As labor stands on wobbly legs

Class warfare lives in America. The problem is that almost everywhere it is a one-sided affair. Despite its downsides, the Cold War tended to keep labor relations on an even keel. Perhaps emboldened by the collapse of the Soviet Union -- which, aside from calamitous characteristics, helped inhibit some of the most egregious features of unrestrained capitalism -- employers have conducted a many-sided offensive against the labor movement’s historic gains: substantial wage and salary increases, health benefits without huge deductibles, even the weekend, the product of labor’s now abandoned struggle for shorter hours. Despite the widely hyped “prosperity” of the 1990s, real wages declined about 25% and household earnings stayed afloat only because still greater numbers of women entered the paid workforce.

Industrial workers have experienced globalization firsthand. Since 1973, when the doctrine of “free trade” became official policy, the United States has lost more than 9 million factory jobs. Enabled by bilateral free trade agreements such as those negotiated with China during the Nixon and Reagan years and the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico enacted under the Clinton administration, employers have closed thousands of U.S. industrial plants and reopened them, without penalty, in low-wage countries such as Mexico, the Philippines and China, moves that have resulted in 39 consecutive months of job losses, a total of nearly 3 million relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs. Unlike the 1980s and 1990s, when services expanded faster than production jobs declined, service employment has stagnated since 2000. Many service companies are demanding that workers take salary reductions, often couched as increased employee contributions to health and pension funds. What is at stake is a U.S. standard of living that had improved steadily since World War II due, in no small measure, to the rise of the labor movement. But as unions have declined in power and influence in recent years, living standards for many workers -- not only the poor -- are being eroded.

Unbound by union contracts, some crisis-plagued corporations, such as Enron, tried to maintain profits by illegally dipping into their employees’ health and pension funds. In union workplaces, however, employers must negotiate salary and benefit reductions. For example, workers at embattled airlines such as United that have threatened to declare bankruptcy have reluctantly granted concessions rather than face long-term joblessness. Others, such as General Electric and the Pacific Maritime Assn., whose member companies run the ports, backed off when workers threatened to strike rather than yield to employer demands to reduce benefits. In one of the largest instances of worker resistance to concessionary bargaining since the early 1980s, 59,000 union workers mounted picket lines in a strike and lockout with three giant grocery chains in Central and Southern California. The workers oppose the stores’ demands for health-benefit reductions and a two-tiered hiring system. The chains claim they are being squeezed by the giant nonunion Wal-Mart, a company whose wages and benefits rank far below union standards. The Wal-Martization of America would seem to be a symptom of a race to the bottom that has no end.

Into this grim environment comes Dan Clawson’s “The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements” to suggest that the labor movement, now almost flat on its back, may revive. A self-described “incurable optimist,” the University of Massachusetts sociology professor begins with a persuasive analysis of the double-edged U.S. labor relations system. A centerpiece of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act recognized for the first time workers’ rights to form unions of their own choosing. It established a federally supervised procedure for enabling workers to vote for union representation. As a result, the labor movement, which had been reduced to less than 10% of the labor force by 1933, grew to 35% 20 years later. At that time, few public-sector employees had bargaining rights. Clawson argues that labor’s growth entailed entering a “social compact” with management and the government. That compact has restrained worker militancy through labor agreements that sharply limited the right to strike and saddled workers and their unions with a slow, sometimes interminable procedure to settle grievances. Perhaps most important, many unions have been reduced from organs of combat to insurance companies and social welfare agencies for their members. The last 50 years have been marked by the growth of a powerful full-time bureaucracy that gradually assumed most union functions and turned the labor movement into a series of service organizations whose members have become clients rather than decision makers.

In the 1960s and 1970s, even as unionism in the private sector slowly declined, unions grew to represent 37% of employees in public-sector and nonprofit agencies, particularly in healthcare. Globalization and the 180-degree turn in the political environment combined to make the 1980s and 1990s disastrous years for organized labor. As economic, technological and organizational changes created industries and occupations -- and destroyed or weakened industries in which unions had built their power -- union membership in the private sector plummeted to less than 10% by 2003. The powerful United Auto Workers shed about a third of its 1.2 million members, and other metalworkers’ unions in steel and machine tools lost more than half of their membership. Over the last two decades, the flight of the bulk of the apparel industry has reduced the two powerful unions in the needle trades to skeletal institutions.

Rather than mounting aggressive organizing drives to move into new job sectors, most unions clung to their traditional base and their service regime. Finally, after the rout of unions during the Reagan years and the Democrats’ loss of Congress, a substantial group of top union leaders swept the sitting administration from power in 1995 and elevated to the AFL-CIO presidency John Sweeney, leader of the fastest-growing national union, the Service Employees International Union. Sweeney pledged to initiate a new wave of organizing to restore labor’s once formidable strength. But eight years later, with only a few victories on a par with its dramatic organization of 74,000 Los Angeles-area home healthcare workers, and with the return of a pro-business Republican White House, Sweeney has all but abandoned the organizing drive to champion returning the Democrats to the presidency. Relying chiefly on electoral solutions to labor’s problems has meant that most unions have relegated organizing to the back burner once again.

Clawson has two main arguments for reviving the labor movement: The prevailing top-down approach cannot restore union power, and the traditional breach between labor and the new social movements, such as those of feminism and black freedom, must end; unions must “fuse” with these movements. He offers a rich stew of case studies and reports on creative and successful organizing tactics: the Service Employees’ Justice for Janitors campaign, largely among Mexican immigrants in Southern California; the proliferation of “Workers Centers,” especially on the two coasts; and the fight of thousands of clerical workers for gender equity at Yale and Harvard universities. He shows that each of these labor struggles inevitably addressed gender and racial equality. Perhaps his most persuasive example is among the least known, the alliance between labor and the community in Stamford, Conn.

Stamford, an affluent city of corporate headquarters and bedrooms for employees of Wall Street, stands out because it is an unlikely site for unionism. Nonetheless, four unions have joined together to organize the lowest-paid workers in healthcare facilities, hotels and janitorial services. Rather than focus exclusively on workplace issues such as low wages and intolerable working conditions, organizers found that in this high-rent area many people could not afford to live where they worked. Union representatives joined with churches and other community groups to fight for housing that working people could afford instead of the local government’s plan to reward luxury-housing developers. In time the unions -- and not only the officials -- became trusted and reliable partners in a community-based housing coalition, a status that helped their organizational efforts across the board. In an unusual display of strategic intelligence, by reviving an old idea -- that workers need decent places to live, good schools and healthcare -- the unions were able to recruit thousands of new members and win many new collective bargaining agreements.

But apart from a few university examples and a brief discussion of a campaign among healthcare workers in Rhode Island, Clawson’s evidence for a resurgence of unions relies almost exclusively on labor’s efforts to organize service industries dominated by low-wage workers. Although there is no question that the AFL-CIO took a giant step when it, and some affiliates, reversed its history of indifference to the working poor and poured resources into organizing among blacks and Latinos, the fate of the unions cannot rest solely with the disenfranchised. Missing from Clawson’s narrative is any discussion, let alone illustrations, of recent national efforts to organize physicians and computer technicians in the Pacific Northwest and industrial workers in the South. Clawson’s emphasis on the disenfranchised is consistent with the prevailing populist tendency of the left, which tends to ignore or underestimate the significance of problems faced by technical and professional groups on the grounds that they are “privileged” in comparison with the poor. This blindness fails to come to grips with the actual trends in the national and global economy, where knowledge and knowledge producers have taken center stage. For example, it is not accidental that the most highly unionized sector in the United States is education, a fact not addressed in this book. Nor is Clawson particularly interested in existing intra-union rank-and-file insurgencies. Curiously, the most celebrated and successful national bottom-up insurgency in recent decades, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, receives little more than a footnote. Nor does he discuss examples of local-level membership revolts against established leadership in favor of democratic and militant unionism. For all his advocacy of grass-roots democratic unionism, his examples are tied to what the leadership has initiated.

Clawson is right in contending that the labor movement’s survival, let alone revival, depends on unions transforming themselves into rank-and-file controlled, militant social as well as economic organizations that undertake community and workplace struggles. But it is a stretch from his half-dozen illustrations to say this portends a new upsurge. In his concluding chapter, Clawson’s incurable optimism inevitably succumbs to a heavy dose of realism. He acknowledges that “many existing unions are weak and ineffective” and that their members see the “union” as separate from themselves. And he points out that the social movements are as distant from one another as they are from the labor movement. Since Clawson renounces the view, prevalent among many, that all we can count on is incremental change, he wonders whether the upsurge will result from external factors such as an economic catastrophe -- as it did during the Great Depression -- or an internal upheaval within labor’s ranks. History suggests that both are necessary.

Economic catastrophe is never enough to spur labor insurgency. Seventy years ago, the labor movement’s great successes in organizing in the mass-production industries occurred under conditions of mass unemployment and widespread misery. But there were other reasons: the leadership of a few visionaries among labor’s top echelon and the accommodation of Roosevelt and the New Deal in the form of new labor legislation. Yet much of the actual thinking as well as the day-to-day work was done by a small but surprisingly effective band of reviled radicals, especially in the auto, mining, electrical and meatpacking industries, many of whom were linked to communist organizations. Radicals in transportation industries helped lead general strikes in San Francisco and Minneapolis and played a key role in organizing a major Toledo autoworkers’ strike. These events electrified the entire labor movement, but, since they succeeded despite the refusal of the AFL, Teamsters and Longshore union leaders to support them, the three victories struck fear in the hearts of the Roosevelt administration, local and state politicians and the established unions that a rebel labor movement might challenge the status quo. In the 1960s, black and female activists, many of them radicals who had cut their political teeth in the civil rights and feminist movements, led the effort to organize millions of public employees and won contracts with federal, state and local governments in which, for the first time, the rights of women and racial minorities were accorded a prominent place.

The conditions that have produced the United States’ 20th century global dominance are disappearing rapidly. Thus far many have accepted the consequences -- rising unemployment and economic insecurity -- without visible complaint. One of the best features of Clawson’s analysis is that he pays serious attention to globalization and resistance as a potential source of change. Perhaps the growing global justice movement, which includes some industrial unions such as the steelworkers, as well as students, feminists and environmentalists, will help spur a new upsurge from the outside. Such hopes notwithstanding, until an independent radicalism emerges parallel to those of the 1930s and 1960s to shake things up within union ranks, in today’s intensifying anti-labor climate, organized labor will be lucky to tread water.