Our History, Part III: From the 1950s to 1970s
Before looking at the development of the labor movement from the 1950s to today, an era of decline and dissolution, it will be useful to review certain aspects of the period immediately preceding it, during which two key laws were passed: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, known as Taft-Hartley.
The NLRA was passed in 1935, establishing private-sector collective bargaining rights, providing federal protections for private-sector unionization drives, and establishing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). However, the US government – which exists to serve the endless accumulation of capital – did not do this as a kindness to the working class; rather, the bosses and their political servants wanted to calm the class struggle by bringing the trade unions under the umbrella of the federal government through state regulation of collective bargaining.
The NLRA excluded certain sectors: agricultural workers and domestic servants, and – most significant for understanding the history of the postwar labor movement – government employees, creating separate legal and institutional jurisdictions for public and private sector labor laws. This meant public sector collective bargaining rights were left to states and localities, fragmenting the labor movement.
This effort by the bosses to slow down the labor movement failed. The result of the passage of the NLRA was that the private-sector unionization rate increased sharply. There was a national wave of private-sector strikes after the end of WWII on an unprecedented scale in reaction to the lowering of wages and the speeding up of work rhythms. The strikes involved workers in numerous branches of industry: automobile, electricity, meatpacking, steel, mining, transportation, etc.
The 1935 NLRA, which stimulated private-sector unionization, did not cover public-sector workers. To this day, there is no federal law protecting public-sector workers in the US.
Frightened by the militancy of the organized working class, the bosses and their political servants drafted and passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which again sought to calm the class struggle, this time by stripping fighting trade unions of key weapons. Mass picketing, solidarity strikes, unauthorized strikes, and public-sector strikes by federal workers were all outlawed. Union leaders were forced to declare that they were not Communists. Employers were given “free speech” rights at the expense of those of the workers. The President was given the unilateral right to declare a sixty day “cooling off” period to prevent strikes. So-called “right-to-work” laws were legalized, which forbade contracts that required non-union workers who were covered by a union contract to pay union dues. The closed shop, in which joining a union is a condition for being hired and for continued employment, was outlawed.
Note that unlike the NLRA, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act addressed public-sector workers, but only to ban federal employees from striking. This made Taft-Harley less significant for public-sector workers, since there were no national collective bargaining rights for them in the first place.
This reactionary, anti-worker law from 75 years ago still governs union activity today. The only movement regarding private-sector labor law has been in the direction of diminishing collective bargaining power.
During this period, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook “Operation Dixie,” an effort to organize textile workers in the South, a part of the country that remained almost completely unorganized. This effort failed, due to, on one hand, the weakness of the CIO, and on the other hand, due to efforts of Southern capitalists to appeal to racism and anti-Communism. The South remains unorganized to this very day, which highlights a peculiarity of the US labor movement: the geographical concentration of unions.
The bureaucrats of the CIO and AFL actively worked against the interests of the working class. For example, they organized only two demonstrations against Taft-Hartley – a token gesture forced on them after a larger, spontaneous demonstration was organized by angry Detroit autoworkers. The labor bureaucrats saw their job as stabilizing the class struggle in the interests of the bosses, rather than struggling for the interests of the working class.
The 1950s
During the 1950s, the legal offensive against trade unions intensified further. In 1948, the NLRB ruled in favor of the bosses’ right to hold captive audience meetings. During such meetings, the bosses assault workers with anti-union, pro-capitalist propaganda. In 1956, the NLRB made a decision to allow capitalists to exclude union organizers from their property. In 1959, the Landrum-Griffin Act was passed, which established federal oversight of union finances, internal elections, and membership.
In 1948, the CIO was split internally around the issue of the failed presidential campaign of populist ex-Democrat Henry Wallace, who made grandiose, empty welfare-state promises. The CIO leadership endorsed incumbent Democrat Truman, while many left unions broke ranks and endorsed Wallace.
In the aftermath of Wallace’s defeat, right-wing unions engaged in often violent raids against progressive locals, struggling for representation against them. During the period of right-wing repression in 1949-50, the CIO expelled a total of 11 Communist-led unions, including United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). In 1953, the CIO and AFL signed a “non-raiding” pact, which ended the practice of brutal competition between the two federations and set the stage for their unification, which finally took place in 1955 under the leadership of George Meany.
At the time of the establishment of the AFL-CIO, union membership peaked. It has declined continuously ever since. This means the history of the AFL-CIO is the history of the uninterrupted degeneration of organized labor in the US.
Union density, which measures the number of unionized workers as a percentage of the total working population, was around 33% in 1956, but it had already fallen to around 30% by 1960. The bureaucratic unions proved unable to deal with the concrete factors that led to this decline, including an increase in the automation of production (i.e., fewer workers were needed to produce a given product), the growth of low-wage and unorganized service sector jobs, and an intensified legal and policy assault on unions in the name of increasing productivity and combating “inflated” wages.
The bureaucratic union leadership did nothing to stop this war on the working class. If anything, the leaders of the trade-union movement proved to be better defenders of the bosses than the bosses themselves.
The 1960s
The 1960s were a decade of further weakening of the private-sector trade unions. Tariffs were lowered, international competition was fierce, and capitalists turned to even more automation and a wave of attacks on the working class. What role did the leaders of the AFL-CIO play in this? The big trade-union federation continued to help in the offensive against the working class, even working with the government in 1962 to keep wages low in the steel sector.
The AFL-CIO was not just anti-worker at home. The trade union federation also took a reactionary stance regarding unions abroad, supporting the US government as it engaged in anti-union activity abroad, intervening to repress worker struggles in a range of countries, from Guatemala to Greece. Beyond attacking foreign unions, the AFL-CIO backed the US war of aggression against the Vietnamese people, advancing the goals of US imperialism while weakening the international unity of the workers of the world.
This decline of the US labor movement was briefly checked by a series of NLRB decisions between 1961 and 1964, preventing capitalists from closing their businesses in retaliation for unionization drives, upholding the right of union organizers to more easily picket and hand out literature, increasing enforcement against labor law violations, and allowing unions to take part in certain management decisions. Most importantly, the NLRB legalized “card check” recognition, in which authorization cards signed by a majority of workers was sufficient to merit union recognition. In this way, workers could bypass the procedure of holding representation elections, which capitalists thwarted through delay tactics.
However, these NLRB decisions were not victories over the bosses imposed by the force of working class organization. Rather, these were reforms initiated “from above” that sought to stabilize the class struggle. Since the 1961-64 reforms did not directly depend on the organized strength of the working class, they could be taken away at any time. And indeed, in 1965, the liberal Warren Supreme Court intervened, ruling that capitalists could in fact close their businesses in retaliation for union drives, and even declared that capitalists could lock out workers whenever they wished.
However, while private-sector unionism declined during the course of the 1960s, public-sector unions grew rapidly, underscoring the sharp divide between public and private unions in the US. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) increased from 9,737 members in 1936 to 286,283 members by 1966.
There were several milestones for public-sector unions within a few short months: in December 1961, the then-new United Federation of Teachers (UFT) was declared the authorized bargaining agent for all teachers in New York City; on January 17, 1962, President Kennedy issued an executive order recognizing limited rights for federal workers to join unions; and on January 31, 1962, the state of Wisconsin issued a state law guaranteeing the right of municipal employees to collectively bargain.
Following these decisions, union density in the public-sector increased sharply, while private-sector unionization continued to decline, continuing the divergent path between private and public sectors. In 1955, no state other than Illinois had a statute allowing state workers to collectively bargain. By 1980, 41 states had such laws, and five states had laws requiring public-sector collective bargaining. In 1960, public-sector union density was 10.8%, but by the 1980s, public-sector union density was 35% – a level of density that has remained stable ever since, even as public-sector unions have been considerably weakened.
The 1970s
The 1970s began with an enormous strike wave, involving some 2.4 million workers across a wide range of industries, including 34 stoppages of 10,000 workers or more. However, this strike wave did not represent a renewal of the labor movement. Following its conclusion, the divide between private and public sector unionism grew sharply, as private-sector union activity soon collapsed, while public-sector unions continued to grow in numbers and militancy.
The divergent paths of private- and public-sector unionization was not just a matter of numbers. Many teachers and government unions included relatively high numbers of women, then entering the workforce in high numbers, and Black workers, who had entered public-sector unions in large numbers in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. These unions were centers of opposition to the Vietnam War. For example, the AFT passed an anti-Vietnam resolution at the 1967 annual convention.
The private-sector unions had a radically different orientation. During the May 8, 1970 “hard hat riot,” Building and Construction Trades Council workers organized a bloody attack on anti-Vietnam War protestors. The private-sector labor aristocracy found its spokesman in AFL-CIO President George Meany, who supported the US aggression against Vietnam and opposed the struggles of Black people for basic democratic rights.
The 1970s were a period of stagflation: a decline in the rate of profit coupled with high inflation and unemployment. Due to this situation, tax revenues declined, the deficit went up, and public expenditures grew. As always, capital and its political servants placed the burden of the crisis on workers. For private sector unions, layoffs, plant closures, and union decertification drives became the order of the day. On the other hand, reactionaries blamed high taxes and large deficits on the public-sector unions. Public-sector union strikes provided a pretext for government attacks on unions in the name of fiscal austerity. Efforts to pass a federal NLRA-equivalent for public-sector workers found no political support. In this context, the Supreme Court ruled against extending the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to public-sector workers, a decision that was later reversed.
In February 1971, Nixon suspended the Davis Bacon Act, which required paying prevailing wages on public works projects. After one month the unions agreed to a Construction Industry Stabilization Committee, whose task it was to lower wage increases. The Nixon NLRB reinstated the “free speech” rights of employers to hold captive-audience meetings, i.e., meeting in which the bosses could hold workers as virtual inmates while spewing capitalist lies at them. In the 1974 Linden Lumber case, the Supreme Court allowed for the denial of card check union certifications, meaning that it was now legal to deny recognition of a union even if a majority of workers signed cards. This meant that employers could insist on NLRB elections, with its delays and anti-union campaigns. In 1977, unions began to lose more than 50% of union elections for the first time since the passage of the NLRA. The Supreme Court also opened the door to easily outsourcing manufacturing operations.
The 1970s ended with defeat all along the line. Organized labor had lost what remained of its power, reduced to a shadow of its former self under the combined assault of capital and its own conciliatory leaders.