Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide by Lane Windham (review)

Knocking on Labor's Door offers an illuminating revision of postwar US labour history, with a particular challenge to the declension narrative of the 1970s. The experiences and union membership declines of white men in heavy industries like steel have received the greatest visibility. Lane Windham, however, takes a wider view of US workers and discovers a history of energetic membership drives and union certification elections with women and Black workers. The civil rights achievements of the 1960s and resurging feminist movement inspired these workers to make demands for collective bargaining and greater access to economic resources. Windham argues working-class activism increased in the 1970s, but a combination of National Labor Relations Board (nlrb) bureaucracy, corporate antiunion tactics, and weak government enforcement thwarted certification victories and worker coordination. Rather than union atrophy or workers fraught with anxiety, Windham presents a diverse working class dedicated to expanding access to economic resources. In the postwar US, this access came through the "narrow door" of collective bargaining with employers, and unions and the nlrb were the primary mechanisms.

In addition to her broad view of the working class, Windham examines all attempts at membership drives and certification elections instead of focusing only on the triumphs. She reveals hundreds of efforts by women and Black workers to organize unions and gain nlrb recognition in the 1970s. She analyzes the intricacies of successes and losses rather than accepting failure as inevitable or indicative of a larger indifference. This tilting of the lens away from established locals and national afl-cio membership toward those workers trying to obtain collective bargaining makes visible another history.

As a result of her attention to nlrb procedures, Windham makes another important intervention in US labour history. Just as she does not imagine declining union membership as a monolithic experience, Windham sees the nlrb as a constantly contested and altered agency. She studies its bureaucracy with attention to changes made since 1940 and discovers key reforms that inhibited union certification. Before the Reagan administration and its overt antiunion policies in the 1980s, the nlrb had already become a contradictory mix of union legitimation and technical obstruction.

Instead of a chronological history about a membership drive or piece of labour legislation, Windham organizes the book in two parts. She provides a national history of postwar labour policy in part one and several case studies of working people and labour activism in part two. The result allows readers to understand the larger policies and procedures that shaped workers' options and access to collective bargaining while also recognizing various workers and their robust activism. As Windham states, "When we fully appreciate the economic-leveling potential of union organizing efforts in the 1970s, then we see the impacts of employers' resistance and weak labor law as all the more calamitous" (11).

The three chapters in part one address different facets of national labour politics. Chapter one discusses the nlrb and significant legislative and executive decisions impacting its practices. Windham notes that the years of increased union successes coincide with greater economic equity. In the next chapter, she looks at the overall trend of labour activism in the 1970s and how African American, women, and Hispanic workers used the Civil Rights Act, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc), and unions to demand both employment and better pay and benefits in previously segregated jobs. Readers learn about legalistic antiunion tactics in chapter three, especially the emergence of consulting firms that specialized in blocking union certification. Many businesses also realized lax oversight meant violations of labour law were worth any possible punishment.

The case studies in part two describe four varied worker campaigns. Chapter four follows the fight to organize a United Steelworkers of America (uswa) local for the shipyard at Newport News, Virginia, when the mostly...