State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (review)

"Explaining labor's decline has become something of a cottage industry over the last quarter century," writes labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, and in State of the Union he brings a welcome addition to that discussion. Lichtenstein, one of the country's leading labor historians, has written extensively about the mid-20th century U.S. labor movement. In his latest work he provides a narrative of American labor history since the 1930s as a backdrop to analyzing the evolving ideology of the labor movement.

The declining power and numbers of labor, argues Lichtenstein, are not solely the result of corporate aggression or a pro-corporate federal government, but very much the fault of the labor movement as well: "Labor's greatest deficit is of the ideas necessary to again insert working America into the heart of our national consciousness."

Lichtenstein's central critique is of the widespread acceptance that, in the aftermath of the 1930's labor uprising and the 1946 strike wave, corporate America made peace with the labor movement. There was no harmonious "social accord" or "social contract," asserts Lichtenstein. The tremendous gains in wages, benefits, and union representation made after World War II were the result of struggle, he argues, and the 1940s and 1950s "were years of historically high strike levels and of corporate-sponsored ideological warfare."

The so-called accord was "at best a limited and unstable truce" between labor and some of the largest industrial corporations, and that only in the highly unionized industrial cities in the North and Midwest. This limited truce was more a result of labor's weakness as American politics shifted to the right in the postwar years than a sign of labor's strength. In no other industrial nation after World War II, argues Lichtenstein, was corporate management so hostile to organized labor.

When union leaders and historians speak wistfully of the good old days of the "social accord," Lichtenstein asserts that they are rewriting history by wrongfully downplaying the militant struggles of the labor movement in the postwar years. They are proffering the illusion that corporate America once was, and again can be, persuaded to take the "high road" to acceptance of unions where both parties will benefit. And they are whitewashing labor's postwar ideological retreat from a broad social vision whereby labor aggressively stood for all workers, was a leading force against racism, supported workers' struggles across the globe, and struggled not simply for better contracts but to radically transform the way the American economy and American society is run.

As labor became more conservative, argues Lichtenstein, women and people of color turned away from labor to adopt a "rights conscious strategy" of seeking legislation and court rulings to support equal rights in the workplace. But whereas the rise of a new "democratizing rights consciousness" strengthened labor in other industrial countries, in the U.S. alone these new social movements arose concurrently with a stagnation of organized labor. The 1960s and 1970s were "barren of virtually any legislative or ideological payoff for organized labor" and this lost opportunity was a direct result of the AFL-CIO's failure to ally the labor movement with the civil rights and women's rights movements. Women and people of color turned to other means to achieve justice in the workplace. Individual litigation replaced the collective power of workers at the workplace to win equal rights.

Lichtenstein concludes that to return to the strength it once had, labor must rethink its ideology, fully ally itself with the marginalized, and return to the CIO's legacy of militancy, union democracy, and independent political action. He's not the first one to argue such, but State of the Union contributes insightful analysis to proponents of such a change.