| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 54

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002)

NELSON LICHTENSTEIN's book combines a survey of American labour history since the 1930s with an assessment of what went wrong, specifically why since the 1970s the union movement has plummeted in power, prestige, and numbers. Here labour history becomes a story of the rise and fall of union power with a straightforward moral: to rise again organized labour must readopt the tactics that worked so well in the 1930s and it must avoid the mistakes made in the subsequent decades. This is narrative history with a mission and with an undisguised interpretive framework, but it is also a highly readable and persuasive account of a significant chapter in modern US history.

Lichtenstein begins with an explanation of the larger social implications of what a turn-of-the-20th-century commentator referred to as "the labor question." He notes that the question involved both concerns about workplace conditions and the social dangers posed by economic inequality. While the ideal of industrial democracy addressed the former, a generous "social wage," meaning the range of services and safeguards offered by the state, has helped ameliorate the latter. Thus, for Lichtenstein, unions have played an invaluable role in modern US history because they promoted industrial democracy and fought for improvements in the social wage.

Having established why a strong union movement matters, Lichtenstein proceeds to offer his version of its rise in the 1930s and subsequent slow slide into senescent impotence. During the Great Depression unions won public support for the goal of creating an economy where workers enjoyed a measure of security. That support led to acceptance of the legal protections for union membership enshrined in the Wagner Act (1935). At the same time, Lichtenstein writes, a newborn CIO shook off the cautious, exclusive characteristics of the AFL and welcomed radical organizers and left-wing supporters who helped the new labour federation score dramatic gains among workers in the mass production industries. These victories overcame longstanding divisions within the American working class along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender. Such organizing achievements went hand in hand with a broad political mobilization of the American working class which spurred on the New Deal reform program. According to Lichtenstein, by the early years of World War II the US appeared ready to create a European-style social democracy.

For Lichtenstein that was organized labour's high water mark. Although unions continued to grow into the late 1950s, their decline had already begun by the 1940s. The villains here include a distinctively conservative US business community which allied with the white power structure of the Southern states. And although he might not label them villains, Lichtenstein also blames labour's decline on those union leaders whose well-intentioned actions served only to lead organized labour down a blind alley. Beginning in the early 1940s business leaders and Southern politicians conspired to turn back the tide of New Deal reform. With the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 they began the work of limiting organized labour's organizing tactics and constraining its field of operation to a narrower range of workplace-related questions. Although union membership numbers remained strong in the industrial heartland, the new legal climate doomed attempts to organize either the South or the growing white-collar segment of the workforce. At the same time, labour leaders like Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers (UAW) accepted the fact that they could no longer hope to use collective bargaining to address fundamental economic issues such as corporate investment strategies or pricing decisions. Instead they focused on a narrower field of action, winning their members steady wage increases, health insurance, and pensions. In so doing, Lichtenstein argues, Reuther and his colleagues changed unions from a social movement to a special interest, one which Americans in the 1950s increasingly saw as selfish and corrupt.

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the rotting condition of organized labour's foundations remained largely hidden from sight. Although Lichtenstein criticizes the long-held notion of a post-war accord between management and labour, he still depicts the dramatic decline of organized labour as beginning only in the late 1970s. A corporate counter-offensive at that time combined with deregulation in the transportation industry (railroads, trucking, and airlines) and the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt to devastate what had become the isolated islands of union strength in America. The Reagan administration's destruction of the air traffic controllers' union highlighted both the vulnerability of labour and the respectability of this anti-union offensive. By the 1990s, global competition offered union opponents one more source of strength; employers faced with a union organizing effort readily brandished the threat of moving operations to an offshore location.

The larger outlines of this argument will be familiar to those who have read Lichtenstein's earlier works, especially his biography of Walter Reuther. But in this account he adds a distinctive emphasis on the role of the Civil Rights Movement. For Lichtenstein, the Civil Rights Movement offers a counter-example of committed activists who achieved sweeping social change during the same era when an older generation of labour leaders were slipping into complacency and irrelevance. The Civil Rights Movement also created a new rights conscious legal environment that has achieved dominance in the US at the same time as the collective bargaining protections embodied in the Wagner Act have been steadily watered down. Thus, for Lichtenstein, a measure of labour's current weakness can be found in the fact that a worker today is likely to get meaningful workplace protections only by turning to civil rights law.

As a new overview of recent American labour history there is much to commend in this work. Lichtenstein writes with style and conviction, and he takes pains to connect this history with current issues that will resonate with a range of readers. As he moves through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Lichtenstein explains the potent issues at stake in seemingly mundane developments, such as the seniority clauses in union contracts or the role of the shop steward. Anyone who has struggled to make students see the significance of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) or to understand the chasm dividing craft and industrial unions, will appreciate Lichtenstein's treatment of these subjects. In lively prose he brushes the cobwebs off these topics and a range of others.

Whether admiration of the writing will be accompanied by an agreement with the author's prescription for what ails the labour movement is more open to question. Labour leaders, he asserts in the book's final chapter, need to return to the tactics and organizational élan of the 1930s. The radicals, who Lichtenstein described as playing such a pivotal role in the organizing victories of the 1930s, need to be invited back into the unions and the left-wing coalition of that period needs to be rebuilt. A reenergized labour movement, one marked by internal democracy and playing a strong, independent political role, offers the best hope, he argues, of addressing the "labor question" of the 21st century. Some readers will find Lichtenstein's proposals a bit optimistic, especially if they have followed the more skeptical interpretation of the CIO's rise offered by Robert Zieger. Few, however, are likely to disagree with his earnest aims.


David Witwer Lycoming College, Williamsport, PA

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