Three Theories on the Decline of American Trade Unions – and Their Implications; Part I – External Conditions

The decline of the economic and political power of American unions and, more broadly, the American working class – intertwined as cause and effect – has now extended at least fifty years. Realistically, the downturn probably came with the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) and the anti-communist purges that followed, but the negative results were not immediately apparent. A good marker is labor historian David Brody’s collection of essays spanning 15 years, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle, which displays Brody’s transition from calm assurance in 1964 to later alarm and dismay.

Alongside the problem of quantity – how to spur recruitment, what is called union density – is that of quality – the strategies and tactics that can help build power directly in the workplace, across bargaining tables, and in political arenas. An increase in the numbers of workers in largely ineffective unions would be of limited consolation. Organizing also means encouraging more vigorous and successful class struggle by existing but inert unions.

Labor activists, leftists, and academics have engaged in a decades-long dialogue, asking ‘what went wrong?’ and ‘what should be done?’ Three distinct accounts have emerged about the fall of the house of labor. The first emphasizes changing external conditions – primarily, more powerful employers and a more hostile state. The second argues that unions did not adapt to these changed circumstances with new strategies and tactics. The third adds tendencies toward hierarchy, top-down control, and the abandonment of militancy that emerged even when unions seemed more powerful.

External Conditions

A century ago, Selig Perlman A Theory of the Labor Movement focused on the constraints on the ambitions of unions and workers deriving from employers’ economic and political power. The rise of powerful employers, he argued, meant that only the niche, and mostly craft, groups that, for one reason or another, were able to exclude lower-skill worker-competitors (i.e., to restrict labor supply), could maintain viable trade unions. Since this was so, explained Perlman disciple Philip Taft (“A Rereading of Selig Perlman’s A Theory of the Labor Movement,” Industrial & Labor Relations Review October 1950), the spread of unionization in the 1930s–40s to the semi-skilled and unskilled industrial workforce, and in the 1960s–70s to the public sector, could only be understood by an unusual period of increased government support and protection for those efforts.

That support, however, came with institutional restrictions. The most important were the grievance and arbitration system devised to resolve disputes during World War II, the 1947 Taft-Hartley revisions of the National Labor Relations Act, and a host of judicial rulings limiting union action. Together, they created the “web of rules” that outlawed or impaired some of unions’ most potent pressure tactics – among them, secondary boycotts, sit-down strikes, mass picketing, and shop-floor job actions – and made new organizing far more difficult. The courts also restricted the issues over which a union could demand bargaining or seek legal remedy, such as decisions about where to operate, close a business (even if due solely to anti-union animus), and subcontracting. Then, stepped-up corporate attacks and economic forces such as globalization and capital flight added to labor’s distress. And, most recently, we are back to the true animus of the state that existed prior to the New Deal.

Public employees, who now represent half of all unionized workers, additionally face a patchwork of state regulations which, in most cases, further restrict unions’ range of legally-allowed recourse. New York State’s Taylor Law is not unusual in its prohibition of job actions and strikes even when a contract expires. It levies penalties for rule-breaking not only against the union (as in the NLRA) but individual workers as well. Taylor prohibits negotiations about many basic work conditions. New York’s teachers, for example, cannot bargain to reduce class size. Most recently, in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has undercut public employee unions’ finances by allowing workers to opt out of union membership and union dues requirements.

Academics of the 1950s saw the web of rules as a positive development, lessening class struggle and incorporating American workers into a pluralist society of give and take. (For an overview of this school see Richard Hyman, Marxism and the Sociology of Trade Unionism, pp. 21-25.)

Modern-day adherents of this school such as Jefferson Cowie (Staying Alive is his famous book, but a shorter version can be found in “Reframing the New Deal,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Vol. 17, No.1, 2016) are far more pessimistic about the consequences, but see few or no prospects that more vigorous union efforts might reverse the trend-line. Debbie Goldman compares two simultaneous Communication Workers of America campaigns against hostile employers and finds the difference between success and failure was “the regulatory regime and the degree of market competition,” not union strategy (“Dialing for Change: Organizing Call Center Workers in the 1990s,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History December 2021). For them, any rebirth of labor must begin in legislative, not union, halls. The Fight for $15 was an example of the Service Employees International Union forging a political rather than a workplace response to low-wages. Those New York teachers won a legislative lowering of class sizes.

Certainly, political, economic, and legal developments beginning in the neoliberal era have imposed heavy burdens on unions. Yet, for all of this, unions and workers continue to seek better wages and working conditions. Both historically and in the present-day, the choices they make matter to their success – or failure. I’ll return next week with more about that.

Harvard To Remove Black Lives Matter Message From Biology Professors’ Office Windows

I got this link from Hamilton Nolan, recently my favorite substack.