WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE US LABOR MOVEMENT? Union Decline and Renewal.

INTRODUCTION

In 1995, the American Federation of Labor--Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the body that unites most United States unions into a federated organization, experienced its first contested election, in which the insurgent slate won, and the victors, led by John Sweeney as president, announced their intent to transform the labor movement (Sweeney 1996, Welsh 1997). Only rarely does a massive institution directly and publicly confront the spectre of its own demise; even more rarely does a bureaucratic organization, albeit one with social movement origins, attempt rejuvenation through a return to its activist roots. This moment of critique and attempted reconstruction prompts a similar response from social scientists, including sociologists, who have devoted surprisingly little attention to the labor movement.

As a discipline centrally concerned with processes of institutional functioning, social movement activism, and class differentiation and domination, this relative neglect is striking. Even scholars who study class or the labor process tend to neglect the importance of group processes of struggle, "focusing on atomized individual workers as the unit of analysis" (Lembcke et al 1994:117). This emphasis has both impoverished sociology and led labor studies "to recede from the intellectual scene, principally becoming a professional area for training union officials and negotiators" (Lembcke et al 1994:114). But outstanding work of the past ten to fifteen years exemplifies the rewards of a renewed focus on the labor movement; four recent collections are especially notable as introductions, each including the work of both academic and labor scholars (Bronfenbrenner et al 1998, Fraser & Freeman 1997, Friedman et al 1994, Mantsios 1998; for a review of earlier work, see Freeman & Medoff 1984 and Cornfield 1991).

Unions provide a laboratory for the analysis of a variety of social phenomena. Thirteen million members are in AFL-CIO unions, including over five million women, two million African Americans, and one million Latino/as, with many additional members in nonfederated organizations like the National Education Association. Even at the present time, strikes involve some 300,000 members per year, and unions successfully organize more than 250,000 workers yearly, with perhaps an equivalent number involved in unsuccessful organizing campaigns. These actions offer social movement scholars an underused resource: the opportunity for systematic study of widely practiced, and often highly risky, forms of collective action. At the same time, labor studies and the labor movement can only profit from contact with sociology's broader contextualization and more explicit theorizing.

The overriding reality that frames the recent history of the labor movement and the social science literature we examine is a dramatic change in the relations between business and unions. Until recently, the dominant scholarly perspective assumed the existence of a postwar "accord" between management and labor, an arrangement whereby business accepted unions and unions became the de facto allies of management, helping to regulate and coopt worker discontent (Aronowitz 1973, Burawoy 1979, Fantasia 1988, Piven & Cloward 1977). For many critics on the left, the accord meant that unions had lost their oppositional character, while capital valued the benefits conferred by a unionized workforce.

This understanding has been shaken by events of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when corporate forces assumed a far more confrontational stance, and unions found themselves under relentless attack. The vehemence of the employer mobilization suggests that the accord may never have been as fully accepted by capital as many had supposed, that instead capital may simply have recognized the strength of labor and concluded that certain kinds of opposition were not (then) feasible.

The labor movement has responded to this assault in a variety of ways. Some approaches call for a new militancy, supported by innovative and aggressive organizing to confront employer opposition, while others seek ways to recreate the accord and reestablish unions as valued partners. This essay considers directions for the future of the movement by examining explanations for union decline and initiatives for labor's revitalization.

UNION DECLINE

The fact of union decline is beyond dispute. Private sector union density (the percentage of the labor force in unions) declined from 39% in 1954 to 10% today. Decline in membership strength has been accompanied during the past two decades by a larger loss of efficacy. From 1969 to 1979, strikes involved more than 950,000 workers in every year; from 1987 to 1996, by contrast, despite a larger labor force, strikes never involved even half a million workers. Many more strikes were broken, with employees losing their jobs. From 1945 to 1980, union wage settlements almost always involved wage increases; thereafter, unions frequently made concessions on both wages and benefits (Griffin et al 1990, Moody 1988:165-91, Wrenn 1985). Politically as well, unions had diminishing clout, in part because of increasing Republican dominance, but even more so because unions exercised less and less leverage within the Democratic party.

Five major perspectives, found both within the labor movement and among scholars, attempt to explain such changes. These focus respectively on (a) demographic changes, (b) the role of the union itself as an institution, (c) the state, especially the legal system, (d) globalization and neoliberalism, and (e) the employer anti-union offensive.

Demographic Factors

Even with no change in unions or the legal climate, union strength would decline if unions were strong in population groups and sectors of the economy that were shrinking. Depending on the time period studied, the methodology used, and the comprehensiveness of the factors taken into account, analysts believe that structural and compositional factors account for 20% to 60% of the decrease in union density (Dickens & Leonard 1985, Farber 1990, Freeman 1985, Goldfield 1987, Western 1997). Many of the significant factors are widely discussed and easily understood: geographic shifts from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt, occupational shifts from blue collar to white collar, and changes in the gender distribution of the work force. Other factors are less obvious: Western's (1997:120) analyses indicate that the tremendous growth in the US labor force explains nearly 9 percentage points of the 15% postwar American union decline, because a rapidly growing labor force diminishes union density unless unions make huge efforts to organize new workers. Although Western provides probably the best examination of these factors, he himself prefers institutional explanations, criticizing the assumption of the econometric approach that "the key agents are workers and employers, rather than unions." This leads, he says, to an institutionally "thin view of labor movements," which fails to recognize the central role of "organizing effort and the active construction of shared interests" (1997:103).

The Union Itself

If, as Western suggests, unionization results from active effort, then the labor movement must bear a significant share of the blame for its own decline. Goldfield (1987:208) defines the problem as a lack of will: "Unions can put out the necessary effort to win when they have to" but "most of the time...do not put out this sufficient effort." An AFL-CIO report similarly argues, "instead of organizing, unions hunkered down" and "collectively chose the shortsighted strategy of trying to protect current contracts of members instead of organizing new members" (AFL-CIO 1996:5). In consequence, the most dynamic sectors of the economy, including service occupations "employing large numbers of women and people of color," as well as "the growing ranks of professional, technical, and white collar employees, except for those in the public sector," were "left nearly untouched by union activity" during the postwar decades of labor's greatest strength (Bronfenbrenner et al 1998:5-6).

The flawed record of unions vis [acute{a}] vis women and racial minorities is reflected not only in failures of organizing, but by an internal reluctance or inability to address issues raised by the feminist and civil rights movements. Women's presence as union members, for example, falls short of their presence in the labor force as a whole, while gains in leadership have been "quite modest" in relation to gains in membership (Milkman 1985:302, Melcher et al 1992, Cornfield 1993, Roby 1995). More fundamentally, Milkman argues, women have been organized not as women, but "as members of occupational groups which happened to be largely female in composition," with the result that women were "now squarely in, but generally still not of the labor movement" (Milkman 1985:302). To the extent that men and women differ in preferred cultural styles and forms of leadership, unions have tended to reflect and to value male (often macho) approaches (Cobble 1993, Feldberg 1987, Sacks 1988).

While the late 1960s saw the emergence of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as a rank-and-file protest movement (Geschwender 1977), more recent responses such as the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists have been largely concentrated among elected officials and staff, focusing, in the case of CLUW, on placing more women in leadership positions "without challenging the basic structure or character of the labor movement" (Milkman 1985:305).

Labor became increasingly distant from other social movements, and unions were not seen--either by unions themselves or by social movement activists--as a primary means of addressing the issues raised by the civil rights, feminist, and environmental movements. Instead these concerns were primarily addressed through new legal rights, governmental regulation, new social movement organizations, and class action lawsuits. Unions participated in these processes but were not generally regarded as crucial actors.

The decline of organizing in the postwar era coincides with an increased focus on contract negotiation and the enforcement of work rules through the grievance system, both of which led to an increase in union staff. Within this framework, the union's shop-floor presence was expressed primarily through its negotiation of work rules and their enforcement through the grievance procedure. Grievances were virtually the only way for workers to address working conditions and conflicts with supervisors within a Taylorist organization of production; the grievance procedure accomplishes this through a multi-step, quasi-judicial process that strengthens the role of staff and attenuates workers' involvement (Spencer 1977). Burawoy (1979:110) notes the individualizing effect of the grievance process: "Each time a collective grievance or an issue of principle outside the contract, affecting the entire membership... is raised" the union representative responded "Have you got a grievance? ... If you haven't, give the floor to someone else."

The limitations of the staff-driven union were also evident in …