Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T05:51:31.391Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Is Labor Dead?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2009

Gerald Friedman
Gerald Friedman
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The Labor Movement has entered a crisis. Declining support for unions and for socialist political movements reflects the exhaustion of a reformist growth strategy where capitalists and state officials accepted unions in exchange for labor peace. While winning real gains for workers, this strategy undermined labor and its broader democratic aspirations by establishing unions and union and party leaders as authorities over the workers themselves. In the upheavals of the late-1960s and the 1970s, dissident movements, directed as much against reformist leaders as against employers and state officials, pushed protest beyond traditional limits toward demands for popular empowerment and democracy. Union decline began then, not because workers had lost interest in collective action but because employers and state officials abandoned collective bargaining to find alternative means of controlling unrest. Capitalism entered a new post-union era, when national leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used policies of open trade and capital flows and high unemployment to discipline labor. Abandoned by their capitalist bargaining partners, reformist unions and political parties have withered. Now, without social space for reformist movements, the labor movement can only advance by openly avowing its original goals of popular empowerment and the establishment of economic democracy.

Type
Rethinking the Left in Victory and Defeat
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 126 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

2. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America. Edited by Mayer, J. P. and Lerner, Max; translated by Lawrence, George. (New York, 1966), 522Google Scholar.

3. These data are discussed in Friedman, , Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring Means to Ends in a Democratic Labor Movement (London, 2008)Google Scholar.

4. Debs, , Unionism and Socialism (Chicago, 1907), 42Google Scholar.

5. This argument owes much to the ideas of others. See, for example, Lichtenstein, Nelson, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; and Piven, Francis Fox and Cloward, Richard, Poor People's Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Rancière, Jacques, Hatred of Democracy (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Rosanvallon, Pierre, Le Sacre du citoyen (Paris, 1992)Google Scholar; and La Question syndicale (Paris, 1998).

6. See, for example, Perlman, Selig, Theory of the Labor Movement (New York 1928)Google Scholar; Lenin, , What is to be Done? (New York, 1988)Google Scholar.

7. Raymond, , Joran, , L'Organisation syndicale dans l'industrie du bâtiment (Paris, 1914), 105Google Scholar. See also Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Axelrod, Robert, The Evolution of Cooperation. (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

8. Hobsbawm, , Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (New York, 1964), 126Google Scholar.

9. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, 127–28.

10. See Friedman, Reigniting the Labor Movement. Also see Clawson, Dan, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cronin, James, Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements; and, of course, Luxemburg, Rosa, The Mass Strike: The Political Party and the Trade Unions (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

11. See Ashenfelter, Orley and Pencavel, John, “American Trade Union Growth: 1900–1960,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 83 (1969): 434–448CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. See Zolberg, Aristide, “Moments of Madness” Politics and Society 2 (1972): 183–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Benn, Tony, Arguments for Socialism (London, 1979), 23Google Scholar.

14. Quoted in Rosanvallon, Pierre, La Question syndicale (Paris, 1998), 182Google Scholar.

15. Quoted in Sinyai, Clayton, Schools of Democracy: A Political History of the American Labor Movement (Ithaca, 2006), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Debs, Eugene V., Liberty: A Speech by Eugene V. Debs. Delivered at Battery D, Chicago, on Release from Woodstock Jail, November 22, 1895 (Terre Haute, Inc., 1895), 1Google Scholar.

17. Hobsbawm, Eric J., Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1990), 35–36Google Scholar.

18. Powderly, Terence V., The Path I Trod (New York, 1940), 55Google Scholar.

19. Nelson, Bruce, Beyond the Martyrs: A Social History of Chicago's Anarchists, 1870–1900. (New Brunswick, 1988), 142, 183Google Scholar; Green, James, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York, 2006), 132Google Scholar.

20. Green, Death in the Haymarket, 130; Dorfman, Joseph, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 3: 1865–1918 (New York, 1949), 140Google Scholar.

21. Fraser, Steven, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991), 42Google Scholar.

22. Tilly, Charles, The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA., 1986), 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23. Perrot, Michelle, Les Ouvriers en grève (Paris, 1975), 100Google Scholar; Sirot, Stéphane, La Grève en France: Une histoire sociale XIXe – XXe siècle (Paris, 2002), 144–151Google Scholar.

24. United Kingdom, Royal Commission on Labour, Fifth and Final Report, 1894 (Dublin, 1970), 44; Howell, Chris, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890–2000 (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar; Harris, Howell, “Between convergence and exceptionalism: Americans and the British model of labor relations, c. 1867–1920,” Labor History 48 (2007): 141–173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. L'Humanité, (June 6, 1936): 1.

26. L'Humanité, (June 12, 1936): 1. Also see Tartakowsky, Danielle, La Front populaire: La vie est à nous (Paris, 1996)Google Scholar; Kergoat, Jacques, La France du Front populaire (Paris, 2006)Google Scholar; Prost, Antoine, Autour du Front populaire: Aspects du movement sociale du XXe siècle (Paris, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Ross, Arthur and Hartman, Paul T., Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar.

28. Cohen, Sheila, Ramparts of Resistance: Why Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get it Back (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Cohen, “The 1968–74 Labor Upsurge in Britain and America: A Critical History, and a Look at What Might Have Been,” Labor History (forthcoming).

29. Crozier, Michel, Huntington, Samuel P., Watanuki, Joji, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. (New York, 1975), 75, 114Google Scholar.

30. Doyle, Clare, France 1968: Month of Revolution: Lessons of the General Strike. (London, 1988), 37Google Scholar.

31. See the discussion in Friedman, Reigniting, ch. 5.

32. See, for example, the Charter of the European Greens at http://www.europeangreens.org/cms/default/rubrik/9/9341.the_charter_of_the_european_greens.htm. Also note the attempt by Green Party activists in England to forge links with labor militants; see http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news. (Consulted on July 20, 2008.)