Knocking on Labor's Door

Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

Lane Windham

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469632087
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The power of unions in workers' lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor's decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing. Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future. Windham's story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women's history.

Part I

1 The Dilemma of the Narrow Door

In 1979, Barbara Cash and her coworkers faced a predicament. Cash made her living unpacking boxes for the Woodward & Lothrop department store warehouse in Washington, D.C., expertly tagging clothes as she hung them on rack after rack. A small and powerfully built African American woman, she had followed her cousin into the job at age seventeen and began loading crates for the freight elevators. By 1979 she was a thirty-year-old mother of two. Though Cash had health insurance and a retirement plan through her husband’s job, many who worked alongside her were not so fortunate; they could not afford the company’s health care and pension plans. Inflation was rampant, and nearly 70 percent of the workers had family incomes below what the federal government determined they needed just to get by. While top management had a carefully calibrated contract, including generous stock options and huge severance packages should they be laid off, Woodward & Lothrop’s rank-and-file workers had no such guarantee of economic security.1

Though workers had an independent union—the Union of Woodward & Lothrop Employees—it was a weak holdover from a company union whose sole founding purpose had been to dodge the more radical and assertive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. “With a union you get a raise every year … with the independent union you got whatever they thought you should have, it wasn’t no set thing,” remembered Cash. She and many of her coworkers took pride in working for the city’s renowned department store, but their low wages and benefits signaled that their employer undervalued their work. They knew very well that in America’s market-centric society, respect and pay were interlinked. They were ready to make a change. That’s why Cash and her 5,300 coworkers began to organize a new union in 1979.2

First they collected union cards; Cash signed hers at a big meeting at a New York Avenue hotel. Then they filed for a union election with the U.S. government. They endured a twelve-week contested campaign and then finally won the vote count, which legally obligated Woodward & Lothrop to bargain with them. After four months of contentious negotiations, the workers won an 8 percent annual wage increase, more affordable health care and retirement programs, and protection from arbitrary dismissal.3 They’d wanted more economic security, and it took organizing a union to get it.

Cash’s story illustrates the central role that firm-level collective bargaining played in the U.S. social welfare “regime,” the multilayered framework of policies and public and private institutions that a nation uses to manage citizens’ social risk. If Cash had been born in another country—in France or Germany, for instance—she would not have had to vote in a union election in order to receive robust medical, retirement, and income maintenance provisions. In fact, most of her social protections would not have been determined by her employer at all. Rather, by virtue of citizenship alone, Cash would have received health care coverage and an ample pension, her wages would have been subjected to higher levels of government intervention, and her nation’s laws would have guaranteed her far more job protection. In most European nations, collective bargaining covered far fewer social welfare issues than in the United States, and it was also industry wide, rather than firm by firm. In the United States, however, most citizens in the post–World War II era received social welfare provisions through their individual employers or a family member’s employer, a system one scholar labels a “public-private welfare state.” The government offered only a thin safety net, much of which also depended on employment, including a minimum wage and Social Security provisions that benefited mainly retirees. So how did the nation ensure that its individual corporations continued to step up and fulfill their social welfare role? The government provided some carrots, like tax breaks for employer-provided health care. It also relied on a big stick: firm-level collective bargaining through labor unions.4

Though at first glance collective bargaining—negotiations over wages, benefits, and working conditions—seems to have been a private affair between a labor union and an employer, the government’s role was central. Employers did not bargain collectively out of goodwill. They did so because they were required by federal law to negotiate with employees who voted for a union. Collective bargaining, in the mid-twentieth century, enabled unions to set higher wage and benefits standards not only for union members but also for much of the industrial economy, because employers routinely followed the lead of the unionized industrial giants. Collective bargaining thus undergirded the most robust and secure tier of the nation’s social welfare regime. “Organized labor wasn’t simply a minor bit player in the ‘golden age’ of welfare capitalism in the United States,” notes sociologist Jake Rosenfeld. “It was the core equalizing institution.” In the United States, unions made sure that rising productivity translated into rising wages and thus did the work of economic redistribution that the state undertook in many European countries in the post–World War II period.5

Scholars tend to treat collective bargaining as static and monolithic, but from a worker’s perspective it was quite fluid. Workers routinely dropped out of its reach when they or a family member lost a job. Like Barbara Cash, they sometimes swapped a weak union for a strong one. Those who were not union members, meanwhile, had three ways to enter collective bargaining’s influence: they could organize a union, get a job in a unionized facility, or get a job with an employer that matched unionized wage and benefit levels. In each case, someone—somewhere, at some point in time—had to organize a union. Union organizing thus held a very specific and heretofore understudied place within the U.S. public-private welfare regime. It was the narrow door through which America’s working men and women had to enter before they could benefit from collective bargaining’s leavening effects and before they could harness the state’s full redistributive power.6

How U.S. Workers Won and Lost the Right to Organize a Union

Many private-sector workers in the United States first gained a permanent right to organize unions with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), or Wagner Act. This New Deal legislation grew out of Progressive Era experiments with government support for collective bargaining. Congress mandated that workers had the “full freedom of association” and protected their right to “designation of representatives of their own choosing, for purposes of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment.” Under the Wagner Act, if the government certified that the workers had a union, then the company was obligated to enter into collective bargaining. Not only that, but the act made it the “policy of the United States” to protect this right. The law did not cover everyone equally, however. The NLRA excluded many jobs that women and people of color tended to hold, like housekeeping and farming. The Wagner Act’s reach was thus limited from its inception.7

In its early years, the law’s enforcement agency, the NLRB, required employers to remain neutral on the issue of a union. In the first five years after the Wagner Act’s passage, the NLRB even certified workers’ unions without an election in about a quarter of cases if workers could prove through a petition, strike list, or show of membership cards that a majority supported the union. The employer was not supposed to weigh in on the election process because, according to the NLRB, an “employer cannot express his opinion in a vacuum. Behind what he says lies the full weight of his economic position, based upon this control over the livelihood of his employees.”8

Within only a few years the tide would begin to turn in employers’ direction. When the NLRB came under fire from conservative members of Congress in 1939, it began to change policy and generally required elections. In 1941 the Supreme Court decided employers could weigh in during those elections as long as they were not “coercive.” One management journal fully appreciated the significance of the chance to electioneer, calling it “a bargaining tool par excellence for industry,” and lamented that so few employers actually used that tool. Nevertheless, before and during the war, the board’s enforcement remained vigorous and employers’ resistance remained relatively in check. U.S. workers still routinely could form unions and won more than three-quarters of union elections in the 1940s, though they had less success and ran into more employer resistance in the South. Unionization efforts soared to all-time highs during World War II, when more than a million workers each year voted in union elections. Yet conservative lawmakers and employers never truly gave up, pushing legislation to weaken the NLRB in the 1940 Smith Act, for instance.9

The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act was a game changer. A Republican-dominated Congress successfully pushed the legislation through, overriding a presidential veto. Taft-Hartley constituted a major revision to the Wagner Act and dramatically weakened unions on many fronts. Among other provisions, the law made it harder for workers to form unions and enter into collective bargaining. It required an election for certification, unless the company waived that right, and codified employers’ right to campaign speech. The act also allowed states to ban the union shop, a provision requiring workers to join the union within thirty days of being hired. Labor had developed union shops as a solution to the free rider problem in which workers could benefit from a contract without supporting the union that negotiated it. The Taft-Hartley Act opened the door to increased employer influence on union elections by reinserting employers squarely into the election process, and so marked a turning point in workers’ freedom to organize. Most employers, however, did not make full use of their new prerogatives to resist union organizing until the 1970s, in the face of increasing global competition.10

In a fateful twist, at the same historical moment that workers’ access to unions became more limited, unions began to matter even more to workers; unions took on a far greater responsibility for negotiating citizens’ economic security. During World War II, many unions had begun to accept employer-provided benefits in lieu of wage increases, which were restricted by the National War Labor Board. Yet, after the war, it was not clear whether the country would increase or decrease the government’s role in providing citizens’ social welfare. Many unions demanded a more robust state presence and pushed for, though failed to pass, universal health coverage in the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill, full employment legislation that would guarantee all workers a job, and even legislation that would link wages to prices.11 Unions shifted tactics as it became clear that their legislative attempts to build a cradle-to-grave social safety net were failing against potent resistance from conservative lawmakers. United Mine Workers (UMW) president John Lewis first demanded a company-funded, union-based health and welfare provision in the 1945–46 round of bargaining, and United Auto Workers (UAW) president Walter Reuther also began to prioritize health care in 1946. Union leaders also turned to negotiating health and retirement plans as a way to incentivize membership after Taft-Hartley allowed many workers to opt out. They hoped that workers would see union-negotiated benefits as a new reason to join up.12

Companies and conservative lawmakers resisted unions’ efforts to increase their role in negotiating the nation’s social welfare. They did not want workers to have a say in employer-provided benefits, arguing that benefits were not issues that should be subject to government-mandated collective bargaining. After all, employers had traditionally only offered health care and retirement policies to a few select managers. They understood that such benefits were the new shop-level battle, and they wanted to drive unions further away from their members. Historian Jennifer Klein describes how employers successfully pushed Taft-Hartley’s sponsors to outlaw the kinds of union-run benefit plans with which the movement had been experimenting. Instead, the law only permitted union welfare trust funds if administered jointly with employers, what would become known as “Taft-Hartley” plans. Employers won this class battle at the congressional level with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. But then the judicial and executive branches legitimated labor’s ability to barg...