Thoughts on Labor Day 2007

Melvyn Dubofsky

Democratic Left Fall 2007

Now that another Labor Day has come and gone, it seems a good time to assess the state of workers and unions in the twenty-first century United States. Any such assessment must register greater liabilities than assets. Union membership as a proportion of the employed labor force has fallen to levels unseen since the the depression of 1893-97, the deepest trough in union density prior to the present. Wage and salary earners have fallen on hard times during the past six years as real wages and earnings stagnated. Workers have held their own materially only by laboring longer or sending more family members into the labor force. Along with stagnation of wages, such protections as health insurance, guaranteed pension benefits and job security have all been weakened or vanished. All this while the Haves accumulated greater income and wealth.

It seems as if I am reliving the 1980s, when, at numerous conferences and symposia, I compared the 1980s to the 1920s. Now (1984-8 as then (1920s), I would tell the audience, an enfeebled labor movement had lost members and influence as its appeal waned in the golden glow emanating from the new “welfare capitalism” with a conscience (or Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America”). Now as then, I would observe, public policy intensified the growth of social and economic inequality. And I would close my talks and comments with the words uttered by the labor economist and president-elect of the American Economic Association, George Barnett, in 1932. “I see no reason to believe,” he declared, “that American trade unionism will so revolutionize itself within a short period as to become in the next decade a more potent social influence than it has been in the past decade.”

Between Barnett’s words to the American Economic Association in 1932 and the revival of the labor movement and worker militancy, only two years intervened. In the two decades that have elapsed since I compared the 1980s to the 1920s, far less has changed. We have experienced a series of pseudo- or non-events, epiphenomena that have drawn attention and publicity yet altered little. In 1995 a palace revolt brought new leaders to command the AFL-CIO, labor insurgents who promised to revitalize a stagnant labor movement, to devote greater resources to unionizing the unorganized, and to raise union density. In 1997 sympathetic progressives and leftists formed Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ) in an effort to foster support for the John Sweeney-led AFL-CIO. Commenting on the new alliance between unionists and intellectuals, the sociologist Daniel Bell noted, “for the intellectuals it’s a lot of wishful thinking…. The real test will be whether labor has the ability to expand its numbers. Simply becoming more rhetorical and becoming more active politically is not in and of itself enough.” How right he was!

The Sweeney AFL-CIO and its supporters failed to staunch the persistent decline in union density. So badly did they fail that by 2005 another group of union insurgents within AFLCIO arose to challenge the Sweeney leadership. Led by Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union and Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm of UNITE-HERE (all three Ivy League graduates), the new rebels demanded that Sweeney devote the bulk of AFL-CIO financial resources to organizing and to restructuring the labor movement around a small core of mega-unions. When Sweeney and his allies rebuffed such demands, Stern, et al., did a collective John L. Lewis, walking out of AFL-CIO to create the Change-to-Win (CtW) coalition. Unfortunately, Stern has been no Lewis, nor has CtW resembled the CIO in its impact on workers and the labor movement. In the two plus years since its founding, CtW, like Sweeney and SAWSJ, has failed to reverse the persistent decline of union density and influence.

To understand why that is so, we must separate evanescent events from long-term patterns. The decline in union density and influence has occurred relentlessly for more than half a century. Moreover, it has resulted from fundamental changes in the structure of the economy, the composition of the labor force, and shifting patterns of national and global economics. Productive, industrial, or manual labor, once the core area of union strength, has diminished as service and sales labor, rarely sources of union strength, have grown exponentially. A labor force and its union members once composed predominantly of white, male, U.S.-born workers has changed to a labor force diversified by gender, ethnicity (race), and place of birth (immigrants, legal and illegal). The prototypical single male primary breadwinner of the affluent post-war decades has been a disappearing species reintegrated into a family-wage economy where multiple wage-earners, including working mothers, are necessary in order to maintain a decent standard of living. Over the past 50 years, employ- ment and social security have diminished, health insurance has become less available and less generous, and defined ben- efit pensions have become the exception rather than the rule. To compound labor’s difficulties within the United States, population and economic growth shifted from union strong- holds in the Northeast and upper Middle West to the non- union and anti-union South and Southwest. Globally, the United States lost market share in high value-added indus- trial production to better-designed products from European and East Asian competitors, and in low added-value goods (textiles, clothing, mass-produced electronics parts) to devel- oping nations with surpluses of cheap labor – places to which U.S. manufacturers also off-shored their production facilities at the expense of domestic jobs.

The one exception to the rule of diminishing job security, dissolving health and pension benefits and plummeting union membership has been among employees in the federal gov- ernment and in those states traditionally receptive to unionism and that have legitimated union representation and collective bargaining for public employees. Absent these, employment insecurity has become the rule and the ability to maintain an adequate standard of living a never-ending struggle. The relative compression of earnings and incomes during the first half of the post-World War II years has given way to a widening gap between the top 1 percent of income-earners and everybody else, especially the bottom 40 percent of wage-earners.

Never has economic inequality been so enormous. How do we reverse the dynamics that over a half century have decimated unions, produced insecurity and misery for millions of working people, and created the most inegali- tarian society since the late nineteenth century’s “age of excess?” We certainly don’t want another great depression or world war, cataclysms today more likely to lead to authori- tarian movements and governments than to New Deal social democracies. George Barnett’s prophecy of 1932 seems quite apropos to the world of the year 2007. Neither the Sweeney palace coup nor the Stern secession has revitalized a dormant labor movement as Lewis and CIO did in 1935-37.

So what is to be done? How do we raise the collective “we” above the singular “me”? How do we reweave the fabric of a labor movement shredded by immigration, gender, race, and conflicting cultures? Here I can offer no answers, only ask the readers of Democratic Leftthe readers to suggest their own alternatives and to debate among themselves how to reverse fifty years of debilitating historical change, and to thrust their answers into the national political and ideological arenas.

Melvyn Dubofsky is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at SUNY Binghamton. He is the author and editor of numerous books on American labor history.