| Book Review | Labour History, 86 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: a Century of American Labor, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002. pp. xi + 336. $29.95 (US) cloth.

The 'labor question' once gripped the American public and obsessed its government officials. A hundred years later — in 2004 — the issue has virtually disappeared from the discourse of mainstream media, policy makers, and the general populace. Lichtenstein explains why, and in the process provides important new insights into the visible decline but also hidden potential revival of the US labour movement. The centrality of the 'labor question' for Lichtenstein, spelled out in the beginning chapter, reveals an approach that most US labour histories published in recent years neglect. He focuses not just on events, organisations, and social movements, but he also identifies what he believes to be the most important ideas behind these events and movements. This is as much an intellectual history of labour in America as it is a narrative of its passage through the last century. This focus on ideas — and the ideology — of the US labour movement is both the great strength and underlying weakness of the book.

The story begins in the 1930s, the heyday of industrial union organising in the United States. Three issues are highlighted. In economic terms, Lichtenstein identifies the problem of under consumption and, as he says, its remedies. The Great Depression's erosion of wages impacted on consumers who spent far less, which then led to further deterioration of the economy. The solution? The New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his huge majorities in the US Congress. New Deal programs first tried to stabilise wages and prices (the National Recover Act, or NRA), but later programs focused more on getting federal funds into programs that would generate more consumer demand from workers. Employment and better pay equalled rising demand and economic recovery, a Keynesian formula that became enshrined for three decades. Government programs alone, however, would not create this demand. It took two other factors to get things moving: real participation by workers in the economic process of production ('industrial democracy') and a voice within that system ('industrial unionism'). Resistance from corporations was fierce, even though it appeared logical that this change toward a demand-oriented economic system would actually save capitalism.

Corporations were forced to change not just through union organising but also through an entirely new legal system underpinning union rights in the workplace. Collective bargaining, with unions and employers reaching agreements (contracts), became the norm from World War II through the 1960s — at least among many of the corporate giants such as General Motors and General Electric. The rights of workers on the job, in terms of wages, working conditions, and a voice (representation), gained ground through pattern bargaining (setting a uniform, nationwide wage and contract agreement) and an active shop steward system in the workplace. This path was forged by the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), with unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the vanguard. Lichtenstein accurately shows how the CIO was not the only way that unionism advanced. The AFL (American Federation of Labor) took alternative routes, especially through expanding membership through general — rather than industrial — unionism. Where the UAW organised mainly in one sector, the automobile industry, the Teamsters (based mainly in trucking and warehouse) organised 'anything that moved'. By the early 1950s it was the AFL, not the CIO, that had the most union members, despite the popular myth of the vibrancy and militancy of industrial unionism.

Lichtenstein covers a vast terrain, including the change in bringing in black and other non-white workers into unions, as well as the problems that women faced in gaining access to jobs and union representation. He summarises this complex history well, but at this point we begin to see a problem the author faced, which was not really his fault. This book is just too short, yet it meets the general requirements of 'labor history' publishers these days. There is not enough detail, no bibliography (we must hunt through endnotes for sources), and numerous developments of a narrative nature are left out. In Irving Bernstein's classic The Turbulent Years, about the rise and successes of the CIO industrial union movement, the length of the text allows for a story to be told and personalities to emerge from the history. Lichtenstein's shorter text does not allow for such a narrative, especially given the focus on ideas and ideologies of the American labour movement.

This book won the prestigious Taft Award, however, and when we get to the middle part of the work it is clear why. He convincingly argues that the array of labour laws and institutions initially established in the 1930s to protect and advance workers' organisation had become just the opposite by the 1980s. They were a serious obstacle to organising and representation, and actually assisted companies in suppressing unions and union rights.

Lichtenstein begins this part of a very depressing saga by detailing the so-called 'labor-management accord' of the 1950s and 1960s, ground he has covered previously, most notably in his outstanding biography of Walter Reuther (which is as much a history of the UAW as it is of that union's most important president). He is convincing in arguing that the UAW set the standard for all other unions, with its agreeing to a 'privatised' welfare system, particularly in health care coverage underwritten by the big auto companies. When he discusses the collapse of this system, he goes further by unveiling the illusion that the big corporations ever really acquiesced to such a reasonable deal. Power always stayed with the corporations, and it was only a matter of time before they would claw back their concessions to the unions. When the newly merged AFL-CIO leadership fell back on job protection (Meany and his craft union building trades men), the social democrats in the new federation, led by Reuther's industrial union faction, pushed for a new corporatist arrangement with the companies. Capital, however, was not interested, as the US Steel confrontation and President Kennedy's intervention soon revealed.

What, then, was this American social democracy embraced by the likes of Reuther and the industrial unionists of the 1950s and 1960s? It was not anti-capitalist, but it definitely was anti-communist. The reality was the bureaucratisation of labour, brilliantly summarised in the photo on page 169 of a 1967 AFL-CIO conclave of older men in suits and ties, and slicked backed hair — a parody of the worst stereotypes of 'union bosses' who could just as well have been corporate managers at a business training session. The Congressional McClellan Committee further undermined unionism's legitimacy by uncovering corruption and racketeering in the Teamsters and other unions. Not only was organised crime a 'problem' in unions — so the public came to believe, not unreasonably — but these worker representative organisations had no democracy. The final nail in the coffin came with the rise of court affirmation of individual civil rights over the rights of labour organisations to collectively organise and bargain.

By the 1960s, individual rights overshadowed economic — and class — rights. Lichtenstein details the rise of identity politics and civil rights as rights of the individual, which has been at the core of the debate on the Left in the United States for the last two decades. He does not denigrate or criticise the growing support that individual rights gained legally at this time, but he does note the imbalance in the legal system that deprived many workers, particularly those who were non-white and did not have citizenship status, of their economic civil rights. The AFL-CIO establishment, however, was unprepared for this turn, and saw the rise of demands by African American, Latino, and women workers as a threat to the existing labour-liberal order. Seniority appeared threatened by these new intruders who focused on their own groups over workers at large — but the AFL-CIO leaders in most unions refused to see the privileged position of their own white male members, however working class they may have been. It was, as Lichtenstein says, 'the liberal hour, but not for organized labor.' Racial discrimination was outlawed but the right to strike was eroded and in many cases eliminated. The conservatism of AFL-CIO head George Meany did almost nothing to bridge this gap.

Perhaps the best parts of the book are where Lichtenstein discusses the collapse of health care for workers — in essence the collapse of the privatised corporate welfare system during the 1980s and 1990s. This was just one aspect of globalisation and dominance of corporate power over any effort by workers to maintain reasonable standards of living. Within the workplace, earlier rights gained through union representation were also destroyed through labour-management cooperation schemes that increased productivity but marginalised real worker power within the company. The summary of a vast literature is superbly presented. The references throughout the book, especially those dealing with this particular legal maze of American labour issues, stand out as one of the best features of this publication.

What does Lichtenstein see as the answer to this rapid decline of organised labour in the United States, a decline not only in union membership but also in general recognition of the legitimacy of labour's cause? He outlines some of the key struggles of the 1970s to the present and highlights some of the key union reform movements that have managed to change this crisis into a new opportunity for organising. It is here, however, that the book falters — and not for lack of activist conviction on Lichtenstein's part. As an academic at the University of Virginia and presently at University of California, Santa Barbara, he has played a leading role in educating students and others about the history and potential of unions and workers, and he has been very active in the growing academic-union coalition to promote unionism in the United States.

His analysis of this recent history and the broader political and theoretical ramifications of it, however, reflect the general deficiencies of 'labor politics' in the United States today. He believes that the labour insurgency that began in the 1960s basically shifted course during the 1973 recession, and thereafter no longer challenged the system but sought to work within the existing legal framework of unionism set by the National Labor Relations Act and subsequent legislation. He draws on mainstream media sources, but did not research into the immense labour insurgency literature of the reform movement itself, nor did he interview any leading labour movement activists, at least as far as we can tell from the endnotes. Although he highlights Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and declares the elimination of mob rule of the union with the election of reform candidate Carey the most important event in modern US trade union history, he does not go into how TDU organised; the complexity of the union (based not just in trucking and warehouse, but in countless manufacturing plants, service, government, and other areas); nor the fact that Teamster activists (myself included) faced regular physical harassment and threats to their lives. Using 'the law' was just one form of protection for TDU activists — and an absolute necessity. Having body guards with you at union meetings was another — and essential in many Teamster locals. This undercurrent of violence directed at dues paying members is a story absent from this text. It also was an indictment of capitalism for many activists, even if the activism on the surface appeared only reformist.

When Lichtenstein discusses Justice for Janitors, the innovative organising campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), he correctly identifies how the organisers rejected using the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and union elections at the workplace and instead used militant protests and community support for direct recognition. He fails to note, however, that this campaign was led for a number of years by Bill Fletcher, who later became AFL-CIO education director under reformer president John Sweeney (who came from SEIU). When Sweeney's victory over the old guard AFL-CIO leadership is described, we learn that Fletcher was a 'black labor intellectual' when in fact Fletcher had experience as a rank-and-file shipyard worker, many years organising black construction workers, and a long career inside SEIU. Lichtenstein and Fletcher have spoken on the same podium before union reformers and students, so this is an odd omission. The problem is that this part of the book does not go deep enough, does not dig into the detail of primary sources and personal experiences behind the reform upsurge, and does not sufficiently engage the radicalism of many of the leaders of this movement. Fletcher, for example, was a founder and for many years the National Organizer of the Black Radical Congress, which for a number of years was a huge coalition of African American organisations active in radical politics but opposed to the narrow prejudices of the Nation of Islam. Fletcher, like many union activists, was and remains a committed socialist — and it is socialism as a labour concept that is absent from Lichtenstein's book.

As for where the union movement is going, Lichtenstein endorses militancy, internal union democracy, and politics. The first two were (and are) the credo of reform movements like TDU. So what about politics? Work within the Democratic Party, we are advised. Here is the heart of the problem — politics and US 'laborism'. The analysis presented throughout the book is excellent in terms of the basics of trade union representation and the hard realities of legal entanglements and obstruction. But it rarely goes further in terms of a broader analysis of the US economic system and its foreign policy, which has become so transparent in recent years as nothing more than economic and political imperialism. The Vietnam War, instead of being viewed as integral to US capitalism and its power at home and abroad, is viewed more as a disturbing event that divided labour. The Cold War also becomes a period that detracted from the greater agenda — expanding union influence and worker voice. Lichtenstein opposes the Vietnam War and the anti-communism of the Cold War, but his theoretical analysis of labour's relationship to these events stops at the door of trade unionism.

What is needed then — or in Lichtenstein's paraphrase 'what is to be done' — is to carry this analysis beyond just unions and to consider the labour movement as a working-class movement — and labour politics not just as politics with a union input, but working-class politics. State of the Union is outstanding as a detailed analysis of the legal and ideological side of US trade union history, but the political — and political-economic — meaning of US trade unionism over the last 60 years has yet to be written.


Flinders University	DAVID PALMER

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