Comments Elsewhere

Maia,

Thanks for this post. It’s an important topic that all too often gets ignored or whitewashed in labor history.

In America, at least, there are two really distinct periods of history to consider — the labor movement up to the establishment of government-sponsored unionism by the Wagner Act in 1935, and then the labor movement after the establishment of government sponsorship. Before 1935 there were many different strands of the labor movement, who were often vigorously competing with one another over the vision of organized labor — conservative unions, especially those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, either actively excluded workers on the basis of sex, race, nationality, and class, or else tolerated and supported their union brothers [sic] who did so. Their strategy was, generally, to shore up the bargaining power of male, white, American-born, skilled tradesmen within the system of Gilded Age state capitalism, by shoving women, blacks, Asians, immigrants, and industrial workers out of the labor market. But other unions, especially radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, explicitly aimed at inclusion of all workers and worked actively to organize across lines of sex, race, nationality, class, etc. They aimed not to shore up the position of unionized workers within the state capitalist system, but rather to organize against the state capitalist system as such and replace it with worker ownership of the means of production. The conservative unions thus effectively became the junior partners of the bosses in trying to protect capitalist labor relations from the organizing of the radical unionists; meanwhile the radical unionists gained strength by organizing precisely those workers who were excluded by the conservative unions.

What happened in 1935 is that the Wagner Act created an extensive system of government privileges for unions that met the conditions for government recognition. Not surprisingly, the system was designed to favor the conservative unions’ organizing models and to focus union energies as much as possible on collective bargaining over wages and conditions with the sitting boss. Thus the explosive growth of the American Separation of Labor and its younger cousin, the CIO, through the new government-sponsored privileges, which “subversive organizations” like the IWW had no access to. The big union bosses flourished as they were inducted into the establishment alongside Big Government and Big Business. The bosses screamed bloody murder but then happily settled down to business with compliant, easy-to-coopt unions. The politicians celebrated their success in incorporating a new organized “base” into the system of political patronage and vote-buying. The radical unions dwindled in membership, or else were bought off by the other new big player in town — the Communist Party and its financial backers in Stalinist Russia. And the privileged, educated professionals who fancied themselves “Progressives” shouted “Hallelujah” and passed off the evisceration of domestic labor radicalism as the great triumph of labor history.

What’s happening now is that, with neither Soviet Communism nor autonomous domestic labor radicalism being considered a serious threat to the stability of the state capitalist system, Big Business and Big Government no longer have as much need for keeping Big Labor at the table. With less of a perceived threat, there is less of a perceived need for co-opting a buffer against that threat. It has served its purpose and now can be scaled back like any other obsolete resource. Thus, the current situation and the decaying prospects of the establishment unions. And since the establishment unions have spent the last half century selling out workers at large in order to protect the short-term interests of their own membership and especially their own union bosses, they have nobody but themselves to blame for that situation.