The 1970s Revisited: Is the Working Class Dead or Alive?

I was a big fan of Cornell University Professor Jefferson Cowie’s previous book. Many workers—at least those in industrial unions—could easily relate to its subject matter, the demise of domestic manufacturing due to overseas outsourcing. In Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, Cowie follows RCA’s shift of production from Camden, New Jersey to plants in Bloomington, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee, and then down to Mexico. A decade ago, when I was organizing education programs for CWA members at the Cornell ILR School’s conference center in Ithaca, we invited Cowie to speak about Capital Moves to a group of shop stewards, including some from manufacturing locals. They were captivated by his account of how corporate globalization affected different groups of workers, here and abroad, in similar fashion. His runaway shop history was a useful tool for classroom discussion about trade liberalization and the capital mobility, on steroids, that has now left Mexico with its own empty factories.

Cowie’s new book, Stayin’ Alive, has been much applauded by fellow academics. It recently received the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Merle Curti prize for the best work published last year “in American social or intellectual history.” According to the OAH, Cowie “moves nimbly between popular culture, campaign and electoral politics, and social science debates to offer a compelling and devastating account of what happened to the working class in the 1970s.” However, if I were still bringing CWA activists to Cornell—for whatever training is now available there in the wake of recent staff cut-backs—I’d be much less inclined to unleash Cowie on a captive audience of local union organizers. After all, they do have to get up the next morning and “keep hope alive,” as Reverend Jesse Jackson used to instruct labor audiences, both black and working-class white.

According to Cowie’s latest work, blue-collar workers weren’t just victims of a runaway shop trend in the 1970s. They actually experienced their “last days” as an entire class! The existence of a working class remains kind of a sine qua non for anyone who is still trying to sign up new union members (unless, of course, all of our future recruits are to be found in what the AFL-CIO, with imprecision similar to Cowie’s, calls “the middle class”?). For those still on the frontlines of class warfare today, what Cowie’s publisher touts as “the definitive account of the fall of America’s working class” (emphasis added) is grim reading indeed, since its message seems to be that organized labor’s struggle for a better America was defeated thirty years ago. So why bother to fight back, Madison-style, today?

Academics and journalists long ignored the significance of the 1970s—the decade in which, Cowie argues, “the post-New Deal working class” lost its footing and never regained it, due to the forces of deindustrialization and deunionization. In the U.S. history section of bookstores, the Seventies were sandwiched in, rather thinly, between the much-chronicled era of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and social unrest (aka “the Sixties”) and the well-known period of conservative backlash in the 1980s dubbed “the Reagan Revolution.” But this gap in “periodization” has been remedied now, for better or worse, by a mini-book publishing boom. Last November, one reliable bellwether of cultural trends, the Nation, devoted an entire cover story to “That Seventies Show,” a review essay by Rick Perlstein covering fifteen books, including Cowie’s, that analyze the era from various angles. Perlstein managed to miss four more—Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right, by Dominic Sandbrook; Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Heather Ann Thompson; The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, a reader edited by Dan Berger; and Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During...