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10 Labor, Liberalism, and the Democratic Party A Fruitful but Vexed Alliance nelson lichtenstein When Barack Obama was swept into office in 2008, a labor-liberal revival seemed a tangible possibility. For the first time in nearly half a century , a liberal, Democratic president, both urban and northern, occupied the White House. A new New Deal was on the agenda, a legislative and political initiative that promised a cavalcade of long-sought social legislation, an invigorated liberal movement and a revitalization of American labor, whose organizations now represented a smaller proportion of the workforce than at any time since Calvin Coolidge took the oath of presidential office.1 American trade union leaders were pleased and hopeful. They had played a decisive role in putting Obama over the top in battleground states like Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, where the key campaign issue revolved around the extent to which the white working class would vote for a black liberal when, and if, they entered the voting booth. And during the bruising legislative battles that preceded enactment of Obama’s New Dealish agenda, the labor movement was a steadfast ally even when it felt the President and many Democratic legislators were far too cautious. “We know we haven’t achieved everything we worked for. But we’ve made progress—and we have to keep it going,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told unionists on the eve of the 2010 elections. “We have to save our anger for the corporate lapdogs who made this mess and the Republicans in the Senate who are determined to keep us in it.”2 But Trumka’s dutiful loyalty to Obama and his party could not forestall defeats suffered by labor-backed Democrats during the midterm elections; nor could it mask the failure of the labor movement to win for itself legislation that would enable the unions to once again begin organizing within the private sector of the American economy, where employer hostility was both fierce and near universal. Indeed, conservatives of all stripes made enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which was designed to advance the institutional strength of the trade unions by curbing a number of antiunion tactics routinely deployed by such employers, a rallying point for opponents of both the Obama administration and the labor movement. EFCA’s details—majority sign-up (card check), larger penalties on labor law violators, first contract arbitration after impasse—were far less important than the organizational consequence of its passage. It had the potential to create a more robust and expansive labor movement, indeed a rescue of private sector trade unionism—now representing about 7.5 percent of the workforce—from virtual extinction.3 Labor-liberal politics repeated an old story. For more than half a century the trade unions have been the backbone of American liberalism and a key electoral element making possible those moments of progressive legislative reform, be they massive as in the mid-1960s or far more modest, exemplified by the Clinton agenda of the early 1990s. But regardless of the extent of liberal legislative success, one outcome remains constant: neither the trade unions nor their ostensible Democratic allies have been able to muster the political muscle or ideological persuasiveness to enact the kind of legislation that would actually enable the unions themselves to increase their size, power, and legitimacy at the bargaining table or in the political arena. Indeed, for more than half a century the trade union movement has almost always emerged from eras of liberal legislative reform in a weaker and more tenuous political shape than when such moments began. To understand the dynamic that made labor so important to the Obama victory, but which produced such a paltry political and legislative payoff for the unions, we need to recognize the character of the contemporary industrial relations regime in which labor now functions and why this is so different from those that have gone before. Indeed, three regimes have governed trade union “bargaining”—with employers, with the Democrats, and with the state—during the era since the New Deal. They are the era of the New Deal itself (1933–1 947) during which a corporatist politicization of all wage, price, and production issues achieved some purchase; the years of classic industrial pluralism and collective bargaining (1947–1980), in which industrial relations was reprivatized to a large extent; and finally, our current moment, (1980s forward) in which the labor movement exists and holds the possibility 230 . nelson lichtenstein [13.59...

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