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

In Knocking on Labor's Door, historian Lane Windham presents a concise monograph on the importance of the 1970s in twentieth-century American labor history. With attention to detail and the personal lives of her subjects, the author identifies and explores the connective tissue between the mid-twentieth-century heights of labor power and optimism and the changes wrought by hostility to unions and globalization in the new century. Joining a number of scholars who have diversified racial concepts of labor history, Windham's work rejects the centrality of white men in the narrative of working-class abatement in the waning days of the post–World War II economy.¹ "The story changes dramatically," she writes, "if we broaden the gaze of labor history beyond the white, blue-collar men who already had unions in the 1970s and include the millions who were outside labor's ranks, seeking to get in" (p. 7). In seven chapters separated into two parts, Windham surveys efforts of new groups to enter the "narrow door" of labor, and outlines the economic and manufacturing changes unique to the decade that simultaneously narrowed it further.

Historiographically, Windham's work departs from Jefferson Cowie's 2012 book Stayin' Alive, which argued that labor organizing fizzled out during the 1970s, and dovetails with the 2010 edited collection Rebel Rank and File that chronicled labor insurgencies of the era that pushed for more aggressive unions. With this positionality, Knocking on Labor's Door interprets the 1970s as a decade when long-excluded groups took center stage in reformulating the relationship between laborers and the private sector. Leveraging inroads built by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the women's movement, men of color, women, and a new generation of workers campaigned for inclusion in a changing economic landscape. Employing this history, Windham is most concerned with challenging depictions of the 1970s as a time of declining political labor engagement when "bureaucratic unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions" (p. 3). In spite of a semi-antagonistic relationship between some laborers and union heads, she argues that overly managerial organizations and apathetic workers were not to blame for declining membership. The American working class gained vitality in the decade as people of color and women wielded renewed capacities to organize, but the formation of unions faced novel difficulties. Although laborers continued to vote in the elections of the National Labor Relations Board at the same pace as they had in the 1950s and 1960s, they lost those elections more frequently than before in the face of increased employer hostility to unions. In addition, labor organizers and workers engaged in movements for rights contended with unforeseen threats presented by globalization and the detachment of wages from productivity and demand. In this predicament, new generations of workers found themselves with far fewer options than their predecessors when forming unions and challenging corporate backlashes, all while the labor market turned from relatively stable and well-paid manufacturing jobs to low-paid and unpredictable service and retail positions. "This precipitous decline in union density meant that the American working class had far less power to counter neoliberal policies and to maintain broadly shared prosperity in the face of globalization and other structural changes," Windham writes (p. 6).

Chapters 1 through 3 outline these developments by chronicling the clash between workers and labor laws, the changing demographics of the contemporary push for unionization, and corporate resistance to labor organizing and outright union busting. Using intimate portraits of workers and the challenges they faced from unfair wages, limited access to benefits, and expensive pension plans, Windham personalizes struggles for equity in labor and makes clear how laborers "used new understandings about their rights to take on their employers in numerous...