Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO’s conservative ideology of “business unionism” effectively disarmed unions in the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its post-war gains.
With extraordinary attention to the viewpoints of rank-and-file workers, Moody chronicles the major, but largely unreported, efforts of labor’s grassroots to find its way out of the crisis. In case studies of auto, steel, meatpacking and trucking, he traces the rise of “anti-concession” movements and in other case studies describes the formidable obstacles to the “organization of the unorganized” in the service sector. A detailed analysis of the Rainbow Coalition’s potential to unite labor with other progressive groups follows, together with a pathbreaking consideration of the possibilities of a new “labor internationalism.”
workers outside its jurisdiction. Local 2000, which had been a Meatcutters local prior to the 1979 merger, was invaded by armed UFCW reps from the US for the crime of organizing grocery clerks. This incident was part of a larger struggle between the UFCW’s two Canadian regions. Region 18 had been the Amalgamated Meatcutters’ region before the merger, while Region 19 came from the Retail Clerks. The leaders of Region 18 were generally critical of UFCW President William Wynn’s approach to
in 1949, and unemployment did not reach this level again until the 1970s. Reflecting the relatively high employment level and some of the gains made during the war, the ratio of Black unemployment to white in 1949 was about 3 to 2, rather than the 2-to-1 ratio that became standard after the mid-1950s.1 Despite demobilization and recession, union membership remained more or less stable, actually growing from 1945 through 1947. The recession cost labor half a million union members, but even during
we are all going ahead together.… the past is dead, as far as factional considerations are concerned.’19 There were, to be sure, a handful of critics such as Carl Stellato of Local 600. But organized opposition was no longer considered legitimate. In the eyes of the International Executive Board there was no ‘honest opposition’, only ‘treason’. Individual dissent might be tolerated. Indeed, in 1957, when the McClellan Committee’s investigation of labor corruption brought abuses of union
since the late 1930s and gone on strike only once, in 1976. In 1968 Gulf & Western bought Morse along with other plants as part of an expansion program. For years, G & W milked the plant and then in 1981 began a drive for concessions aimed mainly at working conditions in its plants around the country. Unlike many of Morse’s previous owners, who bargained by reference to standards set in their own line of production in basically regional markets, G & W took a more global view of what wage levels
long, bitter and ultimately unsuccessful strike, with the company imposing deep cuts on a nonunion workforce. The Teamsters signed the second National Master Freight Agreement to contain across-the-board concessions, including a two-tier wage scale, loss of the COLA, and concessions on production standards. The second round also saw profitable firms such as Greyhound, the three major aerospace corporations, the major oil refiners, Hormel, and growing service industries like the hotel industry
