State of the Union: A Century of American Labor

Nelson Lichtenstein's work titled, State of The Union: A Century of American Labor, provides an historical overview of the laws, people, and times in the American labour movement. In producing his research, Lichtenstein contextualizes (with a few glaring omissions) his discussion of the rise and decline of labor unions in the psyche of the American worker and companies alike. By starting his discussion with the period from the Great Depression through World War I, Lichtenstein provides a frame within which to place events, and accompanying mindsets, that developed from both a legal/legislative and social-change perspective. Additionally, in moving through the waxing and waning moments between the end of WWII and the Civil Rights Movement to the current living wage initiative, he presents a respectable work as to the elements that facilitated the decline in significance of unions in post-deindustrialization America; an institution which he strongly and convincingly argues is in need of a rebirth. I found chapter five particularly engaging due to his treatment of "rights consciousness" and two legal events that were supported by African Americans and the AFL-CIO: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title VII. On rights consciousness, he asserts, "this chapter seeks to evaluate how and why a rights-conscious strategy became the most efficacious way to approach the labor question during the 1960's and 1970's. It tries to measure the success and failure of this approach, and suggests why the labor movement reaped so few dividends from what would otherwise have been a most nurturing social-cultural environment" (180). While such movements in other countries "strengthened social-democratic movements and increased trade-union numbers and power . . . in the United States, this was an area of relative union stagnation" (181). While this is a well-supported assertion and was a result, in part, of the period of deindustrialization (late 1970's and early 1980's) of America's cities/manufacturing centers, the legal maneuvering is nonetheless worth noting. Upon reading of the legal positioning, I began wondering what happened to the levels of consciousness of the 1960's that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title VII? An energized movement that sought to address not only the rights of African Americans and their seemingly intractable marginalization due to their skin color and social stigmatization, but also the rights of poor Anglos/Whites as well, seems to not have served current drives for economic equality. Additionally, I began considering the implications for workers, both African American and American Anglo if the failed Poor People's Campaign scheduled for 19 April 1968 had actually taken place with Dr. King at the helm. I say failed, due to the assassination of Martin Luther King 4 April 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, and the lack of vigor displayed when the event took place. The consciousness displayed during the sixties as detailed by Lic

The backdrop for "State of the Union" is the "labor question" that the author finds Progressive Era reformers confronting. They regarded the disproportionate power that corporate capitalism wielded relative to citizens and workers as unjustifiable in a democratic society. Changes in workplaces were most troublesome. Skilled workers were bypassed by work-simplifying machinery, an autocratic foreman system enforced Taylorism, or speed-up, and wages hovered at subsistence levels. But American workers, drawing upon a republican legacy, seized upon the WWI rallying cry of making the world safe for democracy to insist that industrial democracy be established within workplaces. Even President Woodrow Wilson recognized "the right of those who work, in whatever rank, to participate in some organic way in every decision which directly affects their welfare." Interestingly, the author does not take note of the fact that Wilson's call for workers' participation did not mention unions. But it is the relationship of unions to this "labor question" and to the notion of industrial democracy that most concerns Lichtenstein. The lack of a legal and institutional basis for industrial democracy virtually ensured that industrial democracy would fizzle in the post-WWI era. But the major slip-up of American capitalism in the 20th century, that is, the Great Depression, opened the door for a tremendous, pent-up surge of American worker activism. In the Wagner Act, the most significant piece of New Deal legislation, workers were given the right and even encouraged to self-organize or select a representative to bargain with employers. In unionized workplaces, vibrant shop-floor steward systems ensured that workers' concerns received an expeditious hearing. Many labor activists from the Progressive Era were in the forefront of this politicized offensive to push for legalized industrial democracy. In addition, some of the Progressive social-democratic platform such as unemployment insurance, social security, and fair labor standards were part of the New Deal package.The backlash against this resurgence of worker empowerment began immediately. Conservative justices, hostile corporate managements, racist Southern oligarchs, and anti-statist AFL unions - all opposed state intervention in the private domain of workplaces. But with the onset of WWII, the labor movement was drawn even more tightly into the state web as a participant in peak-level bargaining with the War Labor Board and industry leaders for the purpose of stabilizing industrial relations. For example, to curtail the spontaneous and disruptive strikes that were a part of the self-help tradition on the shop floor, multi-level grievance arbitration systems became standard sections in most bargaining agreements. But that tripartite bargaining did not extend beyond WWII. Some of the agreed to provisions proved to be more debilitating than helpful to trade unions and workers in later years. With the Taft-Hartley Act in

Nelson Lichtenstein's Sate of the Union is a superb study of the current crisis of American labor. If it is not as finely researched or as densely rewarding as his biography of Walter Reuther or Steve Fraser's biography of Sidney Hillman, it is an excellent introduction to the problem and to possible solutions. Lichtenstein demonstrates the vital necessity of trade unions. The average wage of American young families stands at only two-thirds of the their counterparts in 1973, "even though their total working hours were longer and the educational level of the head of th ehousehold higher than a generation before. In the first years of the new century median wages and family incomes were still below their 1989 level." In the decline of civic committment and political life, the untramelled sway of corporate hegemony, the failure to confront health insurance, public transportation, and childcare in the United States and basic civil liberties in much of our brave new globalized world, the decline of American trade unionism truly is an injury to all. Lichtenstein, notwithstanding his title, starts with the thirties. He tells the story of how mass industrial unionism boomed during that decade. The story he tells is not particularly new, concentrating on the famous struggles, as well as the fatal limitations of the CIO on race and gender. But he also goes on to point out that the partial welfare state, far from creating the dreaded dependence of conservative rhetoric, actually gave millions of workers the opportunity to exert civil rights and real power that they did not under the mythology of a producer's republic. Although he is scathing abou the flaws of the AFL's short sighted and often openly racist stratgey he duly notes that their craft unionism did have some advantages in some places.The next two-thirds of the book are much more interesting. Lichtenstein denies that there was ever a "Labor-Management Accord," the belief that labour problems were essentially solved held in the sixties by complacent liberals and confused leftists. Lichtenstein points out the exceptional qualities of American management that differed them from their European counterparts and made them less amenable to compromise. He points out the continent wide nature of their businesses, the absence of cartelization and self-regulation, the increased power of big businesses, who were not tained with collaborationism, and the increasing stress placed on smaller companies which made them blame the federal state. He points out the dead weight southern segregation had on trade unionism and other liberal hopes, He notes how Taft-Hartley legalized right to work laws, as well as banning supervisory unioism making the unionization of many service industries like insurance or engineering "virtually impossible."Lichtenstein goes on to discuss the increasing complacency of the AFL-CIO, under its spectacularly unimaginative leader George Meaney, as well as the calcification

Nelson Lichtenstein's new book, "The State of the Union," gives a history of labor unions in the United States by way of arguing for the need to restrengthen them, and I think the case is very persuasive.Lichtenstein weaves together a number of themes to explain the decline in union membership and power. One is increased reliance on individual rights and legal protections. Federal laws ban all sorts of discrimination, endangerment, and abuse, but the federal government does not do an effective job of protecting workers from retaliation for asserting their rights and almost nothing to maintain other important elements of the workplace, such as wage levels or the prevention of mass layoffs.We have learned to think of ourselves as individuals protected by laws, rather than brotherhoods and sisterhoods protected by our strength in numbers. We have a long list of rights, including - most notoriously - the "right to work." So called Right to Work laws clearly hurt unions but are not too far afield from modes of thought that labor supporters have engaged in themselves.Unions are now seen as ways to protect individual jobs and proper grievance procedures following individual wrongs, not as cross-company efforts to lift the wages and benefits of entire industries. If the purpose of a union is simply to protect me from specific injustices, surely I ought also to respect my coworker's right to not be coerced to join, right?But if the purpose of a union is to change society and improve the lot of all workers, then clearly the "right" of my coworker to be a freeloader and drag us all down is not to be respected.The case Lichtenstein makes is that in the process of making fantastic gains in the Civil Rights, Feminist, and other movements, leftists unwittingly sacrificed a conception of the labor union that is badly needed today. No doubt, this analysis will annoy some people, but it ought to be taken as encouraging. The right didn't defeat us; we beat ourselves. Therefore, a reconstituted labor left can successfully fight back.