The Death and Life of American Labor: Toward a New Workers’ Movement by Stanley Aronowitz (review)

The well-documented decline of US union membership, bargaining clout, and political influence has more than workers worried. One of America’s best-known left-wing critics of organized labour has weighed in with a new book lamenting the current state of working-class organization and suggesting various methods of resuscitation.

In The Death and Life of American Labor, sociologist Stanley Aronowitz points the way “toward a new workers’ movement,” drawing on his own youthful experience as an industrial union organizer and, more recently, as a faculty union activist in New York City. Aronowitz has been an influential thinker on the labour left for nearly fifty years. During the 1960s, student radicals turned to him, as a former factory worker and staff member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers (ocaw), for advice about the New Left’s much debated and then still pending “turn toward the working class.”

As he did in past books like False Promises, Working-Class Hero, and From the Ashes of the Old, Aronowitz criticizes mainstream unions for their lack of militancy, diversity, internal democracy, and progressive politics. “Despite brave words from afl-cio headquarters, unions rely on the mainstream political power structure rather than their own resources for gains. They have poured hundreds of millions into electing Democrats to national and state offices and relegated the grassroots organization of workers to the margins.” (10)

As an alternative approach, Aronowitz offers a blueprint for how a “militant minority within unions and the larger workers movement” can make American labour “more combative in challenging capital and the repressive state” over issues like “the super-exploitation of the working poor.” (165) The author applauds the recent emergence of worker formations in the retail and fast food industries that function with voluntary membership, no legal certification, and a greater reliance on what he calls “innovative direct action,” (175) including short duration protest strikes.

This type of organizing and strike activity reflects, in part, the steady erosion of an industrial relations model based on “exclusive representation.” Under the now 80-year National Labor Relations Act (nlra), a single union could secure the right to represent all the workers in a particular “bargaining unit” after winning a secret ballot vote conducted by the federal government. Employers – often under strike pressure in the 1930s and 1940s – could also voluntarily agree to union recognition when presented with evidence that a majority of their employees had signed union membership cards.

Once an obligation to bargain was established (and assuming that further management resistance could be overcome), the end result was a union contract. It spelled out wages, employment conditions, and “fringe benefit” coverage, in a nation short on statutory entitlement to pensions, health care, or paid time off.

On the union side, one much-sought provision in such collective agreements was a clause requiring “dues check-off.” Except in so-called “right to work” states” – now numbering 24 out of 50 in the US – this “union security” provision obligated employers to deduct dues from the paychecks of workers belonging to the union or deduct an equivalent amount in the form of “agency fees” from non-members.

These arrangements were enshrined in the private sector via passage of the nlra, during the “New Deal” administration of President Franklin Roosevelt. By three or four decades later, about half the states passed laws granting collective bargaining rights to public employees within a similar legal framework (although some of those gains have now unraveled in former union strongholds like Wisconsin).

One downside of the US model was its tendency to make unionization an all or nothing phenomena; if an organized minority of workers tried to act collectively in an otherwise “non-union” workplace, there was little management obligation to deal with their demands and, very often, little sustained union backing for their shop-floor activity.

As Aronowitz observes, “the era of labor-management cooperation that was initiated by the New Deal and supported by succeeding legislation...