The Death and Life of American Labor

Toward a New Workers’ Movement

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781784783006
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784780074
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the movement as we have known it for the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he explains how this death has been a long time coming-the organizing and political principles adopted by US unions at mid-century have taken a terrible toll. In the 1950s, Aronowitz was a factory metalworker.
In the '50s and '60s, he directed organizing with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers. In 1963, he coordinated the labor participation for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ten years later, the publication of his book False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness was a landmark in the study of the US working-class and workers' movements.
Aronowitz draws on this long personal history, reflecting on his continuing involvement in labor organizing, with groups such as the Professional Staff Congress of the City University. He brings a historian's understanding of American workers' struggles in taking the long view of the labor movement. Then, in a survey of current initiatives, strikes, organizations, and allies, Aronowitz analyzes the possibilities of labor's rebirth, and sets out a program for a new, broad, radical workers' movement.

CHAPTER ONE

The Winter of Our Discontent

The year 2011 seemed to launch a new era of popular unrest. Europe was roiled by protests against the relentless march of neoliberal austerity policies, policies directed principally at the living standards of the working classes and salaried middle classes both. European unions and left-wing political parties took to the streets in vigorous protest against conservative efforts to cut wages and roll back social welfare. On the other side of the Atlantic, where the people are hopelessly fragmented, most Americans suffered quietly or internalized their anger by blaming themselves for unemployment, foreclosed homes, and wage erosion. Many today still harbor hope that their slide from comfort to poverty will be halted and then reversed by their economic masters and center-right political leaders, despite overwhelming evidence that corporate capitalist and state efforts to address the crisis are directed upward toward large-scale financial institutions and manufacturing giants. Indeed, watching U.S. workers as they experienced four decades of retrenchment of pay, social services, education and other aspects of the social wage has convinced many observers that the American people are either infinitely patient or else predisposed to fix blame on immigrants, blacks, Latinos, terrorists, and other “others,” or on themselves, or anywhere except where it belongs.

However, in 2011, in a rare moment, suddenly public issues were not rehearsed as private troubles. Passivity and displacement took a backseat to the first major outburst of opposition in more than three decades. It was a cry of resistance heard round the world and it undermined the official claim that the United States is the exception to the rule that most societies are rent and class-divided. At least for now, there is general recognition that we are no exception. Even so, national beliefs die hard. Our students still march to institutions of postsecondary schooling and graduate professional training as if there were good jobs at the end of the long slog. Our ideologies often precede and survive the conditions that produce and legitimate them.

Our current awakening began in one of the more turbulent regions of the country, the contentious state of Wisconsin, home of legendary political figures of all stamps: the progressive Senator Robert La Follette, the Socialists who governed Milwaukee for decades, until the 1950s, and the nefarious Senator Joseph McCarthy and his far-right successors. In February 2011 the state’s public employees and their unions—backed by other unions, political progressives, and students, many of whom were themselves unionized public employees, members of the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin—met Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker and his state senate allies’ bold abolition of public-sector collective bargaining with mass demonstrations that lasted for weeks and staged an occupation of the state senate chambers. At the height of the action, perhaps 100,000 workers and their allies had filled Madison’s streets and the capitol’s halls. And this protest was not the usual one-shot affair; it grew in early spring to a statewide movement, one that witnessed teacher-motivated school walkouts in many of the state’s cities and towns, backed by the unionized graduate students at the university. Midway during the demonstrations, the Madison-area AFL-CIO president openly suggested a general strike. When fourteen Democratic senators disappeared, denying the governor the needed quorum to vote on his collective-bargaining ban, it appeared that the general strike was imminent. The Madison-area labor council appointed a committee to implement the strike. Then adroit Democratic leaders stepped in to propose a recall movement, directed at four GOP senators who had won office by slim margins, and at the governor himself. This move diverted the forward march of the protest to electoral channels, and the general strike was suspended, although some direct action continued. The recall effort deposed two senators, not enough to reverse the right wing’s majority. In Ohio, voters that November repealed a similar state law by a solid two-thirds majority. But in Wisconsin, a second recall effort against Governor Walker in 2012 failed, and the forward march of the movement was halted.

Reflections on the Madison Uprising

One of the chief characteristics of United States labor and social history is that workers and other oppressed and discriminated formations will absorb prolonged assaults on their working and living conditions before they protest and resist. Mass industrial unionism rose in this country after seventy years of relentless worker exploitation—miserable working conditions, frequent wage cuts, brutal killings and firings of union militants by steel, meatpacking, automobile, and rubber barons. The 1930s labor upsurge occurred only after five years of the deepest depression in the history of capitalism. But when it began to gain traction, the rebellion spread with lightning speed. Within a decade after the first mass strikes in the coal mining and apparel industries, in 1933, union membership, as Peter Rachleff shows, had multiplied from 2 million to more than 14 million.¹

In the 1970s and 1980s, labor’s forward march slowed and then halted. The ostensible cause was the fiscal crisis in state and local communities, which politicians, the mainstream media, and many economists ascribed to the disparity between rising public-sector labor costs and restricted tax revenues. Since this was also the period when many manufacturing facilities began migrating from the Northeast and Midwest to the American and global South, many cities and towns, in the vain hope of reversing or slowing down capital flight, scrambled to offer tax advantages, subsidies, and infrastructural concessions to business interests. Meanwhile, school budgets were slashed, some hospitals were closed, and local street and highways remained unrepaired.

A new pattern of concessionary bargaining arose, with New York public unions in the vanguard. In 1976, when Wall Street refused to extend loans to the city government to meet payroll and other expenses—a virtual capital strike—the 150,000-member District Council 37 and other public sector unions agreed to let the city government lay off 50,000 mostly “provisional” (non–civil service) workers, that is, more than 20 percent of the municipal labor force, and hand over control of the city’s finances to the financial services sector. Throughout the 1980s, such concessionary bargaining remained the rule. The decade of the Reagan Revolution was kicked off when the president ordered the firing of 11,000 air traffic controllers for illegally striking for better working conditions.

We are currently experiencing perhaps the last phase of the Reagan Revolution. To be more exact, the decades of a massive transfer of the tax burden from the rich to workers and the salaried middle class, combined with the acceleration of the permanent war economy to $1 trillion a year has produced a new fiscal crisis. As in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this has been achieved politically by a bipartisan effort: no major Democratic governor and few Democratic big-city mayors have refused to do their part in forcing workers to pay for budget shortfalls. From the Northeast Coast to California, state and local governments have reduced teaching staffs, and when federal stimulus money was stopped, the burst of construction of the past two years rapidly came to an end. And with 15 million unemployed and at least 10 million underemployed, Democrats from Obama on down, with very few exceptions, have chanted the mantra of debt reduction, echoing the same Herbert Clark Hoover who brought FDR to the White House. The few remaining liberal and left voices, notably Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, have been crying in the wilderness, sidelined when not silenced.

As the early-twenty-first-century fiscal crisis gathered steam, most unions adopted two tactics to combat budget reductions and consequent layoffs. They sent teams of lobbyists—mostly activists and union staffers—to state capitols to convince legislators to increase taxes at the top of the economic pyramid or else to soften the layoff blow by economizing services. When this appeal fell flat, they offered concessions to prevent layoffs. A few held rallies involving hundreds of their members to protest the cuts. But around the country, almost nobody proposed or planned for the kind of action that happened in Madison.

The Madison protests of March and April 2011 bubbled from the base of the area’s public employee unions. Tens of thousands marched, occupied the capitol, walked out of their classrooms and other public workplaces. But the huge outpouring cannot entirely be explained by Governor Walker’s outrageous proposal or the smug arrogance of his administration. After all, Indiana’s right-wing governor, Mitch Daniels, had already abolished collective bargaining for public employees and unions there had responded with less-than-ringing replies. And although the Democrats in the statehouses in Albany, New York and Sacramento, California would not go so far as to frontally assault their own political base, they, too, have drawn their playbook from the fiscal crisis of the 1980s. They have been willing to bargain over concessions rather than imposing them unless, of course, the workers and their unions become uppity, in which case, both governors announced, they will be forced to make cuts without the unions’ cooperation.

In the heat of the 2011 demonstrations, Jim Cavanaugh, president of the Madison-area AFL-CIO council, had publicly entertained the possibility that the union’s 94 affiliates would undertake a general strike, and the unions voted to authorize one. But when the recall effort intervened, Cavanaugh not only put the strike on hold, he also dissolved the committee formed to implement the resolution. For a while pockets of labor action and popular resistance remained, but once again, the idea of continuous and expanded direct action had been shelved in favor of electoral remedies.

Yet the outpouring of demonstrators in March and April was a sign that many rank-and-file unionists, students and community activists were tired of relying on the electoral system to address their demands. Why, then, when even Democratic state senators fled the capitol in order to deprive the governor and his allies of the quorum needed to pass the draconian bill, and the state Democratic Party came out in support of the public employees, did organized labor abandon the picket lines for the ballot box? It has been seventy years since most unions have been willing to assert their independence from the political system and engage in important direct action, such as an extralegal strike. Moreover, the unions in both the private and the public sectors have not seen themselves as part of a systemic opposition to the prevailing order. That the goal of the vast mobilization in Wisconsin was simply to protect collective bargaining beyond wages is a compelling illustration of how modest organized labor’s demands have become.

During the two periods of twentieth-century labor upsurge, collective bargaining was achieved, initially, through worker disruption. This direct action was followed by legislation giving workers the opportunity to vote in state-supervised Labor Board elections for bargaining rights. But it was the employers who demanded and eventually benefited from the establishment of an electoral road to union recognition: in time, union leaders came to rely less and less on members’ power and more and more on the law, and made steep compromises in order to retain the right to bargain. The real story of the past seventy-five years of labor’s journey is the successful subordination of unions. The union contract is a legal vise; the law that is supposedly the worker’s weapon is in fact a double-edged sword. When unions agree to long-term contracts of as much as six years, they are prohibited from striking for the length of the agreement. For the modest gains unions have made in legal guarantees, they have been obliged to surrender important rights. Labor law obliges a union to enforce its contract against illegal worker insurgencies, and in some states penalties are fairly stiff if union leaders sanction such actions. The law once helped unions to grow their membership, but after years of relentless and relatively successful right-wing attacks on workers’ rights, some unionists have come to realize that the Labor Relations laws at the federal and local levels are mostly rigged against labor. In the 1980s, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland proposed the repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, because it had become so watered-down, it no longer served workers’ interests.² Yet this idea has not been introduced into the dominant vocabulary of union discourse; far from fighting to repeal the law, union leadership is reluctant to challenge or even strategically evade it. Labor remains committed to “reforming” it. But the sorry history of forty years of that effort attests to its futility, even in states where Democrats have had legislative majorities.

Wisconsin has proven to be only a partial exception to the rule. When the insurgency grew, official labor bodies supported it, including national unions whose affiliates in Madison had decided to join, and sometimes lead, the protests. But since the national leaders are tied to the Democratic party and its national administration, it is no surprise that they have not called for parallel actions in other state capitols, especially those where Democrats occupy the governor’s chair and control the legislature. Official labor can muster only shreds of opposition to the growing tendency toward legal restriction of labor’s autonomy, aggravated by severe budget cuts when Republicans are in power. Wisconsin was an exception; in Ohio and Indiana the scope of the protest was much smaller. Even in Wisconsin, despite the concurrent example of the struggle in Egypt, labor’s leadership could not imagine fighting until they won, fighting with tactics that could be interpreted as “permanent” actions until the legislation attacking the workers was rescinded.

Of course, Governor Walker’s victory against collective bargaining should be seen from two viewpoints. On the one hand, when labor is loyal to the law under such circumstances and continues to believe that political action is its best course, unless it can decisively win a recall movement, it will end by falling back into line, as the unions did in Indiana. On the other hand, there is a chance that elements of the huge protest that began in Madison will engender new currents within the labor movement, revive the demand for direct action, inspire confrontation with the law through acts of civil disobedience—a time-honored strategy of the labor and civil rights movements. As the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre once quipped, “events belie forecasts,” and it is hard to predict such an eventuality. Some seeds have been planted, and it remains to be seen whether they will flower.³

Madison indicated the possible beginnings of a different labor movement. If such a movement emerges, it is certain to manifest itself first at the local level. Wisconsin was a likely cradle, because among its distinctive features is a student movement that has lasted for half a century, and many of its activists over those years have chosen to enter the labor movement rather than the professions. In the late 1960s, the Madison campus of the state university witnessed the formation of the first graduate student teaching assistants’ union in the country, the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA). Former state AFL-CIO president David Newby, who was a prominent organizer of the TAA, once said that the right would have to be bold to move decisively against unions in Wisconsin; if they could defeat labor there, they could likely do it anywhere. But as events unfolded, it was clear that the risk for antiunion forces was as great as the opportunity. There is a tradition of protest in Madison that may prove hard to eradicate.⁴

Wisconsin is also famous for its third-party movements. Even if the recall effort had been completely successful, it might not have put labor in a much better position than before—neither of the mainstream parties has shown much interest in alleviating the plight of public-sector workers. Will there now be a breakaway movement toward the formation of new progressive and labor parties at the state and local levels?

But it would be shortsighted to count on a new labor movement emerging within the confines of the existing unions. Throughout the country, new organizations are struggling to survive. Some of these are workers’ centers; others are unions formed, especially by the working poor, without early prospects for achieving collective bargaining. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, with about 15,000 members, relies almost exclusively on brief strikes, highway blockages, and city hall demonstrations to win its demands. The members negotiate informally with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. The workers’ centers mobilize strikes, but not for the purpose of gaining union recognition, which, especially in manufacturing sectors, could result in capital flight. What they usually want is unpaid back wages, better safety conditions, and reinstatement of workers who have been fired for union activity.

The AFL-CIO has about the same proportion of private-sector members as unions did in 1931, and thanks to layoffs, the public-employee unions are declining rapidly, although they still retain enormous numbers. But it is worth remembering that before 1960 the public workers’ unions were considered marginal by both the government and the mainstream unions. In the 1930s a variety of independent unions were formed without the blessing of the AFL, some under radical auspices. These unions were mostly weak, but they did engage in various forms of labor activity and several became the core organizations for future CIO affiliates. If current trends continue, it is conceivable that new outsider movements will arise in a similar fashion, especially among the working poor and professionals not covered by the teacher’s unions. I believe that these movements could be the condition for the general revival of the labor movement, which for so many years has shown only a remarkable capacity for retreat.

A Season of Insurgency

The brief moment of direct action in the United States was not all that happened in 2011, of course. Tunisia’s launch of the now legendary Arab Spring was quickly followed by continuous demonstrations and disruptions in Egypt. President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, autocrat of Tunisia for twenty-four years, and Egypt’s thirty-year dictator, President Hosni Mubarak, were both forced to resign.

Egypt’s revolution cut across class lines, though each class had its own agenda. The entrepreneurial and salaried (or professional) middle class wanted to establish a liberal-democratic regime; some of them favored dismantling of the country’s nationalized enterprises and returning them to private hands. The military initially promised not to use the insurgency to install itself in power, then reneged and began a crackdown on the street protests. The long-suffering working ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Union Defeat at Volkswagen
• Introduction: An Institution Without a Vision
• 1. The Winter of Our Discontent
• 2. The Mass Psychology of Liberalism
• 3. The Rise and Fall of the Modern Labor Movement
• 4. The Struggle for Union Reform: Rank-and-File Unionism
• 5. The Underlying Failure of Organized Labor
• 6. Toward a New Labor Movement, Part One
• 7. Toward a New Labor Movement, Part Two
• Notes