An Injury to All

The Decline of American Unionism

Kim Moody

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780860919292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784787820
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO's conservative ideology of "business unionism" effectively disarmed unions in the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its post-war gains.

With extraordinary attention to the viewpoints of rank-and-file workers, Moody chronicles the major, but largely unreported, efforts of labor's grassroots to find its way out of the crisis. In case studies of auto, steel, meatpacking and trucking, he traces the rise of "anti-concession" movements and in other case studies describes the formidable obstacles to the "organization of the unorganized" in the service sector. A detailed analysis of the Rainbow Coalition's potential to unite labor with other progressive groups follows, together with a pathbreaking consideration of the possibilities of a new "labor internationalism."

1

An Injury to All

On 17 January 1987 the five-and-a-half-month strike of 22,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America (USW) against USX ended when local union presidents approved a new contract by a vote of 38 to 4. The strike was the longest ever waged against a major steelmaker – but it was a lost strike. The new contract contained a $1.14-an-hour cut in earnings. In total hourly labor costs, USX saved $2.45 in the first year of the contract alone. The workers lost four paid holidays, a week of vacation in the first year of the contract, Sunday premium paid, and part of their shift differentials. The union also agreed to work-rule changes that eliminated 1,346 jobs. Larry Regan, president of USW Local 1014 at USX’s Gary Works and one of the four local presidents to vote against the contract, expressed the bitterness of many steelworkers: ‘Any time we’re willing to give up jobs, the union is turning its back on the motto “An injury to one is an injury to all.” We’re going to give away this many jobs and [call the contract] an achievement? It’s disgusting.’¹

The USX agreement was the fifth concessionary contract negotiated by the USW during the bargaining round that began in 1986. The other major steel corporations, Bethlehem, National, LTV, and Inland, had also won wage cuts – without facing strikes. Steelworkers President Lynn Williams had said that USX would not get such treatment because of the corporation’s financial health. The union offered a wage freeze. USX said it wanted what other steel firms had received and perhaps more. When it became clear that USX had no intention of backing down, the union offered to continue work under an extension of the old contract. The corporation said no. On 1 August 1986 the strike began with the union arguing that USX had, in effect, locked the workers out.

It was difficult not to note the contrast between the 1986–87 steel strike and the famous 116-day strike of 1959, the last great national steel walkout. In 1959 the major steel employers had demanded work-rule changes to increase productivity. The leadership of the Steelworkers judged the companies’ demand to be an attack on the power of the union and turned it down. The strike that followed shut down 87% of steel production in the United States – virtually the entire unionized sector of the industry – and led to layoffs in many other industries. It took the intervention of the federal government in the form of a Taft-Hartley injunction to end the strike. And when the strikers returned to the steel mills, they did so with their work rules in place, with a wage increase, and with their pension and health insurance improvements and cost of living allowances (COLAs) and supplemental unemployment benefits intact.²

Before 1986, the USW had bargained simultaneously with the major producers. All of those employers were covered by the Basic Steel Agreement, a master contract that imposed standard wages, benefits, and conditions throughout the industry. This agreement, in turn, set a pattern for steel-fabricating, aluminum, copper, and can companies. By the mid-1980s this arrangement had come undone. Now wages, benefits and conditions differed not only between these USW-organized industries, but increasingly within them. In 1986, under pressure from the employers, the USW had dissolved the entire national pattern in the steel industry by agreeing to negotiate separately and on different terms with each company.

What happened in steel recapitulated union defeats in other sectors. The list of protracted but broken strikes ran from PATCO through Greyhound, Phelps Dodge and Hormel to Wheeling Pittsburgh and scores of lesser known labor struggles. Rollbacks in wages, benefits and conditions had characterized collective bargaining since the beginning of the 1980s. The average wage increase during the first year of contracts covering 1,000 or more workers fell steadily from 9.8% in 1981 to 1.2% in 1986. In manufacturing the trend was even more pronounced: first-year wage adjustments went from 7.2% in 1981 to -1.2% in 1986.³ By the mid-1980s concessionary bargaining had spread to virtually every organized industry – from auto, steel, and rubber production workers to service employees in Las Vegas hotels, state hospitals, and city services.⁴ There were occasional victories or partial successes by hotel workers in Boston, cannery workers in Watsonville, California and clerical workers at Yale University. But across the country the trend was unmistakably downward.

Seven years of concessions had eliminated master contracts and pattern bargaining in every major unionized industry. Pattern bargaining had been an institutional bulwark of collective bargaining; for decades, it was characterized by the regularity of its operation, the orderly renegotiation of industry-wide contracts every three years or so, and the steady increases in worker earnings and benefits. The largest pattern agreements in auto, steel, rubber, coal, meatpacking, electrical equipment, telecommunications, trucking, and rail were emulated by smaller regional patterns, such as Western lumber and longshore on the East and Gulf coasts. By 1987, most of these had also broken up.

Impact Visuals / Mahmood Nadia

A locked-out steelworker pickets USX’s Gary, Indiana plant, 1986.

The fragmentation of collective bargaining and the wage deceleration of the 1980s were both symptoms and contributing causes to a more fundamental tendency in American society – the long-term decline of organized labor. The figures are unambiguous. The proportion of union members in the total nonfarm workforce fell from 32.5% in 1953 to 17.5% in 1986. In manufacturing, the density of unionization collapsed from 42.4% in 1953 to 24.8% in 1985. For transportation the comparable figures were 79.9% to 37.0%; for construction, 83.8% to 22.3%; for all kinds of mining, 64.7% to 14.6%.⁵

Declining union density, sometimes combined with shrinking employment in traditionally unionized industries, has in recent years been accompanied by an absolute decline in the number of union members, from a peak of 22.2 million in 1975 to an estimated 17 million in 1986.⁶ As Table 1 shows, this loss of over 5 million members expressed a significant or even drastic loss of membership for most of the major industrial unions in the US.

Table 1
Paid Union Membership, 1967, 1979, 1985

Union	1967	1979	1985	Loss/Gain, 1979–85
				Numbers	Change
UAW	1,325,000	1,499,000	1,010,000	-489,000	-32.6%
USW	952,000	964,000	572,000	-392,000	-40.6%
URW	166,500	158,000	106,000	-52,000	-32.9%
IAM	740,000	664,000	520,000	-144,000	-21.7%
IUE	304,000	243,000	198,000	-45,000	-18.5%
OCAW	142,000	146,000	108,000	-38,000	-26.0%
CWA	315,000	485,000	524,000	+39,000	+8.0%
UFCW^1	892,000	1,076,000	989,000	-87,000	-8.1%
ACTWU^2	416,000	301,000	228,000	-73,000	-24.3%

1. Combined membership of the Packinghouse Workers, Meatcutters, and Retail Clerks, which later merged to form the United Food and Commercial Workers.

2. Combined membership of the Clothing Workers and Textile Workers, which later merged to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

Source: Bureau of National Affairs, Directory of U.S. Labor Organizations, 1984–85 edn., pp. 51–53 and 1986–87 edn., pp. 61–64.

Only a handful of unions such as the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) could claim any growth – and then due to a strategy of organizing in numerous unrelated industries and jurisdictions. In most industries, the loss of union members reflected not only the loss of jobs due to deindustrialization but a trend toward deunionization as well.

This decline in unionization has had an inevitable correlate in a loss of union power in industry and society as a whole. The consequences of this loss of power are more far-reaching than the figures on wage deceleration suggest. Along with a number of important and usually well-noted changes in the US economy and workforce, the decay of union power has contributed to the first major, long-term decline in the standard of living of the American working class as a whole to occur in the twentieth century.

The Declining Union Advantage

When it comes to money, unions have always made a difference. In 1979, for example, unionized workers on the average made 30% more than their nonunion counterparts. This wage differential has varied over the years according to economic conditions. During World War Two, with virtually no unemployment and union wage increases controlled by the government, it was a low 6%. In the 1950s, the differential ranged from 12% to 16% and rose in the 1960s to 19% to 25%. Its climb to 30% by the end of the 1970s was a function of the unions’ ability to chase inflation through both larger wage increases and cost-of-living allowances. In fact, until recently, the union wage advantage tended to be greater in hard times than in good. The largest gap between union and nonunion wages (46%) occurred in the early 1930s when relatively few workers were organized. Those who were organized, however, were better able to resist Depression-era wage cuts and short time.⁷

As might be expected, the union wage advantage is not the same for all social groups. In 1979, unionized women in the private sector of the economy made 15% more than women in nonunion jobs. The differential for men was 19%. The union wage advantage for Blacks was larger than that for whites, 25% compared to 17%.⁸ The traditional gap between white and Black wages was much narrower in highly organized industries. In 1969 the average Black male made only 58% of the income of the average white male. In auto, Blacks made 84% of what whites made. In steel, the proportion was 83%; in primary nonferrous metals, it was 82%; and in rubber, 78%.⁹ The average union advantage for all workers in benefits was even higher, varying from 30% to 68% depending on the wage level.¹⁰ While these are only averages, it is clear that workers have greatly benefited from unionization.

This continued to be true into the 1980s, but the differential between union and nonunion earnings began to shrink under the pressure of concessionary bargaining. In the private sector, for which these figures are available, the 30% differential of 1979 fell to 28% in 1983, 25% in 1985, and rose slightly to 26% in 1986. In terms of overall compensation, the gap between union and nonunion workers may have closed even more. The employment cost index (which measures benefits as well as wages) for nonunion workers rose nearly twice as fast as the index for union workers from December 1984 to December 1986 – 8.4% compared to 4.8%.¹¹ Union members are certain to stay ahead of those without unions for a long time, but the general deceleration of union wage gains has reduced the union wage advantage. In previous periods of economic dislocation, the union advantage had tended to widen, but in the 1980s the unions were not able to muster the intensified resistance that would sustain their advantage.

The slowdown in union wage and benefit gains has had another impact. Higher union rates tend to bid up all wages up over time as union rates lead a general rise in earnings for all workers. This ‘wage drift’ is most obvious during booms, when the labor market is tightest, and its effect is always stronger on large employers than small ones. But as unions gain only small average wage and benefit increases or even take cuts, as they did for manufacturing wages in 1986, the growth of all wages and benefits will slow down. Indeed, even though nonunion wages and benefits (based on the employment cost index) outstripped union gains in 1985 and 1986, the rate at which they grew slowed from 23% during 1980–83 to 14% during 1983–86. The comparable rates in the growth of employment costs for all workers, union and nonunion, in the private sector were 24% for 1980–83 and 10% for 1983–86.¹²

When wage deceleration combined with even low rates of inflation, the result was a fall in real incomes. A study by the AFL-CIO’s Industrial Union Department (IUD) shows that this has been the case since the early 1970s. From 1973 through 1979, real average weekly earnings declined 7.4% and from 1979 through 1985 another 7.6%, for a total drop of 14.4%. Real average hourly wages fell 4.3% in 1973–79 and 6.0% in 1979–85, a total decline of 10.1%.¹³ There is a difference in the two periods, however. During 1973–79 inflation was rising fast, hitting double-digit levels, while in 1979–85 inflation was moderating, reaching a low of 1.9% in 1986. The decline in real income in the first period was primarily caused by inflation, that in the second period by wage deceleration. In 1987, wage deceleration continued, but inflation grew again: from January to April 1987, real weekly earnings fell 2.3%.¹⁴

Another factor in the decline of real wages has been the shift in the overall economy from previously unionized goods-producing industries to largely nonunion, low-wage service industries. Although this trend (with dramatic implications for the future of working-class life in the United States) has become more pronounced since the late 1970s, it has been unfolding for several decades. Moreover, because of the growing proportion of part-time jobs that is part of the shift to service industries, its impact is even greater on average weekly income than on hourly income. Thus, while real hourly earnings fell 6% during 1979–85, weekly earnings dropped 7.6%. The IUD study indicates that almost half of the decline in weekly income resulted from this sectoral shift. But only a third (two of the six percentage points) of the fall in hourly rates was attributable to the shift to services. Since inflation was relatively low during 1979–85, a good deal of the remaining two-thirds of the decline in real hourly income was a result of concessions and general wage deceleration – that is to say, a result of the behavior of unions during this period.

In the future, the proliferation of low-wage jobs will be even greater if current trends toward deindustrialization and deunionization continue. A study by the Children’s Defense Fund revealed that the average real annual income of male workers between the ages of twenty and twenty-four years dropped from $11,572 in 1973 to $8,072 in 1984. The fund attributed this drop to the ‘continuing shift in jobs in the US economy from goods-producing to service sectors and the reduced ability of young men to secure full-time, year-round employment.’¹⁵

Another facet of this downward trend is the fate of workers dislocated from better paying industrial jobs. The IUD study estimates that about 10% of the 6.1 million workers displaced from full-time jobs between 1979 and 1983 who were fortunate enough to find new employment by January 1984 ended up in jobs paying substantially less. For blue-collar workers, the average loss of income was 16%, but for 35% of them the loss was 25% or more. The figures for income loss by displaced female white-collar workers are identical, but these workers started at a lower pay rate. And Black blue-collar workers lost 50% more than their white counterparts.¹⁶ Another study, prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, found that less than one-fifth of the new jobs created in 1973–79 were low-wage (jobs paying below $7,012 a year in 1984 dollars), but that nearly three-fifths of new jobs in 1979–84 were low-wage. A...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. An Injury to All
• 2. The Postwar System of Labor-Capital Relations
• 3. The Making of Modern Business Unionism
• 4. Blue-Collar Blues Blue-Collar Rebellion
• 5. Economic Power Shift
• 6. Business Organizes as a Class
• 7. The Collapse of Labor’s Political Strategy
• 8. Concessions: From a Bailout to a Tidal Wave
• 9. The Crisis of Industrial Unionism
• 10. Other Voices
• 11. The Black Working Class Since the 1960s
• 12. Other Social Movements in the US Working Class
• 13. If Not Here, Where? If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who?
• 14. The Remaking of the American Working Class
• Notes
• Index