Thus the union idea has been devalued in two dramatic ways. To the extent that the courts continued to honor an outmoded set of pluralist assumptions governing the presumptively equal bargaining power of unions and their corporate adversaries, they generated a false equality between labor and capital….But at the same time, as both the courts and popular opinion have privileged a rights based model of industrial justice, these collective institutions have lost their capacity to command the loyalty of their membership, upon which their strength depends. Individualistic, rights-based assumptions therefore replaced group pluralist ones and devalued the very idea of union solidarity.
- Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Unions
It seems as if Litchenstein is positing a when "group, pluralist" assumptions dominated society(?), industrial justice(?), and/or popular opinion. Yes?
ReplyDeleteWhen was this magical time? It may have existed for very brief times and/or in discrete locales, but I am unaware of a time when the US as a whole was in favor of a "group, pluralist" outlook. Even at the height of the labor movement, it can easily be argued that "loyalty of the membership" was gained more through phenomenal (bread and butter) success at the bargaining table and because unions didn't ask their members to do too much more than they were comfortable with. Lord knows, the experiment with extend the benefits of group pluralism to blacks ended right quick.
When is this golden time that Nelson posits.
And sorry if my personal dislike for the man shades what I hope is a lively discussion. I'm especially not trying to make in comments about academics criticizing unions for not living up to their (academic's) Marxist ideals when said academics have never been in a union and have no idea what they are talking about.
Nuncle,
ReplyDelete"Pluralism" is a slippery word in this work, which appears in numerous contexts and evokes a really specific tendency within Labor Liberalism. Think Walter Reuther after his socialist phase.
You wouldn't know it from the out-of-context bit i quoted above, but Lichtenstein in talking about "liberal pluralism" less as a _popular_ idea and more as a guiding ideology for union leadership during the thirty year legacy of labor-management-state collaboration coming out of WWII.
During this period labor reached its highest heights of density and overall membership (though at different times); COLA, arbitration, and collective bargaining dominated became normalized forms of "industrial relations." Strikes persisted, but wildcatting was kept down by international leadership. The union shop was upheld by the courts, but the courts also held up the proprietary authority of internationals over rank and file autonomy. Meanwhile the National Right-to-Work Committee was emboldened by Taft-Hartley, passing several right-to-work referenda. Taft-Hartley also planted the seeds for Kentucky River, eliminated the secondary strike - you don't need to hear this stuff from me. It's all just to say, "these were pretty fucking ambivalent (best of/worst of) times for labor." And Lichtenstein is himself ambivalent while evoking its successes, since he thinks it planted the seed for the post-1973 assault that we associate with neoliberalism.
Perhaps disproportionate attention is paid to the clause in Taft-Hartley which forced unionists to sign anti-communist affadavits... Lichtenstein allows as much. But he also labors to make the point that the liberal, anti-communist strain in the CIO had more to do with this language than did any fledgling McCarthyism.
Summing up - Lichtenstein isn't implying there was a ready-made proletariat that was somehow overlooked. In fact, he's not talking about popular opinions of workers AT ALL, so much as he's evoking a left-social-democratic, left-er-than-liberal tendency that encompassed staff organizers and rank and file organizers who ranged from Wobs to communists to socialists to whatever. This tendency existed, but Lichtenstein's whole point is that it NEVER was dominant.
Thank you for indulging my labor digressions... it's like I'm outsourcing my dissertation to you.
Forgive my lack of definition/theoretical sophistication (really!); it was not much use to me studying medical history in the nineteenth century.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that you mention an anti-communist wing of the CIO. I know the CIO as the communist-sympathetic wing of the labor movement. Wasn't the T-H provision designed to crush the CIO unions and make way for the Teamsters, et al?
Which puts me in mind of the old historical arguments regarding the "great men" and the "structure"s. The history of the AFL-CIO/CTW split could be written any number of ways. How much of that split was personal? How much of labor history comes down to personal interactions that cannot even be explained? How many times did you vote "yah" on something, just because were tired of hearing people talk about it? Know what I mean?
And then there's the notion that the labor movement was "doomed" by the tripartite love affair of the WWII era. Seems then that this, ultimately, was a bad idea for the labor movement, but what was the other option? Continued ad hoc survival? European models do not really seem to apply, so what was the way?
Nuncle: there were plenty of commies in the CIO working as ground-level organizers or the contemporary equivalent of Salts. In fact, there's an amazing body of work debating a) whether or not these commies were actual CPUSA members and b) whether their being members means they REALLY answered to the politbureau in Moscow. it's an interesting debate, but i am not enough of an historian to say anything authoratative about it.
ReplyDeletethere were ALSO some (non-Stalinist) socialists in the CIO leadership who worked very effectively with Reuther et al. in leveraging New Deal redistribution and policing manufacturing during the war boom. there was intense wildcatting in 1945-1946, for example, that enraged the Internationals because it seemed to undermine their credibility.
as to whether or not labor's post-War strategy was inevitable
or a "sell-out" - well, I don't think those respective strains of defeatism and moralism do justice to the historic struggles of 20th century industrial unions. but i agree with lichtenstein that there was a weird, historic conjuncture in which a lot more than COLA and collective bargaining seemed possible for workers who sought to organize themselves and their social relationships. and that's why i'm so fascinated by the "post-War industrial-labor relations: crap/not crap" question.
(remember hear that i'm speaking with all the certitude of a dilettante whose read maybe 3-5 different takes on this event, no more...)
yep, when you look and see that the immediate post-war years were the most strike-filled years in American history, there does seem reason to believe that the working people of America were looking for something more than wages and benefits. Something more than security. The question is whether they could have gotten it. The gov't is a key piece of that tripartite. Maybe it would have sided with labor, but since it had historically only been used as a force to crush labor in the US, the better, safer bet may have been alliance.
ReplyDeleteIf labor had backed Wallace instead of Truman, Dewey would have won and unions would have been crushed. Labor as we know it wouldn't exist. Would the crushing have sparked something better? Fuck knows. Well, at least I'll admit to not knowing, which is where the theorists and I part company.
This thread is awesome. And I probably just sucked away some of its awesometuity with such a banal remark.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if someday people will be valorizing Andy Stern's vision of labor-management partnership. Maybe they already are? He thinks of himself as an industrial unionist, no?
ReplyDeleteI am very sympathetic to the idea of fewer unions representing more workers specific to their industries, and even sympathetic-er to the idea that there's a place for labor in govt economic policy decisions. For example, I would love to tie wages to prices once again. A socialist and a social scientist, I'm all for macro-level planning, as long as its the right people planning and they're held accountable by more than the threat of a handjob, which as far as I can tell is about as tough as it gets within the current SEC-FED-Wall Street revolving door scenario of the day. Sometimes I even feel sorry for manufacturing capital, finance has this shit so sewn up!
Conversely, I appreciate the "rank and file-ism" of Lichtenstein and Moody as a unionist. And I don't know how to resolve the "dissonance" involved in narrating labor's long march to peace (take, for example, the 1950 "Treaty of Detroit" with 20% wage increases) without allusion to the threat and/or legacy of labor unrest.
Take, for example, our social democratic friends in old Europe. Labor has a seat at the table in those governments, but has shown nothing like the sort of militancy we've seen in the USA. And now that neoliberalism is eroding social democratic gains in Europe, where is the radicalism necessary to win them back or even move forward?
I'm all for macro-level planning, as long as its the right people planning
ReplyDeleteAs my good buddy Han Solo said, that's the real trick now isn't it?
I've often gotten the sense that some disappointment over the tripartite is that labor stopped being a force that could possibly bring about socialism in the US or radically reshape American politics. Obviously, the strains of radicalism and third-partyism run through American history and often touch on the labor movement (although I am persuaded that the Populist movement of the 1880s+ was not one of them), but I think that we run into a real problem with the "when" of this idealized revolution. 1932 seems like the only time in American history when there was viable chance for a more radical third party to capture the presidency, but there doesn't seem to have been much of a challenge electorally speaking. (Am I overlooking something here?) Perhaps if labor had remained aloof from FRD we wouldn't have had Wagner and all sorts of possibilities open up, but unless my FDR hagiography misleads me, he was pretty popular president who would have been tough to defeat during the Depression and the War.
I have also seen it argued that the "no-strike" pledge during WWII was a mistake, as it wasted labor's best change at real change and lead to the post-war no-strike clauses in CBAs (and legally) and put unions in the position of enforcing worker non-militancy. Not sure I know enough to agree/not-agree...mayeb I could blog about that.