On the Militancy of Labor in the US
Stephen Greenhouse’s otherwise effective synopsis of the history of U.S. labor militancy (“In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse” April 5, 2009, Week in Review, The New York Times) suffers from a simple but profound omission. A key factor explaining the decline of labor militancy since the halcyon days of the 1930s and 1940s has been American employers’ virulent repression of labor militancy and unions per se that transformed the character of American labor as an institution as well as U.S. workers’ political culture, and made such basic tools of labor militancy as a legal strike a suicidal act.
As recent scholars of the history of U.S. labor relations have shown, the uniquely (to the U.S.) large industrial employers of this country mobilized against unions beginning in the 1940s on a scale matched by no other advanced industrial nation on Earth. Riding the wave of anti-communism, the militant leaders of U.S. labor were routed out of and expunged from U.S. unions, including the destruction of most of the eleven major industrial unions ejected from the Congress of Industrial Unions in 1949 for having allegedly communist leadership. Employers and employer associations financed a massive ideological campaign against unions that featured the hard sell that only a union-free “free enterprise” economy was consistent with the values of an anti-communist America at the height of the Cold War.
Finally and most importantly, U.S. employers have attacked and killed off militancy, especially legal strikes, through a virulent five-decade campaign to destroy private sector unions that has been an immense success. The cornerstones of this effort have been the transformation of the strike into management a tool to break a union; as University of Berkeley scholar John Logan has shown, American employers discovered that by using permanent replacement workers, companies could deploy a “management strike” provoked by unreasonable demands on unions for give backs. In such a strike non-union workers, who eventually are permitted under U.S. labor law to vote the union out, replace striking workers. The dozens of national management strikes in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s convinced American unions that the strike – their “one true weapon” in bargaining for decent wages, hours, and conditions – had become a sure path to suicide. So, American unionized workers have smartly stopped striking, but they have lost most of their power to bargain on an equal economic basis with their employers. In turn, non-union companies have spent tens millions of dollars a year using consultants to bend and break the law to make it impossible to use existing national labor law to organize new unions. Directly using the threat of eventual permanent replacement in management strike has been central to the successful ability to deprive American workers of an effective right to organize new unions.
We do not know if the one-time militancy of U.S. workers might have become an enduring tradition in the absence of decades of huge and unrivaled repression. More importantly, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act may both lead to a revival of unions, and also a legal framework in which labor militancy is no longer a sure act of self-destruction. Given the depths of the current recession and the historic role that labor played in shaping an effective recovery from the Great Depression, it would be an experiment worth waging.
Michael Hillard
Professor of Economics, University of Southern Maine
