The Long 1970s and the Never-Ending Labor Question

In his introduction to Workers’ Control in America, the late David Montgomery noted that mainstream commentators were astonished at the tidal wave of labor militancy that ripped through the occupational landscape of the United States during the 1970s. These were years during which wildcat strikes hit hundreds of workplaces, insurgent leadership slates challenged entrenched union bureaucracies, and young rank-and-filers grew their hair out as they channeled their generation’s spirit of rebellion toward the point of production. Earlier proclamations of the “end of ideology” and the celebration of a post-war labor-management accord seemed hollow. The bedrock of that supposed class truce had been the promise of rising living standards through collective bargaining in exchange for labor’s acquiescence to managerial prerogatives in production. In the 1970s, however, workers questioned the legitimacy of this model en masse and revived long-standing issues of workers’ control, union democracy, and racial and gender justice as poles of struggle alongside bread-and-butter concerns. For a political order that self-consciously prided itself on solving the “Labor Question” that burned at the heart of the pre–New Deal epoch, the ghost of class conflict had reared its ugly head.¹

Montgomery, of course, reminded readers that the “popular consensus” of the 1950s, which subordinated class conflict to a “cult of productivity” that lifted all boats, was more appearance than reality. A look at history might suggest that the issues that fueled labor militancy in the past—not simply compensation, but more fundamental questions of power and autonomy at work—never really went away, even if they were submerged by the extraordinary confluence of the postwar economic boom, a strong union apparatus harnessed to legally backed collective bargaining norms, the political imperatives of the early Cold War, and a pro-union ruling party.

For historians today, this is now old news. The notion of a labor-capital compromise that ushered in an era of postwar class peace has been complicated, if not fully overturned, by scholars who have uncovered the long history of business mobilization against union power that began almost as soon as the 1935 Wagner Act was passed. If Big Labor’s leaders were too sanguine about the stability of postwar industrial pluralism and the collective bargaining regime that lay at its heart, we now know that conservative elites never accepted this state of affairs. In the workplace and on the airwaves, at the state and federal level, they steadily worked to erode the cultural legitimacy, political power, and legal support of labor unions.² This employer hostility was linked to the labor unrest of the late 1960s and 1970s that Montgomery referenced. But while many scholars have questioned the narrative of postwar class harmony, fewer have tackled head-on the stories of worker rebellion that emerged from the fissures within the “Golden Age” during its fading years.

It is these stories that are at the center of Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below during the Long 1970s. The volume brings together thirteen essays that aim to “rescue” the lost history of bottom-up worker upsurge during what Cal Winslow calls “the long seventies” (p. 2). Rebel Rank and File contributes to recent works on postwar labor history while providing new insights into the scale and substance of the last major gasp of worker militancy during the waning years of the New Deal order. The essays include case studies of a broad spectrum of labor insurgencies, and the authors range from established authorities of economic and working-class history to activist-participants reflecting on their experiences. Scholars of the postwar U.S., labor history, the history of capitalism, and the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s will encounter both new and old findings in this collection. It also contributes to the recent wave of scholarship that reexamines the 1970s as a crucial period of transition...