Site icon Fabius Maximus website

What unions did for America. We should miss them.

Larry Kummer, Editor
Labor Unions

Summary: Americans consider a prosperous middle class to be our just due. We forgot how generations of union activists helped create it. The middle class existed for only a few generations, and survived the crushing of unions by only a few decades. On this Labor Day let’s remember the lost history of the union movement, learn from it – and do better in the future.

 

The rise and fall of unions.

In the mid-1970s Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) was a key part of the labor movement. Its graduates were the vanguard of the labor movement – trained to continue the progress of the previous 110 years. The progress that had played a large role in building America’s large middle class. The ILR students I knew were idealistic, hard-working, and confident they were on the winning side (it was the 1970s).

The ILR students were trained in the social and political sciences, and in business. They did not know they should have been studying strategy and tactics from the West Point curriculum. Corporate leaders had decided to roll back the New Deal, and breaking unions was a key part of that. War, of a sorts, had been declared – an undeclared war, lavishly financed by patient capital, and one executed by people as talented as those from Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Forty years later the union movement is broken, with the last bastions – such as government employees – now under attack. It was one of the first institutions to fall in the ongoing collapse of America’s institutions (see A new, dark picture of America’s future).

The rise of America’s middle class

“To remember the loneliness, the fear and the insecurity of men who once had to walk alone in huge factories, beside huge machines. To realize that labor unions have meant new dignity and pride to millions of our countrymen. To be able to see what larger pay checks mean, not to a man as an employee, but as a husband and as a father. To know these things is to understand what American labor means.”

— Adlai Stevenson’s speech to the American Federation of Labor in NYC on 22 Sept. 1952.

The middle class was not a gift to us from the Blue Fairy. Instead of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, workers mobilized against their employers. It took generations after the Civil War to build America’s middle class, and unions were a large factor making it happen. They provided organization, political muscle, money for research, and trained people to counter the massive institutional power of corporations.

It was a long bloody struggle, For a blow-by-blow of unions’ rise see this series by Erik Loomis (Assoc. Prof of History, U RI). The toll paid by union members – in time, work, and often blood – is as much a cost of building America as that paid by the members of our armed forces. Here are some of the battles in this long struggle.

Struggles during the long decline.

In response corporations organized cartels to fight their workers and raise prices for their customers. They bought politicians in bulk. This was part of their plan to roll back the New Deal. It has been very successful

Throwing away the gains from 110 years of struggle

Gains from generations of struggle were lost carelessly in a generation. Many unions were internally weaker than they looked at their peak, with widespread corruption, stupid and greedy leaders, and infiltrated by organized crime. This made the successful counter-revolution by corporations much easier.

As a sign of their brazen return to power, mega-corps have re-instituted illegal wage cartels: such as those reveal among technology companies and entertainment companies – plus those we don’t know about (these are easy to hide if done informally). What will America look after another generation of corporate attacks on workers?

The fall of unions was a major factor undermining the middle class.

Since 1970 wages have been falling as a share of Gross Domestic Income (GDI); since 1990 profits are rising. See the graphs below. The reasons are complex, the result has by now become unmistakable: a shift of our national income from return on labor to return on capital. Since the nation’s wealth is so highly concentrated, the result is rising inequality of income.

The actual decline of workers’ pay is worse than shown in this graph, since these “wages” include the vast sums paid to senior corporate managers – sums beyond anything seen until 1980s. Click to enlarge.

Profits as a share of Gross Domestic Income fell for generations, reversing after 1990. Since then every day is Christmas for plutocrats! Click to enlarge.

 

For More Information

Vital to remember: “The Myth of the Middle Class” by Alan Nasser (professor emeritus of political economy, Evergreen State College) at CounterPunch. Most Americans have been poor since the 1% took control in the late 19th century, crushing the independent craftsmen and farmers with frequent and long depressions. The post-WWII era is an exception.

Also see “Bargaining for the American Dream; What Unions do for Mobility” by Richard Freeman et al at the Center for American Progress.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about unions, about ways to reform America, and especially these posts about the building of a New America on the ruins of the America-that-once-was …

  1. Why Americans should love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – we live there,
  2. The new American economy: concentrating business power to suit an unequal society.
  3. Public employee unions – an anvil chained to the Democratic Party.
  4. Why the 1% is winning, and we are not – They are smart, organized, and have planned how to win.
  5. Before you celebrate Labor Day, look at the reality of America’s workers.
  6. Much of what we love about America was true only for a moment.
  7. We played while the 1% ran a revolution, quietly.

How to destroy unions: the book

“Against Labor:
How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism.

Editors Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson.

Aailable at Amazon.

Review by Jeffrey Sklansk, author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920.

“The decline of organized labor in recent decades is often attributed to globalization, financialization, and right-wing politics. But the compelling essays in this important volume show that the limits to workers’ collective power stem more basically from the concerted anti-union efforts of their employers dating back to the nineteenth century. Chronicling how capitalists have effectively forged a class-conscious social movement ‘against labor,’ these critical case studies make a vital contribution to the history of capitalism while illuminating the challenges facing workers today.”

A description from the publisher ….

“Against Labor highlights the tenacious efforts by employers to organize themselves as a class to contest labor. Ranging across a spectrum of understudied issues, essayists explore employer anti-labor strategies and offer incisive portraits of people and organizations that aggressively opposed unions. Other contributors examine the anti-labor movement against a backdrop of larger forces, such as the intersection of race and ethnicity with anti-labor activity, and anti-unionism in the context of neoliberalism.

“A timely and revealing collection, Against Labor deepens our understanding of management history and employer activism and their metamorphic effects on workplace and society.”

 

Exit mobile version