5 5 Some Lessons for Today
Only seven percent of private-sector workers in the United States currently belong to unions. While the public-sector rate is over one third, public-sector unionization is under attack in a number of traditionally union friendly states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. For fifty years, even when the Democrats have controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, organized labor has been unable to win any federal legislation that would spur union growth or increase what little political and economic leverage it still has.
Unionization rates have also declined in most of the rich countries, but the United States is an exceptional case. Decline started earlier in the United States, beginning in the late 1950s, and has been more severe. Perhaps the most relevant comparison is Canada, which had a similar unionization rate in the 1950s and 1960s and then saw unionization increase in the 1970s and 1980s, declining slightly thereafter. Canada’s overall rate is now 30 percent compared to 11 percent in the United States.1 Unionization in most European countries is significantly higher, and it is no accident that organized labor there has been much more successful in countering the agenda of organized capital.
Unions now have little impact on wages or working conditions for most Americans. This has not always been the case. Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s, labor was a militant force for social change, and this militancy helped create key social protections such as the forty-hour working week, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, old age insurance, and the right to unionize itself.
How did such a powerful force three-quarters of a century ago become the weak and divided entity that U.S. organized labor is today? There is no single explanation for labor’s decline; in fact, there are nearly as many explanations as there are scholars who have studied the question: bad leaders, excessive bureaucracy, exogenous economic forces, shifts in the composition of the labor force, cultural shifts, excessive wage premiums, employer resistance, presidential and congressional opposition, and the nature of the American legal system are just a few of the explanations given for the exceptional decline of the American labor movement.2
Answering this question has become more urgent since the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting “Great Recession.” Many Progressives see this as a crisis of the free market capitalist or “neoliberal” model that displaced the “New Deal” model around 1980, and they now hope for a return to a more regulated capitalism. But this nostalgia for the New Deal model is generally not for the working-class solidarity and power that produced it but for the economic gains made under the New Deal by the (especially white, male) working class.
These gains are often imagined to be the product of a “limited post-war capital-labor accord” in which capital accepted organized labor’s right to exist and labor accepted capital’s right to rule the work place.3 Yet a careful accounting of historical scholarship since the 1980s shows the idea of a truce between labor and capital to be inaccurate and misleading: inaccurate because it creates an image of a golden age that never was, and misleading in that it suggests a politics of social cooperation that has no material basis.4 Capitalists as a class never accepted anything resembling such an accord, nor is there any indication that support for progressive reform would be forthcoming today in the absence of a serious mass movement for radical social change.
Rather than an accord, the labor relations system in the United States in the New Deal era (ending roughly in 1980) is better understood as the product of the radical labor upsurge in the 1930s that was then shaped and limited by wartime government and capitalist counterinsurgency. The “New Deal system” that resulted was more a product of labor’s defeat than of any truce in the class struggle. This system was institutionalized in workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively by both craft and industry as guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act (1935), known as the Wagner Act; limits on workers’ ability to challenge incumbent union representation based on National Labor Relations Board cases (1940s), so that the law came to protect unions more than workers; and elimination of the radical cadre of union organizers through both Red-baiting, which began in the late 1930s, and continued with the loyalty clause of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947).
In other words, by the early 1950s when labor reached its peak coverage of about a third of the workforce, unions had achieved government protection against employer attacks and against the most radical elements of the working class. This did allow unions to achieve economic gains for their members through collective bargaining and strike activity, but it also made them vulnerable to a change in government policy and cut them off from their most dynamic organizers and leaders. When that change occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, what had been a long slow decline turned into a rout.
There are three distinct periods in the story of American labor relations since the Civil War: the formative pre–Great Depression era (1870s–1920s), the New Deal era (1930s to about 1980), and the era of conservative hegemony since the late 1970s. In the late nineteenth century, the United States had the world’s largest market and largest capitalist establishments (i.e., very big employers with tens of thousands of employees), with no parallel at the time in Western Europe and Japan. In this period, the American state played less of a role in industrialization than did those in continental Western Europe and Japan. Comparatively speaking, capital had an extreme anti-statist ideology. Social Darwinism and a fierce defense of managerial prerogative became deeply ingrained, and employers became used to a unilateral way of operating, free of government influence (though with government assistance for infrastructure). Although labor struggles during this period were fought with an intensity that frequently erupted into open warfare, labor was mostly ineffective in challenging management prerogative. Ultimately, unionism was largely confined to residual groups of highly skilled trades, and radical attempts at mass unionization of industry, such as the “Wobblies” (International Workers of the World), were repeatedly crushed. Large and small employers alike could count on courts stocked by right wing judges to fiercely defend any and all prerogatives.
Finally, unlike European economies, U.S. manufacturers did not develop effective employer associations or cartels, and with unionization fragmented along regional and occupational lines, wages were not taken “out of competition,” creating a strong incentive for employers to crush unions that would make them uncompetitive. In the early twentieth century, European capitalist classes generally faced more prominent left parties than in the United States and sometimes found collective bargaining a useful route to working-class co-optation and thus a reasonable class strategy. They were also more likely to curtail radical or socialist tendencies through various social welfare measures. Prior to the 1930s, the American left and labor movements did not gain the kind of traction that would have made a strategic acceptance of collective bargaining possible, much less likely.5
American employer hostility was both a cause and effect of early defeats of the U.S. labor movement. These defeats—uniquely violent and large in scale—helped produce a very careful and largely non-radical labor movement.6
The labor movement’s weakness in the wake of these violent defeats had a self-reinforcing quality. For instance, because wages were never effectively taken out of competition on the national level, individual employers had a greater incentive to vigorously and violently repress organizing initiatives that would raise labor costs for them but not for their competitors. Without a traditional aristocracy that put a premium on social stability, the U.S. labor movement and its allies had few opportunities to make alliances over the heads of the bourgeoisie, as was possible in some European countries. For example, the limitation of the working day in England would not have been possible without the support of the landed aristocracy. Such alliances were less possible in the United States where no such aristocracy existed.7 By the 1920s well-organized, large, and independent U.S. corporations faced a weak labor movement. Economic policy and company and industry-level industrial relations were, at that time, distinctly employer-dominated.
Accompanied by vast and militant social movements, the economic and political crisis of the Great Depression dislodged capital from its unilateral power position, partly because of the perception that capital was responsible for the Depression. At first the Roosevelt Administration sought to stabilize economic conditions through the promotion of economic planning and the funding of conventional public works—both authorized by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—and by engaging in a halting effort to reform the delivery of public relief to the unemployed through both direct relief and government job creation, a process that culminated in the establishment of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935. This “First New Deal” of 1933–1934 dealt with economic survival in a variety of industries, including banking, agriculture, railroads, and manufacturing. The first New Deal created a legal basis for union organizing under Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act. Though the legality of that Act was immediately and successfully challenged, new unions based on industry (coal, steel, autos) rather than craft (pipefitters, carpenters, etc.) began to organize unskilled and semi-skilled workers. These workers and their militant leaders were critical to the electoral landslide for the Democrats in 1934 at a time when American capital was discredited and politically weak.
That landslide, and continuing agitation by labor radicals, produced an unprecedented three-year window (1935–1937) when the “second New Deal” could be launched. This second New Deal dealt with general economic security through the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, the Social Security Act, the Farm Security Administration, the Housing (Wagner-Steagall) Act of 1937, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which regulated working hours and minimum wages.
Social Security, the right to organize and bargain collectively with employers, and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—the industrial alternative to the craft-based American Federation of Labor—all occurred in a period of unusual weakness for employer interests. These developments will be analyzed in detail in the next section. The key issue here is that the second New Deal did not become the basis for the “New Deal system.” Rather, the “second ND” was modified dramatically by changes in government policy and capitalist organizing.8
Recent scholarship has identified a third New Deal, from 1938–1945.9 The economic downturn of 1937–1938, rising conflict between the AFL and the CIO, and Republican electoral victories in 1938, which left Democrats in control of Congress but ended the progressive majority, led to this third phase. A coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats was able to curtail direct relief programs. The need for big business assistance in the war effort helped to rehabilitate big capitalists, so that industrial stability, rather than economic democracy, came to be the priority in labor relations.
By the New Deal “system,” I mean this last set of conditions. It was modified in important ways by National Labor Relations Board decisions in the 1940s and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, but its basic outlines were clear by the beginning of World War II. Collective bargaining was embedded as a right administered by the state for the promotion of industrial and social stability. Union officials in pursuit of the same goal were generally protected from being challenged by their own members. Taft-Hartley, which was passed in the wake of the postwar strikes and rising anti-Communist hysteria, officially eliminated the influence of the labor left, but this influence had already been tightly contained as labor purged the most class-conscious of its own members.
In discussing the role of the radical labor movement during the New Deal, two issues are of importance: the influence of radical labor action on New Deal legislation, and the impact of radical labor leadership on class struggle in the workplace. With regard to the first issue, I will focus on the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, which gave most private-sector workers the right to organize and bargain collectively and to strike. By “radical” labor I mean trade unions controlled by or generally supportive of the positions of the U.S. Communist Party, by far the most important group on the left at that time.
There have been three general explanations of the major laws passed during the second New Deal, especially the Wagner and Social Security Acts. One, associated with William Domhoff, emphasizes corporate élite involvement in writing those laws. This position is difficult to reconcile with the historical record on the National Labor Relations Act, as virtually all organized capitalist groups opposed the Act. The “state autonomy” theory of Theda Skocpol explains that state actors, strengthened by their experience with the National Industrial Recovery Act and the election results of 1934, were responsible for passing Wagner, but Skocpol and her co-authors provide little documentary or statistical evidence. The “social movement” theories of Michael Goldfield and Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward emphasize popular unrest due to general strikes and other actions led by radicals in the labor movement, but they do not establish a direct link between radical labor actions and legislation.10
An interesting study by Peter Philips resolves some of these problems.11 Using oral history, legislative hearings, and analysis of interlocking membership in élite social clubs, Phillips makes a direct link between the remarkable social unrest of 1934 and the formation of the Liberty League, “the pivotal point for the splitting of the U.S. upper class.”12 Liberty League members were drawn from boards of directors of some of the largest corporations in the United States and saw the New Deal as nothing but socialism under another guise. These business conservatives took direct action to fight New Deal legislation, but they were largely ineffectual in the short run. However, the ties built between various business groups in the fight against the New Deal were to bear fruit in a coordinated ideological mobilization to promote a free-market vision of the economy and a union-free workplace after World War II.
Although labor unions had little role in writing the Wagner Act, radical trade union activity inside and outside the workplace created the context in which the Act became possible. A crucial aspect of the social unrest of this period is the link between the new industrial unions and broader social movements, especially the Communist Party (CP) but also movements of the unemployed, black workers, and single-issue groups and political parties, such as the Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota, the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, New York’s American Labor party, and groups like California’s EPIC, Huey Long’s Share the Wealth, and the Townsend movement.13 General strikes in Toledo (May 1934), Minneapolis (May–August 1934), and San Francisco (July 1934), as well as a huge strike in the textile industry in the same year, created an atmosphere of panic among business élites in 1934–1935, and confusion over how to deal with this. The conservative wing, represented by the newly formed Liberty League, advocated violent repression. They had been fine with much of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which allowed business coordination of industry, but they wanted minimal regulation and balanced budgets, and they resisted Section 7(a) Giving workers the right to organize and bargain collectively was anathema to big business in general; but in this unique period of capitalist class confusion and disorganization, civil unrest led to a critical division within the ruling class. The increasing radicalization of the labor movement in the context of a general social uprising gave corporate liberals and Southern Democrats in Congress a sense that something needed to be done. The Wagner Act, which drew on a series of national and state level precedents and which was opposed by the Communist Party, was near at hand. The Act was meant to provide most private-sector employees rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining and to create a National Labor Relations Board to organize elections and to adjudicate disputes.
In 1934, Wagner had introduced a labor law bill similar to the 1935 Act, but the bill failed. Although communism and radical action had been mentioned in the 1934 hearings on that bill, it had not frightened legislators sufficiently. Roosevelt did not support it, nor did he support the 1935 bill until the very end of the legislative process. By 1935, however, there was “a qualitatively stronger concern [among members of the political class] about communism and radical insurgencies.”14 During the hearings, for example, Lloyd Garrison, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, said, “I regard organized labor as our chief bulwark against communism and other revolutionary movements.”15 That the Communist Party opposed the Act made it easier for its proponents to sell it as both pro-worker and anti-Communist. The 1935 version passed without a roll call in the House and by 68–12 in the Senate. Most Republicans and most Southern Democrats supported it. Phillips argues that voting for the Wagner Act allowed Representatives and Senators to appeal to working people while at the same time taking on the mantle of anti-communism, as the bill was seen as creating the conditions for restoring labor peace. Democrats, who increasingly counted on the labor vote, hoped to gain a return to economic normalcy by constraining strikes through collective bargaining.16 Democratic politicians were looking to secure labor support without grossly exceeding the bounds of what was acceptable to capital.17
The congressional election of 1934, which added a veto-proof Democratic majority in the Senate to existing Democratic dominance in the House of Representatives, “was in good part the result of the activities of broad social movements among the urban unemployed, farmers, Afro-Americans, and others, and of the 1934 labor upsurge.”18 The Communist Party opposed Wagner because it limited minority unionism by granting exclusive bargaining rights and involved employers in dues collection. Furthermore, the Communists feared government-controlled unions would result in loss of the right to strike. However, the CP had moved to a Popular Front strategy and was strongly supportive of the National Labor Relations Board by the time the act was declared constitutional by the Supreme Court (1937). One could say this was typical of the Party’s unstable line, although one could also say that the CP was right on both counts: as argued below, after 1940 the NLRA did narrow union activities in a kind of repressive tolerance, even before the Taft-Hartley amendments. At the same time it protected the right to strike more or less effectively until the 1980s. Moreover, the first Board under the Wagner Act (up to 1940) was generally supportive of industrial unions, where the Communists had their strongest presence.19
Southern planters’ support was critical to passing the Wagner Act and to the New Deal coalition. Through their control of key committee chairs they were able to directly influence the shape of New Deal legislation. Their initial support of Wagner and eventual defection from the pro-labor coalition is an important and little-told part of this story. Unlike conservative capitalists, Southern planters supported the regulation of production and state income supports as long as these did not interfere with their control of black workers and the low-wage Southern labor market. Sixty-eight percent of Southern senators supported the Wagner Act. That this number was lower than Southern support for the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) or Social Security shows that labor policy was tricky for Southern Democrats, even in 1935. Still this is equal to overall support for Wagner from the Northeast where labor was strongest.20
All of these laws were tailored to the needs of the planters. The Wagner Act excluded farm workers, just as AAA payments went directly to landowners, with no requirement they be shared with tenants or sharecroppers. Old age and unemployment insurance similarly excluded agricultural and domestic workers, and other Social Security (SSA) programs were locally controlled. Southerners removed language from the original bill requiring state benefits for the elderly to provide “reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and benefits.” Southern legislators expressed concern that younger people might stay home from the fields, living off their grandparents’ benefits.21
Still, it is not entirely clear why the planters did not simply block the SSA and Wagner. Winders speculates that increased income in urban areas might raise demand for agricultural goods and negate the impact of food price increases due to agricultural price supports, encouraging urban Democrats to support AAA in return for Southern support of Wagner, but he provides no evidence that this was true.22 It is also the case that the SSA meant a permanent infusion of federal money for broke Southern states, but this cannot explain Southern support for Wagner.
Winders argues that, while Southern planters’ support of the SSA and AAA was based on shared economic interests with capitalists and farmers outside the South, their support for Wagner was a calculated political move designed to secure the New Deal coalition and thus became subject to change when the political winds shifted. And that is exactly what happened, as I discuss below.
In sum, radical labor action in the context of general social upheaval and perceived crisis led to a law that placed the federal government in the position of, according to the Wagner Act’s preface, “encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining … protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.”23 While capitalists largely opposed the Act, they were divided, and the Great Depression had weakened their influence. Wagner was supported by Southern planters who were able to exclude domestic and agricultural workers from the Act, shoring up the Democratic coalition while preserving the semi-feudal relations of production in the South.24
The second aspect of radical labor action during the early New Deal period was the effectiveness of radical unions in the workplace. Today it is generally forgotten that Communists and their allies in the CIO created a vibrant and powerful radical left movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Communists were influential at both the local and national level in most of the CIO unions, with roughly 30 percent of CIO members either Communists or non-Party members generally supportive of Party positions.25
Communist and Communist-allied unions were more likely to challenge capitalist hegemony in the workplace and society in the 1930s and 1940s without sacrificing the immediate bread and butter interests of their membership. Precisely why they were successful, whether due to their approach to shop-floor organizing as a mission or calling, their discipline, an ideology that gave them hope, or their long-term focus, is beyond our scope here. But understanding their role is critical to achieving clarity on what the New Deal can teach us in the twenty-first century.
Communist influence on labor radicalism was not a function of their numbers. Twenty-five percent of New York City Teachers Union members were in the Communist Party, but this was unusual. Communists were about only two percent of union membership in the “Red” unions, though the percentages at the leadership level were much higher. Even in a “mainstream” or “non-radical” union like the Steelworkers, roughly 30 percent of full-time staff were Party members in the late 1930s. Moreover, many independent leftists were dedicated union activists, and while they did not caucus with Party members, their positions on key issues were similar.26
There are many critical comments to be made about radical unionism in the 1930s and 1940s; the point here is that despite these failures the Red and “semi-Red” unions effectively challenged capitalist hegemony in the workplace, including on issues such as wages and benefits, hours, and work rules.27 Most Party members and independent leftist union members were effective trade unionists with a penchant for pursuing anti-capitalist goals in written contracts, not simply ideologues.28
While pluralist and some Marxist theories of industrial relations traditions argue that unions tend to incorporate the working class and thus stabilize capitalism, the history of these unions shows that with leadership committed to anti-capitalist struggle, unions can and have succeeded in encroaching on capital’s dictatorship in the workplace and in society.29
Whereas industrial relations scholars and labor historians have claimed that Communist leadership made no difference to the results their unions achieved, quantitative research by Stepan and Zeitlin and qualitative work on individual unions by Rosswurm tell a different story. Looking at a sample of 236 collective bargaining agreements between 1937 and 1955, Stepan and Zeitlin found that contracts negotiated by locals of Communist-led unions were significantly more likely to limit management “rights,” reject strike prohibitions and long-term contracts, and incorporate grievance procedures favorable to unions. They found this to be true regardless of industry structure, and also found that the political orientation of union leadership had no impact on bread and butter issues such as wages. Communist-led unions opposed speedup and other methods of raising productivity on the ground that this increased the rate of exploitation. Based on ethnographic data, Stepan and Zeitlin conclude that contract provisions were mirrored by actual shop-floor practices.30
In the context of the social crisis of the 1930s, the growing weight of labor radicals in general and Communist Party members in particular was critical to the early functioning of the National Labor Relations Board. According to labor historian Melvin Dubofsky, “By the time the NLRB was up and running, the policies of the CIO, the CPUSA, and the New Deal as well were in harmony.”31 Things began to change after 1938 with the split between the AFL and CIO, internal conflicts in the CIO over the issue of Communist influence, and Roosevelt’s reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board in response to congressional attack and red-baiting.
The older craft unions of the AFL were always leery of Wagner, as they saw collective bargaining as a private matter between employers and unions. They saw unions themselves, rather than the law, as determining who had the right to belong to a union. Now rights to organize and bargain collectively had become individual civil rights created and enforced by the state, with unions existing only as representatives of administratively determined groups of workers. That the NLRB seemed to favor the CIO unions in disputes between the two federations only increased the AFL’s conflict with the Board. Searching for allies, the AFL embraced reactionary forces in and out of government. “The AFL leadership could sustain its position only through a more explicit alliance with the elements outside the labor movement—the Congressional conservatives and the employer groups—who were attacking the Wagner Act itself.”32
In its early years (up to 1939), the National Labor Relations Board had been chiefly concerned with workers’ self-organization and its own authority. By 1939, with war looming, there was growing concern in the Roosevelt Administration about autonomous rank and file activity (i.e., wildcat strikes). Roosevelt reconstituted the Board to placate his conservative critics, with the result that stable collective bargaining became the only goal of federal labor relations policy. By the early 1940s, workers’ right to associate in unions of their own choosing was made subordinate to stability and order in business.33
After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Communist Party strongly supported the war effort, and, in particular, the no-strike pledge. However, contracts negotiated during the war were still more likely to be pro-labor in Communist than in non-Communist locals: “wartime contracts won by the Communist-led unions were far less likely than those of their rivals on the Right to cede management prerogatives, to sign away the right to strike, or to have cumbersome grievance procedures.”34 Whatever the national Party line, Communists and their allies in the trade unions sought to balance national unity with worker power at the point of production.
The creation of new workers’ rights, vast expansion of union density, and the rapid growth of the state sparked an immediate response from many sectors of capital, beginning in the late 1930s. Employer hegemony was threatened in three ways—a loss of unilateral managerial prerogative in all aspects of the employment relationship, economic security provided by the state and not employers, and loss of the national narrative about American capitalism. These threats initiated an “ideological jihad.”35 Both individual and collective capitalist activism aimed to reverse all three losses.
First, employers fought to regain a measure of shop-floor control, weaken and undermine collective bargaining, and resist efforts to expand unionization beyond its early post–World War II high mark. There was a broad movement to create a non-union industrial relations alternative that took root and rapidly expanded from the 1950s through the 1970s. These developments have long been known to careful readers of postwar industrial relations’ history.36 I have already noted the shift in National Labor Relations Board policy from 1940, with industrial stability taking precedence over workers’ self-activity. There is also strong evidence from the late 1930s on for an ideological and political campaign waged to reestablish capitalist hegemony. The two-fold goal of this movement was to label labor and the state in general as Communist and a threat to American democracy and to promote these ideas through a variety of channels.
Conservative ideologues and journalists and a growing number of American businessmen worked to create a dense network of right wing institutes, a new political language and to harness these new ideas in political campaigns. Spanning the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, these ideological campaigns were organized around candidates, national anti-labor legislation, and state right-to-work laws. Capitalist funding for employer-associated institutes such as the Foundation for Economic Education and the American Enterprise Association (precursor to the American Enterprise Institute) and right wing journals like the National Review were part of this process, which had the dual mission of restoring laissez-faire and rolling back Soviet-style Communism.37
The central signifier of this political and ideological effort was free enterprise. For the past four decades, hundreds of thousands of business students have passed through the ranks of “Students in Free Enterprise” (SIFE). This Wal-Mart-funded project first flourished in small southern Christian business schools and has become a massive international organization seeding extreme pro-business ideology in countless universities and colleges.38
Elizabeth Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise (1995) details the 1940s’ origins of this movement. In propaganda campaigns, waged in the employer-controlled workplace, in communities, in the halls of state capitals, and in Congress, individual employers and their associations (especially the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce) aimed squarely at changing societal understandings about labor and the state. Union legitimacy was especially targeted. Says Fones-Wolf:
… unions, business leaders complained, had drenched the minds of workers in a “reckless propaganda of distortion, deceit, and phoney [sic] economics.” … [B]usiness not only sought victory at the bargaining table and in the halls of Congress but also sought to win the hearts and minds of American workers. To accomplish this task … employers [sought] to send a message that business had solved the fundamental ethical and political problems of industrial society, the basic, “harmony between the self-interest of our economic institutions and the social interests of society.”39
These efforts dovetailed with the top-down creation of a conservative intellectual movement to carry forward the fight against liberal (in the U.S. political sense) hegemony. Right wing thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and his circle in the Mont Pelerin Society attracted strong business support, providing a language and analysis for this fight.40 Small-business owners had reacted strongly to Roosevelt’s effort to pack the Supreme Court, and this reaction promoted an alliance between large and small business. The older anti-monopoly stance of organizations representing small business faded as it increasingly identified itself with the interests of capital in general. This occurred as conservative economists were abandoning their critique of monopoly power.41
Hayek’s uncompromising indictment of welfare as “The Road to Serfdom” was an instant hit in this new business alliance. In 1945, Reader’s Digest published an abridged reprint of his attack on burgeoning social democracy, which quickly reached a million households in the United States. Right wing activists forged thick connections between the Mont Pelerin Society and a broad network of conservative American intellectuals and businessmen in the 1950s.42 Early leaders in this movement, like Lemuel Boulware, the infamous labor relations director of General Electric and a chief propagandist and organizer for the capitalist reaction, made the extraordinary claim at the height of anti-Communist paranoia that unions and the welfare state were far greater threats to American employers than the Soviet Union itself.43
As employers joined this ideological movement, they also operated directly to thwart the spread of unionism. The defeat of the CIO’s postwar Operation Dixie campaign (1946–1953) preserved the South as a political and economic bulwark against the New Deal and labor. At the level of the firm, many large Northern/Midwestern capitalists moved immediately after the Wagner Act to confront the emerging “New Deal industrial system” of unionized collective bargaining by creating what Jacoby calls “vanguard welfare capitalism.”44 Corporations such as Thomson Products, Sears, Kodak, and IBM led the way in creating an alternative to unionism based on “humane” management methods, company unions or works councils, and modest benefits for long-term workers. While only a minority of American corporations adopted the full package of welfare capitalism, the existence of an alternative model provided a base from which to critique the New Deal system as unnecessary. The discrediting of the New Deal industrial relations system was well underway by the 1940s.
Even where organized capital appeared to be accepting of social democracy, this acceptance was tied to the restoration of employer hegemony in the workplace. Jennifer Klein’s For All the Rights (2003) explains how American capital prevented the expansion of the welfare state, particularly thwarting national health care. Insurance companies were key early advocates and specialists in developing welfare capitalism in the 1910s and 1920s. Insurance companies first persuaded, and then collaborated with, large corporations, using private “welfare” policies to compete with unions and the state for employees’ loyalty. The first step was an embrace of Social Security by insurance companies and some other capitalists in 1936 and 1937. Key employer associations opposed efforts to repeal Social Security, preferring instead to make peace with it while hemming it in. The approach was to keep it as a basic “safety net” to be supplemented by additional “security” provided by employer pensions. The next step in the early 1940s was to compete with emerging community health models supported by unions. To do so, insurance companies successfully promoted the idea of providing group health insurance benefits to employees. This costly investment paid several dividends for employers in their struggle to regain hegemony over employees. It bound employee’s loyalty to their “good employers,” and it also forestalled a move towards national health insurance, which would have reduced employers’ control of their employees, not to mention the blow to health insurance companies.
The legal taming of labor radicalism began in the early 1940s. Both the National Labor Relations Board and the courts narrowed allowable collective action. Though Roosevelt Administration labor policy during the war had favored membership growth, it restricted what labor could do, limiting the ability to strike and imposing a mandatory cooling-off period before strikes could begin. Union leaders were increasingly concerned that subordination of union power to the war effort was spreading apathy and resentment among their members.45 While the Wagner Act had legalized collective bargaining, its interpretation had also reduced workers’ potential for economic disruption.
Business leaders and their conservative allies, however, opposed even this narrow scope of union power; that is, the government-labor-management tripartism that was key to the war effort but that also legitimated organized labor, and the consequences of consolidated union power at the ballot box. Anti-union campaigns from the 1940s to the present day have had the dual goal of restoring capitalist hegemony in the workplace and at the polls.
With the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, federal labor policy actively halted union growth. This revision of the Wagner Act prohibited political solidarity and wildcat strikes, required union officers to sign non-Communist affidavits, and allowed states to pass laws prohibiting union shops. By then capital had repaired its rifts, and the coalition supporting Wagner had frazzled. Senators from farm states both in and outside the South abandoned their support of Wagner. The AFL-CIO split, and the growing salience of anti-Communism meant that it was impossible to produce a united labor front. Labor’s leverage was also reduced because it had become so firmly wedded to the Democratic Party, a party that did not return its love. While President Truman vetoed Taft-Hartley, “only seventy-one House Democrats voted to sustain the President’s veto while 106 voted to override it. In the Senate twenty Democrats voted to override the veto, and twenty-two voted to sustain it.”46
Once agricultural workers were excluded, a majority of Southern senators supported the Wagner Act. But they became increasingly wary of any labor legislation after the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) began to organize tenants and sharecroppers in the South in the mid-1930s. These tensions increased with the dramatic growth in union strength during and immediately after the war. Between 1939 and 1953, union membership rose faster in the South than in the rest of the country. War-time growth was followed by postwar organizing drives by both the AFL and CIO, and while these largely failed, they were seen as a direct attack on the Southern labor system, causing planters to join Northern capitalists in opposing Wagner. Eighty-five percent of Southern senators supported Taft-Hartley, and by 1953, every Southern state except Louisiana had passed a right-to-work law. Groups representing farmers outside the South, such as the Farm Bureau, also supported Taft-Hartley because they saw strikes and secondary boycotts as limiting their ability to get crops to market. The split between labor and various kinds of farmers allowed capitalists to heal their divisions, and the alliance of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans was sealed by the results of the 1946 congressional election. This conservative shift was itself partly due to the strike wave of 1944–1946 and capitalists’ ability to organize against labor’s agenda for the postwar recovery.47
From the depths of the Depression to the late 1940s, a progressive option had been on the table in the United States involving national economic planning and shared corporate governance. It was only at the end of the 1940s that progressive forces in the labor movement were forced to accept “the pursuit of economic security through a private, depoliticized system of collective bargaining” with a state that largely limited itself to pursuing high consumption through monetary and fiscal policy only.48 Those who were fully included—unionized workers and the expanding group of white collar workers—found a definition of the good life in which leisure was superior to work, individual expression was valued over social solidarity, and private family life over public civic life. The older language of workers’ control and payment for the “full fruits of our labor” gave way in the 1940s and 1950s to a rhetoric of personal satisfaction for the semi-skilled operatives whose lot was improved by the New Deal.
The system that emerged included decentralized and highly detailed collective bargaining at the individual firm or plant level, minimal social welfare spending, and labor market segmentation. The end game for a more radical labor strategy was between 1946 and 1948, when business and conservative interests blocked labor’s attempt to create a social democracy based on planning and social solidarity. “This forced retreat narrowed the political appeal of labor-liberalism and contributed both to the demobilization and division of those social forces which had long sustained it.”49 Of course, much of the labor movement had never embraced a class vision of unionism. After 1948, labor as a whole developed an interest-group politics based on growth and productivity gain sharing, and it was even this narrow view of the good society that was lost, post-1980.
Labor’s ambitious postwar social agenda had included support for Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” and his “Economic Bill of Rights,” a continuation of tripartite planning mechanisms established during the war, full employment and national health insurance. This had been prefigured by the CIO’s wartime tripartite governance plan, “an admixture of Catholic social reformism and New Deal era faith in business-labor-government cooperation.”50 Labor progressives in the 1940s assaulted traditional management power in the name of economic efficiency and the public interest, usually through “tripartism,” the notion that cooperation among unions, management, and government at the national level was key to prosperity and social stability. In Europe, many right wing capitalists were legitimately seen as having been collaborators or appeasers and thus were open to tripartism as a way to rehabilitate themselves, but conservative American business leaders had improved their social standing during the war and saw little need for the forms of labor–management cooperation or worker voice that were developing in Germany, France, Italy, and the Nordic states. Moreover, as the economy rebounded from the short but sharp 1945 recession, Keynesian economists began to think that the economy could be stabilized through fiscal and monetary policy without a structural shift in the distribution of power.
One of labor’s key demands after the war was a reconversion wage increase to make up for wartime inflation and to sustain aggregate demand. This had few supporters outside union ranks. Still, the strike wave of 1945–1946 showed that labor radicalism was still alive. General strikes in Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Rochester led to union victories, and smaller ones in Lancaster, Stamford, and Akron constituted a national movement. The United Auto Workers (UAW) demanded that General Motors raise wages by 30 percent without increasing car prices or “open their books” to union inspection to show why this was not possible. GM’s successful resistance to these demands indicated that progressive labor’s hope of reshaping class relations in American society as a whole faced long odds. Instead, by the early 1950s, the UAW worked for privatized welfare that succeeded in providing security for employed autoworkers while giving up on national programs based on citizenship alone.
This wave of strikes, resulting in pay increases, and capitalists’ ability to raise prices subsequently led directly to Republican victories in the congressional elections of 1946 and the campaign for Taft-Hartley. That law, in addition to curbing inter-union solidarity, eliminated the radical cadre and contained the labor movement demographically and geographically. It “encouraged contractual parochialism and penalized any serious attempts to project a class-wide political-economic strategy.”51 The elimination of the radicals removed both an important source of activism promoting class solidarity and any class analysis of the situation facing labor. Women, white-collar workers, and people of color were over-represented in the expelled unions. Indeed, labor segmentation and consequent narrowing of the basis for labor politics in the postwar era is at least partly traceable to the expulsion of the radical unions.
The best estimate is that between 17 and 20 percent of CIO members were expelled from the organization, or between 750,000 and 900,000 people.52 Most of these were people working outside manufacturing, and they reflected the diversity of the working class more fully than those unions that remained in the CIO. For instance, the United Office and Professional Workers (UOPWA) had organized thousands of insurance agents and clerical workers and had begun successful organization of New York banks and Wall Street. Management certainly thought UOPWA was a threat, one indication being a flurry of articles on declining worker morale and the dangers of unions which appeared in the trade press in the mid-to-late 1940s.53 When these groups were expelled from the CIO, any hope for a labor-based civil rights movement, a socialist labor federation, or a working-class political party went with them.
Subsequent to the general strikes of 1945–1946, labor suffered a series of defeats whose longer-term consequences were devastating. Operation Dixie, the attempt to organize the South, was a total failure. A series of organizing drives had already been defeated in textile factories in 1946. In the broader Dixie campaign, CIO leaders excluded Communists (even before Taft-Hartley) and “fellow travelers” such as members of the Highlander Center.54 Two of the most dynamic unions in the South, the Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, were heavily black and hospitable to Communists. They were largely avoided by non-radical unions before Taft-Hartley and systematically raided after. The New Deal’s agricultural policy would eventually proletarianize millions of blacks and transform the Democratic Party, but in the short run it mainly created a labor surplus. The early postwar labor policy did nothing to organize that surplus labor, although conditions were ripe, given the organizing efforts of radical multiracial unions during the Depression and the World War.55
In the North in the 1940s, mass unionization was central to the struggle for civil rights. Although racist discrimination in hiring was still rampant, the rise of the industrial unions and the existence of the National Labor Relations Board generated a class-based rights consciousness. In fact, according to Korstand and Lichtenstein, “By the mid-1940s, civil rights issues had reached a level of national political salience that they would not regain for another fifteen years.”56 But the employer offensive of the late 1940s isolated left wing black leaders and destroyed the Popular Front.
This management offensive was especially destructive of newly organized locals that had especially large numbers of black members. The narrowing of the collective bargaining agenda meant it was more difficult to develop a labor politics specific to black workers. Remaining unions, race-based organizations, and liberal advocacy groups began to take a legal/bureaucratic rather than an organizing approach to civil rights. In other words, rather than seeking power in the workplace, they sought redress through law and the courts. “The rise of anti-communism shattered the Popular Front coalition on civil rights, while the retreat and containment of the union movement deprived black activists of the political and social space necessary to carry on an independent struggle.”57 The working-class-based civil rights movement of the 1940s had little impact on or participation in the movement that would arise a generation later. That the later movement was based in the churches and student groups rather than the unions may partly explain why it failed so completely to solve the difficult economic problems faced by the great numbers of lower-income blacks. Martin Luther King’s increased emphasis on economic and not just civil rights at the end of his life was an attempt to address this, an attempt that failed in the wake of his death.
The closing scene in this tragedy might be Henry Wallace’s insurgent presidential campaign in 1948. His program included friendlier relations with the Soviet Union and an end to the emerging Cold War, ending segregation, with full voting rights for blacks, and universal government-sponsored health insurance. The campaign foundered for a number of reasons beyond our focus here, but also because it ran up against the two pillars of the emerging Cold War consensus: barring Communists from labor organizations domestically and the anti-Communist rhetoric of the Marshall Plan internationally. As Nelson Lichtenstein has written, the failure to build an independent labor party may have been “over-determined” by the peculiarities of American politics, Cold War ideology, the highly uneven geographical development of union representation, ethnic and racial divisions of the working class, and other factors, but the costs of that failure were very high.58 The South was preserved as a union-free underdeveloped colony within the United States. Even in the North, unions rarely played any role greater than junior partner in the Democratic coalition. They had no way to exert systematic pressure on the party at either state or national level and no way to create a union culture within the party. Along with the prosperity of the postwar era, this explains the gradual demobilization and depoliticization of the working class, as its consciousness came to be shaped by the vague populism of the Democrats or the narrow interests of their individual unions.
The defeat of the Communists and their CIO allies eliminated the major barrier to the management-friendly contracts that came to characterize the post–World War II period. Writing in the early 1990s, Stepan and Zeitlin observed, “This defeat, not capitalism’s cunning, accounts for the unions’ capitulation to management and for the unchallenged hegemony of capital in the regnant political regime of production in the United States today.”59 If capital was hegemonic in the early 1990s, how much more so today, with private-sector unionization below 10 percent and worker rights jeopardized in supposed labor strongholds like Wisconsin and Michigan?
The Communists were defeated, not because they were poor unionists, but because of the overwhelming power of business conservatives and their allies, the willingness of non-Communist trade unionists to sacrifice them for the survival of bread and butter unionism, and their own tactical errors. After the expulsion of leftists, the CIO merged with the AFL, attempts to organize the unorganized were abandoned for the most part, and the merged federations failed to challenge the politics of capitalist hegemony on the shop floor or in the state. We will never know how far a third, radical labor federation could have pushed an anti-capitalist agenda in production, by limiting management “rights,” rejecting strike prohibitions and long-term contracts, and pushing grievance procedures favorable to unions. The evidence from the radical remnants—the United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union—indicates there was a possibility for a vital, left-led organized working class had the CIO not fragmented.
Despite the best efforts of United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther and others, the expansion of the state in the sphere of domestic policy was also stopped in this period. Most labor leaders initially rejected cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) in collective bargaining agreements as they sought a large increase in real living standards through a general reconversion wage increase, and they wanted to avoid the down escalator when a period of deflation developed, as it had in the 1930s. The UAW saw its immediate postwar contract agreements as a holding action. Nonetheless, the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit,” which connected wage increases to the rate of inflation and increases in productivity and established pension and health insurance plans for GM workers became the archetypal union contract. Labor agreements patterned on the GM contract accepted the existing income distribution, corporate hegemony in the workplace, and privatized pensions and benefits. According to Fortune magazine: “It is the first major union contract that explicitly accepts objective economic facts—cost of living and productivity—as determining wages, thus throwing overboard all theories of wages as determined by political power and of profits as ‘surplus value.”60 Cost-of-living adjustments, private pensions and private health care, the security enjoyed by the unionized working class, were part of the retreat from the earlier, progressive postwar agenda.
The same forces of organized capital that had gutted the Full Employment Act of 1946 and promoted Taft-Hartley destroyed the attempt to raise the social wage. “Nothing more clearly distinguishes the post-war political climate of the USA from that in Great Britain than the almost unqualified refusal of its legislature to respond to proposals for social reform.”61 “Pattern bargaining,” by which wage and benefit conditions in union strongholds were imagined to spread to other sectors, had “a remarkably anemic life. As a result, wage disparities increased dramatically within the postwar working class.”62
One legacy of the immediate postwar period then was the erosion of working-class solidarity. Workers felt doubly taxed: by union dues for their own pensions and health care and by government for the minimal welfare provided to the poor.63 This perceived double taxation lay at the root of working-class racism. Thus support for the New Deal welfare state eroded even within the organized working class. Once universal health and full employment programs were defeated, labor took care of the interests of its members through collective bargaining and largely withdrew from the struggle over the structure of the political economy. This had debilitating consequences, opening up the working class to conservative cultural appeals and eliminating what might have been a dissonant voice in the celebration of the “American way of life.”
The late Truman and Eisenhower years solidified the “commercial Keynesian” consensus—capitalism worked just fine if government used fiscal and monetary policy to create reasonable levels of employment and collective bargaining, and union threat effects made sure that workers got “their share.” This settlement was contested by an increasingly organized and influential right wing reaction but not by an active and organized left.
A new wave of social turmoil arose in the 1960s, but the possibility of its developing into a drive for social democracy had largely been closed off by the nature of the defeat in the 1940s. The United States did not turn to the left at the end of the sixties, not because of some timeless American antipathy to socialism, but because of the closing off of the social democratic initiative in the 1940s; that is, the shutdown of the New Deal’s left wing and the victory of the corporate crusade for the hearts and minds of workers through the campaign for free enterprise, a campaign that accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s. In both the Kennedy and Johnson years, economists committed to commercial Keynesianism became increasingly influential and had no use for state involvement in capital and labor markets. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson both went out of their way to pander to business interests.64
The failure to transform the South through organizing meant that the Democrats’ commitment to civil rights and economic abundance for all—dragged out of the Kennedy brothers by Martin Luther King, Jr., and pushed successfully by Johnson—required extraordinary judicial action in the absence of the popular support that might have been forthcoming from a unionized South. Of course, those extraordinary judicial actions were met by violence. Great Society policymakers “imprisoned by the 1940s ideological framework they inherited, lacked the necessary intellectual autonomy and clarity.”65
The incorporation of labor within a set of governing institutions in the “Third New Deal” limited what it could accomplish and sowed the seeds of its decline. By positioning labor as an interest group rather than a class and by eliminating labor’s left wing, the New Deal system narrowed the path for radical change and made labor vulnerable to the politics of class fragmentation pursued by the New Right.
The heightened ideological class struggle waged by capitalists and their allies in the 1970s and 1980s led to the erosion of what union power remained and a gross increase in inequality and exploitation. It is not surprising that progressives would be nostalgic for the days when unions had a positive impact on wages and working conditions, but as we have seen, the limited gains made in living standards and social solidarity associated with the New Deal were powerfully driven by socialist and Communist forces in the labor movement. No one starts a revolutionary organization to achieve reform; nonetheless, this was one effect of labor-movement radicalism. Without a significant revolutionary presence in today’s working class, contemporary calls for a “New, New Deal” are pure fantasy or wishful thinking. Even if such a “New, New Deal” could be achieved, there is no reason to believe it could be sustained without a program challenging capitalists’ control of the economic surplus and the ideological apparatuses.
Is a militant labor movement even possible today? Globalization of production means that in some industries (such as electronics, apparel, and footwear), taking wages out of competition necessarily involves organizing across national boundaries and vast national differences in wages. Yet the communications revolution associated with globalization also means that we are aware of these differences as never before, and response to remote suffering now occurs on an almost real-time basis. The exploitive policies of the most-admired companies, such as Apple, are widely publicized.66 This seems to be affecting the speed with which reform occurs. Compare, for instance, the nearly half century it took between the initial establishment of factory regulation in England and the effective enforcement of that regulation with the current speed of change in factory conditions in China.67
The shift from manufacturing to services is also seen as a barrier to militant labor in that services have traditionally been difficult to organize. Yet some of the most militant unions in the United States today are in health care and hospitality services. The National Nurses United made common cause with Occupy Wall Street to demand a “Robin Hood tax” to heal America. Hotel workers, many of them first-generation immigrants, have organized corporate campaigns that pressure large hotel chains by stimulating and utilizing grassroots energy. Many of these immigrants come from cultural backgrounds in which solidarity and even socialism are more powerful concepts than individual gain. These campaigns are based on collaboration between grassroots, working-class leadership and progressive, college-trained activists with roots in the student anti-sweatshop and immigrant-rights movements.68
There is no question that creating a new, militant movement of working people faces daunting challenges. In addition to globalization and deindustrialization, there is the very real possibility of a secular decline in labor demand due to technological change. Yet there are reasons to be hopeful. Perhaps because of its weakness, segments of the American labor movement are as innovative and dynamic as any in the developed world. Because women and racial minorities form a disproportionate share of public-sector workers, increasing union membership there has changed the American labor movement’s racial and gender composition. For instance, women comprised only 19 percent of American union members in the mid-1950s, but today nearly half of union members are women.69
The best survey data indicate that workers want unions more than ever and that union members continue to enjoy superior compensation and more say over working conditions.70 Employer resistance is the most important reason why unions find it hard to grow. Where employers do not resist, unions have success. In the public sector and in the case of some private employers where workers have free choice to join a union, they are as likely as they ever were to join. If workers knew they had a government committed to workplace democracy, another union revival might be possible.
Union growth tends to come in spurts, when workers are willing to overthrow the rational calculation of short-term self-interest for the joy of participating in a common project. These brief periods of social upheaval usually involve major demonstrations and strikes when large numbers see their fellow workers publicly demonstrating a shared commitment to the collective project. In a survey of thirteen countries between 1880 and 1985, Gerald Friedman found that 67 percent of union growth came in only five of those 105 years, and 90 percent in only ten of those years.71
Such a shared collective project is unlikely to be inspired by calls for a “New, New Deal,” for better labor–management cooperation, or for any other slogan associated with reformist liberalism. It is more apt to come out of the immigrant communities, especially the second generation for whom just being in America will not be enough, and to take shape fully when native-born Americans can make common cause with immigrants around workplace and social justice. The lesson of the New Deal is that a radical movement can make real social change when government is even only mildly supportive.
The success of the anti–New Deal coalition in first limiting and then undermining the New Deal also provides an important lesson. Sticking to first principles and developing one’s arguments over a long period of time, while building alliances with like-minded and somewhat like-minded groups, can pay off when the world changes in such a way that what was once considered crazy becomes common sense. The “free market” cause seemed hopeless to some in the 1930s and 1940s, but intellectuals like Hayek and management theorists like Boulware kept the faith. Those hoping for a more just and equal society might learn something from the opponents of the New Deal as well.
1. Kris Warner, “Protecting Fundamental Labor Rights: Lessons from Canada for the United States,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C., August 2012, accessed January 15, 2013, available at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/canada-2012-08.pdf.
2. For detailed discussion see John Godard, “The Exceptional Decline of the American Labor Movement,” Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 63, no. 1 (2009):82-108, accessed January 10, 2013, available http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/ilrreview/vol63/iss1/5/; Jon Schmitt and Alexandra Mitukuewicz, “Politics Matter: Changes in Unionization Rates in Rich Countries, 1960–2010,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington DC, November 2011, accessed January 15, 2013, available at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/unions-oecd-2011-11.pdf.
3. Most progressive economists and sociologists in the United States accept such an accord uncritically. The classic statement is David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
4. Richard McIntyre and Michael Hillard, “Capitalist Class Agency and the New Deal Order: Against the Notion of a Limited Capital-Labor Accord,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 45, no. 2 (June 2013): 129–148.
5. Sanford Jacoby, “American Exceptionalism Revisited: The Importance of Management,” in Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers, Sanford Jacoby, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press), 173–200; Wolfgang Streeck and Kozo Yamamura, eds., The Origins of Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan in Comparison (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
6. For a more detailed discussion, see Michael Hillard and Richard McIntyre, “Historically Contingent, Institutionally Specific: Class Struggles and American Employer Exceptionalism in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization,” in Heterodox Macroeconomics: Keynes, Marx, and Globalization, Jonathan P. Goldstein and Michael G. Hillard, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 189–199.
7. The classic treatment is Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, Chap. 10, parts 6 and 7, accessed September 2, 2013, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm. The role of the factory inspectors and middle-class reformers is emphasized in Richard P. McIntyre, Are Worker Rights Human Rights? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), Chap. 7. The alliance among workers, middle-class lawyers, and Southern planters in passing the Wagner Act is a possible, largely unexplored exception.
8. Lichtenstein, 53; Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “Explaining New Deal Labor Policy,” American Political Science Review, 84, no. 4 (December 1990): 1297–1315.
9. John W. Jeffries, “A Third New Deal? Liberal Policy and the American State, 1937–1945,” Journal of Policy History, 8, no. 4 (October 1996): 387–409.
10. G. William Domhoff, “The Wagner Act and Theories of the State: A New Analysis Based on Class-Segment Theory,” Political Power and Social Theory, 6 (1987): 159–185; Theda Skocpol, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics & Society, 10 (March 1980): 155–201; Michael Goldfield, “Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation,” American Political Science Review, 8, no. 4 (1989): 1257–1282; “Explaining New Deal Labor Policy,” American Political Science Review, 8, no. 4 (December 1990): 1298–1314; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: How They Succeed, Why They Fail (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1979); Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1972).
11. Peter Phillips, “The 1934–35 Red Threat and the Passage of the National Labor Relations Act,” Critical Sociology, 20, no. 2 (July 1994): 27–50.
12. Ibid., 43.
13. Goldfield, 1269.
14. Philips, 46
15. Ibid., 47.
16. Bill Winders, “Maintaining the Coalition: Class Coalitions and Policy Trajectories,” Politics and Society, 3, no. 3 (September 2005): 393. In the mid-1930s industrial and craft workers voted together for the Democratic Party, a switch in that industrial workers had previously supported Republicans. The fight between the AFL and CIO would split the labor movement within a few years, but there was unity at the time of Wagner.
17. Whether Wagner received anything beyond passive support from capital is still a matter of controversy. The few capitalists that did express open support were executives of already unionized firms hoping that the unionization of their competitors would level the playing field. Thomas Ferguson claims that some corporate liberals from export-oriented, capital-intensive industries traded off support for Wagner for Roosevelt’s commitment to pursue bilateral free trade agreements, but he provides little evidence. Thomas P. Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization, 3, no.1 (Winter 1984): 41–94. Peter Swenson has argued that some employers gave “signals” to New Deal policymakers that indicated that while they could not publically support Wagner, they could live with it, but once again the evidence is spotty. Peter Swenson, “Varieties of Capitalist Interests: Power, Institutions, and the Regulatory Welfare State in the United States and Sweden,” Studies in American Political Development, 18, no. 1 (April 2004): 1–29.
18. Goldfield, “Explaining New Deal Labor Policy,”1305.
19. See, generally, James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics, and the Law, 1933–1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974).
20. Winders, 416.
21. See Chapter 7 in this book where the hearings that demonstrate this are discussed.
22. Winders, 387–423.
23. Pub. L. 74-198, 49 Stat. 449, codified as amended at 29 U.S.C. § 151–169.
24. On the postbellum South as a form of feudalism, see Serap Kayetkin, “Sharecropping and Feudal Class Processes in the Postbellum Mississippi Delta,” in Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
25. Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, “‘Red’ Unions and ‘Bourgeois’ Contracts?” American Journal of Sociology, 9, no. 5 (March 1991): 1151–1200.
26. Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
27. The most important way in which the independent radicals differed from the Communists was over the Party’s unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Union. Thus when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Party members became vociferous in their support of the war effort, including the alliance with “progressive capital.” In fact, they became so supportive of Roosevelt that they “failed to politically educate millions of ‘new’ workers to the realities of capitalism.” Rosswurm, 10. The Party’s militant secularism inflamed the hostility of Catholic working people. “The most fundamental criticism to be made of the CP and its trade-union cadre is that it failed utterly in its professed mission to build a socialist movement” (ibid., 11). Its penchant for secrecy also undermined movement building in a fundamental way.
28. Ibid., 12.
29. Marxists have long debated the limits that organized labor might be able to impose on capital within the sphere of production. This is a question both of the ability of unions to affect the relations of production on the shop floor and whether the political orientation of union leadership makes a difference. Because the capital–labor relationship is an incomplete contract, the political regulation of the workplace is not fully defined by capitalist relations of production. Regulation is partly accomplished through law, but laws themselves are responses to the class struggle in the workplace and society. The political regime of production is always contingent on a host of other factors. This perspective is most closely associated with Antonio Gramsci, who argued that trade unions take on a determinate historical form only as its members propose the policies and programs that define it. See Frank Annunziato, “Gramsci’s Theory of Trade Unionism,” Rethinking Marxism, 1, no. 2 (1988): 142–164. The evidence presented by Stepan and Zeitlin can be seen as a criticism of Lenin’s pessimistic approach to trade unions.
30. Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
31. H-NET online discussion, 1995, accessed January 12, 2012, available at http://h-net.msu.edu/cgibin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=hlabor&month=9504&week=c&msg=vXMp9oRI4vbGtahoNsUt%2BA&user=&pw=.
32. Christopher Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also James Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 200–225.
33. On the campaign against the board, see Gross, ibid., 151–225; and on the result, see Tomlins, 148–251. See also Karl Klare, “Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937–1941,” Minnesota Law Review, 6, no. 3 (March 1978): 265–340.
34. Stepan and Zeitlin, “Red Unions,” 1184.
35. Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 242.
36. See especially Jacoby.
37. Right wing intellectuals and journalists actively solicited employer support for this new propaganda campaign—figures like Leonard Read, William Baroody, and William Buckley, a story told especially well by Kim Philips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 26–86.
38. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
39. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 67. The two quotes she cites here are from John W. Hill, “Industry’s Iron Curtain,” Public Relations Journal, 2 (November 1946): 3; and “Basic Elements of a Free, Dynamic Society,” Harvard Business Review, 29 (1951): 57.
40. Robert van Horn and Phillip Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 139–180; Philips-Fein.
41. Nelson Lichtenstein; Bethany Moreton; Robert Van Horn, “Jacob Viner’s Critique of Chicago Neo-liberalism,” in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 279–300.
42. Philips-Fein, 41–51.
43. Ibid., 263.
44. Jacoby, 32.
45. Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 67–81.
46. Alexander Cockburn, “How Many Democrats Voted for Taft-Hartley?” Counterpunch, September 6, 2004, accessed September 2, 2013, available at http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/09/06/how-many-democrats-voted-for-taft-hartley/.
47. Winders, 403.
48. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), xv.
49. Nelson Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining: Organized Labor and the Eclipse of Social Democracy in the Postwar Era,” in Fraser and Gerstle, 123.
50. Ibid., 125.
51. Ibid.134
52. Rosswurm.
53. Sharon Strom, “‘We’re No Kitty Foyles’: Organizing Office Workers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1937-1950,” in Women, Work and Protest: A Century of Women’s Labor History, Ruth Milkman, ed. (London: Routledge, 2012), 206–234.
54. The Highlander Folk School (now called the Highlander Research and Education Center) was founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski in Grundy County, Tennessee, as a safe place for workers throughout the South to meet to discuss grievances and to obtain education and training in labor organizing. The Center also saw itself as conserving the indigenous culture of the region. During the 1950s and 1960s, it served as the training ground for many of the leaders of the civil rights movement. It was often the victim of anti-Communist witch hunts.
55. Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History, 7, no. 3 (1988):786–811.
56. Ibid., 787, 799. See also Gross, The Reshaping, 5–41; Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
57. Korstad and Lichtenstein, 811.
58. Lichenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining,” 139.
59. Stepan and Zeitlin, “Bourgeois Unions,” 1191.
60. Cited in Lichtenstein, “From Corporatism to Collective Bargaining,” 142.
61. Ibid., 142, quoting English political scientist Vivian Vale.
62. Ibid., 144.
63. Of course the expansion of social spending in the 1960s largely benefited middle-income households, especially through Medicare, but this was not always the perception.
64. Philips-Fein, 140–142.
65. Fraser and Gerstle, xxiii.
66. These problems include unpaid overtime, unsafe working conditions, violation of child labor laws, etc. See Charles Duhigg and David Barbosa, “In China, Human Costs Are Built into an iPad,” New York Times, January 25, 2012, accessed April 1, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
67. Keith Bradsher and Charles Duhigg, “Signs of Changes Taking Hold in Electronics Factories in China,” New York Times, December 26, 2012, accessed April 1, 2012, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?pagewanted=all.
68. Julius G. Getman, Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
69. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Membership, 2011,” USDL-12-0094, accessed January 15, 2013, available at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2012/ted_20120130.htm; and Gerald Friedman, “Labor Unions in the United States,” February 1, 2010, accessed January 15, 2013, available at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/friedman.unions.us.
70. Richard B. Freeman, “Do Workers Still Want Unions? More Than Ever.” EPI Briefing Paper #182, February 22, 2007, Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, accessed January 10, 2013, available at http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp182/bp182.pdf.
71. Friedman.