State of the Union

American author and labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein’s non-fiction book State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002) examines the arc of organized labor in twentieth-century America, from its glory years in the 1930s to the open hostilities toward unions during the 1980s—hostilities from which the movement never recovered. Lichtenstein notes that since the 1980s, the share of the non-farm workforce represented by labor unions has shrunk from 28 percent to less than 16 percent.

Lichtenstein begins his narrative with the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO. Founded in 1935 by United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, the CIO quickly won a series of major triumphs for organized labor. In 1937, it helped United Auto Workers win recognition by General Motors Corporation, an infamously anti-union organization. That same year, the CIO helped the Steel Workers Organizing Committee sign a collective bargaining agreement with another anti-union stalwart, U.S. Steel. A collective bargaining agreement is a contract signed between a union and a company that sets terms and conditions involving wages, benefits, and dispute resolution. Lichtenstein's view is that the CIO succeeded not only because of the competency of its leaders but because its work was centered on an ideological vision for social democratic change. The leaders of the CIO wanted to give workers a voice not only regarding issues of wages and benefits but also concerning their employers' management and investment strategies.

Over time, however, the CIO lost sight of this broader vision. Lichtenstein attributes this loss to four factors. First, the federal government's National Labor Relations Board enacted new regulations barring some of the unions' more aggressive tactics, such as sit-down strikes in which factory workers occupy their workstations but refuse to work. This type of strike is generally the most effective because it prevents companies from hiring strikebreakers to replace workers. Second, despite a wave of strikes, particularly after World War II, companies didn't blink in their refusal to allow labor representatives a vote or a stake in the boardroom. Third, the CIO's Operation Dixie campaign to unionize industry workers in the American South was largely a failure, due in large part to racial strife and Jim Crow laws preventing white and black workers from organizing amicably alongside one another. Fourth, and perhaps most important, was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.



Overriding a veto by President Harry S. Truman, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, landing a huge blow to the organized labor movement. Among its many restrictions, the law prohibited foremen, straw bosses, and other low-ranking supervisors from joining unions. Taft-Hartley also disallowed secondary boycotts, in which a union boycotts a company it has no dispute with in an effort to coerce that company to cease working with another company with which the union does have a dispute. Furthermore, the law allowed states to pass "right-to-work laws" which effectively prohibited union agreements. Finally, Taft-Hartley required all union officers to sign affidavits swearing they are not Communists. This led to the ejection of many of the most passionate and visionary activists within labor unions.

Lichtenstein writes that these factors all combined to defang the labor movement. This weakening culminated in 1955 with the merger between the CIO and the American Federation of Labor to create the AFL-CIO. Under the leadership of the relatively conservative plumber's union leader George Meany, the AFL-CIO stagnated, even as the rest of the country underwent massive changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than assert itself in the civil rights revolutions of the era, the labor movement did little to engage in these battles, preferring to stay out of them so as not to risk losing the collective bargaining rights they still had and which were already starting to erode. To young people, the labor movement began to seem like part of the conservative establishment, and innovative activists and thinkers of the new generation had little appetite to devote their talents to organized labor organizations. Lichtenstein adds that the few unions that did engage with the civil rights movement—namely teachers and municipal workers—are among the only unions that saw their power and membership grow over the 1980s and 1990s.

With dwindling membership and few political allies, organized labor had no way to defend itself against the aggressively anti-union policies of Ronald Reagan. As governor of California, Reagan vetoed the state's Agricultural Relations Labor Act, which sought to allow United Farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, to sign collective bargaining agreements. Then as President, Reagan fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and barred them for life from working for the federal government (this ban was later lifted in 1993). His aggressiveness acted as a major deterrent against other organized labor activities. And while Lichtenstein writes that President Bill Clinton was less hostile to unions than his predecessors, as a man who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, he was also relatively indifferent to them.



State of the Union is a fascinating and well-argued history that explains the decline of the organized labor movement in the last half of the twentieth century.