US Labor in Trouble and Transition: A Book Review

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/sherman270308.html

by Steven Sherman

Is there anyone with a deeper knowledge of the contemporary American labor movement than Kim Moody? He not only seems familiar with the strategies and outcomes of practically every strike and organizing drive of the last twenty years. He also appears to know the status of each union local, large and small, as well as every workers' center. If he says that a national union is largely bureaucratized and timid, he is also quick to mention the two or three locals that are exceptions to the rule.



Moody draws on this vast knowledge in his new book, US Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Rebellion from Below. The text focuses on the course of working-class struggle over the last twenty-five years in the US, not exactly an inspiring time filled with bold movements and major victories. Nevertheless, the picture is not altogether without hope or bright spots. The book should be crucial reading for those concerned with rebuilding the Left, because a powerful union movement is important to such an effort. Precisely how important is a matter of some debate, which I will touch on below.

Moody begins by outlining changes to the US economy in the last couple of decades. His take on this question is different than most on the Left. Although there has been a shift to more employment in services, industry has not left the US, for the most part. Rather, the industrial union bastions of the Midwest have been weakened mainly by two trends internal to the US. Corporations have employed technology to reduce the size of the industrial workforce, without necessarily reducing its output. And corporations have often moved industry to anti-union regions of the US, most notably the South. At one point he writes that unions complain of jobs moving overseas when in fact they have moved down the interstate. He does not altogether discount that some jobs have moved overseas, of course. But he also notes, as is often absent from these discussions in the US, that the process cuts the other way as well. Many foreign car companies have opened plants in the US, mostly in the South. Also significant has been the trend towards corporate mergers and acquisitions. This shifted over time from simple financial grabs to strategic purchases of competitors, in the process often weakening unions. For example, unionized UPS purchased non-union Overnite (which became UPS Freight).

Moody doggedly emphasizes the centrality of certain 'traditional' industrial workforces in the US, in, for example, meatpacking, auto, and transportation. I don't think the words "dot com" appear in the text, and he is indifferent to the vogue on some parts of the left for organizing "knowledge workers" (i.e. grad students) or "sex workers" (strippers, prostitutes). As I read the book, I couldn't help but wonder if the indifference on much of the left to industrial workers, notwithstanding their continued economic salience, has as much to do with class bias as to any dramatic shifts in the nature of capitalism.

The geographical shift in manufacturing to non-unionized parts of the country and the technological shift to a smaller, more productive workforce might not have been so devastating to the fortunes of US labor if it had not been for the 'business unionism' orientation of most of the labor leadership. In this view, unions are best off working closely with business, trusting that "what's good for General Motors" will ultimately benefit their membership. There is a broad logical problem with this orientation --business and labor are both struggling to maximize their chunk of surplus value, so their interests are fundamentally in conflict -- and there is also a political and historical problem. Since the 1970s, when profit rates fell, business has become much more aggressive about pursuing an anti-union agenda, both politically and in the workplace. The unions, with a leadership that has failed to absorb the implications of this, have been disarmed and ineffective in the face of the onslaught. Although successful strikes have occurred, by employing such tactics as broadly disrupting the function of a metropolitan area (Pittston in 1989) or mobilizing the grassroots of a national union (UPS in 1996), the union leadership has not sought to generalize these tactics.

Additionally, Moody faults the unions for their embrace of the Democratic Party. Since the late forties, this has brought at best limited gains. In a first period, until the mid sixties, a considerable chunk of the party represented whites in the segregated South and was unsympathetic to an expansion of union-backed social demands. When this group mostly left the Democrats after the passage of civil rights legislation, the party increasingly became the terrain for relatively wealthy liberals detached from the working class. Lip service to union hopes was barely being paid by the time the Clinton administration joined with the Republicans to push through NAFTA. The union response has been neither to move towards building a third party (the strategy Moody aligns himself with) nor towards developing a strategy which might push the Democrats to the Left through grassroots pressure. Instead, "reform from above" efforts (first through the election of John Sweeney to leadership of the AFL-CIO, then through the fracturing of the federation with the emergence of the Change to Win coalition led by Sweeney protégé Andy Stern) have focused on revitalizing organizing drives to expand membership, while political initiatives have largely settled for trying to elect more Democrats, whatever their politics. Additionally, there has been a wave of mergers and consolidations of unions. These reform efforts have not been successful in increasing union density or power, embedded as they are in an expansive union bureaucracy staffed by professionals rather than the creation of a working-class cadre who can both articulate the need for unions and develop workplace-based strategies of struggle. Indeed, Stern, while opening up SEIU to some of the activists who emerged in the seventies and enjoying some success at organizing more workers into SEIU, goes even further than the traditional business union model, adopting an approach to union organization modeled on corporate America (and dismissive of union democracy) and strategies of "partnership" with employers that deeply compromise goals of working class solidarity. Furthermore, some other unions have altogether abandoned any concept of solidarity in favor of endorsing any politician, including Republicans, who can promise them progress on short-term demands.

FULL review at link.