L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement

2. Turning the Clock Back: Anti-Union Reaction, the Return of the Sweatshop, and the New Immigration

CHAPTER 2 TURNING THE CLOCK BACK: ANTI-UNION REACTION, THE RETURN OF THE SWEATSHOP, AND THE NEW IMMIGRATION By the 1950s the labor movement in Los Angeles had expanded to the point that the city’s historic reputation as a bulwark of the open shop had become anachronistic. “It is a prosperous movement,” one contemporary noted, “one that has risen from the dead and today controls a substantial part of the workforce” (Greer 1959, 23). Union density in the L.A. metropolitan area reached a postwar peak of 37 percent of the nonagricultural labor force in 1955, still somewhat below the figure for the state of California that year, but comfortably above the national level of 33 percent (see appendix A and figure 1.2). “Historically, San Francisco was known as a ‘union’ town and Los Angeles as ‘open shop,’” Bernstein (1959, 532) noted in 1959, “but this has long since ceased to be the case.” But if the city’s labor movement was now normal in quantitative terms, it retained some unusual qualities, reflecting both the manner in which so much of its membership had been recruited during the 1930s and 1940s and the disproportionate weight of the AFL relative to the CIO. Organized labor in postwar Los Angeles was “a giant, whose bulk is obvious but whose effective strength remains to be determined” (Greer 1959, 23). Indeed, whether this giant could survive a serious test of its power was far from clear. 77 Such a test would not come for another two decades, and when it did arrive, the anti-union assault was not confined to Los Angeles but instead was national in scope. As the long postwar boom gave way to a prolonged period of economic difficulty in the mid-1970s, employers throughout the United States mounted a broad offensive against organized labor, both within the workplace and by means of public policy initiatives promoting deregulation and weakening established labor protections . In Los Angeles, as elsewhere, most unions proved to be poorly prepared for this challenge. Decades of prosperity had bred considerable complacency among labor leaders, and the bureaucratic regimes that had developed in many unions during the postwar decades were ill adapted to the suddenly transformed environment. Thus, the era of high-density unionism proved short-lived. As early as the second half of the 1950s, union density began declining gradually all across the United States. In Los Angeles it fell from the 1955 peak of 37 percent of the workforce to 28 percent by 1970, although the absolute number of union members actually increased slightly over this period (see appendix A and figure 1.2).1 The slippage in density during these years was largely due to expanded employment in nonunion sectors of the regional economy. The decline continued in the 1970s and 1980s; by then, erosion of union strength in industries where organized labor had once been firmly established was a more important contributing factor. Starting in the late 1970s, a massive corporate anti-union offensive combined with deregulation began to push private-sector unionization into a free fall. As figure 2.1 shows, during these years Los Angeles devolved once again into a citadel of the open shop, although this time it was hardly exceptional, as the wave of deunionization that began in the early 1970s left few regions of the United States untouched.2 All four of our cases were severely affected by these transformations. In the L. A. garment industry, unionism had always been somewhat tenuous , and erosion began far earlier than in the other cases. By the mid1970s , the once-substantial unionized sector of the city’s garment trade already had dwindled into virtual insignificance, and sweatshop conditions had reappeared even as Los Angeles was emerging as the nation’s largest garment manufacturing center. With its classical cutthroat competition , intensified by layers of subcontracting that forced small subcontractors as well as workers themselves to absorb market risk, the nonunion garment industry effectively became a template for the new organizational forms that began to develop in other sectors of the regional economy as deunionization spread. 78 L.A. Story The next among our cases to undergo restructuring along these lines was the residential construction industry, where union density declined precipitously in the face of a vigorous employer attack starting in the mid-1970s. During the economic recovery that followed the recession of the early...