chapter 14

Unfinished Business

One of the most serious limitations of the U.S. labor movement was the failure to make good on the oft-repeated slogan: “Organize the unorganized.” Operation Dixie, the effort launched in 1946 to organize the predominantly non-union Southern states, collapsed by 1948—and despite occasional flashes of rhetoric, it was never revived. Some argued that this would have required the type of crusading, class-struggle unionism, characteristic of the IWW or the CIO of the 1930s, that mainstream unions had turned away from. (It would also have involved a collision-course between labor and the Democratic Party—whose Southern standard-bearers typically lined up with wealthy employers.) The AFL-CIO of the 1950s and 1960s had the material resources but not the vision and deep commitment necessary to bring about the fundamental change in social and power relations a successful unionization drive would have represented. The region’s conservative, antiunion, racist state governments remained intact as a powerful bulwark of traditional social and economic relationships. In fact, the number of Southern organized workers fell, and the South remained a non-union haven for runaway shops from the unionized North. It proved much easier throughout the country to increase the membership of one’s union not through the kinds of efforts mounted in the 1930s, but by “raiding” the memberships of other unions—especially the “left-wing” unions expelled in 1949–1950, but also rival organizations within the AFL-CIO. Sometimes successful raids from outside of the AFL-CIO were also carried out against the federation’s affiliates by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—led by tough, dynamic, soon-to-be-murdered Jimmy Hoffa—which had earlier been expelled from the merged labor federation on racketeering charges. Some workers preferred the Teamsters despite charges of corruption because it seemed to represent a tougher, more aggressive union than those in the AFL-CIO mainstream.

 

 

An important breakthrough in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, was the spread of unionism among white-collar and service workers—such as government employees, teachers, and healthcare workers. This reflected changes in the U.S. occupational structure. Even within industry’s increasingly automated workplaces, there were significant shifts from production to maintenance work—roughly by about 10 percent in the 15.5 million manufacturing workers. The high-growth sectors of the economy were in the white-collar and service sectors, and the high-growth labor organizations were now in these sectors: the Service Employees International Union; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Federation of Government Employees; several organizations of postal workers; the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association; the Hospital Workers and a proliferation of nurses associations; etc.

There was more than simply the changing occupation structure at work, however. The 1960s and early 1970s also saw an upsurge of radicalization among young people challenging racism, poverty, war, conformist and authoritarian trends, sexual discrimination, and other social ills. The cultural and political ferment generated by the youthful activists found its way into workplaces and unions—especially as many of the activists themselves entered the job market.

Racism, Poverty, War

One of the most serious problems facing the United States, the U.S. working class, and the labor movement was the persistence of racism, which remained institutionalized in factories and within urban and regional labor markets. The systematic racial segregation imposed by law in the South, and the denial of voting rights, guaranteed that inferior living conditions and diminished opportunities would be available to African Americans there. But even in the North, blacks were subjected to segregated (and inferior) housing and schools, and fewer employment opportunities. This created serious problems for African American communities but also created a lower-wage sector that tended to pull down wages for all workers. Yet in some cases, black workers were locked out of union jobs through the joint agreement of management and the unions themselves. Even in some of the CIO unions, which had made a point of organizing blacks and whites together, many black unionists often had to fight their union and their company to win their seniority rights. By the 1970s, African American workers in some unions felt they had finally overcome the worst abuses, but as former steelworker Clarence Coe, a retired black unionist from Memphis, observed, “Before we left, blacks and whites were virtually equal; if you qualified for something, you could just about get it. But my God, man, when you’d given up thirty years of your life fighting for something that should’ve been yours to begin with, it’s a little bit disheartening.”

One of the foremost spokesmen for racial equality—criticizing the persistence of discriminatory policies within the labor movement—was A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Another voice was provided by the Negro American Labor Council (a prestigious predecessor of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists), which had members in a variety of unions. These were vital forces in the emergence of the early civil rights movement. A close associate of Randolph, E. D. Nixon of the Sleeping Car Porters in Montgomery, Alabama, helped initiate the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, to which he recruited Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. While some white trade unionists were lukewarm or even hostile to the growing civil rights movement, others—mindful of the old union adage “an injury to one is an injury to all”—were supportive or even actively involved. Among unions around the country, in addition to the Sleeping Car Porters, that stood out in this regard were the UAW; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers; the United Packinghouse Workers; Hospital Workers Local 1199; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the UE; and the ILWU. The impressive civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s inspired and benefited many working people. Yet it quickly became clear that these victories were not enough to solve the country’s problems.

A growing number of labor activists recognized that racism could not be overcome unless bold new programs were developed to eliminate the underlying economics of inequality. It was recognized that developments in the U.S. economy generated technological and structural unemployment that was creating and maintaining a deep-rooted poverty which hurt a significant number of whites, but also an even higher proportion of African Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color. While the Democratic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson moved to wage a “War on Poverty,” however, the effort was hampered by bureaucratic limitations and compromises with various conservative political forces in both political parties.

In 1966, A. Philip Randolph and others in the labor movement advanced—with the support of a broad array of liberal and progressive forces—an ambitious ten-year plan called The “Freedom Budget” For All Americans that would involve “abolition of poverty; guaranteed full employment; full production and high economic growth; adequate minimum wages; farm income equity; guaranteed incomes for all unable to work; a decent home for every American family; modem health services for all; full educational opportunity for all; updated social security and welfare programs; equitable tax and money policies.” Many top AFL-CIO leaders signed on to the “Freedom Budget.” Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King also embraced this program, moving in the direction of supporting an interracial “poor people’s movement” and progressive trade-union struggles. “The emergence of social initiatives by a revitalized labor movement would be taking place as Negroes are placing economic issues on the highest agenda,” King commented. “The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.”

Such a far-reaching social program was beyond the scope of either the Republican or Democratic parties, which were not inclined to challenge the more conservative and narrowly profit-minded priorities established by the big corporations that controlled the country’s economic resources. Since labor did not have a political party of its own, this closed the door on such proposals as the “Freedom Budget.” Randolph acidly noted that the persistence of poverty and racism were rooted in “fundamentally economic problems which are caused by the nature of the system in which we live. This system is a market economy in which investment and production are determined more by the anticipation of profits than by the desire to achieve social justice.”

The Vietnam War provided a more traditional way to stimulate the economy and to employ young men seeking to escape the cycle of poverty. At the same time, it drew government dollars away from more serious programs designed to overcome the sources of poverty. The cost of the war strained the economy and added to the tax burden of working-class taxpayers. Hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese were killed and maimed in the effort to prop up an unpopular right-wing dictatorship that embraced U.S. foreign policy goals and business interests. While the AFL-CIO supported the war until its end, by the early 1970s, several unions and many union members had grown disillusioned with the war and what seemed to many an unpersuasive policy of knee-jerk anti-Communism. The massive antiwar protests (among whose organizers was the old labor educator and radical pacifist Rev. A. J. Muste) were the first since World War I to attract the support of sizable numbers of trade unionists, as increasing numbers of Americans questioned the value of this brutal war for the majority of the U.S. and Vietnamese people.

Economic Slippage, Labor Unease

By the late 1960s, the U.S. economy was feeling the initial effects of a period of profound economic crisis (which would—by the early 1970s—finally translate into a reversal of the capacity “business unionism” to generate rising working-class incomes and living standards). The United States began to run up small deficits with its trading partners. This had less to do with “high” labor costs than with the high costs of the cold war. Military spending had provided full employment during World War II and the Korean War, but in the long run, money spent on the military was not invested in socially useful ways, and in particular there was a failure to develop the country’s economic infrastructure and to invest in modernizing technology. U.S. industrial development began to lag behind advances in Japan, West Germany, and other countries where military spending was a fraction of that in the United States. As profitability slipped, companies began to search for new ways to pad their bottom lines. In the 1940s and 1950s, American companies exported manufactured goods to less industrialized countries, providing jobs to U.S. workers. But by the 1960s, U.S. companies had eliminated many jobs through automation and also began to shift manufacturing to cheap labor areas overseas, where unions and radical workers groups had been severely weakened. Thus the AFL-CIO’s orientation of supporting U.S. foreign policy had helped to provide low-wage sites for runaway shops from the United States.

The failure of the War on Poverty, the persistence of economic and racial inequality, the erosion of workers’ economic security and the mounting tax burden on the middle-income working class, the tensions created by civil rights and antiwar protests, and the failure of the AFL-CIO leadership to offer decisive leadership around a progressive social and political program that would inspire and benefit the country’s working-class majority—all of this led to working-class fragmentation and disorientation. A rift opened up between a frustrated Walter Reuther of the UAW and the majority AFL-CIO leadership around George Meany, with Reuther insisting in early 1967 that “the American labor movement, if it is to fulfill its destiny and become the vanguard of social progress, must restore its sense of purpose and direction, instill vitality, imagination and initiative in its programs and their accomplishment and be imbued with the dynamic spirit of social responsibility.” In the following year, the UAW withdrew from the AFL-CIO to establish, with rhetorical flourishes worthy of a better product, what turned out to be a still-born Alliance for Labor Action with the previously expelled Teamsters and the relatively small International Oil and Chemical Workers union. (It wasn’t until the 1990s that the UAW, Oil and Chemical, United Mine Workers, and a democratized and reformed International Brotherhood of Teamsters found their way back into the AFL-CIO.)

Within the UAW ranks, however, the development of groups such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) arose in 1968 to challenge the union leadership’s progressive image. With articulate leaders who blended radicalized black nationalism (influenced by Malcolm X) with Marxism and ideas of Chinese Communist Mao Tse-tung, the dissidents targeted what they saw as the UAW leadership’s backwardness both on the need to combat racism and the need to develop a class-struggle union policy. Winning significant influence among young black autoworkers, nonetheless the challengers failed to build a durable base in the union. Other less dramatic dissident currents in various unions—some far less radical, others rooting their radicalism more effectively in the actual experience of other workers—also flourished throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but with the partial exception of the Miners for Democracy movement that finally dislodged a corrupt (post–John L. Lewis) machine in the United Mine Workers of America, they enjoyed minimal gains. Not long afterward, however, in the gangster-ridden International Brotherhood of Teamsters there arose a caucus dedicated to militancy, a broad social vision, and union democracy—Teamsters for a Democratic Union—which began a fundamental reform process that would help transform one of the nation’s largest labor organizations over the next two decades.

The absence of an effective and dynamic strategic orientation within the labor movement did not stop workers from seeking solutions outside of the unions for the problems they faced. But they weren’t all looking in the same places. Some white workers shifted toward political conservatives claiming to offer solutions that seemed beyond the grasp of Democratic Party liberals—leading to a partial blue-collar migration toward the Republican Party. At the same time, many African Americans, Hispanics, women, and young people were inclined to organize around issues having to do with what they saw as their own special oppression. Some youthful activists contributed to a partial revitalization of older left-wing groups, while many more—animated by an energetic idealism though sometimes also exasperating political immaturity—created a vibrant cluster of “new left” groups and an even more widespread radical “counterculture.” And yet many of these activists were, in fact, an integral part of the working class, and some were soon to be central to the rapid growth in union membership in the healthcare, government, and education sectors of the economy.

Much of this development was foreseen by some of the more perceptive labor activists. Cleveland Robinson—the Secretary-Treasurer of the left-oriented District 65 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (and A. Philip Randolph’s successor as head of the Negro American Labor Council)—pointed out in 1967 that “the unorganized are to be found, in the main, among the 70 percent of the nation’s work force who are not industrial workers but service workers” that the AFL-CIO had up to the 1960s been inclined to ignore. A high percentage of these workers were made up of African Americans and other people of color. Internal democracy in unions that recruited such workers was essential, Robinson insisted, in order to create “unions whose program will respond to our needs, unions which will be a force to be reckoned with.” Because of neglect and discrimination, many in the black community had become distrustful of unions. Robinson and many other African American trade unionists believed—as he put it—that it was necessary “to bring home to the masses of our people the basic truth that unions are essential, and that in a large sense it is the people, the workers themselves, who really make the union.”

Stirrings

Below the upper echelons of the AFL-CIO, new currents in the labor movement to some extent recaptured the expansive idealism and radical spirit of previous years. Cesar Chavez played an important role in combining many elements—a pride in the heritage of Mexican Americans; the shrewdness of community organizing efforts of the 1960s; the commitment to social justice of the Catholic Church; the perspective of alliance-building among Chicano, Filipino, and other agricultural workers; and the vision of a socially conscious unionism appealing to the general public (through grape and lettuce boycotts)—elements that were essential to building the United Farm Workers of America. “As a continuation of our struggle,” Chavez said, “I think we can develop economic power and put it into the hands of the people so they can have more control of their own lives, and then begin to change the system. We want radical change.” The fighting spirit sometimes personified by the late John L. Lewis permeated such groups as the Black Lung Association and Miners for Democracy that helped to revitalize the United Mine Workers of America. In the United Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers, the Teamsters, and other unions a proliferation of rank-and-file caucuses and reform campaigns sometimes won victories and sometimes endured defeats, but contributed a new militancy and awareness of social issues, helping to regenerate the ranks of organized labor in the era of the Nixon-Ford presidencies.

The spirit of Mother Jones, Rose Schneiderman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and so many other heroines of early labor struggles was also to be found in the growing role of women in the workplace and union movement. Increasing numbers of women—including many in so-called nontraditional industrial jobs, in mines and steel mills and auto plants—helped to change the face of labor. Historians Brigid O’Farrell and Joyce Kornbluh—highlighting the concept of “union feminists”—point out that while “the contemporary women’s movement helped influence union women to support equal rights,” it is no less the case that “union women helped influence the women’s movement to address other important issues in working women’s lives, such as pay equity, a higher minimum wage, child care, and health and safety on the job, that came from the realities of their day-to-day experiences.” Some organized the Coalition of Labor Union Women as well as caucuses in their own unions, in part to help push forward women’s concerns and women’s role in the ranks of organized labor. They also played key roles in the general struggles of the working class, and some were on the cutting edge of such struggles. One famous female activist was Dolores Huerta, the eloquent and inspiring organizer who became a key leader of the United Farm Workers. Explaining that over time it became evident in the farm workers’ struggles that “women are stronger than men,” with “more staying power,” Huerta explained the importance of not allowing dangerous aspects of the struggle to be restricted to men:

Excluding women, protecting them, keeping women at home, that’s the middle-class way. Poor people’s movements have always had whole families on the line, ready to move at a moment’s notice, with more courage, because that’s all we had. It’s a class, not an ethnic thing.

Another well-known female union activist was Karen Silkwood, who helped to unionize her atomic-processing factory in Oklahoma. Horrified by her company’s lax environmental standards, Silkwood was on her way to a meeting with reporters when she became the victim of a mysterious car accident. (This new type of “union maid” was even depicted in Hollywood films, such as Norma Rae and Silkwood).

Although unions like the United Steelworkers; the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (Silkwood’s union); and others had pressed Congress to establish the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, the agency was never adequately funded even in the 1970s. In the 1980s, OSHA was targeted as a heavy-handed antibusiness bureaucracy by corporations worried by a new round of working-class organizing.

In fact, the business community was about to launch a broad and far-reaching offensive of its own, designed to push against working-class gains in order to tilt power relations dramatically back in their own favor. Nor was the challenge to be met by any dynamic new personalities (not to mention visionary union leaders with effective strategies) who might have become prominent in the unions’ upper echelons after the passing of the two dominant figures of the post–World War II period. Walter Reuther had died in an airplane accident in 1970, and no one of equal stature was able to strike as effective a pose as champion of social unionism. The 1980 retirement of George Meany left his assistant Lane Kirkland in the AFL-CIO presidency. Meany’s distinctive gruffness proved a hard act to follow, even though his policies were loyally maintained. But the effectiveness of those policies were increasingly open to question under the changing conditions.