor and industrial relations. But in the high point of his analysis, Lichtenstein insists that collective bargaining--through which unions and management compromise to attain labor peace and by which unions sought a “private� welfare state--tended to blunt organized labor’s political will. The unions were unable to attain such universal gains as a government-run single-payer health plan and they abandoned any effort to emulate European practices of national wage and benefits negotiations. When unions negotiated pensions and health care through the contract rather than through law and always with a single firm, they conceded that these benefits would not become universal.

As a result, inequality sprung up among the country’s workers. The labor relations system helped depoliticize the membership by making unionists company-oriented; rather than retaining their character as elements in a social movement, progressive unions like the United Auto Workers became more service organizations than instruments of social change.

Some of the best sections of “State of the Union� are those showing how these practices resulted in unions becoming bulwarks against race and gender equality. Many blacks found jobs in unionized and urban industrial plants until the mid-1950s. But migration of blacks from the rural South, and Latinos from Puerto Rico and Mexico, occurred precisely as these cities were losing their industrial plants in the 1950s and ‘60s, depriving many people of color of well-paying jobs. Because labor agreements provided, in part, job security for employees with the greatest length of service, blacks, who entered industrial plants during the war, gradually found themselves standing on unemployment lines or accepting low-wage jobs in the mostly nonunion service sector. The CIO had tried to organize Southern textile and garment workers in the late 1940s to close the regional wage gap, but its failure, owing in great measure to its refusal to address the race question, was followed by a mass southward exodus of Northern and Western industrial plants to rural areas in the South.

Although the AFL-CIO--which was formed in 1955 by the two competing federations, the American Federation of Labor and the CIO--consistently supported civil rights legislation, the seniority system effectively excluded racial minorities and women from the best and most secure jobs. But Lichtenstein shows that unions were often unsympathetic to the efforts of women to overturn legislation that excluded them from some occupations. As a result of their union leadership’s narrowing focus on contract protections of a largely white, male membership, unions by the 1960s found themselves separated from burgeoning social movements that demanded opportunities for good jobs and education.

The civil rights movement supported President Richard Nixon’s affirmative-action programs, which sought to reserve places in employment and education for minorities and women. Lichtenstein cautiously supports Nixon’s individualized focus on “rights consciousness� instituted by federal and state anti-discrimination statutes which addressed employment discrimination on a case-by-case basis. But he astutely points out that these statutes undermined labor’s traditional appeal to solidarity and collective action to achieve social justice.

But these insights are episodes in a book that ascribes labor’s decline to the economic and political obstacles it has faced since the New Deal. In the end, Lichtenstein believes that the labor movement needs not only its own strength but a new New Deal to reverse its fortunes. In a time when such an eventuality seems remote, his solutions amount to hollowly urging, “Let us go forth.�

Asking the traditional question, “What is to be done?� in his concluding chapter, Lichtenstein recommends the return of labor to its 1930s roots: militancy, democracy and political independence. In this era of the relentless and largely successful corporate offensive against workers’ living standards and the social wage, and the roaring return of labor’s economic and political subordination at the workplace and the ballot box, this bromide seems implausible.

Far from political independence, even as the Democratic Party lunges to the right, the AFL-CIO continues to put tens of millions of dollars into the party’s coffers, and some, like the Teamsters, cuddle up to the Republicans. With few exceptions, labor has abandoned the brave start the AFL-CIO made, in 1995, under its new president, John Sweeney, to focus on organizing the unorganized. Strike activity is at an all-time low because the membership views its unions as insurance companies rather than a social movement. And most labor leaders don’t care about democracy, in terms of involving rank and file union members in policy.

Lichtenstein knows this. He mentions, briefly, the most successful among the reform movements: Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which has waged a two-decade fight to democratize the union and to restore its militancy. Teamsters for a Democratic Union spearheaded the election of insurgent Ron Carey who became union president and defeated a crime-ridden leadership. But there is no discussion of the many recent attempts at union reform because Lichtenstein, in concert with some labor intellectuals, has cast his lot with the progressive wing of AFL-CIO leadership. On this commitment he can’t bring himself to ally with the actual and imagined insurgencies, without which labor’s fate is sealed. For in the end, like many labor intellectuals, Lichtenstein is out of touch with the rank and file and cannot imagine an alternative that stems from the grass roots of the labor movement.

Needless to say, in the labor movement, there are always conflicting signs, and West Coast unions may provide a ray of hope. The AFL-CIO’s Los Angeles campaign to organize hundreds of thousands of low-wage service and manufacturing workers was capped two years ago when the Service Employees Union brought 74,000 home-health-care workers into its ranks. And the Union of Needle Trades, Industrial and Textile Employees has registered some important gains in the area’s garment shops. These successes, in light of the action simmering among the dockworkers on the West Coast, clearly mark the difference between a movement and a staid institution.