Reigniting the Labor Movement (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Reigniting the Labor Movement

For over a century, the Labor Movement has led campaigns for a more egalitarian and democratic society. As the central vehicles for popular social struggle, labor unions and socialist political movements contributed to much of the improvement in wages and working conditions for average workers, as well as the general democratization of society since 1880. The Labor Movement’s importance in the campaign for democracy makes its decline since 1980 a matter of pressing concern for all. Gerald Friedman charts the movement’s rise and fall and explains how it can be reignited to rebuild a movement for a democratic society. This book begins by confirming that Labor Movement decline is universal, the result of the exhaustion of an old pattern where unions grew by representing strikers, winning recognition from employers by exchanging labor peace for higher wages and improved working conditions. Friedman explores how strike involvement promotes union growth both from the perspective of the individual worker, whose understanding of class conflict is transformed through participation in collective action, and from the perspective of the Labor Movement leadership, who suppress popular militancy and popular democracy to advance a reform agenda through collaboration with employers and state officials. Union decline began because, on one side, workers lost faith in autocratic labor organizations and socialist parties and, on the other side, employers ceased to fear unrest and, thus, saw no reason to deal with unions. The book’s most novel contribution is its Tocquevillian analysis of the way labor unrest and labor organization can promote democracy by giving workers the opportunity to participate in collective action and self-government. Friedman’s controversial analysis suggests that the key to reigniting the Labor Movement is to restore it from a reformist movement of leaders to one organized by the rank-and-file to promote popular democracy. The book is relevant to courses in Labor History, Economic History, Modern History and Comparative Social Systems and is also important reading for political activists and anyone concerned with the future of the Labor Movement. Gerald Friedman is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts.

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94 Reigniting the Labor Movement Restoring means to ends in a democratic Labor Movement Gerald Friedman

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Reigniting the Labor Movement Restoring means to ends in a democratic Labor Movement

Gerald Friedman

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2008 Gerald Friedman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-93786-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-77071-8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93786-4 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77071-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93786-0 (ebk)

Living, arguing, talking with Debbie has made me a better scholar, and, I hope, a better person. This is for her with my thanks.

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

xiv xv

1

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

1

2

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

9

3

Labor’s liberty is a social product

31

4

How unions grew, and why they stopped

55

5

Explaining the inexplicable: accounting for the madness of moments

84

6

When workers win: dilemmas of success

115

7

The limits of social democracy: did success kill the Labor Movement?

136

Reigniting the Labor Movement: restoring means to ends in a democratic Labor Movement

156

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

164 168 172 185

8

Illustrations

Figures 2.1 2.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Union membership over time for 16 countries since 1880 Average union growth rates in years of high growth and regular growth Average union growth rates in strike-wave years compared with other years Average union growth rates for years with high strike activity compared with other years Average union growth rates for years with at least one strike wave in another country compared with other years Comparing effect on union growth rates of strikes and economic boom The average number of years with “special circumstances” affecting union growth, by decade The diminishing effect of strikes on union growth over time Total number of strikers by year for sixteen countries since 1900 Ratio of strikers to labor force, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900 Ratio of strikers to union membership, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900 Union membership growth rate, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900

19 29 68 69 70 89 92 93 117 118 119 119

Tables 2.1 5.1 5.2

The decline of the Labor Movement Characteristics of sixty-eight years with rapid union growth vs. other years Union growth rates in years with special circumstances

18 88 91

Acknowledgments

I was brought up to believe in the Labor Movement. Through unions, collectives, and socialist political movements, Labor was to bring fairness to the world, eliminating poverty and extreme want, transforming society from a capitalist one where people are dominated by property rights into a democracy where all are accorded human dignity and have an equal voice in the management of public affairs. Although he was born desperately poor, my father worked hard and well so that, by the time I was born, he was fairly rich and ran a company where he employed workers who belonged to a corrupt local of the Teamster’s Union. For my part, I was raised in an affluent Long Island suburb of New York, not far from the home of the New York Mets where my childhood heros were baseball players and socialists, including Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford from the New York Yankees, Israel’s labor Zionists, and the leaders of the CIO and the American apparel unions, especially Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, and Sidney Hillman. I believed that the Yankees would go to the World Series every year, and that history was on Labor’s side. Over time, unions would grow, the left would consolidate votes and power, we would move along from reform to reform, until we would wake up one morning in a better, egalitarian, socialist America. I recognized no contradiction in any of my ideas. There was a royal road to socialism to be built by a peaceful alliance of decent, well-meaning people, including both capitalists like my father and class-conscious workers, like those who had built Reuther’s United Auto Workers and Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Of course, I was naive. Even in my youth, it was clear that American unions were unlikely to usher in any millennium. Most unions were weak, many were corrupt, and few had any commitment to broad social change; even the best were ready, even eager, to accommodate themselves to business and to conservative politicians. Still faithful to my youthful hopes, for a time, I resisted criticisms, preferring to look to a future purer, more honest, democratic, and socialist American Labor Movement. By the 1980s, however, I could no longer ignore American Labor’s maladies. Rather than despair of the Labor Movement altogether, I looked elsewhere, outside the United States, for a better Labor Movement. After a brief enchantment with the British rank-and-file movements

xvi

Acknowledgments

of the 1970s, I settled on the syndicalists who, for a brief time before World War I, dominated the French union movement. Thus my first book, State-Making and Labor Movements (1998). I was able to write State-Making without challenging many of my preconceptions. In this work, I attributed the relative success of syndicalism and labor radicalism in the French Labor Movement before World War I to the support French unions enjoyed from politicians and state officials committed to protecting and enhancing French democracy. A continued threat from a monarchist right kept alive the coalition of labor with property-owning reformers that had first established the French Third Republic; the opportunity to win government support for their strikes and other movements encouraged French unions to spread their solidarity more broadly, to expand their actions in order to attract government notice. In the American republic, by contrast, the collapse of the slave-holders’ rebellion of 1861–65 eliminated any real threat to the established regime. Property-owning republicans did not need to maintain a coalition with labor; lacking the opportunity to win government support, American unions learned to narrow their solidarity because expanding their actions would bring on government intervention more likely to be repressive than friendly. In a large sense, I argued that the process of union organization was quite similar in France and the United States but subject to different politics. I intended State-Making to explain American Exceptionalism in terms of political processes unique to the United States. In writing State-Making, I had imagined that the French experience would be the norm, American exceptional due to a temporary conjunction of political factors that made the governing coalition unusually hostile to labor in the American republic. But when I began to think of making a broader argument about labor movement dynamics over time, across countries, and even in France, I was forced to less attractive conclusions that challenged my youthful naivety. I realized that it was the French situation, a coalition between a still-revolutionary bourgeoisie with labor against a surviving aristocracy, that was becoming unusual over the twentieth century; and even in France, most of labor’s allies came to this coalition only because they saw unions and other Labor Movement institutions as organizations that would regulate and channel popular unrest and the workers’ own spontaneous labor movement. Thus the government coalition promoting popular solidarity that I had discovered in France was unusual, was becoming less common, and was less open to popular, democratic militancy than I had thought in writing StateMaking. Instead of leading to revolutionary syndicalism, the logic of the political coalition process that I had discovered in State-Making led to a different type of labor movement. The lure of support from state officials and liberal employers is powerful, but it does not drive union officials towards revolutionary solidarity. Instead, it draws them to forms of labor action consistent with the maintenance of capitalist authority; rather than popular democracy, state officials and liberal employers promote collective bargaining and a centralized, bureaucratic, even authoritarian Labor Movement able to exchange restraints on militancy for con-

Acknowledgments

xvii

cessions at the bargaining table. Rather then promoting labor solidarity, liberal state officials sponsor an undemocratic Labor Movement that will, at best, lead to a somewhat-enlightened capitalism rather than democratic socialism. By the 1990s, when I finished State-Making, those who put their hopes in the Labor Movement had a new problem that loomed even larger than that of American Exceptionalism. By 1990, the great wave of labor radicalism that crested in the mid- or late-1970s had definitely receded and the Labor Movement had begun to lose ground throughout the world. The world had changed, and soon I sought to understand what had changed between the century of Labor Movement growth after 1880 and the decline that set in after 1980. I hoped that my old focus on state politics, coalition building, and the role of mass strikes could help explain the decline of the Labor Movement at the end of the twentieth century and gathered data on annual union membership in countries other than France and the United States. Using these data, I found that mass strikes were indeed generally crucial for union growth. I was able to explain much of the decline in membership growth as a result of declining strike activity and a fall over time in the effect of strikes on union growth. In an evolving series of papers, at the Society for French Historical Studies (Ottawa, 1998), Cliometrics (2003), and North American Labor History (2004), I presented these findings on the role of mass strikes in union growth. Presenting my work to diverse groups of social scientists and historians, I was brought to develop the historical side of my analysis. Instead of viewing unionization as a static result of changes in conditions, I was brought to think of it as a historical process, the result of attitudes and institutions that evolve in response to experience. Union decline, therefore, reflects not only changing circumstances but the exhaustion of a particular mode of union growth; authoritarian Labor Movements have run their course because they can no longer walk the narrow line between workers’ desire for democracy and the readiness of capitalists and state authorities to tolerate any form of worker power. This led me back to my original youthful concerns with the future of democracy and the possibilities for socialism. For a century, the Left looked to the institutions and organizations of the Labor Movement to lead the campaign for equality and democracy. The decline of the Labor Movement has led some to abandon this struggle, some have looked elsewhere for a democratic vanguard, and some, ignoring Labor’s failures, have searched desperately for ways to revive the old Labor Movement. I fear that none of these is the right response. There is no substitute for a democratic labor movement, one that engages workers in the labor process. But there is no real possibility to revive the old union and socialist movements. The old Labor Movement’s failures are not exceptional accidents, and its decline is no aberration to be fixed by some small change in law or strategy. The compromises the old Labor Movement made as a reformist movement prevent it from advancing democracy because they required the Movement to recognize the legitimacy of capitalist authority and hierarchy, trading rank-and-file activism and control for higher wages and better working conditions. Internally undemocratic and externally vulnerable, the old Labor

xviii Acknowledgments Movement lost its democratic impulse long before decline set in. Decline came naturally to unions and socialist political parties who had already forsaken their base in the popular labor movement, and whose program inspired little collective energy. Instead, we need a labor movement that will facilitate and support the efforts of workers at the base, at the workplace, in order to develop popular democracy. This book draws together three lines of my thought: my longstanding interest in unions and the Labor Movement, concern for the future of democracy, and my fascination with issues of historical epistemology. It brings together ideas and research that have been gestating for decades, and my thanks range widely. Even more than would usually be the case, I am indebted to my teachers, including my colleagues, who have helped me along. In the very beginning, as an undergraduate at Columbia, I was introduced to serious scholarship on the role of the Labor Movement by Thomas Horne, Aaron Warner, David Crew, and Allan Silver. In writing this work, I have benefitted from discussion with Michael Ash, Dan Clawson, Rosa Friedman, Dan Gordon, Carol Heim, Wythe Holt, Debra Jacobson, Emily Kawano, Merrilee Mardon, Bernard Moss, Craig Phelan, Bertrand Roehner, and Jean-Christian Vinel. Debbie Sachs Gabor helped edit. Along the way, I have been helped by comments from conference participants at the Annual Meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies (1999), the Cliometrics Conference (2003), and at the North American Conference on Labor History (2004). My colleagues at the Jewish Community of Amherst, notably John Loeb and Judith Glaser, provided models of participatory and democratic self-government. Mistakes, of course, remain my own.

1

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

It is ridiculous to imagine that the wage-workers can be slaves in employment and yet achieve control of the polls. There never yet existed coincident with each other autocracy in the shop and democracy in political life. Samuel Gompers (Kaufman 1973: 212) The triumph of socialism will not be a break with the French Revolution but the fulfillment of the French Revolution in new economic conditions Jean Jaurès (Goldberg 1962: 156)

The Labor Movement and “bourgeois democracy” The modern Labor Movement was born on the centennial of that most democratic of days, 14 July 1789. One hundred years after the people of Paris stormed the Bastille and overthrew absolute monarchy, 391 delegates from twenty countries met in Paris’s Salle Petrelle on 14 July 1889 to form the Second Socialist International.1 Although the German Social Democratic Party called the meeting, a universal respect for the French Revolution brought the socialists and radicals to Paris. Inspired by the Revolution’s democratic achievements, the delegates at Salle Petrelle sought not to overturn but to build on the accomplishments of earlier, bourgeois revolutionaries. Socialists, they regularly appropriated slogans and motifs from the revolution of 1789. “The Marseillaise,” historian Eric Hobsbawm notes, “was the anthem of German Social Democracy, and Austrian Social Democracy in 1890 still put the Phrygian bonnet . . . and the slogan Equality, Liberty, Fraternity, on its May Day badges” (Hobsbawm 1990: 35–6). In 1886, striking miners in Decazeville, France, paraded under the tricolor flag and sang the Marseillaise; their strike against a company led by prominent reactionaries supported by the Catholic clergy was said to embody the continuing “struggle of universal suffrage against the monarchy” (Reid 1985: 103). Heir to the Revolution, the Republic itself, socialist Jean Jaurès said, “is the form incarnate of intellectual liberty moving towards social equality.” But there was still a long way to go to complete the work of the Revolution because there remains absolutism at the heart of the economic system:

2

Labor’s democratic dilemmas In the shop, the workers do not deliberate, they obey. In Parliament, they only deliberate through the intermediary of a few distant representatives. In unions and in cooperatives, workers deliberate by themselves; they pronounce directly on precise questions.... Thus the idea of direct government of the people by the people, which was inscribed in the republican and democratic constitutions of 1793, takes form in the economic organization of the proletariat. (Goldberg 1962: 36, 72)

A link between socialism and the earlier bourgeois Revolution was recognized throughout the socialist movement. The German revisionist socialist Eduard Bernstein agreed; he declared socialism simply “democracy brought to its logical conclusion” (Przeworski and Sprague 1986: 21). Literary executor to Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky was the Second International’s leading theoretician and founding editor for thirty-four years after 1883 of Die Neue Zeit, the world’s leading journal of Marxist theory.2 Speaking for the orthodox center of the modern Labor Movement, Kautsky emphasized the close tie between socialism, labor, and “bourgeois democracy” or a regime with democratic political forms but where private property in the means of production left economic power in the hands of capitalists. The proletariat must do all it can to advance “bourgeois democracy,” including strengthening the powers of parliament, because “[m]odern Socialism is not merely social organization of production, but the democratic organization of society as well” (Kautsky 1971b: 6). The working class needs “democracy no less than Socialism” (Kautsky 1946: 116). Socialism: must represent the realization of the slogan of the French Revolution, which was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. . . . Socialist parties fight not only for shorter working hours and higher wages, unemployment insurance and shop councils, but also for the liberty, equality, fraternity of all human beings, regardless of race, color, or creed. (Kautsky 1946: 115, 27) The labor movement is democratic or it is nothing; either it empowers all, or it is merely a spoils-fight between contending elites. Worse, if it creates an egalitarian society without democratic means, labor risks creating an oppressive dictatorship that would coerce all into a totalitarian mold. As a democratic movement, Labor advances a fundamentally social and communitarian vision where collective action deliberately regulates all aspects of life. It is only through democratic procedures and values that we can hope that such a society can preserve individual liberty because these procedures teach democratic values of mutual respect, respect for individual autonomy, and respect for the equal rights of all individuals. It is through the spread of democratic forms through all aspects of society, including both government and throughout the economy, that we hope to prevent egalitarian democracy from degenerating into a totalitarian dictatorship. Self-government and the attendant procedures and values cannot be

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

3

taught by a dictator, not even the leaders of a nominally democratic Labor Movement. Instead, they are learned through participation in self-governing associations, especially those consciously struggling to create democracy.3 Ultimately, labor struggles teach that our individual freedom, our democratic individuality, rests on a democratic society. Labor’s liberty is doubly a social product. First, the freedom of each individual worker relies on communal support because only through collective action can workers limit the otherwise overwhelming power of employers and those wealthy individuals who control private property. And, second, labor’s liberty is social because only collective action can give security and opportunity to those who do not control property. Equality is not a natural characteristic of individuals; it is achieved only through communal solidarity to create equal opportunity for all to express themselves equally. More than a slogan, “fraternity” is the basis of all social progress through collective action. Workers can always advance their condition within capitalism better as individuals than as part of a collective movement; the only justification for a collective movement is to achieve ends not possible as individuals, collective respect and the opportunity to regulate the workplace through democratic participation. When a movement abandons these broader goals, it forsakes its own existential rationale. Thus for democratic socialists like Kautsky, democracy is not only the goal of the labor movement, it is an essential means as well, because democratic procedures give workers an education in collective action and self-governance. It is democracy that transforms workers into a working class. Participation teaches the value and the power of collective action including the need for individuals to support communal institutions; and the experience of working together teaches people political and social skills needed for collective self-governance, including a sense of their own power as well as both the procedures for democratic selfgovernance and the necessary attitudes of mutual respect. There is a theory of historical change here, one fundamentally opposed to the simple materialism and structuralism usually associated with Kautsky and other Marxists of his age. For Kautsky, Marxism’s great revelation was not the role of material factors in history nor even the nature of capitalist exploitation. Instead, his greatest insight was “the idea of development into socialist thought, and perceived the working class not only as it was but also as it was becoming.” Echoing Engels’ eulogy at Marx’s funeral, Kautsky saw Marx as the Darwin of the social sciences, explaining social development the way Darwin studied the evolution of species. Employing the Marxist dialectic as a tool rather than a solution, Kautsky went beyond Marx’s few writings on the subject to make democratic political action central to the transition from capitalism to socialism. The conflict between the development of the material forces of production and the social relations leads to socialism, Kautsky argues, only when the forms of capitalist class conflict develop the working class’s intellectual and moral power so that it can emancipate itself through democratic action. Class consciousness, Kautsky argues, cannot be taught to the workers, it cannot be brought to them “by men who proclaimed themselves the schoolmasters of the workers” (Kautsky 1946: 26ff.).

4

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

Instead, it must be learned through action, through the work of democratic labor unions and socialist movements. If democracy is the royal road from class conflict to socialism, then the institutions workers form must organize the march. The institutions of the organized Labor Movement did not begin with capitalism or with factory production, or even with the labor movement as a movement of popular protest. On the contrary, factories and capitalism date back well before the Paris conclave of 1889, as does labor unrest. The history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is filled with worker protests, contentious events, strikes, even nascent workingmen’s political movements. But before the 1880s, these protests were effervescent, they were the product of a loosely organized, largely spontaneous “labor movement” rather than a well-orchestrated, organized, bureaucratized “Labor Movement”. Early protest was sparkling, exciting, but short-lived because, by definition, it lacked organization and institutional structure, leadership and bureaucracy, to survive after the initial outburst. The new development of the 1880s, the great achievement of these early giants like Kautsky, Samuel Gompers, Karl Legien, and their colleagues was to create institutions, a Labor Movement that would carry on beyond any particular upheaval to protect gains made and to push forward, even to lay the groundwork for the next upheaval. Throughout the capitalist world, this Movement was born in a burst of creative energy in the 1880s and 1890s when unions and socialist political parties and other institutions were created that would survive and grow for a century. Born from popular upsurges of the popular labor movement, these Labor Movements would be expanded and renewed during subsequent upsurges through the twentieth century, in 1906, 1919, 1936, and other years. But the tie between the institutional Labor Movement and the popular labor movement runs both ways, and it has not always been benign. Labor Movement institutions feed off the democratic popular movement and depend on it for growth, but the Movement institutions can also divert and even undermine the popular movement. They do this by turning popular upheavals away from the fundamental demands for respect and democracy into demands compatible with capitalist authority, into limited campaigns for a constrained set of reforms. While such diversions undermine popular enthusiasm and the possibilities of democratic socialism, they are not necessarily the work of malevolent labor leaders. The mobilized popular labor movement can compel concessions from employers and state authorities; but it is the task of the institutional Labor Movement to secure these gains, to make these concessions enforceable, to end strikes by exchanging labor peace for contractual concessions. Labor leaders become “labor statesmen,” charged to enforce contractual labor peace even against their own members. Thus the upheavals that give birth to the institutions of the Labor Movement create a dynamic where the Labor Movement’s own leaders suppress the very democracy to which they owe their positions. Bridging the gap between power and the people, the institutional Labor Movement provides a mechanism for working-class power; but this bridge carries traffic both ways, selling social peace to society’s powers in exchange for concessions for the members.

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

5

The Labor Movement’s growth ended in the 1980s. Now, after over two decades of decline, we can assess the meaning of Labor’s long cycle of growth and decline. For those who believe in labor’s democratic ideals and hoped that the Labor Movement would usher in a better world, the crucial question remains whether decline can be reversed? But there is a deeper question here going back to the contentious interchange between labor’s democratic ideals and Labor’s often authoritarian institutional life: can we create institutions to build democracy? Can democracy be “organized”? And, can there be popular democracy in this world?

The Labor Movement: democratic workers in hierarchical institutions Others question the association I make between the Labor Movement and democracy. Instead of emphasizing the transformative power of participation in democratic collective action on workers, they stress the way institutions magnify the power of individual workers. The organized Labor Movement has always walked on two legs: the Movement is inspired and powered by rank-and-file militancy but lives day-to-day in institutions. Without questioning the Labor Movement’s commitment to democracy in society, some would defend union and party authoritarianism by questioning the significance of internal union democracy. They wonder whether democratic management of labor’s institutions is even desirable. Instead of focusing on internal democracy within working-class organizations, they emphasize the ability of these organizations to promote democracy by limiting employer power over the workers. Their key question is not whether the union itself is democratic, but whether it can stand against the boss; whether it can muster enough bargaining power to force concessions from management. With this instrumentalist attitude, labor leaders from both the left and the right have used undemocratic procedures to hold onto power and to suppress rank-andfile activism that might question their leadership. Adopting ideas more appropriate for advocates of aristocratic governance, some labor leaders have held nearly lifetime tenure at the head of major labor organizations. The American labor leader Samuel Gompers, for example, used his control over the federation bureaucracy to remain head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for over 40 years until his death in 1925. Léon Jouhaux led the French Confédération générale du travail (CGT) for almost as long, from 1909 to 1947; Karl Legien led the German labor federation from 1890 till his death in 1920; and Walter Citrine led the British Trade Union Congress for nearly twenty years, 1926–45. Far from denying their authoritarian tendencies, union leaders boast of their ability to suppress democratic impulses and to control the union rank-and-file. Indeed, it is this control that becomes the basis for the characteristic Labor bargain with management, exchanging labor peace for concessions on wages and working conditions. Late nineteenth-century reformers quickly came to endorse this type of Labor Movement because it provided improvements in living conditions for workers without threatening management authority or the

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Labor’s democratic dilemmas

prerogatives of private property. As unions mature, it is said, they substitute collective bargaining for strikes because the union leadership develops the tools to regulate their members, including control over union benefit funds and contract procedures. Established unions, an English Royal Commission on Labour said, do not strike; strikes are a characteristic of the early, “militant stage” of unions before they have proven themselves to be reliable partners. Strikes, a French observer agreed, break out among unorganized workers; “they will not disappear with collective bargaining but will be reduced in number.” (Groussier 1913: 102; also see Waldeck-Rousseau 1900: 328) Strikes, an American observer agreed, are the sign of a weak organization. If they were strongly organized, the workmen were able and usually disposed to keep their contracts, as they would not if the organization were weak. In other words, the strong organization is not only the organization which contributes most to its members, but it is the one with which the employer can most advantageously deal. (James Reynolds (head-worker of the University Settlement of Chicago) at National Conference on Industrial Conciliation 1902: 35) The four union leaders mentioned above, Gompers, Jouhaux, Legien, and Citrine, would have denounced the association, but a famous Russian communist, Lenin, provided a theoretical justification of autocratic governance of labor organizations. Unlike union moderates who feared rank-and-file militancy, Lenin opposed union democracy because he wanted an entrenched union leadership to radicalize the rank-and-file. Lenin argued that Labor Movement institutions should be centrally controlled, they should ignore democratic forms and the spontaneous wishes of the workers so that a leadership vanguard of intellectuals and activists will lead the masses to socialism. Lenin’s ideas were controversial and his greatest achievement, the November Revolution that inaugurated Bolshevik rule in the Soviet Union, came to be rejected by most labor leaders. But disputes with the Communists over social goals notwithstanding, most labor leaders in practice agree with Lenin that Labor Movement institutions need to be managed by leaders rather than democratically by membership participation. Again and again, the same pattern has been repeated: a rank-and-file insurgency leads to concessions to the workers and the establishment of a union or a political institution or the election of a new leader to protect those gains and enhance them. But over time, the new institution or the new leader becomes entrenched, the new leadership uses its position to restrain militancy and to hold onto office. The “new men of power,” as the American sociologist C. Wright Mills dubbed them in his 1948 book, value the prestige and the authority their position gives them (Mills 1948). But there is more here than individual psychology. The repeated overturning of democratic procedures reflects a fundamental problem of a reformist Labor Movement within capitalism. The surest way to win concessions from capitalists and governments, indeed, often the only way, is to bargain away the workers’ militancy;

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

7

capitalists and government officials accept and even value unions and socialist parties precisely because they are undemocratic and, therefore, can maintain and enforce agreements against the wishes of the rank-and-file. And when democracy becomes a bargaining chip, popular participation becomes a casualty of the class war. Thus the battle for democracy is fought on two fronts. It is fought externally between labor and capitalists over the right of every individual to a voice in matters that affect them. And it is fought internally, within labor organizations, over the issue of rank-and-file participation versus vanguard or professional management, and it is there that the ideal of labor democracy has been sacrificed for immediate gains. Instead of promoting democracy to empower the membership and build a movement, leaders have used it as a bargaining chip, to be exchanged with labor’s opponents for material concessions by agreeing to restrain rank-and-file activism. Sometimes, the reforms won, higher wages, shorter work hours, even controls over hiring and firing, are presented as important contributions to building a revolutionary movement because they improve the condition of workers and teach the value of collective action. But the readiness of leaders to abandon internal democracy means that the Labor Movement ceases to be a tool for working-class self-education. At best it makes Labor Movement organizations just another set of businesses providing commodity services in exchange for dues; at worst, it risks installing a new set of tyrants who assume power in the name of a passive, voiceless “people.” This then has been the pyrrhic victory of the Labor Movement: successes won through rank-and-file militancy and activism which have become embodied in institutions whose very survival is predicated on channeling, corralling, restraining, and controlling that activism. Labor’s success has created the movement’s gravediggers in the movement’s own leaders.

Labor’s unfinished revolution The labor movement began as a popular struggle for democracy. At the beginning, in the great American railroad strikes of 1877, strikers in St. Louis paraded behind Workingmen’s Party banners and sang the “Marseillaise” (Bruce 1959: 255). Proclaiming their traditional aspirations, the strikes’ leaders proclaimed that “while we still have the Republic we still have hope” (Bruce 1959: 320). The National Labor Tribune promised that the days of capitalistic rule are numbered. . . . Private capital and private ownership cannot exist in a republic. One or the other must fall. Prepare, O workingmen of America, to enter into the promised land which is near us, if we be but true. (quoted in Krause 1992: 139) Lacking established unions, strikers improvised for themselves. They formed “roaming committees” to spread the word and organized committees to guard

8

Labor’s democratic dilemmas

struck facilities and to manage their communal affairs democratically. By tying their strike to traditional democratic values, strikers attracted broad public support, as even hostile observers admitted. Even President Rutherford B. Hayes sympathized, questioning whether “the railroads govern the country, or shall the people govern the railroads?” (Schneirov 1998: 72). Frightened by labor’s use of democratic values and forms, its opponents renounced their own Republic’s democratic origins. Judge Walter Gresham (later Secretary of State under Cleveland at the time of the Pullman strike) complained that “Our revolutionary fathers . . . went too far with their notions of popular government. . . . Democracy is now the enemy of law & order & society itself & as such should be denounced” (Bruce 1959: 317). For over a century, the Labor Movement grew, building from strength to strength, making society more democratic, more respectful of the poor, moving human rights above the claims of capitalist property. But these achievements could not resolve the contradiction at the heart of the Labor Movement, the use of authoritarian means and institutions to advance a democratic cause. On the contrary, success entrenched labor statesmen at the head of the hierarchical institutions of the Labor Movement, institutions organized to administer an exchange of concessions for labor peace. Organized Labor won its place in society at the price of overcoming labor democracy; instead of schools for popular democracy, unions became bargaining agents for their members, providing one more commercial commodity. No longer adherents who have joined their identity to the union, too many members have become simple dues-payers, no more involved with the union struggle than with the management of some insurance company (Rosanvallon 1998: 33). So long as Labor’s power grew, these democratic dilemmas could be ignored. But they can be neglected no longer. Labor’s power and public support has been ebbing since the late 1970s until, today, both the Labor Movement and the popular labor movement on which it has been based appear to be peripheral to modern society and social struggles. This book explores the loss of Labor’s forward momentum, and asks what can be done to revive the Movement, or at least the movement. It shows how Labor’s past success rested on practices that built community and solidarity among workers, but also how these successes led to a self-defeating policy of economic brinkmanship where union leaders abandoned needed spontaneity and democracy to manage labor unrest through collective bargaining. Uninspired by bureaucratic organizations, workers came to reject the formal institutions of the Labor Movement, choosing either unregulated militancy, which undermined their unions’ accords with management, or drifting off to private pursuits and individual consumption. Hard as it is to renew, labor’s democratic project of building community, solidarity, and democracy is as necessary as ever. Today, as much as in 1889, we need to build a social movement explicitly around popular democracy and control over means of production as a democratic right. We need a labor movement that can rebuild faith in democracy, in community, and in the possibility of collective action. Labor is dead only if we are ready to bury it, and with it the hopes for democracy that gave birth to the labor movement.

2

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

Every place where the capitalist mode of production exists, with few exceptions, they [the Socialist parties] have been irresistibly on the march since the end of the last century. Karl Kautsky in 19381

“The first May Day of union and hope” Over one million Parisians swelled the streets of Paris on 1 May, 1936. Celebrating the Popular Front, the union of the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties formed to defend democracy and the French Republic, two immense columns paraded from Place de la République to meet at Place de la Nation “running along the large avenues and the paths of Vincennes a veritable human sea.” A mighty crowd united “shop workers, store clerks, and office workers together, fraternally, with a multitude of technicians and intellectuals . . . to celebrate the success, the power, and the unity of the Popular Front” (L’Humanité, 2 May 1936: 1). The demonstrators marched behind signs representing the full gamut of the popular movement behind the alliance. In addition to banners supporting the Popular Front parties and their demands, marchers proclaimed their union affiliations, support for striking workers, and affirmations of democratic principles. Banners defended the Republic against its domestic enemies, supported the Spanish loyalists and called for international unity against German Nazi and Italian Fascist aggression. Joining millions of demonstrators in other French cities, and throughout the free world from Madrid to London, New York and San Francisco, the marchers who filled Paris on that sunny May Day proclaimed the unity of labor in the struggle for democracy. May Day continued to be marked with rallies and marches in Paris for another half century before the celebrations suddenly grew quieter in the mid1980s. Banned by the Nazis during the Occupation, for years after World War II May Day demonstrations were both a nationalist celebration of the democratic Liberation and a parade of labor demands. Large Parisian May Day demonstrations supported demands ranging from labor unity against the war in Algeria to the defense of unions and strikers. In 1967, thousands rallied at the Paris Bourse

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Has the forward march of Labor halted?

du Travail to support iron miners and carpenters and to rally “against US aggression in Vietnam;” thousands joined striking students on May Day 1968, prefiguring the ten million strikers who almost brought down the Fifth Republic government of Charles De Gaulle. De Gaulle’s Republic survived, albeit without the General, and Parisians continued to march on May Day. Anticipating that year’s parliamentary elections, tens of thousands marched in 1978 in the “workers’ May Day . . . for our demands, for liberty, and for unity and solidarity in struggle.” Under gray skies, they followed the now-traditional route from Place de la République to Place de la Bastille demanding “Liberté et Solidarité” and against the conservative government’s austerity program raising train fares, electric rates, and value-added taxes.2 On May Day 1981, Parisian workers turned out for a giant demonstration of their power, their solidarity, and their commitment to world-changing collective action. Anticipating the election of a Socialist President, François Mitterrand, thousands marched along the Seine demanding jobs, higher pay, and proclaiming the dignity of labor. The celebration was even more boisterous when, two weeks later, Mitterrand won the runoff election and, again, when his Socialist/Communist/Radical coalition elected a solid majority of members to the Chamber of Deputies. Once again as in 1936, there was unity and hope. It has been a long way down after the May Day hopes of 1936 and 1981. May Day continues to be celebrated; but the festivities are much quieter. With only a small demonstration to cover in 1997, the Communist paper L’Humanité could scarcely proclaim the imminent triumph of socialism. But, at least, workers had rejected the appeals of the racist Front nationale; even compared with the Left’s small turnout, the Front’s rally was quiet and poorly attended. Today, few recall that labor’s May Day, with all of its leftist traditions and European memories, is an American invention. The first May Day was proclaimed in 1884 when the annual convention of the nearly decrepit Federation of Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) voted to launch a national movement for the eight-hour-work day to be held on 1 May 1886. A confederation of craft unions organized against broader forms of labor solidarity, the FOTLU lacked the resources or the organization to advance the May Day movement. But the campaign was picked up by radicals in the FOTLU’s rival, the Knights of Labor, and by others who used it as a tocsin calling the American working class to action. On 1 May 1886, nearly half a million workers struck for the eight-hour day. The May Day appeal was renewed by the FOTLU’s successor, the American Federation of Labor, with a strike movement called for May Day 1890. But it was the same Paris meeting that launched the Socialist International, in July 1889, that made May Day a phenomenon. Endorsing the May Day concept, socialists called for a worldwide campaign for an eight-hour work-day to begin on May Day 1890. Thus the new Labor Movement launched its first international action. From meager beginnings in the late-nineteenth century, unions grew in membership and bargaining power; growing numbers of workers joined strikes; and radical political movements gained greater electoral support and government

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

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authority. By the 1970s, the Labor Movement had established social welfare programs that had transformed capitalism into a kinder, gentler system, restricting the power of capitalists over their workers, limiting the scope of capitalist property, and constraining markets. Labor had moved many capitalist countries far down the path from a society governed by property to a democratic society of equals. But this growing tide ebbed abruptly between 1975 and 1980. In 1975, socialist or labor parties governed nine of sixteen leading industrial economies, and a rising tide of social reform threatened conservative rule in others, including the United States. That year saw history’s largest strike wave, over fifteen million strikers demanding higher wages and a greater say in industrial management. Union membership rose to a new high; union leaders were dictating policy to governments from Britain to Italy; and shrinking profits threatened capitalism as a system. Questioning whether capitalism could even survive, conservative social critics warned of a “crisis of governability” and an excess of democracy (Crozier et al. 1975). Then, the tide turned. After weathering the crisis of the 1970s, Western capitalism has gone from strength to strength with renewed confidence. And the organized Labor Movement went into a continuing eclipse along all dimensions: union membership dropped; the number of strikers plummeted; and support for socialist political movements fell. This was not Labor’s first downturn; but it has been different from previous retreats because this time Labor has lost its confidence, its sense of mission; and this time there is no sign of revival. Even before sustained decline began in 1980, the historian and radical activist Eric Hobsbawm asked presciently in 1978 whether “[t]he Forward March of Labour Halted?” (Hobsbawm 1981). Pointing to declining membership and electoral support for the Labour Party and the Communist Party, falling unionization rates, and diminishing support for the other institutions of Labour Movement, Hobsbawm concluded that “the forward march of labour and the labour movement, which Marx predicted, appears to have come to a halt in this century about twenty-five to thirty years ago” (Hobsbawm 1981: 1). At the time, Hobsbawm’s warnings were angrily rejected by commentators. Even after the election of the arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, the socialist activist and labor historian Royden Harrison insisted that British working people “are not to be easily defeated” and that all they require for victory is “a belief in themselves and a Clausewitz to supply, not a preconceived strategy, but the one appropriate to the surrounding terrain and the prevailing disposition of forces” (Hobsbawm 1981: 57). Hobsbawm may have been a little premature; on at least some measures, Labor’s forward march continued after 1978 in a few countries. But he was remarkably prescient about the main point: the Labor Movement had lost momentum and decline was coming. Earlier in some countries, later in others, Labor’s decline has become general, with, in some cases, a sense of rout. Taking equivocations into account, the forward march of labor halted between 1975 and 1980; and it shows no sign of restarting.3

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Has the forward march of Labor halted?

Unions in decline The Labor Movement has declined along every dimension: membership in labor unions, strikers, votes cast for leftist political parties. But these numbers tell only part of the story. The Labor Movement has lost its spirit, its élan, social legitimacy, and moral status even faster than it has members. No longer seen as the engine powering a drive for general emancipation, today’s Labor Movement is widely portrayed as an exclusive “special interest,” concerned only with the interests of those lucky few who belong to unions or, even worse, the interests of a few leaders. Even in the 1970s, Labor was at the center of hopes and dreams for revolutionary social change to spread democracy. No longer. Today, even the Left expects little of Labor.4 The decline in union membership has been the most striking aspect of Labor’s decline and has generated the most attention. Perhaps the first warning of trouble was from one of the many intellectual activists who came to the Labor Movement in the 1930s in hope of promoting social reform and democracy. Born in New York City in 1907, in a Jewish community established in the shadow of Czarist oppression, Solomon Barkin was brought up with a commitment both to personal advancement and to radical democracy and fundamental social change. As a youth, he was familiar with both libraries and with May Day demonstrations. After being graduated from City College in 1928, he studied at Columbia University with the liberal labor economist, Leo Wolman. There, he made connections that allowed him to wed his desire for personal advancement with his commitment to social reform. After Barkin earned his master’s degree in 1929, Wolman helped him to become assistant director of the State Commission on Old Age Security. After New York’s Governor Franklin Roosevelt became United States President in 1933, Barkin moved to Washington to serve as a specialist in industrial economics on the labor advisory board of the National Recovery Administration and in the Department of Commerce. Until 1935, Barkin’s career as a social reformer had taken him along well trodden paths from academic success to top-down elite social reform. But such paternalistic social reform did not satisfy Barkin’s desire to promote democracy and popular empowerment. Instead, he sought lasting reform that would bring power to workers by spreading democracy through popular mobilization and organization. He came to believe that labor unions could fulfill this democratic function. “Trade unions,” Barkin argued, are “essential to an effective decentralized pluralistic, democratic society.” “Political freedom and democracy,” he added, “depend upon an effective internal balance of private economic power. Management has accumulated great might in the large corporations; there must be a countervailing force representing employees” (Barkin 1961: 64, 65). Barkin established connections in his work for Roosevelt’s New Deal that gave him a unique opportunity to foster union organization and popular empowerment. At the National Recovery Administration, Barkin met Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. For over thirty years after he was elected President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA)

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

13

in 1914, Hillman and the ACWA were at the center of American politics and social change. As a union leader, Hillman had transmuted the spontaneous militancy of the garment workers into a strong organization; but under his control, the union had gradually lost the democratic spirit and rank-and-file combativeness that had given it birth. Hillman sought to use unions and the Labor Movement to make a better capitalism, and his reformist “new unionism” won friends among political progressives and even a few capitalists. But by leaving intact the structures of workplace authority, his policies rested on restraining rank-and-file militancy and ultimately undermined the labor democracy he and his young friend Solomon Barkin sought to promote. At the ACWA, Hillman created a Labor Movement that improved conditions for workers and made society more democratic without bringing democracy to the workers. In 1935, Hillman broke from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize mass production workers into industrial unions. Working backward from the apparel industry, he established the Textile Workers’s Organizing Committee (TWOC) to organize an industrial union in the textile industry. To help, Hillman recruited his new friend from the National Recovery Administration, Sol Barkin, as research director for the TWOC. He hoped that Barkin’s ability, connections, and training would help organize the union and win it allies among progressives and social reformers. Barkin would remain at this post for over twenty years. As Hillman had hoped, Barkin helped to place the TWOC and, later, the Textile Workers’ Union of America, on a sound administrative footing. He provided invaluable help to locals in bargaining and grievance arbitration, and effectively presented the union’s case before the public. More, he helped to train generations of rank-and-file activists in the economics of the textile industry, the workings of collective bargaining, and the administration of contracts. Throughout, he sought to strengthen the union as a vehicle for worker empowerment, a democratic instrument where the workers themselves would exercise power in the industry and in society. At the TWOC/TWUA, Barkin participated in the major events that shaped twentieth-century American labor, including the Great Depression, World War II, and after, including the rise of a strong and dynamic American labor movement advancing a broad program of social reform through rank-and-file activism. But these triumphs were followed by failures. After successful union organization during World War II came defeat in “Operation Dixie,” the CIO’s campaign to organize southern industry, and the CIO’s debilitating anti-communist civil war in 1947 which led to years where the CIO lost its way before giving up the ghost and merging with the AFL in 1955. By the late-1950s, Barkin feared that the spirit was gone from the labor movement. Not only had membership growth slowed to a crawl, but a “certain lassitude” had “overtaken the trade union movement” in the United States. “Union leaders,” he wrote in 1961: know that an institution that does not grow tends to stagnate and atrophy, and that the trade union movement cannot adequately serve its following if

14

Has the forward march of Labor halted? it is not expanding. . . . It must constantly seek to capture the leadership of new unorganized groups in order to maintain the buoyancy of social leadership, the role of innovator in working conditions and employee benefits, and the position of social and industrial critic to which it is committed. . . . “Crisis” is not too strong a word for the cessation of the trade union movement’s expansion into new areas and its decline in numerical strength. (Barkin 1961: 5, 6, 62)

Without directly labeling the problem, Barkin identified the source of union decline as the loss of rank-and-file initiative and of the Labor Movement’s democratic spirit. Members, he lamented, now treated the union as something separate from themselves, an organization run by others for vague and perhaps nefarious purposes. “Little is left,” he warned, “of the proselytizing spirit” that had created the modern union movement. “Union members were the principal recruiters in the Thirties and Forties,” he recalled. “They proselytized their fellow employees” and preached “the gospel to which they were committed.” No more. Now, Barkin lamented, the “attitude of the rank and file has changed considerably. . . . They view the union as an institution in which the full-time official has the responsibility” (Barkin 1961: 55–6). No longer the workers’ vehicle and responsibility, the “union” has become another outside institution, another purveyor of services to customers and clients. Barkin meant his book to be a clarion call for the revival of American labor as a democratic and progressive movement. At first, he hoped that it was “receiving increasing acceptance” and hoped that “some day someone will ask me to draw up the outlines of a blueprint” for union revival.5 But despite some friendly responses, many reviews, and a few invitations to address union gatherings, Barkin’s words bore little fruit. Phillip Taft, the dean of American labor historians, branded Barkin an alarmist, a “Cassandra.” Denouncing him as the latest in a long line of critics, Taft answered Barkin’s warnings by pointing to labor’s past successes and by asserting that “the American labor movement with all its defects and limitations fights harder, better, and more successfully for its members than any in the world” (Taft 1963: 11, 15).6 Any “crisis in the labor movement,” he warned, is “the intellectual creation of old left-wingers who miss the drama and excitement” of a movement “struggling for survival.”7 Nor did labor’s critics welcome the book. The conservative economist Leo Troy dismissed Barkin’s suggestion that labor’s decline was due to factors under conscious control, legislation or political ideology. These, Troy argued, had “at most only a marginal influence on the decline of unionism.” Instead, “the more important causes have been the ones that are primarily economic in nature” and, therefore, beyond organized labor’s influence (Troy 1962: 412). Barkin was not alone in his fear that American labor “is sleepwalking along the corridors of history” (Barkin 1961: 60). By the mid-1960s, most of the intellectuals who were drawn into the dynamic movement of the 1930s had left (Harris 1964). Despairing of the Labor Movement’s lost democratic energies, they abandoned the unions, either forsaking the dream of a democratic society or

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

15

seeking other vehicles for popular empowerment. Some retreated to academe, others to private research foundations or to work in other social movements, such as the civil rights or anti-war campaigns of the 1960s. Barkin himself left the Textile Workers in 1963 to head the Manpower and Social Affairs Directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. They left behind a self-satisfied Labor Movement whose established union leaders settled into a relatively quiet life, with a stable membership and secure collective bargaining relationships. These union leaders could rest smugly comfortable because, for a decade after Barkin’s book appeared, his warnings seemed seriously exaggerated. Union membership rose significantly in the 1960s until, by the early 1970s, over twenty million workers belonged to United States unions, up 20 percent since 1961. Behind the numbers, the situation was less reassuring. Despite this growth, unions were not keeping up with the growth in the total labor force so that the share of workers belonging to unions, the unionization rate, was falling. Aggregate growth also hid particular failures. Rapid expansion of public sector unions, like the Health Workers Local 1199, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, masked the stagnation of private-sector unions. Still, union leaders could dismiss Barkin’s warnings by pointing to a growing membership that still included nearly a quarter of the United States labor force. And while Organized Labor’s growing ranks of critics now included many on the democratic left as well as on the right, few thought to criticize the still-growing American Labor Movement for failing to organize new members aggressively. Barkin’s warnings seemed even less germane to other labor movements. Outside the United States, unions reached new heights of membership and power in the 1960s and 1970s. In the decade after Barkin’s book was published, unions in sixteen advanced capitalist economies added fifteen million new members, an increase of over 25 percent. Indeed, aggregate membership continued to grow. Unions in these countries added another fourteen million new members in the 1970s so that, in 1980, there were over ninety million union members in these sixteen countries, 50 percent more than when Barkin published his book. Leaving behind the decline of American unionism, in 1975, Barkin published an edited volume, Worker Militancy and its Consequences, 1965–75 to evaluate the impact of the revival of union growth and labor unrest. European unions had “acquired fresh strength.” [S]o powerful has their bargaining leverage become that they could negotiate sweeping improvements in the terms and conditions of employment, extend their rights and those of employees to participate in decision making on an ever broadening range of subjects, and secure significant social gains for their constituency and for low-income groups in general. . . . While continuing to voice the traditional slogans, trade union programs now include the humanistic values absorbed from the debates and propaganda of the leftist and student movements of the late 1960s. (Barkin 1975: vi)

16

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

As it entered the 1980s, the United States stood out for its exceptionally weak labor movement. Even in Canada, where many unions were affiliated with “international” unions based in the United States, there was union growth and labor ferment; only in the United States, Barkin lamented, unions “did not share in this change of mood and outlook” (Barkin 1975: vi). In 1986, economist Richard Edwards could write that “[o]nly in the United States is the evidence almost completely unfavorable to the union cause. The American labor movement stands out as that most likely to be marginalized and rendered impotent” (Edwards et al. 1986: 12). In Scandinavia and in Belgium, over 60 percent of the labor force belonged to unions, and unions enrolled a majority of the labor force in the United Kingdom, Italy, and in Australia. Unions dominated industrial labor markets throughout Europe. But the movement was cresting and the tide was to change quickly. Now, forty-five years later, Sol Barkin’s little book seems prescient, not only for the United States but for the world. Total union membership in the United States peaked in 1974 and by the the twentieth anniversary of Barkin’s book in 1981, American unions had lost over one million members. Even then, the apparent strength of unions elsewhere led observers to interpret American union decline as exceptional, the result of peculiar American conditions. For many, this explanation suited their political agenda which sought to reverse decline by changing state policy in the United States; declining membership in the United States when unions were growing elsewhere was important evidence that decline was due to conditions unique to the United States, such as our peculiar legal environment.8 Economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff, for example, blamed union decline on the combination of peculiarly aggressive employers and a legal environment that provided inadequate protection to workers interested in joining a union (Freeman and Medoff 1984). Because union decline was unusual, it was not due to conditions intrinsic to unions under capitalism and could be reversed by changes that would make America’s labor laws more like those found elsewhere. Conservatives understood well the rhetoric around union decline. Hostile to labor unions, they pounced on the suggestion that unions were doing exceptionally poorly in the United States so that they could dismiss arguments that legislative changes could salvage United States unions. As he had in 1961, the conservative American labor economist Leo Troy denied that American unions were in any way special or that union decline in the United States was due to peculiar features of the American Labor Movement or legal environment. Instead, he attributed union decline in the United States to a universal market correction where unionized firms are replaced by more efficient non-union competition. He saw this as a worldwide phenomenon and he argued that in the 1980s, unions were declining in private-sector employments everywhere, a decline masked by continued strength in public-sector unions (Troy 1990a). “If,” Troy argued, “the advanced industrial nations exhibit a common decline in private-sector unionism, then there is almost certainly a common explanation.” These are, Troy stated:

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

17

Market forces – intensified global competition and structural changes . . . Structural shift, spurred by competitive forces, . . . changes the occupational mix of an enterprise and an industry by shifting employment from production to non-production employment, to white collar and predominantly nonunion occupations. Second, structural change has expanded employment in establishments and industries relying particularly on predominantly nonunion white-collar occupations. (Troy 1990b: 584, 613) The data summarized in Table 2.1 on union membership and support for other aspects of the Labor Movement suggest that conservatives like Troy have had the better of this argument. American unions began declining before those in most other countries; but decline has since spread to them all. After the mid1950s, American unions grew slower than did unions in other countries; reducing their share of membership from nearly 30 percent down to 27 percent in the early 1970s. By 1984, when Freeman and Medoff published their study highlighting employer repression and labor law, the American share of total union membership had fallen to below 23 percent. But while it was not yet clear to Freeman and Medoff and their research assistants, union decline was spreading. The unionization rate had already peaked in three countries by 1975 (Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands), and it peaked in Canada in 1977. As mentioned earlier, however, because unions continued to grow in many countries, including such large ones as Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, aggregate union membership continued to rise, reaching over ninety million in 1980. That membership level was not to be seen again because the bottom fell out of the Labor Movement after 1980. Perhaps it is a coincidence that union decline began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Perhaps not, because after 1980, union membership decline spreads until unions are contracting in every country, including both those with conservative political leaders and those with leaders from the political left. Total membership drops by nearly six million between 1980 and 1987, with almost half of the decline outside of the United States. A majority of workers in the United Kingdom belong to unions in the peak year of 1979; from there the unionization rate drops nearly in half by the late 1990s. Union membership rates were declining in three countries before 1975; by the publication of Freeman and Medoff’s book in 1984, the list had grown to eight. There were nine countries on the list when Leo Troy published his attacks on Freeman and Medoff in 1990; by 1996, the unionization rate had passed its peak level everywhere. At their peak, unions in these sixteen countries enrolled a third of the labor force; by 1995, the unionization rate had fallen to under 25 percent, the lowest rate since World War II. Since the beginnings of the modern labor movement in the 1880s, there is no period of comparable sustained decline (see Figure 2.1). Unions have declined with the collapse of some strongly organized industries, including coal mining, and many heavy manufacturing industries. High productivity growth rates, slow demand growth, and rising imports have all

58.6 52.0 44.3 26.3 50.2 49.2 56.2 46.1 47.4 40.1 38.9 52.6 54.7 31.3 48.9 2.7

Peak level (%)

1972 1979 1946 1965 1979 1966 1981 1972 1976 1967 1946 1946 1946 1947 1951 1948

Year

38.6 34.9 22.4 8.5 43.1 35.2 30.1 46.0 32.2 20.6 32.5 41.1 48.6 24.5 41.9 0.0

End level (%)

Socialist, Labor, or Communist vote share ■

46.1 49.6 70.0 33.3 86.2 101.3 26.2 37.3 53.3 23.4 33.9 68.5 97.0 31.8 53.0 26.4

Peak level (%) 1974 1988 1995 1977 1994 1993 1946 1991 1995 1975 1973 1996 1994 1957 1979 1956

Year

21.0 40.1 69.6 28.0 82.1 94.6 9.2 28.5 53.1 17.9 23.2 67.8 92.9 22.5 30.2 13.9

End level (%)

Union membership rate ■

387 332 62 76 595 232 197 122 630 47 17 46 44 9 80 52

Peak level

1970 1964 1948 1974 1984 1975 1968 1921 1977 1970 1922 1923 1979 1918 1980 1919

Year

45 24 3 15 273 28 10 4 98 0.4 3 8 8 0.7 9 2

End level

Strikers per 1,000 labor force ■

34.1 32.9 49.4 67.7 14.1 28.5 46.4 0.2 32.1 48.6 16.5 21.9 11.2 21.7 14.3 100.0

Vote (%)

54.4 19.2 0.6 15.9 4.8 6.6 64.9 23.6 0.4 23.5 31.6 1.0 4.2 29.2 43.0 47.3

Membership (%)

Decline from peak

88.4 92.8 95.2 80.3 54.1 87.9 94.9 96.7 84.4 99.1 82.4 82.6 81.8 92.2 88.8 96.2

Strikers (%)

Notes This table gives the percentage change since the peak values of various measures of Labor Movement strength. The “Share of the vote” is the percentage of the vote cast for Communist, Labor, or Socialist parties. The “Union membership rate” is the percentage of the labor force belonging to unions. The “Striker rate” is the share of the labor force striking; it is a five-year moving average centered on the year.

Australia Austria Belgium Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Japan Netherlands Norway Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States

Country

Table 2.1 The decline of the Labor Movement

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Union membership (millions)

100 80 60 40 20 0 1880

1900

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Year 3 Countries 10 Countries 16 Countries

6 Countries 8 Countries

11 Countries 15 Countries

Figure 2.1 Union membership over time for sixteen countries since 1880. Note This figure gives total union membership, in thousands, for different countries as data come available for more countries. Data begin in 1884 for four countries, rising to sixteen countries after 1950. Note that German reunification in 1990 creates a one-year loss of the continuous German data series and a jump in total membership. The countries and time series are in the Appendix, Table A1.

caused the share of total employment, and even the absolute level of employment, to fall in some highly unionized industries. But industry shifts cannot explain the decline in union membership. Changes in the mix of employment do not preclude union growth if unions organize workers in expanding industries to replace the members lost in contracting ones; indeed, this is exactly what unions did before 1980 in most countries, and they continued to do this in those few countries where unions have maintained their membership. Between 1950 and 1980, for example, declining employment in mining alone cost Austrian unions 49,000 members, or over 7 percent of their total membership. Despite this loss, Austrian unions gained nearly 400,000 new members and increased their share of the labor force from 59 percent to 65 percent because of rising membership in service industries, including education and government, commerce, and financial services. Since 1980, Austrian union membership has continued to decline in mining, where unions lost over 40,000 members by 2000. In contrast with the earlier period, however, overall membership fell after 1980 by over 180,000 because there were only small membership gains in the services to balance membership declines in mining and manufacturing. Had unions maintained their share of employment in the services after 1980 as they had before 1980, then total membership would have grown by over 200,000 and there would have been only a small drop in Austrian unionization despite the relative decline of employment in the most unionized sectors. The Austrian experience is repeated elsewhere. In the United States, for example, membership was almost stable in the period from 1950 to 1970 despite

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a sharp decline in the share of employment in mining and manufacturing, because of membership growth in the services, especially the public sector. These changes in the distribution of employment have continued since 1970 causing individual unions, such as the once-proud United Mine Workers or the United Steel Workers, to suffer sharp membership losses. But these employment-driven membership losses account for only a small part of union decline since 1970. The larger share is due to the failure of unions to maintain their position within most industries, and their failure to grow in rapidly growing sectors, such as private commerce and trade. Union movements which have avoided stagnation and decline have done so by mobilizing effectively in the new, growing industries. This is as true today as it was in the 1900s or the 1930s when unions grew despite the rise of mass production industries and the relative decline of small-scale production. Unions in the nonstagnant countries have largely maintained their membership by replacing lost industrial members with new members in the service sector. Since 1970, for example, Belgian unions have suffered the same problems of deindustrialization that afflicted Austrian and American unions; declining employment in mining, textiles, and metalworking industries after 1980 reduced union membership in these three union strongholds by nearly 90,000 members, or nearly 5 percent of total membership. But Belgian unions have held their own by attracting new membership in commerce, finance, and services; growth in these three sectors accounts for over two-thirds of Belgian union membership growth. Had Belgian unions lost membership share in these growing industries as quickly as did their Austrian peers, then Belgian union membership would have dropped by 13 percent from 1980 to 1998, and Belgium’s unions would have joined the list of sharply declining union movements. Unions decline because they fail to organize workers where they are. Unions’ fate is not in the stars of deindustrialization, but in themselves.

The decline of socialism When some progressives voiced concerns about union decline in the 1960s and 1970s, others dismissed their worries by putting their hopes in state policy and the rising tide of social reform promoted by growing leftist political movements. With roots in the activist community and the New Left of the 1960s rather than in the Labor Movement, the American economist Richard Edwards, for example, was relatively indifferent about union decline, even dismissing the prospects for union revival. Quoting Troy, an interesting source for a selfproclaimed progressive economist, Edwards concludes that “The American union movement is in a permanent state of decline” (Edwards 1993: 95). If “collective bargaining can no longer be regarded as the core institution” for protecting workers’ rights, “some other basis must be found” (Edwards 1993: 97). Rather than hoping for a union revival, for renewed working-class collective action, Edwards urged progressives to devote their energies to insuring individual workers’ rights through political action and by influencing state and

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21

judicial authorities. Oblivious to the democratic aspirations of the early labor movement, Edwards suggested substituting the services of politicians and lawyers for those provided by union institutions and bureaucrats. Rather than a fruitless campaign to revive unions, he urged political and legal action to extend legal protections to workers, to protect workers’ economic position and their democratic rights to voice grievances. While this legal campaign may appear as hopeless as a campaign to revive unions, Edwards even held out the hope that employers would support extending workplace rights because international competition would require that American companies boost productivity by raising worker morale (Edwards 1993: 188–9, ix–x). Capitalist support for workplace rights and the benevolence of judges may appear to be weak reeds on which to pin a political program. Edward placed his trust in benign capitalists and state authorities because he believed that he proposed a reasonable “grand compromise” between capital and labor that would give concessions to both, workplace protections to labor and productivity to capitalists. Compromises are only made with power; American employers had no reason to compromise with Labor in decline. Considered from a more realistic perspective, it is not surprising that Edwards’ hopes went unrealized; they were subverted by the precipitous decline in Labor’s political clout after the 1980s. Unions and radical political movements have been joined since that first meeting in Salle Petrelle in 1889. Decline could not be contained within the union movement but extended to a loss in support for labor’s political wing, socialist and communist political parties, and for direct industrial action, or strikes. Since the late-nineteenth century, labor’s political fortunes have followed its organization into labor unions. Drawing votes and institutional support from the growing union movements, socialists gathered strength with each election. By 1900, the average vote share for socialist parties in the sixteen countries considered here had passed 10 percent; by the beginning of World War I it had grown past 20 percent, more still in Australia, Denmark, Finland, and Germany. Growing electoral support can translate into political power but socialists came to power by a different path. By 1920, socialists had entered the national governments in about half of the countries considered here, but they rarely assumed office on their own or on the strength of their electoral success. Instead, socialists were first called to office during crises, when, during national emergencies, they were needed to manage labor relations, to forestall disruptive strikes and unrest. A socialist politician first assumed national office in France, during the Dreyfus Affair, when Alexandre Millerand entered government as Minister of Commerce and Labor. Again, during World War I, socialists were brought into the French government, and, later, they joined other governments to strengthen popular support for the war effort and in the expectation that socialist ministers would be better able to manage labor relations and limit strikes and popular unrest. After World War I, when established regimes collapsed in Germany and elsewhere, military authorities brought socialists into office in the hope that their presence would appease popular unrest after war and avoid further revolution. A nominally revolutionary political movement assumed state

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power in order to forestall revolution. This has been the standard pattern for socialist politics. Like unions, socialists have gained authority to broker a reformist compromise of labor peace in exchange for improvements in wages and working-class living conditions. It was the Great Depression and World War II that brought socialists to power by enhancing the electoral strength of the Labor Movement. Socialists and communists won over 40 percent of the vote in the first post-war elections, including about half the vote in the United Kingdom, in France, Austria, Australia, and over half in Sweden. Leftist coalitions governed a majority of the countries considered here, including nine of fourteen with representative governments. In addition to discrediting many conservative politicians and parties, World War II linked socialists and even communists with national identity because of their role in the struggle against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. But depression and war did not change the fundamentals: socialists were welcomed into government because they were expected to calm labor unrest and regulate labor militancy. The price of political power was to behave “responsibly,” that is to accept authority, hierarchy, and the importance of order. A more serious challenge to capitalist authority arose in the 1960s when the easing of Cold War tensions allowed new unity on the working-class left at the same time that the Vietnam War and civil rights struggles discredited established conservative elites. By the early 1970s, the socialist and communist share of the vote in the sixteen countries considered here had risen to over 40 percent of the vote and socialists sat in as many as nine national governments. Never before had capitalist authority seemed so vulnerable. On 14 July 1975, eighty-six years after the Socialists met at Salle Petrelle, Time Magazine used a cover story to pose the simple question: “Can Capitalism Survive?” (Time Magazine 1975). The magazine warned that “steadily hemmed in by the power of omnipresent government regulators, mass unions,” capitalists were finding few allies. It lamented that “many intellectuals – and young people – contend that capitalism at best can build only a rich, not a just society.” Seven Nobel laureates, including economists Gunnar Myrdal and Kenneth J. Arrow, signed a declaration condemning Western capitalism for causing “crises” by producing “for corporate profit” and called for an intensive search for “alternatives to the prevailing Western economic systems.” Even the procapitalist economist Milton Friedman feared that capitalism was dying and would turn out to be “an accident” in the long sweep of history (Time Magazine 1975). As happened with unions, socialist politics went into decline after the 1970s. The socialist/communist vote share dropped below 40 percent by 1983 and fell to under 35 percent by 1993. Despite a small revival in the mid-1990s, by 2000, Labor Movement parties were attracting only a third of the total vote, as small a share as they received in the 1920s. Proud and strong working-class parties in Austria, Belgium, France, and Italy were devastated; others, including the British Labour Party and the German SPD, have done better but only by reconstituting themselves as moderate liberals.9 Whether parties lost public support or changed programs, the result has been the same: socialism has disappeared from the political agenda. The Socialist collapse reflects an erosion of the Labor Movement’s popular

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23

base that goes well beyond the decline in the share of manual workers in the population. From 1950 to 1980, socialist and communist parties maintained their vote despite a steady decline in the share of industrial and manual workers in the electorate; socialists then replaced lost manual-worker voters with growing support among nonmanual workers, with white or pink collars. Since the 1970s, however, the electoral left has lost support among all voters. Shrinking union membership has contributed to this fall, but the decline in the left’s vote is too great to be explained by falling unionization alone. Rather than a structuralist story where the Labor Movement declines because of changes in the material structure of the economy and the distribution of workers in different industries, there is a historical and dialectical explanation for socialist decline. During crises like wars or periods of popular upheaval like the 1960s and 1970s, socialists assume political office but they have never been able to inaugurate a new, democratic socialist regime. Instead, socialists have exercised state power charged with administering the existing social system by restraining labor militancy; the price of political success has been to restrain the very rank-and-file militancy that brought the Socialists to office. Rather than enhancing the capacity of the working-class to act, political power has undermined labor movements because it has been exercised by socialist politicians against the working class. Contrary to the fundamental ideals of the Labor Movement, socialist political power is used to repress popular democracy.

Declining strikes: the fallacy of composition Born in 1904 in Warwick to a journalist and a homemaker, John R. Hicks studied mathematics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received no “adequate qualification,” in the liberal arts (Hicks 1972). More training in history might have helped Hicks in his first major work as an economist, his 1933 publication The Theory of Wages (Hicks 1933). This was a seminal work with “a considerable progeny.” Forty years later, Hicks noted that “[w]ork that is based upon it, or on other constructions of the same character, continues to appear; so it is far from being dead.” Nonetheless, Hicks himself was unhappy with the work, writing in 1973 that “I do not think much of it now; I think that I have learned a good deal since I wrote it” (Hicks 1973). In The Theory of Wages, Hicks tries to explain the outbreak of strikes as cases of normal behavior by “rational” individuals trying to maximize their net welfare as individuals through the free market exchange of commodities. Beginning with the assumption that strikes are costly to both sides, he argues that the longer a prospective strike, the higher the wage offer employers would be willing to make to avoid a strike and the lower the wage the union would accept to avoid it. Comparing an upward sloping “employers concession curve” and a downward sloping “union resistance curve,” Hicks concludes that the highest wage the union could expect to gain, and the lowest wage that a rational employer might expect to impose on the union, would be at the intersection of these curves. From this, Hicks concludes that an equilibrium union wage would

24

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

depend upon the particular position of the two curves. Circumstances that lower the cost of striking to the workers or raise the cost to the employer, will raise equilibrium wages; those that lower the cost of a strike to the employer and raise the costs to the workers lower wages. Hicks’s analysis also leads to another, perhaps less intuitive conclusion. If rational union leaders and employers agree on the position of the two curves, then they should be able to avoid the expense of strikes by moving directly to the wage equilibrium. Strikes then are irrational and must reflect mistakes or misunderstandings, if not foolishness. To avoid the inefficiency and waste of unnecessary strikes, one would expect that employers and workers replace foolishly aggressive managers or union leaders, and invest in improving communication to avoid these mistakes. Over time, these changes should reduce strike activity, even leading to the “withering away” of the strike (Lester 1958; Ross and Hartman 1960; Kerr et al. 1964). For a time, experience seemed to confirm the Hicksian expectation. There was an explosion of strikes after the upheaval of World War II, but from a peak of nearly thirteen million strikers in 1949, the number of strikers dropped sharply and continued to drift down through the early 1960s. Nonetheless, as I mentioned earlier, Hicks himself was unhappy with The Theory of Wages. Perhaps this eminent economic theorist recognized that there was a fundamental fallacy in an analysis that treats strikes as the result of individual choice rather than as social actions. It is clearly wrong to assume that individual workers will support a strike or join a union because it is in their collective best interest. Instead, it would be better for them to “free ride” or stand to the side, let others make the sacrifices and do the work, and then enjoy the benefits. Unions and strikes cannot be understood using assumptions of rational behavior because it is never rational for individuals to support collective action voluntarily. But, of course, if everyone tries to free ride, there will be no collective action. Here we have the ultimate fallacy of the Hicksian approach: strikes, unions, and the rest of the Labor Movement cannot result from individuals acting to pursue selfish individual interests, but must reflect the development of a collective identity that comes only through collective action. The analysis of strikes must be political and historical, studied as part of the development of a labor movement that produces a social definition of labor that would go beyond personal self-interest. The workers who would support strikes need to be produced by a community of workers struggling for goals beyond their personal aggrandizement. Individual workers can always do better for themselves, they can get more money and better jobs for themselves, by free riding than by supporting the collective process. If they become union members, socialists, and strikers, then it is because they were persuaded that there are more important goals than these, higher ends than they can imagine reaching on their own.

Strikes: the times of the prophets? Workers’ first weapon as workers is the ability to withhold labor; the first form of collective protest is the strike. Strikes then are the starting point for under-

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25

standing the rise and decline of the Labor Movement. Strikes have also been the most dramatic aspect of the Labor Movement. With promises of dramatic changes through participation in the collective project, participation in such mass movements can arouse hopes, and fears, of a better world being created. Strikes are, as the French historian Michelle Perrot wrote, “the return of the times of the prophets” (Perrot 1975: 100; Sirot 2002: 144–51). Through parades and other public demonstrations, strikes give workers, their employers, and the whole community a visual index of labor’s organization and power. In addition to intimidating employers into conceding workers’ demands, demonstrations impress workers with the possibilities of collective action. They can also impress outsiders and state officials with the workers’ commitment to their project; or frighten these outsiders and state officials away from any cooperation with such a disruptive movement. Strikes are lived in the open air with demonstrations and public displays because these public acts expose the fundamental nature of the labor movement as a political movement, and the fallacy of an individualist approach, like Hicks’. By treating strikes as cases of normal markets, of the voluntary exchange of private commodities, Hicks puts them into a realm outside politics, a realm of solved social problems. But strikes, and the labor movement, are always political because they are about the social distribution of power and authority. Rather than private commodity exchange, strikes are about the nature of public order in the workplace and community; rather than the exchange of fixed commodities, they deal with the definition of labor power as a commodity; rather than voluntary exchange, they address the limits of authority and the ordering of power. In the standard markets that Hicks takes as his paradigm, exchanges are fully specified. Both consumers and store owners, for example, know the price, size, and characteristics of a can of soup for sale on the store shelves and property relations are fully defined so that consumers who refuse the offered price leave the store with no claim on the soup. But neither of these conditions holds for labor; instead, “labor power,” the commodity sold in labor markets, is “variable,” its exact conditions of employment, including, notably, the amount of labor to be performed in any time period, are not specified. Instead, capitalists hire workers for a period of time in hopes of driving them to labor enough to cover their wage and allow for a profit. The incomplete nature of capital–labor contracts makes the labor process a contested terrain: capitalists hope to use authority to command enough labor from their workers to turn a profit, workers hope to go home without having worked hard. From this, conflict extends to all areas of society that influence the workers’ productivity, including the authority of supervisors, management’s right to hire and to fire workers, and workers’ speech at work. The capitalist’s exercise of authority makes strikes a collective matter. A capitalist uses his or her control over access to the means of production to enforce a version of the labor contract, for example by threatening to discharge individuals who work too slowly. In a one-to-one capitalist–labor exchange,

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control over access to jobs gives powerful and wealthy capitalists great leverage against individual workers. Bargaining collectively with the employer, balancing numbers against the employer’s wealth and power, strikers challenge capitalist power by rejecting not only the individualist premise of the one-to-one labor contract but the very principle of the capitalist’s control over access to productive property. Unlike disputes over cans of soup, strikers insist that they retain their jobs through the strike and have a right collectively to control access to the means of production, what capitalists consider their private property. There is, therefore, no such thing as a moderate strike that simply disputes wages. Instead, all strikes are incipient rebellions against the capitalist system itself, challenging the fundamental premise of capitalism as an economic system, the capitalist’s authority over the worker, authority that comes from control over access to productive property. No dispute over the price of soup could ever raise such fundamental issues. It is this political character of the strike, in all its dimensions, that distinguishes it from other forms of self-interested behavior, such as buying a can of soup. Joining a strike is a particularly odd behavior for an individual, because it involves joining in a social movement to produce public benefits available to all. Such behavior cannot be explained in terms of rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest within society; it can only come from an attempt to achieve goals beyond the scope of individual action, to change society. Workers interested in improving their own personal circumstances within society can do so directly by changing jobs or by working hard to ingratiate themselves with their employer. By contrast, joining with others to challenge their employer collectively is dangerous, is unnecessary to enjoy whatever gains are won by striking, and is almost certainly less remunerative than scabbing; employers are sure to reward workers who did not join the strike, any strike breakers, particularly generously. Most of all, joining a strike is a gamble on the behavior of others. Nothing an individual can do will win the strike for the workers unless others join the movement; indeed, the worst position for an individual would be to strike alone, thereby insuring both failure and punishment. This “irrational” and “social” character of strikes explains strike behavior that is inexplicable in terms of individuals attempting to improve their personal welfare within society. Public action is the very lifeblood of a strike because it shows participants, both strikers and others, the strength of the movement and the support others give it. Extreme and even millennialist appeals, common in strikes, emphasize that striking is more than a weak means to achieve individual ends but is the only means to achieve higher goals, such as industrial democracy, not attainable through individual action. Strike rallies and picket lines, for example, are meant not only to intimidate strike breakers, but also to encourage strikers by demonstrating the widespread public support for the strike. The “irrationality” of striking also explains the clustering of strikes. The outbreak of other strikes in a region or industry, even outbreaks in other countries, signals to workers that others will strike, raising each individual’s expectation that others will answer a strike call.

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27

Of course, strikes are not the only form of social protest. Indeed, the strike changed the nature of social protest, elevating the concerns of some groups at the expense of others. When it developed in the nineteenth century, the strike supplanted forms of popular protest, such as charivaris, bread riots, and even urban insurrections, where workers acted as members of communities rather than as wage workers with grievances specific to that social status. Since medieval times, for example, French workers had joined their neighbors in charivaris to defend a traditional moral economy linking all members of the community in webs of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities without regard for wealth or the ownership of capital. These highly routinized, even scripted, protests were sparked by perceived violations of rights rooted in community membership. Angry, for example, that an old widower had married a young woman, or that a marriage was held without the customary wedding ball for the community, workers would gather with others in the middle of the night outside the home of the miscreant master or merchant. The charivariseurs would then serenade the house, accompanying themselves on makeshift and improvised musical instruments while singing mocking, even obscene, songs describing and condemning the miscreants’ misdeeds. For small offenses, a gift of money or drinks would suffice to end the protest. More serious offenses might require larger gifts, perhaps even departure from the community of the tainted individual or couple (Tilly 1986). By treating workers as members of communities, these forms of collective struggle linked workers with their non-wage-earning neighbors. Conducted outside of the production process and without the support of national or industry-wide institutions, charivaris united workers with homemakers, students, and others outside the wage-earning workforce in defense of established claims. Focused on the development of the working class, many scholars and activists have discounted non-strike protests to highlight the power of the modern Labor Movement, its ability to maintain protests over time and to coordinate them throughout large areas and industries, and the importance of collective bargaining between strong unions and employers. But there is a price for the power of a Labor Movement oriented to achieve material gains for workers. Emphasizing grievances associated with capitalist labor relations discounts the concerns of women and others whose oppression comes from outside the production process; worse, a movement that discounts these other forms of oppression loses its legitimacy as a movement for democracy and social emancipation. Moreover, the establishment of national Labor Movement institutions takes power away from local participants, diminishing the democratic experience in exchange for achieving more. Again, a reformist focus on collective bargaining by Labor Movement institutions costs the formal Labor Movement its standing as heir to the labor movement tradition of democratic empowerment.

Where goes the strike? It took a century of capitalist industrialization before large numbers of workers adopted the strike. Notwithstanding occasional forerunners, the great railroad

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Has the forward march of Labor halted?

strike of 1877 marked the first great national strike in the United States, launching a wave that continued through the general strike for the eight-hour work-day on May Day 1886 and soon spread to Europe with the great British strike wave of 1889 and the first French strike wave around May Day 1890. Strike participation rose steadily before World War I but the post-war explosion eclipsed all previous strike waves. In 1919 and 1920, there were nearly ten times as many strikers as in the pre-war years; and the number of strikers remained high until the middle of the 1920s. This shows a common characteristic of strike activity. Even more than unionization or socialist politics, strikes are episodic; strike rates are highly irregular and discontinuous, with long periods of dormancy punctuated by sudden bursts of action. Second, these sudden spurts can be sparked by events great, such as war and foreign revolution, or small, as tiny as the discharge of three girls for talking to a magazine reporter about working conditions.10 During these sudden spurts, or strike waves, large numbers of workers previously outside of the labor movement join in and discover the power of collective action. Strike waves inspire new groups to demand changes in conditions previously seen to be beyond their ability to change. These “mass strikes” are “moments of madness,” when a new repertoire of collective action is created by the workers themselves whose consciousness has been transformed in the crucible of collective struggle (Zolberg 1972). Strike waves are unusual. Depending on the definition used, there were only between four and fourteen strike waves in the United States from 1880 to 2000; and there were strike waves in fewer than 10 percent of the years in other countries.11 Waves have been crucial for the development of the strike as an instrument of collective protest. Strike waves raise the base level of strike activity by involving new workers in collective action. By showing that it is possible to challenge capitalist authority and that these challenges will be supported by their fellow workers and may even succeed, strike waves encourage others to join in and to strike. Moreover, participating in a strike can be transformative. Strikers can reinterpret their position in the world, develop a new sense of their own capacity, their own power, and the possibilities of collective action. Strikes like these can lead to a life-long commitment to working-class collective action (Biggs 2003). Joining across firms in an industrial and regional strike wave, workers forge a new repertoire of collective action, new ways to advance their collective interests. In the northern French department of the Nord, for example, the May Day strike wave of 1890 initiated a century of strike action and support for industrial unions and socialist politics. The London gasworkers and dockers’ strikes of 1889 left a legacy of committed working-class militants; so did the sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s among metal workers in Michigan in the United States and in the Paris suburbs in France. One indication of the impact of strike waves is the acceleration of union membership growth. In the sixteen countries studied, unions grow over three times as fast in strike wave years as in other years (see Figure 4.1). Through the 1970s, strike activity rose almost without interruption, peaking

Has the forward march of Labor halted?

29

Annual union growth rate (%)

50 40 30 20 10 0

1,305 Regular years

68 High growth years

Figure 2.2 Average union growth rates in years of high growth and regular growth. Note This figure gives the average annual growth rate for sixteen countries comparing the average for the sixty-eight years with the highest membership growth rates compared with 1,259 other years.

for the sixteen countries considered here with over twenty-six million strikers in 1979, making a total of over 210 million strikers in the period 1969–79. Never before had so many workers joined the strike movement; and never had labor conflict been so politicized. “Wage struggles,” a British observer wrote, “are no longer pure wage struggles” (Ken Gill in Hobsbawm 1981: 22). Projecting the recent past forward, as people often do, observers expected that the great strike wave of the 1970s prefigured still more strikes and class conflict in the future. These expectations, or perhaps hopes, did not come to pass. Rather than prefiguring rising class conflict, the great strike wave of the 1970s was the end of an era. Since 1979, strike activity has fallen dramatically, dropping to levels not seen for almost a century. From twenty million in the 1970s, the average annual number of strikers in these sixteen countries dropped in half, to under eleven million in the 1980s, and again to under four million in the 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, there were barely two million strikers per year, fewer than in the depression years of the 1930s when strikes were illegal in Germany, Italy, and Japan. By the 1990s, the share of union members striking was down almost 90 percent compared with the early twentieth century. Instead of an outlier, as it seemed in the 1970s, the United States with its “exceptionally” weak Labor Movement now appears as a forerunner of future trends.

Labor’s lost ground The Labor Movement is in eclipse. Union membership is falling, collective bargaining is in retreat, socialist political action has fallen from favor, and the strike has nearly disappeared. With nothing to replace these tried-and-true weapons, Labor Movement decline threatens to undo working-class gains long taken for granted in the advanced capitalist world. Even worse, the Labor Movement’s

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Has the forward march of Labor halted?

legitimacy as a movement for social emancipation has been brought into question. On the right, conservatives reject its democratic and egalitarian aspirations, its reliance on collective action, and its social orientation. Perhaps even more troubling are those on the left who have come to disdain the Movement’s new weakness, or else despise it for failing to honor its own commitments to democracy and equality. For a century, labor militancy was organized by the institutions of the Labor Movement, especially labor unions and radical political parties, institutions that organized the campaign for economic democracy; and to many people, these institutions became the campaign. Labor Movement institutions allowed labor to maintain a continuing presence, to protect acquired positions and to organize for further gains. Excited at the possibilities, building Labor Movement institutions became the major project of the century after 1880; and protecting the Labor Movement became a major concern of labor activists. But institutionalization came at a price, separating Labor from labor, the Movement from the workers. Rather than building democracy by empowering workers, institutionalization built a hierarchy to provide services to workers as clients and customers. Workers paid for this hierarchy not only with their dues and votes but by relinquishing their autonomy and their demands for a thoroughgoing democracy. For workers, the Labor Movement marked a great advance. By forcing employers to negotiate to raise wages and grant short work weeks and paid vacations, socialist politics and labor unions won workers’ respect, a modicum of dignity, and, however attenuated, a touch of democratic governance to the workplace. But these gains came at the cost of forsaking labor’s wider aspirations to challenge capitalist workplace authority through rank-and-file democratic militancy. Advocates of bureaucratic unionism and collective bargaining would argue that the price, the democratic aspirations forsaken, is reasonable; and they might be right if society had remained as it was in the 1960s and 1970s with entrenched unions and socialist parties providing collective services to contented workers. Today the costs of institutionalization appear in a different light because a bureaucratized Labor Movement appears unsustainable. Having abandoned economic democracy, the Labor Movement relinquished its trump card in appealing for government and popular support at the same time that the Movement’s inability to control labor militancy, the movement, cost it the tolerance of state officials and employers. Why, one may ask, should government favor Labor if it is only a service organization, a different type of insurance company? Why negotiate with organizations that cannot restrain their constituents and cannot deliver on their promises? And why negotiate with them if they do restrain militancy so well that there is no viable threat of labor unrest?

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Labor’s liberty is a social product

We are fighting for democracy. When we get enough of it we will have socialism. Dayton, Ohio, Socialists around 1914 (Judd 1979: 238) I hail the Labor movement for the reason that it is my only hope for democracy. Wendell Phillips, April 1872 (Debs 1904: 22)

The lights of Paris Founded in 1855, the Compagnie parisienne de l’éclairage et du chauffage par le gaz, or the Paris Gas Company (PGC), was a marvel of its time. A limited liability company and one of France’s largest industrial enterprises, it pioneered the development of new, impersonal forms of management and finance. The PGC’s success rested on these managerial innovations. A high-technology company for its time, its operations required a tight coordination of work across separate departments and strict quality control in handling highly volatile and toxic materials. To maintain this coordination and control, the PGC used salaried managers to oversee a workforce of over 4,000 workers and nearly 2,000 white collar employees. The key to the PGC’s operations was holding the loyalty of the hired managers so that it could safely disperse authority among them. Members of a privileged elite, these managers were recruited from France’s elite schools, the grandes écoles, the Ecole Polytechnique, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. These were men raised to see themselves as part of France’s power elite, its governing class; and the PGC built on this haughty attitude. A sense of shared supremacy and responsibility bound together the PGC’s management elite. Managers were part of the PGC family; they were rewarded with lifetime employment and seniority-based salaries. They were instructed in an ideology of paternalism where their superior training and personal talent, their better judgment, and, most of all, superior morals gave them responsibility for the workers, to supervise not only their labor but their lives. This made their defense of the company’s authority as much a matter of

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morality as of class interest. “The engineers, self-consciously devoted to the work ethic, thrift, deferred gratification, and hierarchical authority, imagined that workers shared none of these values. They took it as a given that among their duties was implanting their own values in their subordinates” (Berlanstein 1991: 127). Rejecting the democratic values of the French Revolution, the PGC insisted that its managers’ superior knowledge and morals gave them the absolute right, indeed the imperative responsibility, to instruct the workers not only at work but in their home lives, to lead them away from bad politics, drink, prostitution, and to elevate their morals. All businesses must instruct workers in the use of machinery and technology. But paternalism is about more than workplace human capital. It is an answer to the problem confronting capitalists in a democratic world, the need to restore legitimacy to capitalist authority in a society that rejects all other forms of established authority. Swimming against the tide of equality and universal suffrage, paternalists would restore social peace by persuading the workers of the superiority of their managers and their right to command. In the words of a contemporary French advocate of this type of patronage, [t]he idea of patronage, which implies the idea of influence, of protection of certain men on the other the patron should be the protector of the poor and his family, that he should not abandon him after leaving the shop, that he should ask after the health of his wife and children; that with an indispensable firmness, he should extend a generous hand . . . that he should moralize especially . . . he does not lack to give him an edifying example of religious belief and an irreproachable life . . . the worker will see in the employer no longer a tyrant but un maitre bienfaisant; henceforth, he will render a voluntary submission without believing it compromises his dignity and limiting his liberty. . . . The choice is between the influence of intelligent men, devoted, charitable and Christian, and the influence of men not less intelligent . . . slaves of their ambition, exaggerated flatterers of popular interests and apostles of dangerous socialism. . . . The employer or the activist . . . One creates the elements of peace to the brandishes of discord. On one side the union of classes under a holy philanthropy; on the other, anarchy . . . patronage has three ends: charity, education, influence. Charity is a combat against misery, not only material but still more moral. (Ameline 1866: 22–31) By resting capitalist authority on managers’s moral superiority, the PGC’s authoritarian paternalism gave great scope to individual managers and supervisors. This was an ideology consistent with the values of the French Revolution, a modern authoritarian ideology that rested the paternalist’s right-to-rule on accomplishment and merit rather than divine right. Democrats who reject these claims of moral superiority would find it inevitable that this paternalism leads to abuse, unfounded discrimination against individual workers, injustices in fining,

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intimidation, and even demeaning gestures from supervisors (Berlanstein 1991: 174). In the early years of the French Third Republic, such flawed paternalism violated spreading democratic and egalitarian norms among workers and provoked a response. To defend the republican values of “liberté, égalité, et fraternité,” PGC workers formed a union and claimed the right to negotiate conditions of work with management. Simply voicing this demand challenged the company’s paternalism. The union’s actual demands, including increased wages, changes in work rules, and restrictions on “the petty tyranny inflicted . . . by foremen and other supervisors”, directly confronted claims of managerial absolutism (Berlanstein 1991: 170). For the paternalists who ran the PGC, managerial authority was more than a business proposition, it was the front line of moral order and decency. This made union organizing and the demand for any collective regulation of the workplace, a revolutionary act, the storming of what the French socialist leader Jules Guesde called “the economic Bastille” (Rosanvallon 1998: 182). It also brought unions support from all who still held to the democratic values of the English, American, and French revolutions. In the case of the workers at PGC, they formed one of the strongest local unions in pre-World War I France because they received critical support from the Paris city council, from radicals looking to launch a new round of republicanization by extending democratic values to the workplace (Berlanstein 1991: 318; also Friedman 1990). The particulars of the PGC case are, of course, unique to pre-World War I France where the political leadership was unusually hostile to the country’s economic elite. Indeed, rarely have so many prominent members of the governing party denounced capitalist personal authority as an unacceptable privilege (Friedman 1990, 1998). Still, lessons from the PGC experience resonate more broadly. The PGC case shows how liberal democracy can open a path for the labor movement; even imperfect democracies promise equality and the opportunity to participate in self-government. This necessarily challenges capitalist authority; and the labor movement is the form of that challenge. PGCstyle authoritarian paternalism has been so common because capitalism itself rests on the supremacy of the employer to the worker at work, including the right to order and regulate the worker’s time. Far from an anomaly, abusive management is to be expected in a system founded on superiority of manager to worker. Capitalists would order the upbringing and the education and training of working people to reinforce hierarchy and authority by discouraging autonomous thinking and workers’ self-confidence. Against this, republican government and democratic values uphold the worth of each individual, the legitimacy of popular opinion to regulate property, and the idea that everyone should have a voice, and every voice should be respected. Such values were, and are, truly revolutionary. The experience of the young Isidore Nagler illustrates well the power of republican ideas. Arriving in New York from the Czar’s Empire in Russia, Nagler was inspired by American democracy and the promise of equal respect for all that he found on the city’s streets and issuing from its public schools.

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Disappointed to find these values missing in the sweat shops of New York’s garment industry, but holding fast to his youthful democratic aspirations, Nagler went on to lead the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ during the height of its power (Haskell 1950: 24). His idealism, his story, and many, many like it, made the labor movement.

Spreading the revolution Much has changed in the century since the meeting on Salle Petrelle, but the labor movement still represents, in Kautsky’s words, the “demand for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity advanced by the men of the French Revolution . . . It reflects the desire of all oppressed, exploited and their friends ever since there have been oppression and exploitation” (Kautsky 1946: 23). The link between the labor movement and broader social movements, the grounds for labor’s claim to social legitimacy and public support, is labor’s democratic ethos. The philosophic basis of all systems of oppression, from slavery and feudalism onwards, is the denial of the humanity of the common worker and the assertion that they exist to serve and to be instruments in the hands of their betters. From the earliest Pharaohs to the PGC to George Pullman, rulers treat workers as irresponsible fools, incapable of arranging their own lives and certainly incompetent to manage affairs of state or business. Against this, labor asserts the essential humanity of the worker, proclaiming, as Memphis, Tennessee, sanitation workers did in 1968: “I am a man.” A century before these Memphis strikers, the American labor leader William Sylvis condemned relations between employers and employees as “for the most part, that of master and slave, and totally at variance with the spirit of the institutions of a free people.” The late-nineteenth-century American economist Richard Ely agreed in identifying the labor movement as fundamental to human aspirations. It is, “in its broadest terms,” the “effort of men to live the life of men.” He continues: The end and purpose of all is the true growth of mankind; namely, the full and harmonious development in each individual of all human faculties . . . It is directed against oppression in every form, because oppression carries with it the idea that persons or classes live not to fulfill a destiny of their own, but primarily and chiefly for the sake of the welfare of other persons or classes. (Ely 1938: 66) Viewing the labor movement as a campaign for democracy and civic equality does not deny the importance of bread-and-butter campaigns for higher wages and better working conditions. On the contrary, such demands come from a view of the worker as an equal citizen because citizens require decent material conditions to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens. A decent living standard, a voice in management, shorter workdays, and better working conditions are not privileges to be granted but rights due to all citizens of a democracy; moreover,

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they are necessary for citizens to participate fully in the democratic process. Labor appeals for allies because it is not campaigning for monopolistic privileges but to build on the egalitarian thrust of earlier democratic revolutions to achieve their promise. By overturning aristocracy the democratic revolutions that began with midseventeenth-century England laid the grounds for a campaign for universal civil rights in tandem with claims for equal political rights. From the outset, however, the nature of these universal civil and political rights was left ambiguous because these revolutions conflated these universal civil and political rights with the right of a few to control productive property. “Though the name of liberty be pleasant to all kinds of people, yet all men do not understand the same thing by it,” Edward the Earl of Clarendon observed. During the revolution, all stood for freedom but once the war was won and “the common enemy is gone you are all like men in a mist, seeking for freedom and know not where nor what it is” (Hill 1996: 243). “There were,” historian Christopher Hill writes, “two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England.” On one side was the revolution which “established the sacred rights of property” and “gave political power to the propertied.” But there was another “revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic” (Hill 1972: 12). The seventeenth-century English Revolution ended with the victory of the assertion of the sanctity of private property and by overturning any traditional customary rights of the poor. By establishing private ownership in the means of production with minimal communal regulation, and by disestablishing commons rights, the English Revolution polarized seventeenth-century English agrarian society between a small class of entrepreneurial farmers and tenants and a larger population “depressed into poverty, having lost the not inconsiderable assets provided by common land.” Nominally a universal right, and the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty, private property in the means of production becomes meaningful only when it is not universal so that some are forced to labor for others. This monopolization of property was accomplished by the concentration of land in a few hands and the elimination of commons rights. This political and legal process laid the basis for the establishment of modern capitalist industry because private property, monopoly control over the means of production, forced “peasants into wage labour, enclosure ended their freedom to decide how and when they worked, ending their freedom of choice” (Hill 1972: 24, 40, 41; also see Lazonick 1974). Indeed, opponents of the extension of private property rights in land, including some royalists, warned “that taking away the right of the poor in their commons” would reduce their liberty by making them dependent upon their capitalist employers. Capitalist property would establish a new form of dependency and, with it, authority. This led the royalist Sir Robert Filmer to warn that “Liberty and Property,” “are as contrary as fire to water” (Hill 1996: 252; 1972: 44).

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Here then was the great unresolved issue of the bourgeois revolutions: is productive property to be controlled by all, regulated democratically like other social institutions, or is it to be held privately, outside of the general democratic tide? Should democracy go beyond a vote in elections to include a voice in all decisions with social consequences, including those otherwise left to private property owners and individual bargaining? And if democracy does not extend beyond election day to social and economic life, then can it be maintained in the political sphere or will it be overwhelmed there by the strength of private authoritarianism? Insisting on the right of workers to a voice in the management of their place of employment, the labor movement defends the democratic principle that all affected should have a voice in making decisions regardless of whether they are made by “public” or by “private” officials. Bourgeois liberals insisted on private property as a bastion protecting individuals; but this bastion is exclusive to those few who own productive property. Instead, working-class political economy presents a more expansive vision where all should have some of the opportunities private property gives the rich through a voice in the management of productive property just the same way that all citizens have a voice in managing the state. As the American political theorist Robert Dahl said: If democracy is justified in governing the state then it is also justified in governing economic enterprises. What is more, if it cannot be justified in governing economic enterprises, we do not quite see how it can be justified in governing the state. Members of any association for whom the assumptions of the democratic process are valid have a right to govern themselves by means of the democratic process. If, as we believe, those assumptions hold among us, not only for the government of the state but also for the internal government of economic enterprises, then we have a right to govern ourselves democratically within our economic enterprises. (Dahl 1985: 134–5) In the name of egalitarian democracy, the right of all to participate in decisions that affect them, labor would expand dramatically the area of conscious social regulation. Instead of abdicating authority over social resources including labor to individual property owners, society would exercise this power democratically, through elections and through representative bodies chosen with the participation of all. This movement involves redefining property within democratic communities. Capitalist private property rights grant owners formal monopoly privileges enforced by police action against trespassers; property owners have state-sanctioned authority to do what they will with their property, including the right to order others, such as discharged employees, to leave. This right is expressed in the classic Anglo-Saxon legal maxim sic utere tuo, ut alienum non laedas, or “use your own so as not to injure another.” Because it protected individuals from state interference, by the nineteenth century, sic utere was the legal axiom of liberals and democrats looking to

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expand individual liberty. By establishing a sanctified area for individual autonomy, sic utere has been the individualist liberal answer to both absolute-right monarchists and to authoritarian paternalists. But hardly is the sic utere maxim stated than it raises dilemmas that provide a window into the meaning of the labor movement. In the 1846 Massachusetts case of Commonwealth v. Tewksbury, Justice Lemuel Shaw argued that “All property” was “held under the tacit condition that it shall not be so used as to injure the equal rights of other, or to destroy or greatly impair the public rights and interests of the community; under the maxim of the common law, sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas” (Novak 1996: 144). But what does it mean to “greatly impair”? New York’s Chancellor Kent similarly argued that “[e]very individual has as much freedom in the acquisition, use, and disposition of his property, as is consistent with good order and the reciprocal rights of others.” But, again, “good order” and “reciprocal rights” are vague terms; how are we to apply them to actual cases? (Novak 1996: 44, 49). Jurists have wrestled with this problem since the founding of the American republic because sic utere is a principle not a rule. Oliver Wendell Holmes called it “an empty vessel” providing no guidance in actual cases because these invariably involve individuals with competing property interests, Kent’s “reciprocal rights of others.” The real question is how the doctrine should be applied when everything that property owners do affects others (Holmes 1894: 11). Where I live, for example, a homeowner may assert under sic utere the right to paint her house, build an extension on her sunroom, or install a mailbox shaped like a dragon’s mouth. But all of these activities would be challenged by neighbors and our local homeowners’ association over concerns that such actions would mar the appearance of the neighborhood, reducing the wealth and welfare of other property owners. To maintain the desired appearance, our association only allows natural stains; building expansions are also subject to public scrutiny to maintain sight lines; and a dragon mailbox would be proscribed because it jeopardizes our neighborhood’s image as a responsible and serious place. Instead of the empty principle of sic utere, “private” activities have been subjected to public regulation under the overarching maxim salus populi suprema lex est, or “the welfare of the people is supreme law” (Friedman 2003). Here is the fundamental democratic ideal that a community should regulate property in order to protect human rights and opportunity without regard for their level of wealth or position. With its origins in the Roman Republic, salus populi is not a principle we would expect in a monarchy or an aristocracy. Instead, in classical oligarchies like Venice or monarchies like Bourbon France, the interests of the monarch or a few rich aristocrats subsume any public interest. Instead, salus populi reemerges in democratic societies when public regulation of property is put in place to ensure that the rights of all citizens are to be respected despite a highly unequal distribution of property. In democracies, salus populi trumps sic utere because the rights of living citizens are held above inanimate property. Without breaking new legal ground, labor reformers would apply this principle to allow public regulation of productive property to replace the capitalist’s subservient, serf-worker with a

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democratic citizen-worker. Such democratic regulation of productive property, however, would open the door to the complete subversion of capitalism and its replacement with one where the community regulates productive property democratically. Against this universal democracy, capitalists and their allies marshal an individualist ideal of liberty where workers stand independently of society, face-to-face with employers, legal equals but practically incommensurate. Capitalists and their individualist-liberal allies attack social regulations for overturning agreements voluntarily accepted by freely contracting individuals. In the 1886 case of Godcharles v. Wigeman, for example, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned a law requiring payment in lawful money labeling it an infringement alike of the right of the employer and the employee . . . an insulting attempt to put the laborer under legislative tutelage. . . . He may sell his labor for what he thinks best, whether money or goods, just as his employer may sell his iron or coal. The United States Supreme Court agreed, overturning a New York law in the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York, on grounds that “[t]he general right to make a contract in relation to his business is part of the liberty of the individual.” Earlier, in In re. Jacobs, the New York Appeals Court ruled that banning cigar manufacture in apartment tenements “interferes with the profitable and free use of his property by the owner or lessee.” By restricting “the application of his industry and the disposition of his labor,” regulation “arbitrarily deprives him of his property and some portion of his personal liberty.” The court concluded that: one may be deprived of his liberty and his constitutional rights thereto violated without actual imprisonment or restraint of his person. Liberty, in its broad sense as understood in this country, means the right, not only of freedom from actual servitude . . . but the right of one to use his faculties in all lawful ways to live and work. . . . All laws, therefore, which impair or trammel these rights . . . are infringements upon his fundamental rights of liberty. (quoted in Jacobs 1954: 51) For these jurists, for liberals who would reconcile capitalist authority with democracy, freedom lies in the individual’s autonomy from conscious (or democratic) social regulation even when the lack of such regulation abandons them to face overwhelming economic power alone. This is the line dividing individualist liberals from those democrats who moved into the labor movement. It is the conception that one of these liberals, the great French socialist Jean Jaurès, criticized in attacking his former ally Georges Clemenceau: Your doctrine of absolute individualism pretends that social reform is contained entirely in the moral reform of individuals, it is . . . the negation of all

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the vast movements of progress which have shaped history; it is the negation of the French Revolution. (France, Chambre des députés 1906: 2013) The great champion of democracy and social reform in the Second Empire and early Third Republic, Clemenceau moved in the opposite direction from Jaurès. Choosing sic utere rather than salus populi, he abandoned his enthusiasm for radical democracy when confronted with a revolutionary labor movement that threatened individual liberty by challenging the sovereign autonomy of property. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were three ideas contending for public support after the collapse of absolute monarchism: sic utere founded on individualism, and two alternative conceptions that recognized the importance of society and community, labor’s salus populi and capitalist paternalism. Labor’s vision combined democracy and community, liberty and equality protected and enhanced by community support, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Rather than a negative attribute of individuals formally equal but with different opportunities, labor’s liberty is a positive attribute where fraternal support opens opportunities for individuals without regard for their station. Individual opportunity, the chance for an individual to develop his or her individualism, comes from the fraternal support that individuals get from the community. Labor’s concept of liberty is rooted in opportunity, which is a social product created for individuals through fraternal support and by restrictions on individual behavior. My liberty to drive a car, for example, depends on restrictions on the rights of others to go through red lights and stop signs. My opportunity for selfexpression, similarly, depends on restrictions on the meanings of words and other social signs; only by defining these and according them socially fixed meanings can I use them effectively as vehicles for self-expression. And, my freedom in my home depends on restrictions on the behavior of others, not only the protection of my “property” from invasion and seizure, but also protection from the waste produced from others, such as smoke from their fires, the smell of their uncovered septic system, and the unsightly displays of neon lights from their signs. I am free in my home only to the extent that social regulations restrict my behavior and the behavior of others. Therefore, my liberty is only secure when I have equal democratic right to contribute to the communal regulation of life and property. This concept of liberty as a social product, and labor’s concomitant demand to extend democracy to the workplace, divided the revolutionary liberal movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When labor abandoned the liberal concept of the individual free of restraint, represented in literature by the freedom of castaway Robinson Crusoe, for a social concept of liberty, it separated radicals like Clemenceau from socialists like Jaurès. “There is,” warned the American labor leader George McNeill, “an inevitable and irresistible conflict between the wage system of labor and the republican system of government” (Montgomery 1993: 121). Against capitalist oppression maintained by a system of individual bargaining, E. R. Greenawalt, President of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, pronounced in 1908,

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Labor’s liberty is a social product The union shop stands as an effectual barrier against tyranny and oppression in the workshop. . . . It enforces the principle of collective bargaining and the minimum wage scale. It seeks to establish universally even and exact justice as applied to the relation existing between employer and employee, the citizen and the state. (Pennsylvania Federation of Labor 1908: 21)

This social concept of liberty was neither original to labor activists, nor restricted to labor unions and their socialist allies. Indeed, it lay behind the development of the new social sciences in the late nineteenth century, including the disciplines of economics and sociology, and this attracted allies to labor. In France, for example, Émile Durkheim established sociology in the academy and was a prominent academic leftist. Descended from a long line of rabbinical scholars, Durkheim himself had originally prepared for the rabbinate but with the establishment of the Third Republic, he abandoned religious studies for practical scholarship intended to promote the new regime. Inextricably interwoven with the Third Republic’s trials and tribulations, his work was designed to provide a new secular basis for national moral unity, a social alternative to sic utere individualist liberalism and a democratic counter to paternalism. Democracy, secularism, equality, and positive social science were, Durkheim concluded, to be the Republic’s ideals. After studies in the elite Ecole Normale Supèrieure in Paris, the young Durkheim went to study in Germany, an unlikely destination for a patriotic Frenchman barely a decade after the Franco-Prussian War. But Louis Liard, Directeur de l’Enseignement supérieur, encouraged Durkheim to study there to learn the tools for scientific social analysis from Germany’s institutional and historical economists. Led by Adolph Wagner and Gustav von Schmoller, Germany’s Historical School economists had rejected the isolated individualism of classical English economics to view individuals as members of communities with values and behaviors that change over time in response to events. This evolutionary dynamic made the German outlook historical because they believed that events shaped the evolution of communities even without regard for the intentions of individuals within. And it made the German historical school’s teachings ethical and normative; if actions matter, then the choices people make shape economic outcomes. For the Germans, economics was no longer a descriptive discipline, reporting on the development of material conditions, but a normative discipline, identifying outcomes and delineating choices. Income distribution, for example, was no longer a natural consequence of individuals acting through markets shaped by impersonal material forces; instead, for the German Historical School it becomes the result of the social allocation of property rights, state commercial policy, and other conscious political decisions. Far from violating any natural law, redistribution, then, would simply apply a new state policy and new politics. For Schmoller and his colleagues, justice was not an attribute of isolated individuals left free to pursue their personal interests, but is to be achieved by organ-

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izing society to create opportunities for all. The pursuit of social justice and institutional economics led Schmoller to join with Wagner, Wilhelm Roscher, Johannes Conrad, Ernst Engel, Lujo Brentano, and others in 1872 to establish an organization to press for social reform and to promote the new economics, the Verein fur Socialpolitik. The young Durkheim rejoiced in this environment of social reform and intellectual ferment and he set out to introduce elements of it at home on his return to France. He found a receptive audience in the new Republic’s “progressive establishment,” republican intellectuals devoted to the liberal and egalitarian values derived from the French Revolution. Opposed by a powerful anti-republican right with roots in the old aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and paternalist employers, the Third Republic had a tenuous grip on power that these republican intellectuals sought to reinforce by spreading republican education and developing a republican ethos (Auspitz 1982). Durkheim sought to apply his new social science to the moral consolidation of the Third Republic, building a foundation of republican morals on a new social science that emphasized both the social construction of individuals and the possibilities for liberation through social action. Durkheim’s friends pushed him quickly up the French academic ladder. In 1888, his mentor Louis Liard persuaded Bordeaux to hire Durkheim and to create a course in social science, the first time that French universities, with all of their religious and classical traditions, had officially opened the doors to this rather suspect subject. In 1896, after the publication of his De la division du travail social (The Division of Labor in Society), Durkheim was promoted to full professor in social science, the first to hold such a post in France. Then, as a mark of his political importance, in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair, in 1902, Durkheim was called to Paris to introduce sociology to the Sorbonne. His course was made the sole required course at the University for prospective teachers. At each step up the academic ladder, Durkheim expanded his influence, building a school of empirical social science designed to counter both liberal individualists and anti-democratic paternalists. At Bordeaux, he trained a group of devoted students, more fellow workers than disciples, a group that included a panoply of the French intellectual establishment of the twentieth century, including Hubert Bourgin, and Georges Davy, Maurice Halbwachs, François Simiand, and Durkheim’s own nephew, Marcel Mauss. At Paris, Durkheim was known as a passionate and moving instructor; a hostile observer bemoaned that “Those who wished to escape his influence had to flee from his courses” (Alpert 1961: 62–3). Another reactionary critic warned that “the requirement to teach the sociology of M. Durkheim in 200 French Normal schools is the greatest peril that our country has faced in a long time” (Bouglé 1935: 168). Raymond Aron said that it was the “desire for social reform that brought Émile Durkheim to sociology” (Aron 1960: 37). Durkheim and his followers were openly on the political left; he famously entered class carrying a copy of Jaurès’ socialist journal L’Humanité under his arm. But Durkheim was never a doctrinaire socialist; he rejected economic determinism and the period’s simplistic Marxism.

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Believing passionately in the democratic values of the French Revolution, Durkheim’s socialism would fulfill the Revolutionary goal of joining liberty to equality through a fraternity that would bind citizens together through participation in democratic institutions to support their individuality. By fostering communal life through democratic participation, Durkheim would build a society modeled on the vision of New England towns that an earlier French scholaractivist, Alexis de Tocqueville, had so admired in Democracy in America (de Tocqueville 2004). Durkheim’s doctoral dissertation, De la division du travail, identified the fundamental social problem as protecting individualism in an egalitarian society that depends on an integrated and close coordination of work and labor. The time was long past when society could return to simple authoritarianism or the supremacy of a few over the many as was envisioned in paternalism. Instead, Durkheim saw the choice between what I have called sic utere liberal individualism and some form of democratic socialism. He warned that the Revolution of 1789 left a destructive legacy of extreme individualism, the belief that individuals alone were productive and created society on their own (Durkheim 1890). Against this, Durkheim would knit society together with new institutions, a renewed union movement, and social justice with economic equality and equal opportunity supported by the entire community. Behind Durkheim’s reforms was a new social science that would describe a new positive science of ethics. Durkheim’s science begins with the independence of society from individuals, the clear separation of sociology from psychology. “Social facts,” Durkheim argues, are characteristics of society and social systems that must be studied without regard for the individuals who make up the society because they are the result of other social facts. Because society is separate from and prior to the individuals who compose it, because he denies any independent role for individuals, Durkheim can treat ethics and morality as social phenomena, and ethical behavior as a political act rather than the result of individual choice. “Social life,” Durkheim pronounced, “is a system of representations and mental states . . . fundamentally different from those that constitute the mental life of individuals and subject to their own laws . . . that cannot be understood by individual psychology” (Durkheim 1901: 704). Even suicide, Durkheim argues, is subject to social laws and suicide rates are determined by characteristics of the society (Durkheim 1951). But while denying individual autonomy, Durkheim favors a politics and a society that will give scope for individual creativity. Societies can be compared according to their outcomes, the people they produce, and Durkheim favors societies that will give individuals opportunities. Individual liberty, he argues, is a social value, the product of social regulation: “True individual liberty,” he argued in De la Division du travail, “does not consist in suppression of all regulation, but is the product of regulation. . . . This work of achieving justice is the task which is imposed upon higher societies; only on this condition can they maintain themselves . . . labor is divided spontaneously only if society is constituted in such a way that social inequalities exactly express natural inequalities” (Durkheim 1964: 377).

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The reformist, even leftist, tinge to Durkheim’s program, and his association with many left radicals, led his critics to charge that his sociology was, in Raymond Aron’s words, “the scientific counterpart of socialism” (Aron 1960: 33). Péguy accused Durkheimians of providing “camouflage for socialism” to smuggle it into the educational system (Vogt 1976: 271). Indeed, many of Durkheim’s students were active socialists, including Mauss, Simiand, and Lévy-Bruhl who, with Herr and Jaurès, helped to found L’Humanité; Halbwachs and Paul Fauconnet who contributed to the paper for many years; and Emmanuel Lévy who, along with Simiand, Mauss, and Fauconnet, taught in the Ecole Socialiste, founded to instruct workers in socialist doctrines (Clark 1973: 188). After labeling most of his students and “even the master himself” as socialists, a one-time student and later fascist critic of Durkheim noted that “Division du travail social was published 1893, the same year when legislative elections brought significant number of socialist deputies to Chamber, including Guesde and Jaurès” (Bourgin 1942: 72). Many of Durkheim’s later followers have disputed the charge that their master was a socialist; and many on the left have responded by rejecting Durkheim as an advocate of social solidarity. In a deeper way, however, Durkheim did provide a social science for the labor movement because he gave it a social science of collective action where individual opportunity is a social product.

Labor’s allies Durkheim was the most creative and insightful of the men and women who developed the new social sciences of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Indeed, Durkheim is most significant because he had company; the development of social sciences that view individuals within a social context should be seen, in Durkheim’s words, as a “social fact” rather than the product of any individual’s genius. In Germany there were the historical school economists, reformers and institutionalists in search of a social theory; in the United States there was the rise of the New Economics around Richard Ely (Furner 1975; Ross 1991). In France, many joined Durkheim’s campaign for social science as a vehicle of social reform. Just three years after Durkheim published Division du travail, one of the leading politicians of the French Third Republic, Léon Bourgeois, published Solidarité. Beginning with the observation that membership in a community makes us much more productive than we could ever be as isolated individuals, Bourgeois concludes that we all owe a “social debt” to society that is greater the more wealth we have from society. The concept of “social debt,” Bourgeois argues, negates the standard liberal defense of private property, the sic utere approach, by discounting personal responsibility or credit for wealth. Instead, drawing on the ideas of young liberal academics, including the economists Charles Gide and Charles Rist, and the sociologist Alfred Fouillée, Bourgeois defends progressive income taxation and other social reforms to redistribute income and power and spread among all of us the advantages we all gain from participating in a community;

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“a man’s liberty begins,” Bourgeois argues, only “with liberation of his social debt” (Bourgeois 1912: 12).1 English reformers, such as those in the Fabian Society, and the younger American economists who founded the American Economic Association in 1885, made similar social arguments to justify social reform. For labor, these could be useful allies, friends with political connections to advance programs to help workers and the poor, and thinkers able to articulate theoretical grounds for labor’s attack on laissez-faire and to legitimize labor militancy. After denouncing laissez-faire as “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals” the American Economic Association called on all the progressive forces in society, church, unions, and the academy to join together behind a program for social reform (American Economic Association 1886). Noting these forebears, the American academic and public intellectual Ira Katznelson observed that: In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, a remarkable and diverse group of public moralists on the left under the umbrellas of progressivism, social democracy, and the “New Liberalism” worked the space where political imagination meets social and political theory . . . figures as diverse as England’s T. H. Green, Germany’s Walter Rauschenbusch, France’s Jean Jaurès, and America’s John Dewey sought to make liberalism more social and socialism compatible with liberal democracy while tempering both with a large dose of civic virtue. (Katznelson 1998: 36) When such diverse figures in different countries develop such similar ideas, it suggests there are some common circumstances at work. Like most workingclass activists, the new liberal intellectuals of the late-nineteenth century were themselves outsiders, generally from lower-middle class backgrounds, often from minority groups; virtually all were from backgrounds previously excluded from positions of responsibility and power but now admitted to the expanding academy. Durkheim and the American economist Edwin Seligman, for example, were Jewish, as were many of Durkheim’s students. Others were from lowermiddle class provincial backgrounds. The son of an unsuccessful businessman, Jean Jaurés was born in the provincial town of Castres in southern France; Schmoller was born in Heilbronn, Wurttemberg, the son of a civil servant; Sidney Webb was born into a lower-middle class London family, the son of a freelance accountant and a shopkeeper; and America’s Richard Ely was the son of an unsuccessful, downwardly mobile New England farmer. Many of these New Liberals were the first representatives of their social group to join the academy and society’s intellectual life. Their entry was made possible by expanded scholarship opportunities and new, egalitarian admission procedures; they owed their positions and opportunities to the democratic movement that had removed many barriers to advancement, and they knew from personal experience how important this movement was. Indebted as they were to the democratic movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were

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beholden to the new, democratic states that these movements had created, not only the American and French republics but also the new German Empire and the transformed British state with its reformed parliament. Unlike many labor activists, the New Liberals had reason to feel loyal to the new states, even to feel a sense of patriotism. Durkheim, for example, understood that the French Revolution was not yet fulfilled, but, having received great opportunities from the Third Republic, he also appreciated that there were achievements to be defended as well as demands to be pressed; he and his fellow liberals had more to lose than their chains. Here was a crucial point of division between the New Liberals and their revolutionary acquaintances. Revolutionaries like Marx’s French son-in-law Paul Lafargue, for example, were suspicious of Durkheim and the other New Liberals as much for their style as for their content. They distrusted the New Liberals because they showed a sympathy with the existing order and an appreciation of gains achieved; they sought to build on past achievements rather than overturn everything of the old order. They anticipated, correctly as it happened, that given the opportunity, the New Liberals would guide the Labor Movement in a reformist direction, to again ameliorate society while leaving intact capitalist and other authority. Even if labor activists did not want to admit it, the tie between the New Liberals and the new, more democratic states of the late-nineteenth century reflected a political dynamic that sometimes benefitted unions and the organized Labor Movement. In addition to foreign foes, the new states were endangered, challenged on their right by reactionary forces: southern slave holders in the United States; aristocrats, the clergy, and elements of the haute bourgeoisie in France; the Catholic Church and entrenched aristocracies in Bismarck’s German Reich. Even relatively conservative political elites sought working-class support to protect their government from its enemies; unions and reformers could benefit from these new opportunities. Fearing that outsiders and intellectuals would divert unions, some labor leaders shunned the help of the new liberal intellectuals (Perlman 1928). But this help was often crucial for whatever success the Labor Movement has enjoyed because it helped to balance the great power of capitalists against workers. Compared with capitalists, workers are poor, lack access to knowledge and information, have little control over resources, and have few social connections with other power centers. Allies help with some of these disabilities. Some, like Solomon Barkin, have provided expertise to labor organizations to help them deal with government officials. Writers and artists sympathetic with the Labor Movement help to attract public support by exposing workers’ poverty and harsh working conditions in their art; lawyers help defend unions before the judiciary. Some outsiders seek only to provide support to help workers to find their own emancipation; others seek to guide, and then to lead, the Labor Movement along a preferred path. The greatest help allies provided during this time may have been of a different sort altogether. Intellectual allies legitimized labor’s struggles by contradicting the

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claims of conservatives that hierarchy and oppression are inevitable, unavoidable, and natural in humanity’s fallen state. Compared with its capitalist opponents, labor’s greatest disability has been the inherent sense of illegitimacy that comes from challenging established powers and ways of doing things. In demanding respect for workers, the labor movement disputes the common sense of capitalist society, the received wisdom that authorities are licit and their challengers wrong. Demanding change, challenging the way things are done, labor asks for a leap of faith into a world where things are done differently. Why should others accept that the changes labor demands are even possible? Certainly, it would be hard for workers themselves and their self-taught leaders to persuade others; coming from workers without social standing or intellectual legitimacy, their claims are inherently suspect. The very same arguments are more plausible coming from established intellectuals with training and social status.2 But this form of legitimization came at a price. Intellectually committed to democracy, the New Liberals were successful arrivistes who had attained success within an existing hierarchical order. As affluent consumers, as employers, and as supervisors, they enjoyed the benefits of success and power within an authoritarian social order. The New Liberals often contradicted in their own lives the values of equality, democracy, and respect that they upheld in their political writings. A much-loved and respected teacher and researcher, Durkheim, for example, came to treat many of his students in an authoritarian way. The American liberal economist Richard Ely combined subservience to those with wealth and power with a domineering, even brutal, approach to employees, students, and even his colleagues (Friedman 2005b). From positions of authority and power, the New Liberals would come to see labor unrest as a protest against themselves and against their positions; no longer a matter for others, the New Liberals found themselves defending hierarchy, authority, and social order. The goal was no longer to use popular unrest to advance democracy but rather to build institutions to reinforce the existing order by conciliating unrest and integrating organized labor into the status quo. Favoring conciliation rather than repression, the New Liberals were still labor’s allies rather than its enemies; but this had become an alliance to defend hierarchy by reforming its outcomes rather than by transforming its authoritarianism into democratic processes.

Democratic dilemmas: property, and collective action Labor leaders had good reason to be suspicions of outside allies, who often had their own motives for supporting unions and the Labor Movement. Democracy, even economic or industrial democracy: these are elastic concepts subject to disparate, even contradictory, meanings. Does democracy mean an equal right to participate as free agents in the marketplace? Or the right to participate directly in management? Is it satisfied with the right to belong to a union charged with negotiating contracts every few years? The plasticity in the concept of demo-

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cracy can help to build coalitions uniting those whose differences would prevent united action except when hidden behind vague language. “Labor’s call for industrial democracy,” historian Joseph McCartin has observed, “was indeed a powerful rallying cry. But it was powerful partly because it was such an amorphous concept.” What made the term acceptable to different groups was that each could apply their own, different definition (McCartin 1993: 79). Paradoxically, it is not failure but success that endangers labor’s democratic coalition. In failure, all can unite behind a program of democratic reform without naming particulars. But in success, labor is called on to take action and establish new institutions, embodying its precise democratic vision. In the early years of the Labor Movement in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, labor’s allies shared a commitment to the values of 1789, the ideals of the French Revolution. But, just as the revolutionaries themselves found, these were elastic concepts, subject to different, even conflicting, interpretations. In particular, how much say should the general public, and the workers in particular, have in the disposition of productive property? To workers, their liberty requires a voice in the management, the communal regulation of productive “property;” but coming from an upwardly mobile middle class, many of labor’s allies believed that liberty was secured not by democratic popular action but by private property that protected individuals against oppression. “In fact,” the late-nineteenth century French liberal Alfred Fouillée said, “a person is not free when his liberty does not lead to the ownership of things, of instruments and of products. From the day that the public collectivity administers all things it will also rule all persons” (Logue 1983: 145). Others would favor a more extensive revision of property rights by arguing that in a society where wealth is concentrated in a few hands, wage workers do not have “exclusive disposal of” the products of their labor. Durkheim went further than most of the New Liberals in favoring radical measures to reduce inequality, including high progressive income taxes, the abolition of inheritance and hereditary class positions, and educational reform to open paths for social mobility. Justice, he argued, required that we abolish institutions that “crystallize objective conditions of inequality” such as “caste and the inheritance of property.” Social solidarity, he warned, is necessary for modern society but is only possible on the basis of justice; and justice is impossible in a contract between rich and poor (Durkheim 1964: 377). But even he, on the left of the New Liberals, rejected full equality or the full democratization of the economy. It was the concept of “fraternity,” the regulation of society through democratic participation, that threatened to divide the liberal–labor alliance. Recalling the events of 1793 as much as 1789, the reign of terror as much as the glorious beginnings of the French Revolution, many middle-class liberals feared that labor militancy would usher in a reign of terror and mob rule. Comfortable with a social system which had treated themselves so well, many liberals sought to improve conditions for workers and to pacify labor; but they feared the consequences of assuring workers of equal rights as citizens in a democracy. After

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acknowledging that workers are at a disadvantage against capitalists, the American liberal economist John Bates Clark, for example, warned of violence, of “slugging,” by union members to exclude nonunion labor. Communities, he said, needed carefully to contain unions to prevent the use of force to assert claim of job ownership (Clark 1907: 452–8, 469, 481). Others were less restrained. “Unions,” an American critic charged, were “thoughtless mobs full of ignorant men . . . criminals and outcasts.” Nelson Miles lined the defense of liberty, order, and property with national pride: Men must take sides either for anarchy, secret conclaves, unwritten law, mob violence, and universal chaos under the red and white flag of socialism on the one hand; or on the side of established government, the supremacy of law, the maintenance of good order, universal peace, absolute security of life and property, the rights of personal liberty, all under the shadow and folds of Old Glory on the other. (Watts 1991: 159, 75) Liberal ambivalence reflected a divergence of interest between labor and its liberal allies, the relative success so many liberals enjoyed under capitalism. But there is a more fundamental problem. Some element of “slugging” and “coercion,” even “mob rule,” is necessary for any collective action, especially when conducted by a group, like workers, facing the opposition of powerful interests. Collective action requires a commitment of private energies and resources to achieve social goals and, therefore, requires either the development and inculcation of non- or even anti-individualist private mores, or the use of social coercion. Individuals have a strong private interest in sacrificing and working for themselves because they receive the benefits. But there is much less incentive to sacrifice for a group or for collective action where the benefits, public goods, are spread across a whole community without regard for contribution. Instead of contributing, self-interested individuals will refrain from contributing, reasoning as some unnamed French construction workers did, that “‘if the union’s movement fails, we will have risked nothing, and if it succeeds, we will share the benefits” (Joran 1914: 105).3 Sometimes, during strikes and other “moments of madness,” workers will be drawn almost recklessly into unions by great hopes and dreams. But, eventually, when they calm down, many will again consider their personal interest in private rather than collective action. The journal of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Labor Leader warned that: “He who is not with us is against us” should be inscribed upon the banner of organized labor . . . For a man to remain neutral is, of course, a personal right, but for a man to remain neutral when he hopes in his heart that the union of his colaborers will succeed in obtaining for himself and other an increase in wages and better working hours is a pretty poor stick of a man. (Lancaster Central Labor Union, January 17, 1903: 3)

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The New York-based Fur Workers union also recognized the danger that some will enjoy the benefits of public goods won by collective action without contributing. When the members of a trade union have by the expenditure of their own time and means created certain conditions necessary for their safety and well-being . . . it is morally their right and logically their duty to insist that the nonunionist who seeks to share these conditions shall first agree to share the labor and expenditures – in other words to insist that he shall join the union. (Dubofsky 1968: 38) The “free rider” problem afflicts all social movements, including the Audubon Society, the Jewish Community of Amherst, and the Western Massachusetts Arts Alliance. But the problem is greater for labor movements whose campaign for democracy faces determined and powerful enemies. Employers use positions of power to discourage individuals from participating in labor’s campaign, discharging union activists, closing unionized workplaces, and rewarding those workers who break with the collective project. Sometimes, police imprison union activists; and vigilantes have beaten and killed them. The struggle against external resistance makes union democracy especially hard to maintain. Dissent and dispute, the lifeblood of healthy democratic governance, can threaten the unity needed to overcome opposition; and they may even be a sign that some are acting in the interests of the movement’s opponents. Hierarchy, the enemy of democracy, can become a tool in an ongoing social conflict because it concentrates the movement’s energies around a small group best able to wield them against the movement’s external enemies. So is the only way that unions can maintain a popular movement to advance democratic values and individual rights is by trampling on those values within the organization itself? This has been the approach of many political theorists fearful that democracy will unleash the limitless desires of individuals until society plunges into violent chaos. Against this danger, a democratic society can survive only with authority embedded in hierarchies powerful enough to restrain the populace to maintain order and to divert popular energies into safe avenues, such as the accumulation of wealth rather than autonomy or power. By playing this restraining role, strong unions abandon an alternate route to popular democracy, through participatory democratic institutions that educate the population in democratic values. Early in the nineteenth century, the French political activist and theorist Alexis de Tocqueville and the English social theorist John Stuart Mill, two men suspicious of democracy, suggested that democratic societies, like the United States, can survive only by training their populations in democratic values of mutual respect and devotion to the commonwealth (Mill 1886; de Tocqueville 2004; see also Rosanvallon 1998; Rancière 2006). Writing in the shadows of the French Revolution and Napoleon, Mill and de Tocqueville shared classical fears

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that democracy would swiftly degenerate into authoritarian rule; but rather than abandon the democratic project, they looked for institutions to foil tyranny by inculcating constructive democratic mores in the population, including values of respect for the opinions of others and a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the community even when this conflicts with one’s personal interests. Touring America in the 1830s, de Tocqueville concluded that American democracy could be safely maintained because these mores and values were maintained by constant participation in the institutions of democratic selfgovernment. He highlighted the role of juries, town meetings, and private institutions in the United States because these all trained Americans in democracy, including the skills of self-government, respect for the ideas of others, and a sense of constructive responsibility that will help individuals see beyond their personal interests to the common good. Without these skills and values, a majority will use its control over politics and society to turn a democratic state into the most oppressive dictatorship. Indeed, de Tocqueville warned that a democratic society will become tyrannical unless it consciously works to spread democratic institutions throughout, so as to teach the population essential democratic values, values reinforced through participation in democratic institutions. If democracy is possible only if individuals constantly practice acting democratically through participating in democratic institutions of self-government, then the persistence of undemocratic institutions threatens democracy. Not only do authoritarian institutions give the wealthy and powerful inordinate weight in deliberations, but they also teach subordination and irresponsibility, encourage withdrawal from the public conversation into private concerns, and generally counter the constructive educational work of democratic institutions. By undermining democratic values, by reinforcing authoritarian ideas, the persistence of undemocratic institutions threatens to transform a democratic society into a totalitarian tyranny. In short, there is no safe stopping place in democracy; it is all or nothing.4 Here is where democratic social theory must run up against capitalist authority and hierarchy. States-within-a-state, islands of autocracy in a democratic sea, capitalist enterprises operate by command and control rather than by dialog. The American labor leader George McNeill warned that the wage-labor system “corrupts the morals” by making “the employer a despot, and the employee a slave.” Implicitly accepting this title of despot, an American railroad magnate sent an open letter to the American public in 1902 promising that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for – not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country” (Sinyai 2006: 21, 59). There is no room here for democratic values; and left unanswered, the claims of divine-right paternalists threaten the very survival of democracy. Here is where we all need working-class collective action to maintain democracy, not only by limiting managerial authority, bringing democratic participation into the workplace, but also by providing an institution for democratic self-management of the union itself. Collective bargaining, John R. Commons said, brings an element of “constitutional government to industry” (Commons 1996: 1:163).

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But unions must do more, work is too important a part of life to leave to autocracy whether the capitalist rules or some union leader. To protect democracy, unions must also become schools for democracy, teaching the skills of selfgovernment and the values of respect and responsibility that de Tocqueville had found in the New England town meeting. De Tocqueville and Mill recognized that it is hard to build democratic habits, to teach mutual respect and the value of a regular commitment to the public good. Democracy takes work. Self-government takes time, time to participate in decisions, and still more time to discuss public policy with our fellow and equal citizens. It is always hard to get individuals to commit resources, including time, to produce public goods, even those we value highly. It can appear easier to entrust our public life and democratic space to others, to professionals, activists, bureaucrats, and leaders. But that moves us down a slippery slope that ultimately undermines democracy, creating a new inequality, even a new aristocracy, between the activist who produces self-government and idle consumers. Bureaucratic leadership converts democratic institutions into insurance companies delivering products to customers in exchange for dues. Hollow shells, these organizations lack commitment from their membership, and often act to protect their leadership and preserve their existence as service organizations rather than to advance the original, larger project of working-class empowerment. Unions and radical political movements can protect their position with employers and state officials by centralizing power in a leadership devoted to pacifying labor unrest rather than promoting democracy. But, in the long run, this approach undermines the organizations. With little popular support, they become especially vulnerable to attack from their external opponents. The dilemma of advancing democracy through organizations like unions and socialist political organizations was addressed soon after the birth of the modern Labor Movement by a European sociologist Robert (sometimes Roberto) Michels. Born to a bourgeois family with mixed German, French, and Italian roots in Cologne, Germany, on 9 January 1876, Michels was a cosmopolitan intellectual, a citizen of Europe. After studying in London, Paris, and Turin, he earned his degree in Political Economy from Halle in 1898, and then taught at the University of Marburg. Notwithstanding his academic success, he joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), attending party congresses in 1903, 1904, and 1905. But Michels was never comfortable with the SPD. At party congresses, he supported the syndicalist left, emphasizing trade union struggle over political action or even collective bargaining; and he denounced parliamentary politics with all its compromising and cautious, restrained bill-drafting. Instead of elections, negotiations, and bureaucratic regulation, Michels wanted a socialism that could emerge only from the militant action of the rank-and-file workers themselves when they seize control over the means of production through a general strike. Disenchanted, Michels complained that the SPD itself had become counterproductive. A focus on seats in the Reichstag and enacting legislation had led the SPD to restrain rank-and-file militancy from fear that it would lead to

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government repression. “All the resolutions of German socialism,” he complained, “are dominated by the fear of its organization’s being dissolved by the state, which might take offense at any action too direct, too imprudent, or too energetic.” Rather than promoting rank-and-file democracy to encourage militancy, the SPD limited democracy to restrain militancy, sacrificing the socialist end for the party instrument: “Organization for its own sake . . . this is the fetish to which German Social Democracy appears so often ready to sacrifice everything, including socialism itself” (Michels 1949: 72). Michels’s syndicalism led him out of the SPD and to renounce the entire social democratic project. In 1911, he published his classic tome, Political Parties, extending his critique of the SPD to all political organizations. “Democracy,” Michels begins “has today entered upon a critical phase from which it will be extremely difficult to discover an exit.” And the crisis is especially dire because it springs from internal inconsistencies rather than external opposition which could be more easily overcome. “Democracy has encountered obstacles,” Michels asserts, “not merely imposed from without, but spontaneously surgent from within.” “Democracy leads to oligarchy, and necessarily contains an oligarchical nucleus” (Michels 1949: 6). Democratic action, the collective action of a mass of people, requires organization, but following what Michels labels an “iron law of oligarchy,” organization necessarily negates democracy. Leaders and bureaucrats are needed to hold the experience and expertise needed for effective action, but their dominance of the movement necessarily undermines popular participation and democracy. Instead, popular institutions become service organizations, managed by their bureaucratic leadership. Worse, to maintain their position, leaders learn to limit the very popular participation that is needed to keep organizations vibrant and to sustain democratic spirits. Instead of promoting democracy, party bureaucrats and leaders substitute their own authority for that of capitalists or state; all they do is bring power to a different leader; in the words of the rock band The Who: “a new boss, same as the old boss.” “In theory,” Michels writes, “the principal aim of socialist and democratic parties is the struggle against oligarchy in all its forms.” Yet, he concludes, there has arisen within all such parties “the very tendencies against which they have declared war” (Michels 1949: 13). If this were a problem confined to Germany and its SPD then it could be blamed on a few individuals and their Teutonic culture. But when repeated in political movements throughout the world, it can neither be attributed to accident nor to the errors of a few. Instead, the problem of maintaining democracy in a world of large institutions appears to Michels to be insurmountable. “Democracy is inconceivable without organization. . . . Organization . . . is the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong”. But, organization becomes “the source from which the conservative currents flow over the plain of democracy, occasioning there disastrous floods and rendering the plain unrecognizable.” The oligarchic tendencies of the SPD are not due to the peculiar failings of German socialists; instead they come from the practical requirements of effective organization and the social division of labor.

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No large group, Michels argues, can conduct practical deliberation; instead, organization necessarily requires the delegation of responsibility, of selfgovernment, to smaller groups. But here democracy decays. “Originally the chief is merely the servant of the mass. The organization is based upon the absolute equality of all its members.” Egalitarian principles are maintained through the rotation of officers and by maintaining short terms of office. But, soon specialization sets in; terms of office are extended and rotation is abandoned to preserve the specialized knowledge of officers, their technical specialization, and from respect for their past achievements. Rather than replace officers, the rank-and-file come to defer to them and devote their own energies to their private pursuits leaving group governance, the work of democracy, to an elite. Soon enough, organization becomes oligarchy, not from malevolence but from a desire to be effective. And those who do not become oligarchic, Michels warns, those who uphold democracy from the ground up, die because they lack the expertise and resources to be effective (Michels 1949: 19, 20). Although he left the SPD in 1907, government opposition to his activities limited Michels academic career in Germany, where socialists, like Jews, were banned from the academy. His friend Max Weber helped him to gain a position at the University of Turin, Italy, where he taught economics, political science, and sociology until 1914, when he became professor of economics at the University of Basel, Switzerland, a post he held until 1926. Disillusioned with democracy and having shed his youthful infatuation with socialism, Michels eventually moved to Italy where he endorsed the fascist movement led by another former left-wing socialist, Benito Mussolini. Michels then spent his last years in Italy as professor of economics at the University of Perugia. Michel’s Political Parties is the cri de coeur of a frightened and disappointed man whose later behavior almost makes it possible to ignore his ideas. But the book raises fundamental problems that cannot be ignored, problems facing any democratic union, problems that endanger the ability of the Labor Movement to fulfill the vision of the labor movement’s militant workers in their struggle for democracy. Workers need collective action to advance their rights and they need organization to represent and organize their collective project; but collective action necessarily raises knotty problems for a movement committed to advancing democracy. Can a democratic collective movement maintain the expertise and gather the resources needed to take on powerful enemies? If it relaxes its democratic orientation, can it maintain needed popular support? And if it survives by abandoning its democratic orientation, can it then advance democracy?

Individual rights or the Labor Movement? At the peak of the labor upsurge of the 1880s, a critic of American unions attacked unions in terms that many liberals would not entirely dismiss. The Labor Movement, he charged, was made up of common workers lacking advanced education or the markers of social success. As a movement, it violated

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individual rights by using compulsion both to maintain internal discipline and to overcome external opposition. What wonder then that these organizations composed mainly of those who lack these necessary qualifications, burning under a sense of wrong and outrage, in form a fierce democracy in which numbers alone control, and so subject to the guidance of those least qualified to rule . . . be fierce, cruel, arbitrary, dictatorial – in a word, tyrannical! . . . The tendency of all unions is to place men on one dead level. . . . So far as individual workmen are concerned, they have exchanged the right of private contract, with all its disabilities, for the despotism of the union, which acts as an effectual bar to the industrial progress of themselves and their class. It is difficult to see how men can preserve their self-respect who tie themselves in body and soul to these organizations. (Day 1886: 400) Here, at the very beginning of the modern Labor Movement, we have a clear expression of the position of individualist liberals. “A fierce democracy . . . subject to the guidance of those least qualified to rule . . . in a word tyrannical.” Of course, these are the words of one, a “western manufacturer,” an employer with an economic interest in resisting unionization. But there is more than mere interest at work here. By charging that unions infringe on “self-respect” and violate the rights of “individual workmen,” this employer speaks the language of the same democratic revolutions that engendered the Labor Movement itself only to turn it in an individualist direction that denies the movement’s larger democratic and egalitarian thrust. So long as labor could claim this heritage as its own, it can demand, even command, respect and support; but it can do this only by maintaining liberty as a social product of a democratic society. Labor’s worst setback would be to lose this claim to democracy and liberty to individualist liberalism.

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It was a stroke of genius on the part of those predecessors to have perceived, in the face of all previous experience and despite the inherent difficulties, that the social, economic and political climate favoured the launching of a union for men and women in the most diverse occupations, without any specific skills, more often than not employed in unpleasant, discontinuous, and poorly paid work . . . yet with the inalienable rights, the needs and the personal dignity which deserved to be as highly respected and as stoutly defended as those of anyone else. Yvonne Kapp, about the British New Unions (1989: 154) Well, it just went like tinder. One girl began, and the rest said yes, so out we all went. A striking match girl from Bryant & May, London, 1889 (Charlton 1999: 146)

The Labor Movement and the working class: the irony of union growth From the dreams of a few mid-nineteenth-century idealists, the Labor Movement grew to immense size and power. By 1950, unions in sixteen countries had enrolled over fifty million workers, over 40 percent of the labor force in these countries. When membership reached ninety million in 1980, it seemed to many that the question was no longer whether labor would rule, but when. Perhaps it was inevitable that this long century of growth would leave unions unprepared for the decline that has come since 1980. Indeed, labor’s golden growth century misled both activists and scholars; we can now appreciate better how difficult it was to build the Labor Movement, and we can see how choices made to promote growth have come to undermine labor today. To grow, labor unions and radical political movements must mobilize workers for collective action against almost insurmountable opposition. Against labor stands the wealth, authority, and prestige of the established order; and all that labor can bring against this power is a claim to speak for a great working population that is a fragmented mass of individuals. And what if activists do succeed in involving some large number of workers? That heroic achievement only moves them to the point where they can confront hunger while challenging

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the great powers of established society: capital, the police, and the curses of the clergy. Not only must activists mobilize workers, but success depends on persuading employers that they are better off accepting unions than fighting them. Far from an inevitable triumph, what labor has accomplished appears almost to be a miracle. It should be no surprise, therefore, that the answer to the mystery of union growth is that unions usually don’t grow. Over the century after 1880, unions grew at barely 2 percent a year, only a little faster than the growth in the labor force. But this average obscures labor’s successes, because most growth came in a few years, years characterized by widespread unrest that led elites to be receptive to unionization as an alternative to undisciplined, spontaneous, and potentially revolutionary unrest. It was unrest that compelled state officials and employers to reach out to union leaders and socialist politicians to restore order and to calm unrest. Labor leaders accepted this bargain. Happily exchanging peace for recognition and a seat at the table where decisions were made, labor’s leaders returned from the palaces of power to urge their followers to go back to work and to accept the new collective-bargaining regime, forsaking any broader demands to revolutionize or to democratize work. Surges of popular unrest fueled organized labor’s short spurts of growth, but unrest has been a necessary, not sufficient, condition for growth. Employers and state officials turned to labor leaders for help only because they themselves lacked the confidence, the unity, or the opportunity to crush unrest. A strategy of unrest worked for labor only when employers were vulnerable; self-confident and well organized employers and state officials can nip unrest in the bud or crush even mass strikes. Thus the mysteries of union growth and decline are really one, united by the role Labor Movement organizations play in resolving periods of labor movement popular unrest. The supreme irony of collective-bargaining unionism is that the way unions win recognition from employers undermines future union growth by deflating militancy and separating workers from their own organizations. Unions grow because employers and state officials accept them to pacify militant labor; but this condition eventually puts unions in an untenable position. By requiring that the union manage the workers and restrain their militancy, separating union organizations and leaders from the workers themselves, the commitment to labor peace undermines the democratic spirit of the union. It can turn unions into service organizations, providing insurance and collective bargaining to clients rather than representing members as adherents. Furthermore, a policy of labor peace risks falling between stools. To the extent that pacification succeeds, it risks undermining popular militancy until employers conclude that there is no longer a threat of unrest and they can abandon dealing with the union. But if pacification fails, if workers reject the narrow gains of collective bargaining and there is renewed labor militancy, employers conclude that the union cannot restrain labor unrest and there is no gain in dealing with the union. Either way, employers return to their previous anti-union stance. Scholars and activists have largely missed the irony of union growth because

How unions grew, and why they stopped 57 they have been blinded by a founding myth of the Labor Movement that workers determine Labor’s fate. In this vision, usually accompanied by black and white pictures of strong, tanned male workers swinging heavy hammers, unions grow through the efforts of tormented workers joining together against their oppressors. Activists devote their time to persuading workers to support labor organizations on the premise that the major barrier to labor’s success is to persuade workers of their class interest in organization. But this may be the easiest task activists face, and the least important. Workers are the least important consideration in understanding variations in labor militancy. Success in the overwhelming task of advancing the Labor Movement depends on gaining the support of greater powers and authorities outside the working class, employers, state officials, and middle-class observers. It is ironic how both left and right prefer to describe the rise and fall of unions as a result of the wishes and values of the workers involved. Marxists and other radicals focus on workers and their place in the labor struggle because they prefer to study workers and disdain the study of the opposition. For their part, conservative scholars and writers also accept this approach, because, like the myth of consumer sovereignty, that of worker sovereignty is a useful ideological tool that allows them to explain union weakness as reflecting the wishes of the workers themselves. On a deeper level, by concealing the harsh and often unappealing reality of capitalist power, pretending that workers are free to choose a collective voice hides class conflict and the repressive power of employers and their state allies. Using a worker-centric perspective, many previous studies of union growth have emphasized economic conditions or cultural values because these presumably affect workers. Among these are many studies exploring the relationship between business conditions and union growth which assume that workers will join or disaffiliate from unions depending on changes in wages and employment (Commons 1966; Ashenfelter and Pencavel 1969; Bain and Elsheikh 1975).1 Others look for links between technological change and union growth on the assumption that workers’ interest in unionization depends on conditions at work (Montgomery 1979; Shorter and Tilly 1974). And there are studies associating union growth with cultural changes and changing popular attitudes (Cohen 1990). There are problems with these studies. First, it is wrong to expect workers to support unions because circumstances at work make it rational to have a union. Rational behavior has nothing to do with workers joining a union because it is virtually always more rational (that is, serves the worker’s interests better) to free ride on the efforts of others. Nor, as I mentioned above, is it right to focus on the workers in explaining unionization. Remember, labor is the weaker side in the class struggle and union success or failure depends more on the attitudes and actions of others than on the actions of the workers. But the attitudes and actions of activists and workers are still important. We simply need to integrate this counterintuitive fact into a broader analysis of a multi-sided class conflict, and focus on the worker behavior that generates alliances and the impact of these alliances.

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Capitalism and capitalist authority, worker collective action, democracy, allies, and the police power of the state: together these raw elements produced the remarkable century of union growth that ended around 1980. The labor movement challenged capitalist authority in the name of democracy; even more than higher pay or better working conditions, workers sought power to balance that of capitalists with that of workers united. Rarely can workers overcome the power of capital directly on their own; more often, to succeed, labor needs allies, politicians, liberals, and state officials to help workers overcome the opposition of powerful employers. Sometimes, labor finds allies among ambitious politicians looking for votes in democratic elections. Other times, allies are attracted to a democratic movement, including idealistic young professionals like the American Sol Barkin or the Polish Rosa Luxemburg. By staffing young unions and providing valuable skills and access to resources outside the working class, these idealists were often crucial to union growth, especially for young unions. Instrumental concerns were even more important in leading employers and state officials to support unions. Labor militancy, the popular labor movement of rank-and-file workers, threatens normal economic life through strikes, the occupation of workplaces, and public demonstrations. Sometimes employers look to unions, to the organized Labor Movement, to restore order disrupted by the rank-and-file movement. Thus state officials and employers accept unions from fear, fear of an unruly rank-and-file as a means of organizing labor relations to substitute organized and regulated collective bargaining for strife. A leading French labor reformer had “the profound conviction that it is in union organization that is found the most powerful supports for public security, and for industrial and social progress” (Tolain in Rosanvallon 1998: 97). This is the promise offered by the American trade union leader James O’Connell: “Organized labor,” he claims, “aims to bring the employer and employee closer together” (National Conference on Industrial Conciliation 1902: 141). Anticipating that union organization and collective bargaining would benefit both employers and workers, the American reformer Carroll Wright predicted in 1885 that “The age of lock-outs and strikes is fast passing away, and the rule of reason is rapidly asserting itself; and, when it shall hold sway, capital and labor will learn that their interests are reciprocal and not antagonistic” (Wright 1881: 171). This instrumental view, that through collective bargaining unions can help improve the operation of capitalism, won the organized Labor Movement important victories when governments and employers turned to union leaders to pacify popular unrest. But unions cannot survive as alternatives to popular unrest because this turns them against their own constituents who, ultimately, want a voice in management, power over capitalist property. Repressing rankand-file militancy, union leaders lose credibility among workers and allies, crushing their own vitality, and they surrender their raison d’être, the spread of self-government, of popular democracy throughout society. Abandoning this democratic vision, unions, socialist parties, the organized Labor Movement, loses its future.

How unions grew, and why they stopped 59

Overcoming the collective action problem: unions, organizers, and moments of magic Unions face a problem integral to their role as organizations for collective action. To attract members, they must persuade workers to ignore their own narrow financial interest to contribute to a collective project where success or failure depends on the actions of others. This is why narrow bread-and-butter appeals rarely succeed in bringing workers to unions. Those looking to raise their own wages can almost always do better by free riding or even supporting the employer. Instead, unions rely on broader appeals to concerns that employers rarely, if ever, grant: dignity, respect, and a voice in management, even a chance to change the world. Millennialist appeals like these can succeed because they cannot be countered by preemptive concessions by the employer; and they are brought to workers by union activists, union apostles, the militant minority, who would never sacrifice themselves or work so hard for bread-and-butter concessions. Activists are crucial for successful collective action because, to quote Sidney Tarrow a modern American social scientist, they “resolve the social transaction costs of collective action; creating focal points for people who have no sources of compulsory coordination” (Tarrow 1994: 189). By providing the initial investment of resources, time, and example, they help launch a movement until it can attract members and resources on its own. Activist organizers have been crucial in every major union-organizing drive. In the pre-World War I French Fédération du batiment, or the construction workers’ union, for example, there were four hardly paid organizers who traveled to cities and towns urging organization (McMechan 1975; Joran 1914). They would frequent cafés popular with construction workers, mingling, distributing literature, and talking to workers about the advantages of union organization. Placing placards on walls, they would call meetings where they would address workers and urge them to form a union. With luck, with available grievances, and sometimes with the help of alcohol, enough workers would commit to the union at a meeting to allow a committee to be formed to present their demands to management and to explore organizing a permanent union structure. Unions with higher dues and larger treasuries than the Batiment employed more paid organizers. In 1904, for example, the American Federation of Labor had twenty-seven full-time organizers at an expense and salary of $1,200–5,000 each. They would spend a week or more in a community helping organizers working for the federated unions (Mullin 1993: 174). (These well paid organizers also constituted a political machine available to advance the views and maintain the position of the AFL’s longtime president, Samuel Gompers.) Few union organizers were so well off. More often, they slept on trains and on the floor of workers’ houses while evading hostile authorities and thugs hired by the employers. An organizer for the Textile Workers Union of America, the Reverend John A. Callan, learned the hard way the fate of “radical” organizers in Columbus, Georgia. On 13 April 1918, authorities raided his boarding house and

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“found” a stash of explosives, illegal whiskey, and crude diagrams (in German) of various Augusta factories. J. M. Murrah, president of the Muscogee Bank, testified that he heard Callan threaten to “blow up” the President of the United States. Showing how far the city’s cotton mill “barons” would go to get Callan removed from their city, this absurd testimony was corroborated by an impressive list of Columbus businessmen. Nor did they stop there. To defeat the union drive, authorities arrested dozens of striking millhands, mostly on trivial or manufactured charges. And when these charges did not suffice, deputies harassed and provoked strikers; when one responded by hitting a deputy he was sentenced to nine months in jail (Byrne 1997). Callan’s experience was typical of union organizers throughout the capitalist world. William Owen, former president of Eureka Longshoremen’s Union, led an organizing drive for woodsmen and millmen in Humboldt County, California, in 1905. A dedicated and effective organizer, after he was thrown off a lumber company train, he trudged miles through pouring rain to keep a speaking engagement. Another time, after he was evicted from a cookhouse and then a blacksmith’s shop, he held an organizing meeting on some nearby railroad tracks. Several organizers in the American South after World War II needed bodyguards after they were shot at. One organizer confessed that “I had a great big old steelworker who shared a room with me after that. I was not anxious to be a hero.” Others were not so lucky and died heros (Cornford 1987: 158; also see Griffith 1988: 37). Even without threats to life and limb, an organizer’s life was hard and lonely. Richard Trevellick of the National Labor Union in the United States spent 169 days traveling in 1869; John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers, was on the road the whole time between Christmas 1905 and June 1906 (Van Tine 1973: 162). Few organizers were paid enough to support a family, and even fewer had enough time at home to lead a normal family life. Why would people undertake such a life? Organizers have been chiefly drawn from idealists who believe in the Labor Movement as a force for social change. In Humboldt County, California, William Owens was seconded by B. Callaghan of the Painter’s Union. “He heralded the rising spirit of unionism in the woods and mills” as the dawning of a new “spirit of brotherly love.” He yearned for the day “when all the working people will be encircled in one common family, and then the watchword will be ‘Union’ ” (Cornford 1987: 158). Organizers risked much for little to make the world better; their idealism was essential for the growth of the Labor Movement. And sometimes their efforts bore fruit. Through persuasive reasoned argument and by the force of personal example, organizers can encourage workers to commit to collective action and to join unions. Organizing efforts can succeed. One of the fastest growing unions in the United States in the early 1900s was the Amalgamated Wood Workers which grew nearly 30 percent per year for a decade, from 2,500 members in 1895 to 30,000 in 1904. Contemporaries attributed its rapid growth “to the special effort put forth to extend the organization.” Inspired by the idea of worker solidarity uniting all who worked with wood,

How unions grew, and why they stopped 61 Amalgamated organizers were also well supported. In addition to spending on literature and propaganda materials, nearly a fourth of the union’s budget was devoted to paying organizers (Deibler 1912: 71, 72, 108). Recently, economists Paula Voos, Kate Bronfenbrenner, and sociologist Kim Voss, among others, have demonstrated an association between spending on organizing and union membership growth in the United States, and the importance of idealism in motivating organizers (Bronfenbrenner et al. 1998; Milkman and Voss 2004; Voos 1987). Persuading individuals can be a slow and difficult process but at least it is under the control of the unions and at the discretion of labor itself. Attracting and hiring energetic organizers, training them well, and giving them the resources they need to work well: what unions can do themselves can increase their membership. This may be why labor’s supporters have devoted so much energy to measuring the impact of organizing expenditures and debating the optimal organizing strategies. Unfortunately, these debates are largely irrelevant: despite occasional successes, organizing efforts have made little difference for union growth in the past and are unlikely to matter much more in the future. The Labor Movement as a whole has not grown in the past, and can never grow in the future, through logical argument by activists and organizers. Even when made by idealists, activists and organizers, reasoned arguments have little impact against the greater logic of collective action because the strongest argument is always that individuals can do best for themselves by remaining outside of the collective project, leaving to others the risk and expense while enjoying any fruits of their efforts. Viscerally, if not rationally, good organizers know all this. They understand that they need deeds, they need to attract workers by involving them with dramatic appeals, with passion, and romance. That is why activists labor over slogans, write songs, and work so hard to involve workers in demonstrations and protests. These, labor’s collective effervescence, tie workers together beyond logic, connect them emotionally to each other and to the Labor Movement. Growth depends on these irrational bursts, and the Labor Movement’s growth has come in spurts associated with periods of social upheaval, labor movement militancy, largely outside of the control of unions, their leaders, and their activists. The role of these activists and leaders has been to take this unrest, to fan the flames of protest, and channel protest into institutional forms; once workers have been mobilized through massive strikes and political demonstrations, activists chase after them to organize them into unions. But once established, these new unions are led into a Faustian bargain with employers and state officials, exchanging recognition and acceptance for containing and channeling the very popular unrest that gave birth to the union as a mass institution. From their inception, unions have traded their birthright for a place at the table.

Rosa Luxemburg and the growth of the Labor Movement Despite their best efforts, even the best organizers and the cleverest slogans have little effect on the growth of the Labor Movement as a whole. The world is too

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large for a few organizers to make much of a difference; and in normal times, slogans travel too slowly. But if organizers cannot transform labor relations and bring masses into the Labor Movement, when circumstances are right, they can steer them into particular institutions, unions and socialist political parties; they can be sparks to the ready tinder, or occasionally gather tinder for the sparks to come. Until those times come, organizers’ struggles and work matter for a few, but the large mass of workers remain uninvolved. There are times when history turns, when almost by sheer will alone, people rise together to change life through collective action. In these revolutionary times, inspired by the spirit of the times, by visions of a better world, people find new ways to act together to change life. With a newfound faith that others too will join in a collective effort that will matter, they throw caution to the wind, reject established precedents and old rules to join together to redefine their relationship with the state, with society, and with each other. Abandoning the constraints of narrow individualism, in these “moments of madness” people achieve dramatic social changes through collective action (Zolberg 1972). In these brief moments of upheaval, history happens; in these times of revolution, society changes through conscious social action. Since the beginning of the Labor Movement, mass strikes have been one of the most common manifestations of public upheaval. General and theoretical rigor was first given to the study of mass strikes by a Polish-born, Jewish economist, Rosa Luxemburg. Born Rozalia Luksenburg, the youngest of five children of a downwardly mobile Jewish middle-class family in Zamosc, Poland in 1870, she started early as a rebel. Every step in her upbringing and education drove home the facts of inequality and inequity. Assimilated Jews, her family was removed from the rest of the Jewish community without being accepted into the Catholic Polish community; Luxemburg grew up as a Pole, speaking German and Yiddish in a country occupied by Russia; she was a woman in a world ruled by men. And she suffered a physical disability, a hip dislocation that gave her a limp and earned her the schoolyard title of “cripple, cccrriipplee” (Ettinger, 1986: 10). Admitted to secondary school under a quota system designed to limit the number of Jewish students, her Warsaw school was conducted in Russian with Polish strictly forbidden. Jewish students were segregated, treated as guilty by definition and subject to punishment for the smallest infractions. It is easy to understand how Luxemburg found school an alienating experience. Still, it was a sanctuary compared with the outside world where the police stood idle while crowds celebrated Christmas, 1881, with a pogrom against Warsaw’s Jews (Ettinger 1986: 14–15). A biographer suggests that “the nervous restlessness” that set the rhythm of Luxemburg’s adult life “originated with the obstacle course that school presented to her.” Her upbringing also directed that energy, both to find a larger community that would accept her, and a desire to change the world to eliminate such inequity. Even as a teenager, Luxemburg threw herself into the revolutionary movement, joining “Proletariat,” one of the first organizations of Polish Marxists. Ironically, it was this involvement in the Polish revolutionary

How unions grew, and why they stopped 63 movement that forced her to leave Poland. Soon after she was graduated from secondary school in Warsaw in 1887, she had to flee to Switzerland to escape arrest for her political activities. But exile did not prevent involvement in Polish revolutionary politics. In 1893, she helped to found the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland; appealing for the unity of Polish and Russian workers, and ignoring the fight for Polish sovereignty, Luxemburg’s group never attracted much support. Looking for a wider field Luxemburg moved to Berlin in 1898, to join the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).2 There she would remain until her assassination in January 1919 during the German Revolution, devoting her energies to promoting revolution by transforming the SPD into a revolutionary party. Luxemburg brought great gifts to her party work. In 1893, a complete unknown, she captivated the meeting of the Socialist International with her plea to admit the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland instead of its nationalist rival, the Polish Socialist Party. Émile Vandervelde recalled that her “adversaries had a hard time keeping up with her” and “she defended her cause with such magnetism in her eyes and in such fiery words that the majority of delegates, captivated and spellbound, voted in favor of accepting her mandate.” (Outmaneuvered by the better-connected Polish Socialists, her mandate was later revoked in a committee vote (Ettinger 1986: 48).) Barely three weeks after arriving in Berlin, Luxemburg campaigned through Polish Silesia for the SPD. Her contagious zeal mesmerized her crowds. News of the Polish Fräulein Doktor spread quickly drawing crowds that overflowed lecture halls. The tour was a triumph beyond all expectations. Almost bewitched by the adoration of the crowds and the attention her words brought her, Luxemburg hoped to build on her Silesia tour to ascend to a prominent position in the SPD. This was never likely; her religion, her nationality, her language and, most of all, her sex, all insured her outsider status. In any case, Luxemburg was soon disenchanted with the SPD. She began to complain that the party was dominated by self-serving and self-congratulatory coteries committed to maintaining their Party positions rather than pursuing socialism. Luxemburg wanted to “push forward the entire movement . . . to instill new life.” But she feared that she would not be able to do so because she “does not belong to the family.” She “has no backstairs influence . . . [but she] is a potential threat,” Luxemburg wrote a friend, and “has no chance . . . because all deals are struck backstage” (Ettinger 1986: 86). She soon found an opportunity to make a mark on the SPD, but as a theorist rather than an agitator. Luxemburg joined the debate over “revisionism” provoked by the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s work, Evolutionary Socialism. Friend of Friedrich Engels, editor of one of the Party’s leading journals, Der Sozialdemocrat, Bernstein had impeccable Marxist credentials that made his attack on Party orthodoxy particularly shocking. Not only did he deny that capitalist societies tended towards spontaneous collapse, but Bernstein denied that the working class would necessarily inaugurate a socialist society. Instead, Bernstein urged socialists and the SPD to renounce revolutionary aspirations to

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focus on achieving practical social reforms for the workers. In practice, what he proposed was less a change in tactics than a realignment of the Social Democrats’ ultimate goals to match their reformist tactics; he recommended that the party should openly avow what it was already doing. “I have no objection to the practical aspect of the Social-Democratic programme with which I am entirely in agreement,” he wrote, “only the theoretical part leaves something to be desired.” “The movement,” Bernstein added in an oft-quoted and deliberately provocative remark, “means everything for me and what is usually called ‘the final aim of socialism’ is nothing” (Bernstein 1912: 167). Bernstein’s work provoked a firestorm of protest and one of his strongest, and first, critics was the young Rosa Luxemburg. Undeterred by those who labeled her a “guest who comes to us and spits in our parlor,” she rejected Bernstein’s arguments tout court. He was wrong, she wrote, about the stability of capitalism, wrong about the revolutionary potential of the working class, and wrong about the appropriate tactics for the SPD. The working class, Luxemburg wrote, could overturn capitalism but only if it retained a commitment to revolution. The great threat from revisionism, Luxemburg feared, was that by sundering the Party’s connection with an ultimate goal of socialism, trade union and parliamentary actions would become purely commercial work, service to a dues-paying membership that could never build “awareness, the consciousness, of the proletariat becomes socialist and it is organized as a class.” It was, she argued, the revolutionary socialist vision that made trade unions and the SPD into fighting organizations, mobilizing adherents to build class consciousness through participation in class struggle: “the Socialist purpose of trade-union and political struggle consists in preparing the proletariat for social upheaval, i.e. emphasis on the subjective factor.” Once the idea of popular revolution is abandoned, then trade unions and parliamentary politics “cease to be a means of preparing the working class for the proletarian conquest of power.” Instead of teaching revolutionary democracy and self-government, these become service organizations bringing benefits to passive members. Without a socialist vision, the unions and the party will abandon the work of raising consciousness and instead protect their own survival and gain reforms by trading social peace; “What the revisionists proposed,” she warned, “was to sign peace with the enemy, open up the fortress to him in return for a limited number of places in society” (Nettl 1966: 1: 247). In the end, the SPD rejected Bernstein and his revisionist program in theory even while continuing to follow his prescriptions in practice.3 The Party leadership squared this circle by claiming that campaigning for reforms would build an organization to achieve a revolution in some unspecified future time. Equating institution building with movement building, the SPD became a movement of union bureaucrats and party politicians who devoted their time to providing services to client-members and managing the popular labor movement to avoid endangering the institutions of the growing Labor Movement. Focused on electoral politics, the SPD’s leaders carefully refrained from inflammatory rhetoric and discouraged aggressive strikes or public demonstrations to cultivate an image as respectable labor statesmen. A model party, leader of the Socialist

How unions grew, and why they stopped 65 International, the SPD’s strategy of preparing for a revolution by building, maintaining, and protecting reformist institutions became the received wisdom of the twentieth-century Labor Movement. After 1900, Luxemburg’s growing disappointment with the SPD’s policy of building an organization to make revolution, led her to extend the campaign against revisionism to a full critique of reformist theory. She began to see the revolution as the culmination of a long-term process of consciousness-building through participation in class struggle rather than a quick putsch. “Such an enormous upheaval like the change of society from a capitalist to a socialist order is inconceivable in one hit through one victorious strike on the part of the proletariat. . . . The socialist upheaval predicates a long and bitter struggle.” During this struggle, “the great Socialist importance of the trade-union and political struggle consists in socializing the knowledge, the consciousness of the proletariat, in organizing it as a class” (Nettl 1966: 1: 225). It is only through struggle, what Marx called “revolutionizing praxis” that workers become aware of both their oppression and their ability to overcome it through cooperative collective action. The movement building of the SPD claimed to build consciousness by delivering tangible benefits for the workers, higher wages, government and union services, better working conditions. While appreciating the immediate value of these material gains, Luxemburg denied that they brought the working class closer to social democracy. They could not, she argued, develop the fighting capacity and consciousness of the workers themselves because these gains were given to the workers by the organizations rather than won through direct struggle by the workers and therefore did nothing to increase the workers’ confidence or their capacity for democratic self-government. Reform politics relies on party and union institutions staffed by professional Labor Movement bureaucrats to negotiate on behalf of workers with employers and state officials. Such institutions, Luxemburg argued, cannot promote revolution which depends on popular upheaval, democratic actions where the masses develop experience in self-management, the selfconfidence to believe they can manage society. It is only through struggle that workers learn to manage society democratically, and only through struggle that they develop their grievances. “Those who do not move,” she warned, “do not notice their chains.” Reformism cannot build a sense of empowerment; on the contrary, reformist Labor Movement organizations actively undermine any sense of popular autonomy or power because they are managed by bureaucrats who routinely buy social reforms with popular quiescence. Reform, therefore, is not a step towards revolution, it is a substitute. “It is absolutely false and totally unhistorical to represent work for reforms as a drawn-out revolution, and revolution as a condensed series of reforms. A social transformation and a legislative reform,” Luxemburg argued, “do not differ according to their duration but according to their essence” (Luxemburg 2004b: 156). Instead of establishing respectability and building organization by discouraging popular militancy, Luxemburg urged the SPD to build class consciousness by promoting class conflict and direct action. She would build the revolutionary

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capacity of the working class by raising workers’ awareness of their own oppression and by training them in class conscious action and class conflict. Strikes were central to her theory, revolutionizing praxis transforming a mass of individual workers into a working class and the place where a democratic mass movement is built by the actions of the people themselves. “[G]enuine popular participatory strikes come when the strikers are emotionally prepared and that can come without warning after some provocation, perhaps small in itself.” The role of the union or the party, she argued, is to engage in “a continuous state of preparation,” to maintain “some type of permanent structure through which a general strike can be organized,” and to support mass strikes when they come. The “fruits of agitation extending over several years of the Social Democracy,” mass strikes, such as those in the Russian Revolution of 1905, are unpredictable. While any little conflict between labor and capital can grow into a general explosion, the mass strike cannot be called at will, even when the decision to do so may come from the highest committee of the strongest Social Democratic party. . . . Of course, even during the revolution mass strikes do not exactly fall from heaven. They must be brought about in some way or another by the workers. The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and the wider direction naturally fall to the share of the organized and the most enlightened kernel of the proletariat. But the scope of this initiative and this direction, for the most part, is confined to application to individual acts . . . spontaneity, as we have seen, plays a great part in all Russian mass strikes without exception, be it as a driving force or as a restraining influence. . . . In short, in the mass strikes in Russia the element of spontaneity plays such a predominant part, not because the Russian proletariat are “uneducated,” but because revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them. (Luxemburg 2004a: 196–8) Once begun, mass strikes become the training ground for revolutionary militancy, the very “form of the revolutionary struggle.” Like “bleeding wounds,” strikes stir up “all the innumerable sufferings of the modern proletariat” while pointing towards a solution, substituting direct worker control for “the capitalist principle of ‘mastery of the house’.” “Only the working class, through its own activity,” Luxemburg concluded, “can make the word flesh.” But this will not automatically happen. The working class “only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.” Even where mass strikes do not end in revolution, Luxemburg observes that they leave in their wake a more conscious, more confident, and more organized working class. The firm organization, which as the indispensable hypothesis for an eventual German mass strike should be fortified like an impregnable citadel – these organizations are in Russia, on the contrary, already born from the

How unions grew, and why they stopped 67 mass strike . . . the Russian revolution shows us . . . from the whirlwind and the storm, out of the fire and glow of the mass strike . . . like Venus from the foam, fresh, young, powerful, buoyant trade unions. (Luxemburg 2004b: 186)

Mass strikes and union growth Luxemburg died at the end of the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919, killed by right-wing proto-stormtroopers commanded by a loyal Social Democrat, the former furniture maker Gustav Noske. Since her death, Luxemburg has become a romantic figure on the political left, claimed by nearly every dissident group, who drew inspiration from her dialectical theory of action and consciousness. She was especially popular in the 1960s when the failures of Communism and disappointment with reformist social democracy led many in the New Left to be suspicious of organization; instead, they saw democracy in the streets. Luxemburg’s concept of the mass strike as a potentially revolutionary moment found scholarly development in the work of Charles Tilly, including his study of French strikes conducted with Edward Shorter. Shorter and Tilly identified twelve strike waves between 1830 and 1968, years when a massive upsurge in strikes and public demonstrations forced major concessions from employers and state officials, and led to new forms of popular protest and organization. While associating strike waves with the development of new forms of industrial organization and technology, Shorter and Tilly also emphasize that strike waves have a political dimension. They often coincide with elite divisions that open new opportunities for effective working-class political action, often leading to lasting changes in the position of organized labor in the polity. Strike waves force political and economic elites to recognize labor’s ability to disrupt the economy and society; and they also extend this power by involving new groups of workers in labor militancy, and by teaching a new repertoire of collective action. Following Shorter and Tilly’s lead, Sidney Tarrow, Dan Clawson, and I have all associated union growth cycles with these popular surges. By implication, union decline can be associated with the decline in the frequency and magnitude of such surges in recent decades.4 Strike waves have punctuated the social history of advanced capitalist countries. Defining strike waves as years when the number of strikers is three times the average for the preceding five years, there was a strike wave in barely 100 of the over 1,300 years for the sixteen countries for which I have data.5 While this is almost a strike wave per year, the 107 strike waves are not distributed randomly. Even a casual analysis suggests that there are patterns to strike waves because they are clustered: six countries had a strike wave in 1919, for example, four in 1968, and five in 1970. Strike waves are more common in prosperous years, much more common in years when a leftist party is in government, and most common during and immediately after wars. Strike waves are particularly common in years when socialists first achieve political power; there is a strike wave in a quarter of such years.

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Like strike waves, union growth is an unusual phenomenon. Unions grow little in most years; instead of steady progress, most growth comes in those few years where unions break through to involve large numbers of workers in strikes. Almost all union growth in the sixteen countries studied here came in only a few years; out of 1,373 years, there are sixty-eight high growth years where unions gained thirty-five million members or over half the total growth. Compared with average growth rates of under 2 percent in other years, the average growth rate in these years is almost 50 percent. Union growth comes in spurts linked with strikes. In the 107 strike waves, unions grew by 11 percent compared with a growth rate of barely 3 percent in other years (see Figure 4.1). Notwithstanding a few years where unions grew without significant strike activity, unions grow five times as fast in high strike years as in other times (see Figure 4.2). Viewed in another way, major membership growth spurts are over three times as likely in strike waves as in other years. Even this understates the importance of strikes in union growth because focusing on national strike waves misses the impact of local strike waves and individual strikes. Including these waves, it is probably safe to say that all union membership growth has been associated with strikes. Emphasizing the way strike involvement mobilizes workers, Rosa Luxemburg argues that mass strikes tear “hitherto untouched sections of the proletariat out of their immediate immobility.” “A rigid mechanical bureaucratic conception,” she criticized, “will only recognize struggle as the product of a certain level of organization. On the contrary, dialectical developments in real life create organization as a product of struggle” (Luxemburg 2004a: 198). These findings support Luxemburg’s insight about the transformative power of mass strikes. Participating in a collective project can transform people’s attitudes and

Average union growth rate (%)

12 10 8 6 4 2 0

No strike wave

Strike wave

Figure 4.1 Average union growth rates in strike-wave years compared with other years. Note This figure gives for sixteen countries the average annual union membership growth rate for the 107 years with a strike wave compared with 1,198 other years.

How unions grew, and why they stopped 69 Average union growth rate (%)

20

15

10

5

0

Regular strike years

High strike years

Figure 4.2 Average union growth rates for years with high strike activity compared with other years. Note This figure gives the average annual growth rate for sixteen countries for the sixty-nine years with the highest ratio of strikers to the previous year’s union membership compared with 1,236 other years.

calculations; even observing mass strikes may change those who do not participate. Observing strike action can change one’s rational calculation by demonstrating the readiness of others to support the collective action. More than emotion is at play here because strikes give participants and observers opportunities to make discoveries and to develop new skills. By gathering large numbers of workers together, strikes provide an audience for activists, and opportunities for workers to discuss their grievances and to formulate strategy and tactics on their own. Participating in strike planning and action gives workers the opportunity to discover within themselves the ability to organize large operations. Strike actions can do more than change people’s rational calculations. Designed to move people beyond rational calculation to involve themselves in the collective project, strike activities give workers a bridge of faith over the chasm between flesh and fantasy. Strikes do this with group action, collective effervescence, that oversteps rational faculties to forge emotional ties with others in the collective project. If the only purpose of a picket line, for example, was to discourage strikebreakers then it would often suffice to have one worker stationed outside each entrance to record names at opening. Instead, strikers ring a workplace with pickets throughout the day, marching together in unison, holding signs, and chanting slogans. More than a barrier to strikebreakers, these picket lines demonstrate commitment to the strikebreakers, to the employer, to the outside public, and, perhaps most of all, to each other. And once people have marched together, stood together, sung together, they are united in a way that no calculation could justify. Through common actions like these, workers become a class. Participation, marching in public demonstrations, standing together on picket lines, organizing soup kitchens and meetings, gives workers the opportunity to

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meet, to work together, and to develop new skills while plunging themselves into the full repertoire of the Labor Movement’s collective effervescence. Furthermore, strikes assert a new, working-class political economy, challenging employer authority in the name of economic democracy and the right of workers to regulate their employment themselves. That is why strikes are much more threatening to capitalist authority than are unions. The real challenge to capitalism does not come from labor leaders, whose position of authority in the union hierarchy can make them natural allies of authoritarian employers. Instead, it comes from rank-and-file militancy which challenges authority tout court in the name of democracy and popular participation. By celebrating rank-and-file autonomy and democratic participation, strikes challenge all authority, that of the union leadership as well as that of the employer. By showing how a large number of workers will sacrifice to protest against the conditions of their employment and their employer’s authority, strikes change the terms of discourse. Sacrifice is an important part of this process; through their sacrifice, strikers show their commitment, they show how important their goals are, how horrible the old order is for them. Through sacrifice they gain moral authority, legitimizing their protest against capitalist authority and suggesting that a different organization of the workplace is desperately needed if so many are so aggrieved. So powerful is the example effect of strikes that it can even hold across countries. Union growth accelerates when there are strike waves in other countries (see Figure 4.3). At the time of 14

Average union growth rate (%)

12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Without foreign strike wave

With foreign strike waves

Figure 4.3 Average union growth rates for years with at least one strike wave in another country compared with other years. Note This figure gives the average annual growth rate for sixteen countries for the forty-two years where there were strike waves in at least one-third of the other countries compared with 1,331 other years. Note that there are strike waves within the country in many of these years.

How unions grew, and why they stopped 71 the Russian Revolution of 1905, for example, each strike wave in a foreign country would be associated with a direct increase in union growth of nearly 1.6 percent.6 Why would a mass strike in a foreign land, even across the world, lead workers to join unions? Here again we move beyond any idea that workers decide to join unions from a rational calculation of the costs and benefits. Instead, seeing what others do and what others have accomplished can inspire them beyond narrow reason.

What do unions do that make them grow? A closer analysis of the relationship between strike activity and union growth may reveal some differences from the simple Luxemburg story. This is because the impact of strikes on union growth changes over time and place. For example, in general unions grow no faster when there is a friendly or pro-labor government, but they do gain more members after mass strikes in these cases. Before World War I, about ten of every 100 new strikers joined a union in the next year but unions gained forty new members, the effect is nearly four times as great, where the government was friendly towards unions. Furthermore, the impact of strikes and government policy on union growth is not due to some universal structure; it needs to be put into historical context because it changes over time due to experience. Indeed, both the effect of strikes on union growth and government policy have declined sharply. By the end of World War II, unions gained only five new members for every 100 additional strikers, twenty where the government is friendly; and by the 1980s, unions gained almost no new members from additional strikers, even with a friendly government. Even major strike waves such as 1979 in Britain or 1995 in France did nothing to arrest recent union decline. Perhaps, over time, strikes may lose their impact on worker consciousness because workers have become familiar and bored with strikes, unions, and the labor movement’s whole repertoire of collective action. But there may be something deeper here that pushes the limit of Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of unionization, or the conception common to labor activists and their scholar allies that the workers are responsible for their own fate. Luxemburg interprets unionization as a result of worker consciousness and mobilization and unionization measures workers’ growing understanding and their success in overcoming the free rider problem. It may be, however, that unionization depends on state policy and may reflect changes in the response of employers to worker militancy. The most important fact to consider is that unionization is not simply a choice by workers; in the class struggle, workers are the weaker party, their support is a necessary but not sufficient condition for unionization. Union growth happens when workers mobilize at a time when employers and state officials are ready to tolerate unions; perhaps as the lesser evil when confronted by militant strikers. Yes, strikes promote organization by transforming workers’ consciousness; but

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they also affect employers and state officials; and these latter effects may be more important. Integrating employers, state officials, and evolving union policy into the union growth story explains some of the mysteries of union growth, such as why strike waves led to rapid growth, and why strikes have had less impact over time. It should go without saying that employers do not like labor unions; virtually none would promote unionization and few would even accept unionization among their workers without protest. They come to tolerate union organization only as the lesser evil when the alternative, continued, uncontrolled and unregulated labor strife, is worse. Employers accept unions when they hope that the union and its leadership will restrain strike militancy; they admit democracy into the workplace because they anticipate that this democratic impulse will be restrained by the union institution. And they quickly lose patience, and tolerance, for unions that are unable to control popular protest. For their part, few politicians or state officials have much sympathy for unions. Even many socialist politicians question their value; after all, if they believed in the union movement then they would have involved themselves in that branch of the Labor Movement! Electoral considerations may lead some politicians to favor unions as a way of currying favor with working-class voters, but these must be balanced against the loss of votes and financial support from employers and their allies. Like employers, politicians support unions only where the alternatives are worse, when they fear continued labor unrest and hesitate to use, or to allow employers to use, repressive force. Instead, like employers, state officials might turn to formal union organization to restrain popular unrest. State officials establish union leaders as regulators of unrest, even mediators between angry workers and their employers. Here then we have the nature of the Labor Movement’s Faustian bargain: Unions expand through the unrest that they then pacify; they pacify the unrest that feeds their growth. Clearly, this is not a stable situation. Strike waves lead to union growth only when employers and state officials believe that unions will restrain later unrest; once they conclude that unions cannot restrain unrest then strikes may do little to promote union organization and may even lead to union decline when employers and state officials turn against unions. Successful unionization does not end this historical process. Over time, the pacification of popular militancy and the settlement of disputes through top-level and bureaucratic negotiation can lessen the need to tolerate unions; on the other hand, continued popular militancy also lessens the reason to tolerate unions because they have failed in their promise to restrain unrest. These dynamics, the working, and unraveling, of Labor’s bargain, can be seen in the rise of the French and American union movements in the late 1930s. In both cases, economic depression and political dissension had undermined established elites, giving workers a political opportunity which they seized with a massive strike wave. In France, however, the Labor Movement, socialist politicians, and labor union leaders failed to establish themselves as social medi-

How unions grew, and why they stopped 73 ators, leading to renewed resistance by employers and state officials until the union movement collapsed. The same could have happened in the United States except there, barely, Labor Movement leaders showed that they could restrain labor militancy, honoring contracts so that they eventually contributed to the war effort. Key to the different outcomes was both the ability of union leaders to control their membership and the readiness of state officials to give union leaders the time to consolidate their Movement.

A failed wave: France under the Popular Front Let us begin with one of history’s monumental strike waves: the French Popular Front of the 1930s. By the mid-1930s, the French elite was hopelessly divided, between a minority who supported the Third Republic and a larger group of employers, landowners, and aristocrats who hankered for a safer, authoritarian regime modeled on Italian fascism or even Germany’s new Nazi regime. In February 1934, these divisions exploded. On the night of 6 February, angered at a cabinet reshuffle that had forced out several conservative politicians and Jean Chiappe, the right-wing Paris Prefect of Police, the French right took to the streets. Crying “Hang the Deputies,” angry mobs marched through Paris promising to chase the “robbers” from the Chamber of Deputies. Over 100,000 wannabe-fascists flooded the streets that night to support a rally called by the right-wing groups Jeunesses Patriotes and Action Française. Through the night, they challenged the police around the Place de la Concorde and along the Seine bridge leading to the Palais-Bourbon where the Chamber of Deputies meets. In a foretaste of the open civil war to come, the police, whose loyalty to the Republic was questionable, were backed by representatives from the far left singing the Internationale. When he was discharged on 3 February 1934, the Paris Prefect of Police, Jean Chiappe, threatened Daladier, “[Y]ou’ll find me tonight in the street!” (Shirer 1969: 212). Whether Chiappe seriously proposed to lead the police in a coup d’état, the events of 6 February led many in France to take his threats seriously; the republican center and left saw the image of German and Italian fascism and was frightened (Bernard and Dubief 1993: 228). Fear of a rightwing coup led the Radicals to join with the Socialists (SFIO) and Communists (PCF) in a Popular Front in defense of French democracy. Massive street demonstrations were held in defense of the Republic on 12 February; one million marched then, and more still on 17 February at the funerals of workers killed in the earlier street fighting. Sensing an opportunity to gain the support of sections of the middle class and even the ruling elite, labor militants suddenly reversed fifty years of anti-patriotism and working-class internationalism to associate their movement and their demands with France’s republican traditions. It took two hours for the various union, party, and human rights groups to parade past the reviewing stand at the May Day demonstrations in Lyon in 1936 behind two marchers dressed as sans-culottes and a young woman dressed as the

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Republican symbol Marianne wearing the Phrygian bonnet. The march ended at a statue of Equality draped with the tricolor and the red flag where the paraders sang the Internationale followed by the Marseillaise in a stunning combination of working-class and patriotic imagery and sentiment (Mann forthcoming: 18). Across France, the Left responded to the events of 6 February with a wave of popular protest that would transform French politics and society. Through the mid-1930s, the nascent Popular Front mobilized the French through public action. From 13 February 1934 to 5 May 1936, there was an average of one street demonstration per day in France (Tartakowsky 1996: 32). The rising tide crested with the parliamentary elections of May 1936 when the Popular Front elected a majority to the Chamber of Deputies. Victory led to the inauguration of a Socialist-dominated government led by Léon Blum. But even before Blum could assume office, popular protest overflowed the normal political channels to threaten the established order. French workers embarked on a remarkable strike wave involving more workers in more industries in new types of unrest. Stirred by two years of popular action and rejoicing that they finally had a friendly government, French workers embarked on a militant campaign that frightened not only employers, but the government, the Popular Front’s leaders, and the trade union leaders as well. For 1936 as a whole, two and a half million workers participated in 17,000 strikes; most struck in May and June, making this France’s largest strike wave before May 1968 (Shorter and Tilly 1974: 127). The strike wave began in aviation, in the Breguet aircraft factories at Le Havre, and spread from there to Latécoère in Toulouse and Bloch in Courbevoie. From there, it spread to Parisian metal working. Half of the region’s metal workers participated in May Day demonstrations, which fell between the first and second rounds of the legislative elections. Then, without any direction from union leadership, sit-down strikes spread throughout the region’s metal working plants until the entire industry was closed at the end of May. Strikes spread throughout the country, in manufacturing establishments, retail stores and offices, even farms; and whether the strike was in an establishment with a nominal union affiliation or in a completely nonunion workplace, the established union leadership soon lost all control over the movement. Industries previously untouched by unions or collective action were swept up in the strike wave. “Actresses” at the Folies Bergères joined the movement, as did department store workers. Workers in Paris’ great department stores, such as Au Printemps and Les Galeries Lafayette, politely moved protesting and gesticulating patrons out the doors which were then locked in a “clerks’ folded arms strike”. It is revealing that the only industry untouched by unrest was the public services, France’s most unionized industry. “It was not yet revolution,” an observer said, “but it was a revolutionary act of the highest importance” (James, 1939: 12). The strike wave was spontaneous. Surprised by the uprising, union leaders could do little to control, or even to influence, a movement that exploded from below, and quickly spread to many establishments without any union members. Contemporaries were struck by the

How unions grew, and why they stopped 75 extraordinary cheerfulness of the almost universally peaceful events, the newfound ability of the workers to organize themselves and their strike, their new confidence, and their evident joy. Participants and observers felt they beheld a new sort of nonviolent revolution taking place in a holiday atmosphere. Indeed, strikers showed the same initiative and ingenuity that has often characterized workers during these great upheavals. They pioneered a new form of strike, the sit-down strike. Over half of the year’s 17,000 strikes were sit-down strikes where workers stopped work without leaving. Almost unknown before May 1936, these strikes were a direct challenge to capitalist private property that frightened employers and, as we shall see, the Popular Front leadership as well. Inside the occupied plants, workers discovered the skills within themselves to manage their lives autonomously of employers or even union leaders. There was no throwing of monkey wrenches or the traditional sabot into costly and useful machines. Instead, when workers shut machines down they carefully oiled and smeared with grease parts likely to rust. Women strikers were segregated from men on different floors “for reasons of propriety.” Striking against the will of their union leaders, often in workplaces and industries without any unions, the strikers would organize their own logistics, plan their campaigns, and identify their demands while learning to communicate with others inside and outside the plant. At the giant Renault plant at Billancourt, for example, workers organized food service right away. We let down baskets from the window on a rope and brought them back up full of bread, sausage, drinks, and cigarettes. After two days, we had the women leave. Inside we organized dances and games. There were parades with Communist and Socialist flags. It was a real carnival. It lasted three weeks. (Tilly 1986: 327) Here, in these mass strikes, democracy was being built from the ground up through popular empowerment. One lasting product of the strike wave was a new generation of French activists, workers who were to lead the French labor movement for the next 30 years, including some still involved in the student revolt of 2006. But while these strikes empowered the rank-and-file, they were a challenge to labor leaders as well as employers. Employers, of course, feared the breakdown of work discipline. But union leaders were also threatened by a strike wave that erupted outside of their control, was directed by new leaders acting autonomously of the established union organization, and that challenged their commitment to inter-class harmony through the Popular Front. Scrambling to calm the situation, the central union confederation, the Confédération générale du travail or CGT, called for the end to the strike. The strike wave had barely begun when on 2 June, the Communist Party newspaper, L’Humanité reported that “Trade Union militants, as they have indicated, are using all their strength to achieve a rapid and reasonable solution of the conflicts that are in progress.” Socialist leader Léon Blum’s close associate and future interior minister, SFIO leader Roger Salengro, also demanded an

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immediate end to this “unjustified agitation.” He promised that if the choice is “between order and anarchy, I would maintain order against anyone.” The Blum government’s inauguration on 6 June was almost eclipsed by the growing strike wave. L’Humanité’s headline that morning was: “Order will assure success.” But the workers had another idea about how to achieve success. Believing that they had the bosses by the throat, strikers hesitated to settle; instead many began to reach out to other occupied establishments to develop regional networks. Such moves impelled the CGT and the leadership of the SFIO and the PCF to work harder to end the strikes and occupations and restore their control over the workers’ movement before the situation turned into a revolution. Born in 1872 to a well-to-do Jewish orthodox family, Léon Blum was a most unlikely leader of a revolutionary movement. He was an elite intellectual, even a thinker, without direct experience of working class life. Educated at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, he worked at avant garde literary reviews, in the Conseil d’Etat and then served as Directeur du Cabinet to the socialist minister Marcel Sembat. A jurist with a strict moral code and a deep belief in the sanctity of law, he belonged to a line of French intellectuals, such as Jaurès, who came to socialism by a sense of humanity and a paternalist desire to do good works for the lower classes. An impressive intellect, Blum had little natural warmth; widely disliked, he was ill-suited for the compromises and contradictions of political life. A Jew, he also aroused the worst feelings in some; anti-Semites on the right detested him as embodying Jaurès and Dreyfus in one. In one of the milder expressions, conservative Deputy Xavier Vallat greeted the Blum cabinet’s unveiling before the Chamber of Deputies with the words: “This is the first time that our old Gallo-Roman country of France will be governed by a Jew!” (Time Magazine 1936: 18). It was Blum the jurist who opened the 6 June Chamber of Deputies debate on his government. He promised to address the growing strike wave by submitting bills to establish collective bargaining and binding contracts. Then, he sternly condemned the sit-down strikes: “I have been asked if I think factory occupation is legal. I do not regard it as legal” (Bernard and Dubief 1993: 308). Still, he would not back his words by sending troops to clear the factories. Facing the occupation of their factories and without effective government support, France’s previously arrogant and powerful employing class capitulated to those they hoped could restore order. On 7 June, leaders of the French business confederations met at the Prime Minister’s residence with representatives of the government and the CGT. A night of negotiations brought forth an agreement, the “Matignon Accords,” raising wages by 7–15 percent, granting paid vacations, the 40-hour week, and union recognition in exchange for the promise from the government and from the Labor Movement leadership to end the strikes. The Labor Movement’s leaders launched a full campaign to quiet unrest. On 8 June L’Humanité proclaimed: “VICTORY IS WON!” Paris Soir observed how “the inspirers of the People’s Front suddenly in the face of the fire that has broken out have adopted the role of extinguishers.”

How unions grew, and why they stopped 77 Today the Matignon Accords are commemorated as marking a signal advance for French workers. But at the time many workers rejected them as inadequate and resisted their leaders’ calls to return to work. On 9 June, for example, 537 factory delegates from throughout the steel industry rejected the accords and sharply rebuked the union leaders who had negotiated them. They demanded a larger salary increase and gave the owners forty-eight hours to accede, failing which they would demand the nationalization of the factories (James 1939: 14). Their wage demands were accepted, but the formal Labor Movement’s leadership had no stomach for further militancy. Communist leader Maurice Thorez proclaimed on 11 June that “one must know how to end a strike once satisfaction is obtained.” Blum agreed: “I believe that I can, and that I must affirm that forms of worker struggle like factory occupation must not become a habit. I say that they must not continue. That they will not continue” (Kergoat 1986: 205). It is not surprising that the non-socialist Radicals condemned the sit-down strikes as “a blow against liberty.”7 But just as vehement were the Communists, Socialists, and the CGT. Seeking to establish their mediating position by reassuring French capitalists that they could indeed be trusted to quell industrial militancy, the leaders of these institutions of the organized French Labor Movement attacked the sit-down strikes in ever harsher language. Union membership exploded with the Popular Front; unions added almost two million members in 1936 and another 1.5 million in 1937; the CGT’s metalworkers’ federation alone grew from 40,000 to 600,000 members between September 1935 and September 1936. Rejecting further strikes and public demonstrations, the leadership of the Popular Front sought to reestablish social peace by establishing a system of state strike arbitration to support collective bargaining and strong union organization. After enacting legislation in June 1936 to confirm the Matignon Accords, by establishing a forty-hour work week and paid vacations, the government passed legislation that guaranteed the right to belong to a labor union and a system of compulsory arbitration; unions were supported as a means to help impose labor peace in exchange for a reformed capitalism. As I noted earlier, many strikers were disappointed with Matignon and hesitated to let go of their new sit-down weapon. Pressured by their leadership, strikers drifted back to work, allowing the Popular Front leaders to claim they ended unrest and restored factories and workplaces to their rightful owners. Still employers gave little credit to the Popular Front’s leadership. Instead, frightened by the near revolution, they immediately set out to chip away at the Matignon Accords. Many small- and medium-sized employers resented the big industrialists who dominated the CGPF (Confédération générale du patronat française) which had negotiated the Accords. Resenting the agreements, they soon replaced the CGPF leaders who had negotiated them at Matignon. With their paternalist tradition and history of opposition to democracy and the Republic, few French employers were ready to compromise with labor, even with a Labor Movement that promised to maintain labor peace, and certainly not to one still committed, at least nominally, to a socialist or communist revolution.

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A seemingly endless stream of propaganda poured forth from employers against the Popular Front and its works. Wage increases and the forty-hour week were blamed for undermining French competitiveness and leading to an outflow of capital and to unemployment. Employers took advantage of an economic slowdown in 1937 to renege on the Matignon Accords, to discharge union activists, and to ignore concessions on pay and work time. Rising employer opposition threatened a Popular Front government that was already losing support. The economic slowdown exposed the contradiction between Blum’s position as a socialist leader managing a capitalist economy. A Keynesian before his time, Blum would have revived the economy by promoting increased consumption by a prosperous working class and peasantry. But his government was also committed to respecting private property, free trade, and protecting the value of the Franc. Unwilling to restrict capital flows or to put restrictions on foreign trade, Blum faced a foreign exchange crisis produced by rising imports and a capital outflow. At the same time that the Franc was falling, some of Blum’s own supporters feared that the shorter work week threatened rearmament against Nazi Germany. The liberal economist Alfred Sauvy, for example, warned that the Front Populaire threatened to become a national disaster by undermining France’s ability to face the threat of Nazism (Bernard and Dubief 1993: 314). It is important to note that Blum’s problems reflected choices he had made. It may have cost more but France could have rearmed with the forty-hour work week. And Blum was not defenseless against international capital flows; he could have imposed foreign exchange controls or devalued the Franc. Indeed, the declining foreign balance finally forced Blum to take action. In September 1936, he reversed his, misguided, commitment to maintain the value of the Franc; allowed to float, the franc élastique quickly lost about a third of its value. But then, panicked, Blum abandoned his allies to curry favor with financial capital. He urged further restraint on labor militancy, pleas echoed by his allies at the CGT and in the Communist Party, and he threatened strikers with a new arbitration law of 31 December that made it illegal to strike without first recourse to arbitration. Unsurprisingly, Blum’s appeals did little to slow the capital outflow or to revive private investment. In an ultimately vain attempt to appease his enemies, on 13 February 1937, Blum proclaimed a “pause” in social reform and agreed to appoint three conservative economists to an exchange stabilization committee and to advise the government. On 8 March 1937, the conservative daily Le Temps triumphantly proclaimed: “It’s more than a pause, it’s a conversion.” Pause or conversion, Blum devastated the Popular Front’s rank-and-file who in the spring of 1936 had believed that “everything is possible.” Nor did his concessions appease an opposition whose papers poured out the vilest and most absurd calumny on the Jewish Blum and his allies. But the most difficult problem for Blum and the Popular Front remained the international financial markets because Blum’s decision not to break with capitalism and to leave the Bank of France and financial markets alone left him hostage to their whims.

How unions grew, and why they stopped 79 Repeatedly, Blum tried to appease powerful capitalists by restraining labor unrest; but they never accepted this concession. When he finally did break with capitalist financial markets, after France was unable to float bond issues in the spring of 1937, his request for plenary financial powers was reluctantly approved in the Chamber of Deputies but rejected by the French upper house, the Senate. Frustrated, despairing of his ability to govern in the face of antisemitism, hate, and collapsing financial markets, Blum conceded to the Senate and resigned on 22 June. After barely a year in office, the Popular Front had fallen. Even more surprising, its fall was greeted with indifference on the streets by its own supporters: “Not a movement, not even a cry” (Magraw 1992: 281). This was not quite the end of the Popular Front. Six months later, Blum returned to power only to face the same contradictions between a reform policy and a working-class shop-floor revolution. This time, however, his administration lasted barely a month before the complete breakdown of the Popular Front. Nor was it the end of popular protest and the strike movement. Attacks on the Popular Front’s gains were met with another major round of strikes in 1938. But this time management was ready and was supported by a conservative government fearful that labor militancy would undermine rearmament. When the red flag flew over the occupied Citroën plant in Paris in 1938, employers sent in right-wing gangs supported by the police. If concessions to the Labor Movement could not buy social peace, then management and conservative politicians had decided to win it through force. Fearful of a resurgent Germany, Marianne turned to the right and patriotism was used against strikers and Labor’s demands. After Blum, a Radical-led but center-right government was formed, led by former Popular Front supporters the Radicals Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud. Reynaud promulgated a series of decrees canceling many of the gains of 1936 including the forty-hour work week, in order to promote rearmament against the Nazi threat.8

A wave that lasted: the CIO and the New Deal in the United States The French strike wave of 1936 failed. Against the united opposition of French employers and alienated state officials, the gains of 1936–37 were rolled back and union membership tumbled down in 1938 and 1939 almost as fast as it had risen. In many respects, the American experience in the mid-1930s paralleled the French. Support from Communists, socialists, organized labor, and antifascist liberals made President Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide reelection victory in 1936 labor’s triumph, a victory for an American popular front. While the nascent CIO actively supported Roosevelt, big business supported the Republicans, including the auto industry magnates who ostentatiously financed their campaign. Polarizing capital against labor, the campaign sharpened the “us versus them” feelings of many workers; victory inspired their hopes. Like French workers after the Popular Front’s election, American workers seized on a political victory to launch a powerful strike wave. Even before

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Roosevelt’s second inauguration, night-shift workers in a plant in Flint, Michigan on 30 December 1936 stopped the loading of machine dies being shipped out by General Motors to other factories with weaker union organizing drives. Angered by decades of corporate arrogance and the continued abuse of petty foremen and line supervisors, the Flint strikers were inspired by the earlier sitdown strikes, by workers in the Akron rubber factories, and by the French sitdown strikes. Like their models, the Flint strikers acted on their own, without union leadership; on the contrary, they acted against instructions from CIO headquarters where the union leadership was focused on the drive to organize the steel industry. The Flint strike was a spontaneous rising by a minority of the workers in the plant. At first, only some thousand workers in the giant plant sat down, using their buttocks to occupy valuable GM property to force the company to negotiate (Preis 1972: 53). The parallels with the French experience continue. The sit-down strike quickly spread, first to other Flint factories and then to hundreds, even thousands, of workplaces across the United States. As in France, the sit-downers displayed remarkable initiative. Sitting together, they discovered within themselves the ability to manage their occupation and to build their union. Flint workers, for example, fought off police assaults by turning fire hoses on the attackers and by hurling tools from second-floor windows. “It was like we were soldiers holding the fort,” a striker declared. “It was like war” (Meister 2001). Sit-down strikers organized entertainment and exercise programs; families and neighbors, including sympathetic restaurant owners, organized support. Volunteers at a rented restaurant across the road from the Flint plants cooked three hot meals a day, for what ultimately amounted to 5,000 strikers. Food was passed through open plant windows while municipal and company police stood by in frustration, fearing the publicity they would reap from an attack, given the heavy presence of women and children and reporters from all over the country. The entire operation was planned and organized by the workers themselves; even after they agreed to support the strikes, the skeletal Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the tiny United Auto Workers (UAW) apparatus could do little for them. Instead, the sit-down strikes at Flint were a proving ground for a new generation of union leaders and activists democratically recruited from the rankand-file. Many were radicals, some were Communists; but what was important was their commitment to rank-and-file empowerment through popular militancy. As in France, employers resisted, but the sit-down strikes forced them to come to terms. On 11 February 1937, GM signed a one-page agreement with the CIO recognizing the UAW as the only legitimate labor organization in the plants affected by the strike for a period of six months. Later sit-down strikes won the UAW recognition at Chrysler and elsewhere. Emboldened by these victories in the auto industry, the CIO took its campaign to steel, winning recognition by the giant United States Steel company on 2 March 1937, a victory no less stunning and vindicating than the GM contract three weeks earlier. By mid-1937, barely six months after the Flint sit-down strikes, American workers had achieved great victories beyond what anyone could have anticip-

How unions grew, and why they stopped 81 ated. Union membership had nearly doubled, and union organization had spread to some of the citadels of American industry. As in France, however, the next step was to survive an employer counter-offensive; and it is here that the CIO was more successful than the French CGT of 1937–39. Like their French counterparts, American employers quickly went on the offensive to reverse the concessions made to the sit-down strikers. Ford, still nonunion, stepped up its intimidation of union activists, savagely beating UAW organizers distributing leaflets outside the River Rouge complex. The “Little Steel,” companies that were not US Steel, fought the CIO without quarter, using muscle provided by various right-wing and neofascist groups ranging from the American Legion to Michigan’s Black Legion to the Ku Klux Klan. Seeking to renege on their agreement, General Motors and other companies under contract fought the union at every turn. The counter-offensive against the American union surge of 1936–37 had a political dimension as well. While the 1935 Wagner Act established a national right to participate in collective action, many states, especially in the conservative South, sought to limit this right with laws restricting union organizing; these were eventually overturned but until then they hindered union organizing (Gall 1999: 161–9). Even the ever-popular Roosevelt came under attack. The elections of 1938 could be seen as an American counterpart to the fall of the Blum government. Sweeping out New Deal governors like Michigan’s Frank Murphy and Pennsylvania’s George Earle, Republicans made major gains throughout the North while conservative Democrats consolidated their hold in the South. While it retained a nominal-Democratic majority, gains by the Republicans and by conservative Democrats in the new Congress that took office in January 1939 marked the end of the New Deal. Still, the CIO survived and, after a slight drop in 1940, union membership renewed its upward march for another six years.9 The difference from France may owe little to differences between the American and French labor movements. America’s new unions were no better organized, no better prepared to fight a determined adversary than were their French counterparts. Reporting sourly on escalating factional fighting within the UAW, longtime union organizer Adolph Germer warned in 1937 that factionalism may very well fulfill GM chairman Alfred Sloan’s prediction that the UAW would collapse before six months had passed after the 11 February 1937 contract (Zieger 1995: 53). The ability of American unions to hold onto their gains after the sit-down strikes may be due more to political accidents and the continued divisions among the American elite than to any particular organizing success by the unions themselves. After the political reversals of 1938, American unions were more fortunate than their French counterparts because under the American constitution, Roosevelt, unlike France’s Blum, remained in office even after he was repudiated politically. Defeat in the 1938 elections limited further social reform but Roosevelt remained as President with considerable power including the power to appoint cabinet officials and administrators. Even after congressional conservatives forced him to restrain the Wagner Act’s National Labor Relations Board, for example, Roosevelt’s more conservative NLRB continued to protect

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union organizers, and to provide a visible statement of the nation’s commitment to unions and collective bargaining. Once war came, furthermore, Roosevelt was able to set the terms for labor’s participation in the national war effort, enforcing an accord that recognized unions, and recognized the Labor Movement in exchange for labor peace. And, unlike their French counterparts in 1937–39, American unions were able to trumpet anti-strike policies as essential patriotic support for the war effort. Unlike their French counterparts, American unions, including the CIO, also succeeded in persuading some employers and many government officials that they could be useful bargaining partners because they could enforce labor peace. After the collapse of Blum’s government and the Popular Front, French employers and government officials turned against unions because they did not believe the unions’ weak leadership could deliver labor peace and, therefore, saw little reason to negotiate with the unions. In America, however, unions grew dramatically during World War II as part of a win-the-war coalition because they were able to restrain labor unrest, delivering labor peace to a grateful government bureaucracy. Through support for the war effort, and a crusade against wartime strikes, the CIO and the expanded American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions were able to secure government support to entrench their position in the workplace and their role in collective bargaining (Lichtenstein 1982; Kersten 2006). Of course, they gained this position by suppressing shop-floor democracy and popular militancy. It may have been a watered-down form of corporatism that prevailed in Washington during World War II, but it was enough to save American unions from management counter-attacks for long enough that they could implant themselves firmly in much of the United States. Not that American unions achieved all of their goals through their New Deal alliances. Unions were not established everywhere in the United States. Even at the Labor Movement’s wartime peak, the South and many large industries, including textiles and retail trade, remained largely nonunion. Two factors may contribute to these variations. First, compared with their French counterparts, there were some American industrialists who were ready to consider accepting union organization as a means of winning labor peace and facilitating labor–management cooperation more generally. Many were impressed by the Rockefeller Plan and sought a compliant, employerdominated union; some few were inspired by an illusory English example and sought cooperation with a truly independent union movement (Harris 2000, 2007). These attitudes were most common in the North where, even after 1938, labor also had more political influence. Compared with the North, southern employers remained entrenched in their anti-union paternalism; and they had the local political support to remain there. In employer attitudes and the nearly total defeat of labor as a political force, the American South most resembled France in 1939.

How unions grew, and why they stopped 83

Have unions grown in ways that limit further growth? It was Rosa Luxemburg’s great insight that a socialist revolution would come through action. Through popular militancy, participation in strikes and other insurgencies, workers would develop the capacity and the confidence to rule; participation in collective action and through the practice of democratic management of its own collective affairs that would prepare workers to assume power. A socialist revolution cannot be a putsch because success depends on the working class developing tools of democratic governance through participation in strikes and other collective struggles. How ironic then if the Labor Movement institutions built through collective struggle necessarily impede the further development of the labor movement as a campaign for democracy? To sell themselves to management and state officials, including nominal socialists and communists, labor leaders offer themselves as intermediaries who will pacify labor. But if they succeed, as in the United States, then they disarm the social movement that made labor a threat worthy of conciliation. And if they fail, as in France, then they risk alienating state officials and employers. Heads, labor loses; tails, capital wins.

5

Explaining the inexplicable Accounting for the madness of moments

In the whole history of the labor movement there has not been any question upon which the thoughts of the civilized world have been so thoroughly centered as upon the Eight-Hour movement inaugurated by the American Federation of Labor at its last convention. . . . It was at this time that our proclamation to the world was made to call on the toilers of the country to the movement to enforce the Eight-Hour workday, May 1, 1890. From that moment a change took place. Hope was instilled into the hearts and minds of the workers to supplant despair. The rallying cry of eight hours was sounded. The working people again stood erect and staunch in their manhood. The tide had changed. Sam Gompers (AFL 1889: 14)

A warning against prediction Though they are often wrong, few economists have been so spectacularly and publicly wrong as George E. Barnett in 1932. A labor economist at Johns Hopkins University, Barnett devoted his presidential address to the American Economic Association in December 1932 to the subject of his life’s research, the American labor movement. After over a decade of decline, America’s trade unions, he lamented, were on an inexorable road to oblivion. With fewer than 3 million members, unions had lost all the membership gains they had made since before World War I. “American trade unionism is slowly being limited in influence by changes which destroy the basis on which it is erected.” Projecting this dismal record forward, Barnett predicted only more decline. “I see no reason,” he concluded, “to believe that American trade unionism will so revolutionize itself within a short period as to become in the next decade a more potent social influence than it has been in the past decade” (Barnett 1933: 6). Within six months of Barnett’s forecast, American unions were resurgent, and they would add another ten million members over the next decade. Since 1933, Barnett’s address has been held up by unions and their allies as a warning to observers who would write off the Labor Movement.1 But Barnett’s terrible performance as a prognosticator is hardly unique. France’s President Charles de Gaulle, for example, opened 1968 with the regal pronouncement: “L’année 1968, je la salue avec sérénité.” “It is impossible to see how France today could

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be paralyzed by crisis as she has been in the past,” de Gaulle added. Other countries have been “shaken by confusion,” but “ours will continue to give an example of order.” His prime minister Georges Pompidou, who would succeed de Gaulle when the General resigned after the events of 1968, agreed. The opposition, Pompidou confidently predicted, would harass the government this year but “they will not succeed in provoking a crisis” (Kurlansky 2004: 3–5). Like Barnett, Pompidou and de Gaulle were not only wrong, they were fabulously wrong. But their failure to predict coming upheavals was itself predictable because it reflects the fundamental nature of these events. Upheavals like the 1930s or 1968 are hard to predict because they cause behavior changes where, in the thick of social conflicts, people respond differently to familiar events; forecasts made on the basis of past behavior, therefore, will be wrong. Perhaps Barnett, de Gaulle, and Pompidou would have done better, or at least been more modest in their errors, if they had pondered a paper, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements,” that the English historian Eric J. Hobsbawm presented to the Economic History Society in 1951. Hobsbawm begins with the empirical observation that “the graph of the membership of virtually every trade-union movement . . . looks like a series of sloping steps, or of broad valleys broken by sharp peaks . . . very rarely is it a mere rising slope.” Most of the increase in British union membership before 1914, for example, came in three dramatic leaps, in 1871, 1889, and 1911, when membership doubled. These leaps marked qualitative as well as quantitative changes in the Labor Movement, taking strikes and unions “into new industries, new regions, new classes of the population.” In these years, labor developed new institutions, new unions organized along new dimensions, and adopted new goals and new politics (Hobsbawm 1964). During leaps, people behave differently than in other times, establishing new patterns of behavior that will persist during the longer period of slow growth that follows. Later, Hobsbawm would elaborate: Only when unionism in a country has been recognized and institutionalized . . . can the curve of union growth be expected to be smooth and gentle. . . . [otherwise] growth must be discontinuous . . . because if unions are to be effective they must mobilize, and therefore seek to recruit, not numbers of individuals but groups of workers sufficiently large for collective bargaining. They must recruit in lumps. (Hobsbawm 1985: 15) Hobsbawm devoted much of his earlier article to an unsuccessful attempt to discern common patterns in the hope that by explaining the determinants of past leaps observers could predict future ones. Perhaps he should have known better than even to try: how could one expect to predict discontinuities on the basis of past experience? Certainly, no one could have anticipated the strange twists and turns of Eric Hobsbawm’s own life! Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917, to an Austrian-Jewish mother and an English-Jewish father, Hobsbawm’s parents were citizens of countries at war living in a protectorate of one of the warring

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states. He spent his childhood in post-war Vienna before moving in with his uncle in Berlin after his parents died. Fortuitously, he emigrated to England in 1932, when his uncle was hired by an American firm. Had his parents lived and remained in Vienna, Hobsbawm may have been among the over 60,000 Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust; and his chances of surviving would have been even less had he and his uncle remained in Berlin. Hobsbawm’s strange but good fortune continued in England. A stellar student, he earned a scholarship to attend King’s College, Cambridge, at a time when Cambridge was most open to radical political ideas and Marxism. After military service in World War II, he continued both his academic career and his commitment to the Communist Party. The latter may have prevented him from several “Oxbridge” jobs, but he was hired at Birkbeck College where he taught part-time and returning students. Working with other members of the Communist Party Historians Group, including Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson, Hobsbawm helped to found the journal Past and Present. Together, they transformed the study of British history, and, more broadly, economic and social history (Hobsbawm 2002). A committed revolutionary and a Communist who came to maturity during the tumultuous 1930s, intellectual passion and a desire to anticipate and to help guide the coming revolution led Hobsbawm to become a historian. Perhaps his most important work on the “Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,” published in 1954, examines the current European revolution from the perspective of a general political crisis which engulfed Europe in that period leading to the establishment of capitalism in some European states, including England, because of the particular political outcome of the crisis. A concern for discontinuity and dramatic change marks Hobsbawm’s work, distinguishing him from most historians who look to uncover the past roots of modern circumstances in historical continuity. Perhaps this concern for historical continuity is why, as Hobsbawm observes, “the ‘leaps’ have attracted remarkably little attention among students.” Or, perhaps, most historians may find that the task of uncovering common patterns in periods of historical change is simply too daunting. By their nature, these “moments of madness” are hard to explain for the same reason they are unpredictable: they would not happen if people behaved as they usually do. Nor, I might add, would they happen if people followed a narrow personal interest and disdained collective action.

Explaining madness? The inability of methodological individualism to explain union leaps does not preclude other explanations. “Moments of madness” may not be predictable ex ante or in advance, but in exploring several we can uncover important common elements. In the “moments,” individuals cross the bridge between “flesh” and “fantasy,” between the mundane reality of life and the possibilities of achieving change through group action. The bridge across this divide is courage built on faith; the courage to believe that change can be achieved and the faith that

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others will rally to the cause. Where do people find this courage and this faith? How do individuals come to believe that the world can be changed through collective action, and that others will join with them? Faith and courage cannot be explained rationally or predicted, but we can say that “moments of madness” come when people perceive opportunities. Opportunity may appear because the forces governing society appear weak, divided, and have lost confidence. Just as important are experiences that give confidence that others will rally to the collective cause and that the cause can triumph. Sometimes it is the surprising readiness of some to strike or protest. Even actions by foreigners may be taken as signals that protest is possible and collective action can succeed. Magnifying the importance of surprising victories, sudden dramatic changes in the readiness of others to support collective action may lead large groups to reevaluate their estimate of the likely outcome of collective protest so that they make a new leap of faith into action. Hobsbawm was certainly right about the relative importance of “leaps.” Half of all union membership growth in the sixteen countries studied here came in sixty-eight (of the 1,373) years. Almost all of these high growth years were relatively strike-prone; furthermore, within them, the fastest growth came in ten years where there was also a strike wave. These ten years, less than 1 percent of all the years for which data are available here, alone account for a fifth of all union growth in the entire period. With growth concentrated in so few years, it might be possible to uncover structural conditions favorable to union growth by examining characteristics of these high growth years; at least this was the hope of scholars like Eric Hobsbawm. And this analysis does suggest that some circumstances, some structural conditions, are more favorable to union growth. There remains a large subjective factor here because the attitudes and policies of workers, employers, and state officials are not set by structure but change with experience. Any empirical analysis is at best probabilistic, suggesting circumstances more or less favorable rather than deterministic, because the same structural circumstances occur in years with and without rapid growth. In Table 5.1 I compare characteristics of the sixty-six years with rapid union growth versus other years. Separating years with fast and slow growth, there is surprisingly little difference in some commonly cited structural circumstances. Rapid economic growth and low unemployment rates, for example, favor union growth, but the effect is not definitive. There are years of slow union growth matched with years of economic stagnation and high unemployment, but there are also years of rapid union growth during economic slowdowns, and slow union growth during some economic booms. Nearly half of the fast growth years, nineteen of sixty-six, were during economic booms; but more, twentyeight of the sixty-six high growth years, were in depressions, years with high unemployment and economic contraction. Furthermore, membership fell in over a fifth of the years of high economic growth. It may be even more surprising that pro-labor governments and support for leftist political parties have been associated with slow union membership growth. In general, socialist politics appears to be more of a substitute than a

40.0 18.2 11.1 16.1 18.2 30.9 5.9

Labor militancy variables Strikers/previous year’s union membership Strike wave Strike wave in another country

Political variables Pro-labor government Share of vote for Labor, Socialist, or Communist parties in last election War year Administration of first-time socialist government

31.3 32.4 15.7 1.6

18.6 7.8 8.0

35.9 16.7 3.4

1,305 other years (%)

Notes This table gives the average value of selected variables for sixteen countries for years with the highest growth rate compared with other years. Data on the number of strikers are available for only 1,305 of these years.

32.4 10.9 4.4

Economic variables Share of total labor force employed in manufacturing, mining, transportation, or utilities Share of national production exported Change in gross domestic product since the previous year

68 years with highest union growth (%)

Table 5.1 Characteristics of sixty-eight years with rapid union growth vs. other years

Explaining the madness of moments

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complement to union organization. The negative association between union growth and political socialism is surprising. It is even more striking because state policy helps unions to grow faster when socialists first assume office, in wartime, and during major strike waves. Unions grow faster during wars, twice as fast as other times. They also benefit when socialists first assume office; it is only after the socialists have been in power for a while that they move away from their labor union base and stop helping unions to grow. Unions also gain more from strikes when there is a pro-labor government in power; it may be that the presence of a government sympathetic to labor encourages employers to seek to conciliate rather than to repress labor unrest. The circumstances most strongly associated with rapid union growth were created by the workers themselves. There were many strike waves without rapid union membership growth, but on average, membership grows four times as fast in years with strike waves as other years, even when there is a strike wave in a foreign country. Strike waves are most productive where they involved the extension of strike involvement to workers previously outside of the Labor Movement. To measure this extension, I have calculated a “quasi-striker rate,” or QSR, as the ratio of strikers to union membership. This ratio is associated with rapid union growth; on average, unions grow over seven times as fast in years with the highest QSR compared with other years (see Figure 4.2). In Figure 5.1, I directly compare the effect on union growth of economic growth with the effect of increasing strike activity and the QSR. Union growth rates increase with both; but the effect is over ten times greater for strike involvement. Moving from the slowest to highest economic growth rates is associated with

Average union growth rate (%)

10 8 6 4 2 0

Lowest

2nd

3rd QSR

Highest

DGDP

Figure 5.1 Comparing effect on union growth rates of strikes and economic boom. Note This figure gives the average union growth rate for sixteen countries for years sorted into quartiles according to their rates of growth in the gross domestic product or the QSR, the ratio of strikers to the previous year’s union members. Both economic growth and increasing strike activity are associated with increasing union growth; but the effect of strike activity on union growth has been much stronger.

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nearly a doubling in the union membership growth rate; moving from the lowest to highest ratio of strike involvement, however, is associated with an almost 20fold increase in membership growth. Sometimes unions do not grow even under the most favorable circumstances. Of seven years with a strike wave, high strike participation, and favorable economic circumstances, unions grew at an above average rate in only five, and in only two had rapid union growth spurts. But on average, an accumulation of favorable circumstances is associated with union growth. In Table 5.2 I have calculated union growth rates for years with certain “special circumstances,” including strike waves in the previous year, strike waves in other countries, strike waves in the country, high ratio of strikers to union members, the inauguration of a pro-labor government for the first time in the country, and war. Union growth rates accelerate in each of these circumstances. Years with at least one of these “special circumstances,” account for most union growth. Growth rates also rise with the number of special circumstances in a year, such as when there is a strike wave in a year with a high rate of strike extension or with a new socialist government installed. On average, unions grow by 1.4 percent for each additional circumstance. But the impact of additional circumstances on growth is nonlinear; in major upheavals, years with multiple special circumstances, union growth rates accelerate. Growth accelerates in years with only one special circumstance, such as a war year without any major strike activity or a year with a new socialist government. But the second “special circumstance” produces a significant 5 percentage point bump in union growth rates; and further circumstances are associated with growth accelerating by 10 percent up to 20 percent (see Table 5.2).2 In all, 60 percent of union growth comes in years with at least one of these “special circumstances,” a war, a strike wave, or a first-time prolabor government. If not for these circumstances over the past 120 years, unions today would have a membership of barely one-third the size of even today’s shrunken union movement. The impact of these “special circumstances” works in reverse too. There have been fewer “special circumstances” over time and this has contributed to declining union growth rates. Each decade since the 1940s has had a lower proportion of years with special circumstances and fewer of these circumstances. In the war-torn 1940s, for example, unions benefitted from an average of almost one special circumstance per country per year. This rate fell to one circumstance per country for every two years in the 1950s, and only one every four years in the 1970s (see Figure 5.2). From there, however, the rate of special circumstances dropped sharply to one every six years in the 1980s and 1990s. The fall in union growth rates has been greater than the decline in “special circumstances” because the nonlinear impact of special circumstances on union growth magnifies the negative impact of declining numbers. But even allowing for the cumulative effect of circumstances and structures on union growth, much of the variation in union growth rates remains unexplained. Special circumstances are present in forty-two of the sixty-six fastest union growth years, but there were none in twenty-four of sixty-six high growth

Average growth

4.1 3.0 4.3 9.5 30.0 61.8

17.6 16.8 13.7

69 25 42

1,373 1,033 264 56 15 5

4.1 7.6 11.0

1,373 215 107

68,642,360 27,427,372 23,811,292 2,447,417 7,834,239 7,122,040

18,980,643 7,082,173 11,397,763

68,642,360 28,426,133 16,378,112

49,994 26,551 90,194 43,704 522,283 1,424,408

275,082 283,287 271,375

49,994 132,215 153,066 1,304 1,348 1,331

1,158 1,198 3.0 3.9 3.8

3.5 3.1

Average growth rate (%)

49,440,807 61,560,187 57,244,597

40,216,227 52,043,338

Total growth

Years

Total growth

Years

Average growth rate (%)

Years without “special circumstances”

Years with “special circumstances”

40,001 45,668 43,009

34,729 43,442

Average growth

Notes This table gives union growth rates for years with some “special circumstances.” The circumstances included are war, a strike wave in the country, a year with a particularly high ratio of strikers to previous year’s union members, the presence of a socialist government for the first time, or the first time in a long period, and the presence of a strike wave in at least one other country. Circumstances may overlap and the table also gives union growth according to the number of difference special circumstances in the country in the year.

Number of circumstances All years 0 1 2 3 4

All War Strike wave High QSR (ratio of strikers to union membership in previous year) New Socialist government Foreign strike waves

Circumstances

Table 5.2 Union growth rates in years with “special circumstances”

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Number of circumstances

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

Decade OSW

New govt

War

High QSR

Strike wave

Total

Figure 5.2 The average number of years with “special circumstances” affecting union growth, by decade. Note This figure gives the number of years with “special circumstances,” for each decade since 1900. Special circumstances include OSW (or a strike wave in another country), New Govt (or the firsttime inauguration of a socialist government), War (or a war year), High QSR (or a year with a very high ratio of strikers to previous year’s union membership), or a strike wave. The share of such years drops steadily after the 1940s and there are very few after 1979.

years!3 More than the declining frequency of “special circumstances” has contributed to declining union growth rates. Indeed, only a small part of the decline in union growth has been because of less favorable circumstances. Instead, perhaps the most important finding from the quantitative analysis of annual growth rates is that strikes and popular unrest have had a diminishing effect on union growth for the past century (see Figure 5.3). Strikes have always had the greatest effect on union growth where there has been a friendly government in power. But even with a friendly government, strike activity now has almost no effect on membership growth. Does participation in strikes mean less to workers now than a century ago? Does seeing other workers on strike have less effect on workers’ morale? Perhaps even militant and mobilized workers no longer see unions as the appropriate vehicle for their militancy? Or, perhaps, we need to look at the problem from another perspective: perhaps strikes no longer frighten employers and state officials the way they did in the past; perhaps employers have more confidence in their ability to ride out strikes on their own without special appeals to union leaders? Perhaps this is because they are more confident that they will have the support of political leaders, even including leaders of nominally pro-labor parties? The statistical analysis cannot go beyond probabilities because history deals with the behavior of people living at the time. Unlike the inanimate particles in

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Additional membership growth (%)

4 3 2 1 0 1 1880

1905

1930

1955

1980

Year Hostile government Friendly government

Figure 5.3 The diminishing effect of strikes on union growth over time. Note This figure shows the increase in union membership from an increase in the number of strikers of 10 percent of the previous year’s union membership for countries with a pro-labor government and for those without a pro-labor government. This is from a simulation based on the coefficients from a time-series regression of union membership growth on economic and political variables including the share of strikers of previous year’s membership and an interaction term of that variable and the time trend.

an isolated vault in some physics experiment, humans have memory that allows them to learn from experience; their reactions change each time they encounter the same structures because of their past experiences. Studied in the world and over time, human behavior is much more complicated than anything physicists have ever encountered. That is why Barnett and de Gaulle were wrong; and that may be why those who today pronounce the death of the labor movement may be wrong as well.

Years that rocked the world: the crisis, and the opportunity, of the 1880s To understand why Labor grew, we should step back from statistical analysis and social science to explore the particular history of individual union growth spurts beginning at the dawn of the modern organized Labor Movement with the first, international explosion, 1885–95. Throughout the history of industrial societies, there have been surges of labor militancy, periods of upheaval with strikes, boycotts, public demonstrations, sometimes barricades and rebellions where workers demanded political and economic changes. While some important social changes may have come from labor movements in these times of trouble, such as the British Chartists, the Canuts of Lyon, or the National Labor Union in

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the United States, these movements left little or no institutional legacy.4 After the storm, little remained. This is not to say that there was no institutional Labor Movement before 1880. There were various, generally small craft organizations as well as some political groups, but no mass Labor Movement of large unions and radical political organizations. The modern Labor Movement was created in a few years after 1885 when a surge of popular labor militancy was institutionalized in the unions and socialist political organizations. In three nearly consecutive years, 1886, 1889, 1890, “madness” struck the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, giving birth to massive institutions that would structure labor unrest for the next century, including the AFL (American Federation of Labor) in the United States, British New Unionism, the Confédération générale du travail, and Europe’s May Day.5 Cynics do not join together to protest their conditions and create a better world. The discouraged and the downhearted do not rise up because they only expect to be struck back down. “Moments of madness” come with hope, when individuals discover a new faith that life can be made better and that effective collective action is possible. That is why successes, especially surprising successes, that cause people to reevaluate their expectations, can be so important in sparking these moments. Other conditions can also encourage these moments by leading even rational individuals to reexamine their expectations. Moments come with opportunity, when the established order is vulnerable because of divisions among the elites or when those elites have lost faith in their right to rule. They come when movement leaders give their would-be followers new reason to hope, with new strategies and new appeals that promise new successes. It was a century after the industrial revolution, in the 1880s, that unions and socialist political parties became mass organizations throughout the western world. The Labor Movement was born during a period of dramatic conflict within elites divided over economic and imperial policy, conflicts that helped labor to find new allies among those struggling against established authorities, and against ethnic, racial, and gender oppression. In these years, workers rallied to new appeals, including those who gained new legitimacy because of their international appeal. Born in America in 1886, May Day became a celebration of labor’s growing power that marked a new dawn of international worker solidarity. The concept of labor solidarity across trades and even across industries took root with the development of general unions of the Knights of Labor (exported from the United States to Britain, France, and beyond) and the New Unionism in Britain. In these years, socialist political movements first became significant forces in Britain and France, and the German Social Democrats doubled their vote. Unions developed new international ties: the American idea of May Day was adopted by the Socialist International meeting in Paris; British New Unionism was saved when Australian workers sent money to support strikers on the London docks. There were favorable conditions for a union surge in the late 1880s. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, the 1880s was a decade of political transition

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and economic crises. For Britain, it was a decade of economic stagnation, even depression, where, for the first time, Britain’s industrial leadership was challenged by the growth of new economies including Japan and India as well as the United States and Germany. The economic situation was most difficult for agrarian interests, not only in Britain but throughout Europe. Declining shipping rates and the occupation of native peoples’ land throughout the interior of the Americas and Australia, as well as in Asia and Africa, flooded European markets with relatively cheap foodstuffs. Together, growing industrial and agricultural competition contributed to declining prices. Led by falling grain and meat prices, for example, British prices fell by nearly 25 percent in the 1880s. Falling agricultural prices raised the real income of industrial workers without squeezing their employers’ profit margins. Welcome to workers, cheaper foodstuffs threatened farmers and landlords, creating a political crisis for political regimes based on agrarian support and undermining established alliances. On one side, powerful agrarian interests sought to use their political power to protect their economic interests. To stem the flow of foreign competition, agricultural interests in France and Germany turned against free trade to forge new alliances with conservative nationalists. Some social critics used the ongoing challenge to established agricultural and industrial markets to launch a general critique of the distribution of income and power. This happened in the United States when farmers, angry at falling prices, supported independent radical movements, including the Greenbacks, the Union Labor Party, and the Populists. Farm revolt also roiled French politics in the late-1880s, threatening the newly established Republic when many farmers supported first a monarchist surge in the mid-1880s around the Comte de Paris, and, later, a nationalist movement around General Boulanger. By the 1880s, free trade and economic liberalism were in retreat through the world. With its vast internal market, the United States had embraced protectionism early; high industrial duties were enacted in 1862 and were not substantially reduced until the Underwood Tariff of 1914. Other countries also abandoned free trade. Germany did in 1879 with Bismarck’s “Iron and Rye” tariff raising duties on both manufactures and agricultural goods; as was often the case, a system of protection was voted in along with other measures to restrict free markets, including a program of social security. The French Republic waited till 1892 to enact similar duties in the Méline Tariff. Even the homeland of free trade, England, was not immune from the political effects of rising international competition. English industrialists lost prestige along with markets, perhaps contributing to a rebirth of British socialism; both the revolutionary Social Democratic Federation and the reformist Fabian Society were founded in 1884. Without going socialist, some capitalists abandoned free trade. Many rallied around Joseph Chamberlain, the reforming mayor of Birmingham, who extended his critique of economic liberalism to call for a protectionist system of imperial preferences. Falling commodity prices were especially difficult for poorer regions of advanced capitalist economies. Within the United Kingdom, for example, Irish

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farmers and landowners suffered from competition with American grain and Argentinian beef. Falling incomes contributed to the Irish “Land War” of the early 1880s and the period’s “Pay No Rent” campaign. These movements fueled the growing campaign for Irish Home Rule, which was to disturb the balance of British politics beginning after 1880. Calling for repeal of the “Coercion Act,” used to suppress protests, the Irish Land League demanded the three Fs: Fair rents fixed by government officials; Fixed tenancies and no evictions; and Free sale of leases by tenants leaving farming. The Irish movement gave the world, including the labor movement, the word “boycott” after a systematic protest by Irish tenants against Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, a land agent for an absentee English landlord who refused to grant protesting tenants a rent reduction in 1880. On the suggestion of Charles Stuart Parnell, President of the Irish Land League, residents around Loughmask in County Mayo ostracized him, refusing to work for him, to serve him in shops, or even to deliver his mail. These events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant byword, first used, in our sense of collective and organized ostracism, in the London Times in November 1880. The three Fs were conceded in the Irish Second Land Act of 1881. Further concessions were granted the Irish in the so-called Kilmainham Treaty (1882) between Prime Minister Gladstone and the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell. And, then in 1885, Gladstone promised Irish Home Rule – roiling British politics for a generation. English workers, many of Irish descent, drew a lesson from these campaigns. Success for the Irish promised further victories for other movements of the British lower class.

A new union and a new May Day: the Great Upheaval in the United States For the Labor Movement, the upheavals of the 1880s were seminal because they expanded Labor’s horizons, extending unions and working-class political movements to new workers and regions and inspired new hopes for workers. Entering the 1880s, most labor unions were organizations of craft workers whose chief functions were to organize insurance benefits and to protect the interests of the skilled against both employers and common laborers. Politically, these organizations sought to advance their members’ narrow interests through alliances with established moderate politicians without straying far from the political center (Friedman 1992). The upheavals of the 1880s transformed the Labor Movement by establishing new, more inclusive organizations, and by leading these older unions to broaden their appeal, transforming themselves into organizations for broader social change. The first step in this transformation was to articulate appeals to attract all elements of the working class. It is curious that this should have been done first by an organization of the old-style trade unions. At the 1884 convention of the (United States) Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), the twenty-five delegates in attendance voted 23 to 2 to declare that “eight hours

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shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886 and we recommend to labor organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named” (American Federation of Labor 1906: 14). And thus was launched May Day, the worldwide campaign for the eight-hour day, and the modern labor movement. The FOTLU would have seemed a poor candidate to inaugurate a movement that would transform not only the American labor movement but the world. Formed in 1881, the FOTLU represented skilled workers organized into trades (sic) unions organized “to protect the skilled labor of America from being reduced to beggary and to sustain the standard of American workmanship and skill.” Craft unionists formed the FOTLU against movements like the Knights of Labor (KOL) that sought to unite workers with specialized skills with common laborers in industrial and regional unions. Broader organization and broad solidarity was of little matter to these craft unionists whose interests went little beyond controlling their own labor markets to maintain their own wages. Even their own organization, the FOTLU, was starved of funds and energies by unions who saw little use for a national confederation beyond speaking for them against the KOL.6 This was an exclusive organization, a confederation of craft unions to protect narrow interests against those of the broader working class. It stood for the right of the skilled “to use their advantage of skill and efficient organization in order to wrest the maximum amount of concessions for themselves” against the KOL, who would “annex the skilled men in order that the advantage from their exceptional fighting strength might lift up the unskilled and semi-skilled” (Commons 1966: 2:396). Calling for an eight-hour day, the FOTLU joined a campaign by American labor activists that dated back nearly 50 years. It was a campaign that enjoyed broad support.7 Peter McGuire of the Carpenters union told a congressional committee in 1883 that the reduction in the length of the work day was the “primary object” of the Carpenters’ union; FOTLU and AFL leader Samuel Gompers agreed that the eight-hour day was the AFL’s goal. It was a demand that “[h]owever much they may differ upon other matters, . . . all men of labor . . . can unite upon” (Rodgers 1978: 16). Prominent politicians also favored the eight-hour day, including radical Republicans like Ohio Senator Ben Wade and Pennsylvania’s Representative William Kelly (Sklar 1995: 89; Keller 1977: 72, 185, 416; Montgomery 1967). The energetic use of governmental power by Republicans to free the slaves, save the union, expand public education, establish homesteads, and subsidize railroads and manufacturers and banks “provided,” in David Montgomery’s words: a valuable precedent for legislative action to reform industrial employment and living conditions as well. No sooner had the war ended than state legislatures were bombarded with petitions to establish a legal eight-hour day, petitions that bore the signatures of many well-known Republicans. (Montgomery 1993: 134)

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Labor reformers were disappointed, however, with the outcome of these campaigns. In Illinois, for example, an eight-hour day law was voted to go into effect on 1 May 1867. Workers greeted the law with a huge parade in Chicago on 1 May 1867 led by banners proclaiming “Eight Hours and No Concession” and “We Respect the Laws of the State.” But employer resistance and the refusal by the judiciary to enforce the law defeated this campaign, striking a lasting “blow at the labor reformers’ belief that they could rely on enlightened legislation.” By contrast, New York City workers took matters into their own hands. Forgoing legislation, they briefly won the eight-hour day after a long strike in 1872 and celebrated their victory with a parade of 150,000 workers. But their short-lived victory disappeared in the 1873 depression (Green 2006: 31–3; Ozanne 1967: 6–7). At the beginning of the 1880s, most American workers worked for over ten hours a day. But wide support among both workers and middle-class reformers for an eight-hour day encouraged the FOTLU’s leaders to use the issue in their bid for the leadership of the nation’s Labor Movement. Despite the FOTLU’s own weakness, surprising energy was brought to the campaign. Historian Steven Ross reports that by May 1886, wage earners in Cincinnati, for example, “were deluged with scores of FOTLU circulars and speakers exhorting them to press forward on behalf of the cause” (Ross 1985: 273). Belying the FOTLU’s orientation as an association of narrow craft organizations, the eight-hour campaign was presented as a defense of democratic values and the rights of workers as citizens. Shorter workdays would redistribute income towards labor, but also by ending the degradation of the endless workday they would create time for education and citizenship. With free time to become an educated citizen, producers would come to expect not only a decent income, but also independence, and self-respect. A typical leaflet emphasized this democratic demand: Arouse, ye toilers of America! Lay down your tools on May 1, 1886, cease your labor, close the factories, mills and mines for one day in the year. One day of revolt – not of rest. . . . A day of protest against oppression and tyranny, against ignorance and war of any kind. A day on which to begin to enjoy “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”. (Dennis 2002) The idea of a national campaign for the eight-hour day stirred the hearts of workers throughout the United States and gave a single locus for militancy and organizing. While union journals associated with the FOTLU, such as the Carpenter, spread the word, the campaign quickly moved beyond the FOTLU. Ironically, it became associated with the KOL, which did not endorse it, more than with its original sponsor, the FOTLU. Because it was open to all workers, the KOL was better positioned than were the craft unions in the FOTLU to take advantage of surging popular interest, and the KOL became the chief beneficiary of the agitation. Because it did not distinguish between skilled and unskilled

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workers, between well-paid craftsmen and poorly paid common laborers, the eight-hour campaign came to mobilize workers without specialized skills previously excluded from craft unions, including African-Americans and women. In growing numbers, these workers organized their own unions or joined existing unions, especially KOL local assemblies. Soon, they began to form strike committees to demand the eight-hour day. Even many craft workers joined the KOL; swept up in the enthusiasm, through the prism of the eight-hour campaign, they came to see their class position as wage earners rather than craft workers. Thus the eight-hour agitation had the unintended effect of raising the KOL up as a true rival to the craft unions and the FOTLU. From barely 60,000 members in 1884, the KOL grew to over 100,000 in 1885 and then mushroomed to over 700,000 in 1886. (By contrast, unions in the FOTLU grew by only 30 percent between 1884 and 1886, from 105,000 to 138,000; other unions grew by only 50 percent, from 127,000 to 195,000 (Friedman 1999).) Powered by the KOL, total union membership grew by a phenomenal 180 percent in 1886 with unions spreading throughout the country from Louisiana’s African-American sugar plantations to the timber workers of the Pacific Northwest to the women office clerks in the urban Northeast. This was the “Great Upheaval,” the first general rising of the American working class with surging strike participation, independent political action, and mass demonstrations as well as growing participation in unions. There were almost as many strikers in 1886, over 600,000, as the total for the preceding four years. Over half of these struck in the first week of May alone. On 1 May, 11,000 Detroiters marched, 5,000 paraded in Troy, New York, 10,000 in Milwaukee, 6,000 white and black workers paraded together in Louisville, Kentucky, and 50,000 in the epicenter of the May Day events, Chicago, Illinois.8 The May Day movement benefitted from the involvement of some remarkable labor leaders, including, in Chicago alone, George Schilling, August Spies, and Albert Parsons. These were passionate and idealistic men who “possessed the ability to articulate workers’ grievances, as well as the unflagging energy it took to engage in relentless political activity” (Green 2006: 126). But May Day 1886 was a true mass strike, a genuine and spontaneous popular upsurge beyond the control of any group of labor leaders. The movement benefitted from great leadership, but already by March, it had taken on a life of its own and was producing new leaders from among the workers themselves. Early successes encouraged the agitation, breeding more success because more workers were willing to lend support to a successful campaign. Whether intended or not, eight hours proved to be an excellent issue for a broad working-class campaign. Not only did it attract broad interest among workers but it also resonated with a larger public, fearful that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few powerful capitalists was undermining the social basis of American democracy. Right after the Civil War, the New York Times, hardly a leftist journal, warned that the rapid expansion of factory wage labor threatened to create a “system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed in the South.” “Manufacturing capitalists,” the paper

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admonished on 22 February 1869, “threaten to become the masters, and it is the white laborers who are to be the slaves.” Even E. L. Godkin of the Nation, a leading conservative, warned that the “accumulation of capital in the hands of comparatively few individual and corporations” threatens republican government by creating a large class of wage earners trained to a “servile tone and servile way of thinking.” His words echoed those of labor leader William Sylvis who condemned capitalist relations as, “for the most part, that of master and slave, and are totally at variance with the spirit of the institutions of a free people” (Sandel 1996: 188, 187, 186). A shorter workday would not eliminate this bit of slavery but it could mitigate it by reducing the time where workers were under the capitalist’s authority and giving them more time to cultivate themselves as citizens. This movement joined strikers to a continued campaign for democracy that stretched back to 1861, 1776, and before. For Chicago’s labor leaders, unions were not only the “great lever by which the working class will be emancipated,” but “the living germs of a new social order . . . a free society” reconstructed on a democratic basis” with “self-governing community of equal producers.” Some of Chicago’s radical labor leaders quoted Marx, historian James Green adds, “but they also salted their speeches and pamphlets with songs and mottoes from the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man” and also from Paine, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and John Brown (Green 2006: 130). They celebrated Bastille Day, 18 March (the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871), and 1 May; and they also flew American flags and celebrated the Fourth of July. By magnifying labor’s political influence, political circumstances in the 1880s gave workers new reason to believe they could use government for their own purposes. In addition to strong farmer-labor political movements, the period’s politics were dominated by an extraordinarily close balance between the two main parties, which enhanced the influence of even small groups of swing voters. In no period in American history was the electoral competition as closely balanced as in the late nineteenth century, and in few was the elite so divided. Even southern elections were relatively close, and the northern electorate was closely divided along ethnic lines and by issues like prohibition and the tariff that led some manufacturers, bankers, and merchants to support the Democratic Party despite its Irish working-class base. No president elected from 1876 to 1892 received an absolute majority of the vote, and a change of a few thousand votes (of over ten million cast) could have reversed many of these elections.9 Elections were closely contested even in Republican strongholds like Massachusetts where Republican presidential candidates averaged only 51 percent of the vote in the period 1884–92 (Friedman 2002, 2000). Close elections led each party to search relentlessly for votes, even from supporters of minor parties and other independents. Even small groups of independent voters, such as the famous Mugwumps of 1884, could have disproportionate leverage over political parties and state policy in a political regime where only a handful of votes divided the two major parties. Going into May 1886, American labor benefitted from elite sympathy and elite divisions that encouraged employ-

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ers to seek compromise resolution of strikes by limiting the ability of employers to use force against militant workers or to gain police support. In Chicago, for example, the Democratic candidate, Carter H. Harrison, was elected mayor in 1879 because the dominant Republicans, who had easily won every election for twenty years, split over prohibition leading to a Socialist Labor Party insurgency that garnered 20 percent of the vote. Adroitly using his position to nurture his political base, Harrison was reelected three times, serving as mayor until 1887. Anti-union businessmen paid for his electoral success. The Kentucky-born but cosmopolitan Harrison was no socialist. Residing in a grand house on Ashland Avenue, he dressed in silk vests, smoked the best Havana cigars, and moved comfortably in the city’s most elite circles. But he exhibited rare political genius, and appreciated that his continued electoral success depended on attracting the Republican voters who had defected to the Socialist Labor Party. In office, the influence of Irish trade unionists on the mayor kept the police at bay during strikes; the police, reports historian James Green, were “so unreliable in the eyes of many large employers that they equipped small armies of militiamen as reserve forces or hired private guards to protect strikebreakers” (Green 2006: 122). This experience was replicated in cities throughout the United States, where political authorities withheld police protection from fear of antagonizing labor voters, and businesses were forced to deal with labor unions and tolerate strikes and picket lines (Friedman 1992). American workers, therefore, could look with some confidence on the outcome of the May Day events in 1886. The massive support given that day’s general strike gave them further reason for optimism. But instead of a resounding victory, May Day 1886 turned into a dramatic setback, even a catastrophe, after labor’s opponents used labor’s strength to rally their own allies, to win government support for their cause, and to divide labor. Some reaction may have been inevitable. In Chicago and other cities, the strength of the radical labor movement and the size of the May Day movement frightened property owners and others who feared a militant labor movement would overpower democratic governance. The Haymarket Affair reversed any gains. On the evening of 4 May, a bomb was thrown at the police breaking up a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. This murderous act was used to justify a general attack on labor. “NOW IT IS BLOOD! proclaimed a typical headline. A BOMB THROWN INTO RANKS INAUGURATES THE WORK OF DEATH” (Green 2006: 192). Fear of continued violence justified a brutal repression of strikes and labor organizations. In Chicago’s Bohemian district, socialism was broken by the “bold front presented by the policemen and the readiness they showed in the use of revolvers.” Chicago apparel worker and union activist Abraham Bisno wrote that “after May 5th picketing became absolutely impossible.” By 27 May, ten labor meeting halls, seventeen saloons, and several newspaper offices had been raided, many houses searched, often without warrants, and 200 arrests had been made (Green 2006: 199, 204, 207). Repression extended throughout the country. Writing in John Swinton’s Paper from New York on 8 May 1886, labor journalist John Swinton called the bomb “a god send

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to the enemies of the labor movement” who used it “as an explosive against all the objects working people are bent on accomplishing.” The Haymarket Affair was a disaster for labor because it brought America’s divided elites into a common front. Blaming the victim, the Chicago Tribune wrote that “The Knights of Labor are responsible for the appearance on the field of the Knights of Capital.” Suddenly, there were no more divisions over labor policy among the economic and political elite. The Chicago Tribune had greeted the May Day strikes with a banner headline proclaiming that “THE GREAT DAY IS HERE – LOUD CRY HEARD FROM WORKINGMEN ALL OVER LAND.” But after the Haymarket, the paper said that every organization, society, or combination calling itself socialist or anarchist should be “absolutely and permanently suppressed.” Radical workers were hardly entitled to any civil liberties or respect because they were barely human. The scholarly Albany Law Journal characterized militant workers as “long-haired, wild-eyed, bad smelling, atheistic reckless foreign wretches.” They “ought to be crushed,” and their evil deeds justified resort to “the vigilance committee and lynch law” (Green 2006: 208). The Haymarket was a disaster for American labor because what emerged from it was a divided working class and the consolidation of the American business class. A year after the May Day events, on 13 May 1887, the Chicago Tribune observed that “The strike of a year ago marked an epoch in the history of industrial affairs in the city.” The Haymarket bomb changed the situation and put new ideas in the heads of the men who furnished the brain and the capital. They realized for the first time that unless active measures were taken business would be ruined and the triumph of the walking delegate would be complete. (Schneirov and Suhrbur 1988: 35; Schneirov 1998: 248) Organized into anti-union associations, often for the first time, employers launched a policy of discrimination and lockouts, directed mainly against the Knights and other radical unions. John Swinton’s Paper reported on 5 September 1886 that “Since May last, many corporations and Employers’ Associations have been resorting to all sorts of unusual expedients to break up the labor organisations whose strength has become so great within the past two or three years. Sometimes they attack them in the front, but more often on the flanks or in the rear.” It is significant that attacks focused on radical labor and industrial unions, such as the KOL and the Chicago anarchists. Eight of the most effective leaders of Chicago’s radical labor movement were arrested and seven sentenced to die. A union leader estimated that between May 1886 and Labor Day 1889, Chicago unions and the KOL had lost 60,000 of 100,000 members, a decline even greater than the national union membership decline of 40 percent in these three years. Because of its association with class solidarity and political activism, the KOL took the brunt of the repression and suffered the greatest membership losses. National KOL membership fell by over 60 percent, with

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especially large losses among semi-skilled workers in large manufacturing establishments (Schneirov 1998: 254, 258; Friedman 1999). By contrast, membership in the FOTLU and its successor organization, the AFL, continued to rise even after the Haymarket Affair. The repression that undermined the KOL may have even helped some craft unions by allowing them to present themselves as moderate, even safe alternatives to employers fearful of radical unions and the KOL. By emphasizing their moderation compared with the KOL and other radicals, American craft unions won the support of some politicians and other liberals who were sympathetic with labor but feared radicalism. Again, this came at the price of restraining militancy within the organization, and undermining class solidarity. Relative moderation was crucial for the success of craft union organizations after 1886 (Friedman 1988, 1998). In 1887, the KOL remained the largest part of American organized labor. Enrolling over 60 percent of union members in 1887 the KOL was three times the size of the AFL and it remained larger than its craft rival until 1892. To try to wrest leadership from the KOL, the AFL voted, at its 1888 convention in St. Louis, to call for a renewal of the May Day movement for the eight-hour day. This time, however, there was a small but significant change. Instead of a general movement, the AFL called for an industry-specific campaign for 1 May 1890, beginning with carpentry, home to one of the AFL’s strongest affiliates. The AFL planned to target mining in 1891, and would then move on to other industries. Venturing less, the AFL’s targeted campaign divided the American working class rather than uniting it. Union membership grew in 1890, but AFL unions gained only 15,000 members. (Membership grew still faster in the KOL, which added 49,000 members or over 20 percent.) Linked with the May Day movement, most of the AFL’s growth came in construction unions, notably the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Once again, Chicago was the center of the movement, but this time, unlike 1886, the campaign was as carefully controlled as it was carefully planned (Schneirov 1998: 307). Restricted to the Carpenters, it was designed to advance the interests of a relatively small group of relatively privileged workers. Moreover, after the fiasco of 1886, the Carpenters looked to appease potential enemies and to form alliances with powerful local businessmen and politicians. For business, the Carpenters promised to restrain strike movements by agreeing not to engage in sympathy strikes; and they promised Chicago’s ruling Democratic organization to shun radical third party campaigns. In 1889, after the union endorsed the Democratic mayoral candidate De Witt Cregier, the Democrats granted an eight-hour day for carpenters on city contracts and withheld police protection for sites struck by the carpenters. In a striking change from 1886, in Chicago’s May Day strikes of 1890, only fifty-six union men were arrested and none were convicted by local judges. Unable to rely on municipal police, contractors were forced to pay for private security, ironically furnished by Bonfield’s Detective Agency, run by the former police commander from the Haymarket Affair of 1886. And barely two months after

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the strike’s successful conclusion, the carpenters refused to join a movement for an independent labor party because, as the Tribune remarked, “This would exasperate the Democratic city administration and bring on the active opposition of the City Hall officials and the police” (Schneirov and Suhrbur 1988: 39–47). Having captured theirs, the Carpenters were content to leave other workers to manage for themselves. By 1890, the historic outlines of American Exceptionalism had emerged. By mobilizing employers as a class, America’s revolutionary May Day of 1886 had, ironically, undermined working-class solidarity. Rather than simple, paternalist repression, America’s employers and political authorities were groping towards a new strategy, one of divide and rule intended to separate a responsible, “American” Labor Movement from the irresponsible foreign radicals. Even in radical Chicago, the May Day movement had transmuted from a celebration of working-class solidarity to a rallying point for intraclass division.

Eight hours and the New Unionism in Britain Smugly self-satisfied, entering the 1880s, much of Victorian England’s elite appeared more concerned with the horrors of Jack the Ripper than with the ongoing suffering of the industrial working class. The foundation of the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society, both in 1884, seemed to change little. Poverty, hunger, and dangerous working conditions were old problems, long ignored by the upper classes and little alleviated by the efforts of Britain’s few, isolated reformers and its narrow and exclusive craft union movement. The same combination of changing perceptions, opportunities, elite divisions, and new leadership with new strategies brought an unexpected labor explosion to Britain in 1889. Already, Victorian complacency was being threatened by economic and political changes. Challenged by new competitors in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere, Britain’s dominance of world industry eroded visibly in the 1880s, challenged by new competitors in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere; and British imperial rule was threatened from the Sudan to Ireland. In the mid-1880s, Parnell led a group of over sixty Irish MPs who used their strategic position in a closely divided House of Commons to force Liberal Party leader William Gladstone to commit to Irish Home Rule as the price of their support for the post of Prime Minister. This was an earthquake that unmoored British politics. By dividing Gladstone’s Liberal Party and giving new life to Britain’s moribund Conservatives, Irish Home Rule would undermine effective government in the United Kingdom for thirty years. For some, Irish Home Rule was an unwelcome distraction from the pressing matter of social reform at home in England. The reform impulse was dramatically renewed in the late 1880s. Angered by claims by the socialist leader H. H. Hyndman that 25 percent of London’s population lived in abject poverty, businessman Charles Booth assembled a team, including his cousin Beatrice Potter, to investigate the true extent of London poverty. First published in 1889,

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Booth’s findings stunned English society. Instead of correcting Hyndman’s exaggerations, he found that the socialist leader had understated the truth that 35 percent of London’s population was poverty stricken. Shocked, Booth himself endorsed government action to aid the poor, including an expanded system of poor relief and old-age pensions. Many of his assistants, and some of his readers, were ready to go further, including Potter whose subsequent political work led her to meet her future husband, Sidney Webb. Work like Booth’s legitimized the views of labor activists and attracted new allies. One who rallied to their cause was a remarkable woman, Annie Besant. Born in 1847 Annie’s father, William Wood, a doctor, died when she was five. Suddenly destitute, her mother, Emily Morris, tried to support her family by taking in boarders, but poverty forced her to send Annie to a friend, Ellen Marryat. In 1866, at age nineteen, Annie married the Reverend Frank Besant and within four years she had two children. The marriage was not happy. Soon her independent spirit clashed with her husband’s traditional views. When Annie refused to attend communion, Frank Besant banished her. A separation was negotiated where Digby, the son, stayed with his father, while daughter Mabel lived with Annie. Leaving her husband, Annie Besant rejected Christianity and developed a close relationship with Charles Bradlaugh, editor of the radical National Reformer. In 1877 Besant and Bradlaugh were together charged with obscenity for publishing The Fruits of Philosophy, Charles Knowlton’s book advocating birth control. Their response was itself a scandal because they linked their attack on traditional morals and their feminism with a critique of the existing economic order. “We think,” they proclaimed in court, that “it is more moral to prevent conception of children than, after they are born, to murder them by want of food, air and clothing.” Found guilty for publishing an “obscene libel,” Besant and Bradlaugh were sentenced to six months in prison. Undeterred, Besant published her own book advocating birth control, The Laws of Population (1884), which the London Times labeled “an indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene book.” (All this allowed Rev. Besant to persuade the courts to grant him sole custody of their Mabel.) Thus Annie Besant followed a path from secularism to feminism and then, by the late-1880s, to socialism. Working with socialists such as Walter Crane, Edward Aveling (Karl Marx’s son-in-law), and George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant joined the Social Democratic Federation and soon started her own campaigning newspaper, The Link, to focus on the conditions of young women workers in London. Of all the workers, the most pitiful were the match girls, whose low wages and harsh working conditions rated them “somewhere practically below prostitution” in the London hierarchy (McCarthy 1988: 57). Told of conditions at the highly profitable Bryant & May match factory, Besant visited. Standing by the gate at closing, she persuaded a small group to talk to her. Returning from the East End, on 12 June 1888, she published an article, “White Slavery In London,” about conditions at the factory, highlighting the starvation wages, the casual sexual abuse by managers and supervisors, and the dangerous

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phosphorus fumes which caused “phossy jaw” (or bone cancer) and skin cancer. Embarrassed, the company’s manager Theodore Bryant sacked her three main informants, leading the rest of the workers to walk out in protest. This strike electrified London and The Link helped to draw allies to the match girls’ cause. Soon, The Pall Mall Gazette and other liberal papers appealed for funds, and workers throughout London rallied to help the girls (Charlton 1999: 16–18). Successful, the match girls’ strike galvanized London’s workers. By demonstrating that it was possible for even the poorest workers to win, their victory “had a psychological and social significance out of all proportion to the comparatively small scale of a dispute at a single large factory.” Even a group of girls – many very young, mostly of Irish descent, initially unorganized and considered unorganizable – could win improvements if only they had the courage to defy oppressive and unjust employers (McCarthy 1988: 59). Inspired by the match girls’ success, the London Gas Workers organized behind a thirty-one-year-old, nearly illiterate, common laborer, Will Thorne. Orphaned and working full-time at age six, by age fourteen Thorne was working twelve-hour shifts in a metalrolling and ammunition factory, a “little hell on earth.” There he earned permanent scars from acids that corroded his clothes and ate into the flesh of his hands. At the time, he swore to help prevent other children going through the same hardships, misery and suffering . . . We were poor ignorant victims of a system that made us work long hours of brutalising toil for little pay; a system that had no care for the slums we slept in, the food we ate, or the education we received. (Kapp 1989: 22) Thorne joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1881. Eloquent and passionate, Thorne believed in the labor movement’s struggle for dignity and respect. “Fellow wage slaves,” he addressed the gas workers: It is easy to break one stick but when fifty sticks are together in one bundle, it is a much more difficult job. The way you have been treated at work for many years is scandalous . . . I pledge my word that if you will stand firm and don’t waver, within six months we will claim and win the eight-hour day, a six-day week and the abolition of the present slave-driving methods. (McCarthy 1988: 61) With clerical help from Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, Thorne led the gas workers to victory in their 1881 strike, a victory as surprising as that won by the match girls. Even more important than the wage gains, Thorne argued, was the reduction in the hours of work, from twelve- to eight-hour days, because this would reduce the “the inhuman competition that was making men more like beasts than civilised persons” (McCarthy 1988: 64). Thorne proudly proclaimed the settlement “a milestone in Trade Union history and one of the greatest victories ever achieved. . . . Our union put heart into thousands of unskilled, badly

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paid and unorganised workers” (Kapp 1989: 55). Within three months the new union had 20,000 members. Together with the victory of the match girls, the surprising and dramatic success of the gas workers inspired workers throughout England with a new vision of the power of labor solidarity. Labor activist, Tom Mann, called the gas workers’ success “so substantial an improvement that everyone who gave the least thought to the subject could see the advantages of industrial organization” (Mann 1967: 59). “This was a victory,” that “put older and larger trade unions to shame” (Pelling 1987: 93). Thorne would not rest on success among the gas workers. Soon his union was spreading solidarity, organizing unions among woolen workers in the West Riding, agricultural workers, casual railway workers, and other common laborers. Growing socialist agitation, popular frustration with British capitalism, the Irish agitation, and the political opportunity created by the Irish Home Rule debate: all these made British unskilled workers ready to respond to the call of unionism in the mid-1880s. Apparently ignoring the movement’s ultimate failures, English workers were inspired by the Herculean struggles of May Day 1886, in the United States (Mann 1967: 58–9; McCarthy 1988: 8). Even the Knights of Labor made an appearance; recruiting at least 10,000 members in local assemblies throughout Britain by 1888. On Tyneside, the National Federation of Labour was formed in 1886, led by Edward Pease, a Fabian Socialist from London. It would promote organization among seamen, including Joseph Havelock Wilson who organized a seaman’s union with 65,000 members by 1889 (Pelling 1987: 93). These groups represented the “new unionism.” Before 1888, most British union members belonged to restrictive organizations of craft workers. Opposed to strikes and to radical politics, most sought to establish a cooperative relationship with their employers and in politics were allied with the Liberal Party. Catering to unskilled and poorly paid workers, the new unions had low entrance fees and dues and depended on aggressive strike tactics. First the match girls, then the gas workers inspired a wave of organizing that transformed the British labor movement by bringing organization to the masses of the unskilled, low wage workers. But it was the London dock strike of 1889 that was to be the catalyst that would launch the organizing drives among the unskilled that would give birth to the New Unionism. In the 1880s, the London docks attracted the roughest of the British working class to some of the roughest and toughest employments that Britain had to offer. Casual labor dominated the docks due to the twin factors of unpredictable labor demand and a glutted supply of labour. Because of the highly variable labor demand, companies avoided a large permanent staff and relied instead on a large pool of casual laborers. Like a stagnant pond at the bottom of a long series of hills, the docks collected this casual labor force from all regions and trades, including workers who were unable to gain other employment because of lack of training or skill, or past criminal activity. A dock workers’ union leader, himself a third-generation longshoreman, observed that:

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Explaining the madness of moments The detritus of society was by no means the only element to swell the supply of labour. Men temporarily out of work in their normal trade might try their luck at the docks. Building workers unemployed in the winter months and gas workers surplus during the summer months would drift down to the docks. (Taplin 1985: 14)

When word spread that ships had arrived in port, workers would gather in “pens,” like cattle in a shed, iron-barred from end to end. Inside, a foreman would walk up and down choosing workers at will. As with any system of personal power, this hiring system led to wide abuse. In addition to driving wages down this competition, according to the London Times, compels workers “to bribe, treat, or fawn upon the sub-contractors who have the selection of the workers.”10 Victorians believed it was impossible to organize dock workers into effective unions. The London Eastern Post concluded that dock workers were “so poor that a strike or even a combination with a view to joint action is not to be thought of. They can only appeal to the companies to reconsider the whole question, and ask the public to sustain that appeal” (Lovell 1969: 61). Ben Tillett was one of the few who believed that it was possible to organize the docks. Like Will Thorne, Tillett was orphaned at a young age and began full-time work before his tenth birthday. At thirteen, he joined the Royal Navy; by sixteen, he was wounded and was invalided out of service. Settling in London, Tillett worked as a shoemaker; laid off, he followed a path blazed by many others and drifted down to the London Docks. He tried to join one of the two London stevedores’ trade unions but was ineligible because of his lack of specialized skill. Instead, Tillett took his place among the struggling mass of men fighting for a little work for a few pence. Here the young Tillett felt the first stirrings of rage against “the horrible nightmare of the dockers’ poverty” and what he labeled “the criminal wickedness of the exploitation that went on” (Kapp 1989: 47). Luckier than most, Tillett eventually found regular work as a teacooper at the Monument Tea Warehouse. There, in 1887, he joined a protest meeting against a wage cut and found himself “hoisted onto a table” to give a speech that brought into being the Tea Operatives’ and General Labourers’ Union. With Tillett as General Secretary, the union launched a strike at the Tilbury Dock in the Fall 1888. Defeat left Tillett “ill from exposure, the men disheartened and the union in disarray.” That might have been the end of the story except that the next year’s success of the Gas Workers’ Union encouraged the men and renewed hope, so that they were soon talking among themselves about their grievances and planning action. A dispute over bonus pay at the Lady Armstrong lying in the West India Docks was the spark that brought on the great dock strike of 1889. As observers noted: the nature of the dispute – about the division of the “plus” on a certain cargo – is of little importance, for it was avowedly only a pretext for a revolt

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against all the grievances which had long rankled in the minds of dock labourers. (McCarthy 1988: 81) As happens in all of these explosions, the workers soon ran ahead of the leadership. “The men wanted to come out at once, and their leader only managed to restrain them until he had formulated their demands in writing.” On hearing of the strike, Tillett “could scarcely believe my ears. It had never occurred to me that they were ready for such a thing” (McCarthy 1988: 78). A prominent socialist who supported the strike, H. H. Champion described how the strike spread beyond the docks: As soon as it became obvious that the Strike was not merely a local dispute, but would be carried on with courage and energy and on a very large scale, numberless trades threw in their lot with the Strikers, abandoned their work and joined the processions. Men who had been working for years with every appearance of being resigned to their lot suddenly discovered that they too had grievances. . . . So rapidly did the discontent spread that the Committee was seriously hampered by the applications to them for advice, encouragement, and assistance by workmen whose precipitate action hindered rather than helped the Dockers’ cause. Each day one saw in the processions larger numbers of rudely-improvised banners, setting forth that their bearers belonged to this trade or the other, and had struck work until their demands were conceded. (McCarthy 1988: 100) Without any other institutional structure, it was the Tea Operatives who organized a strike that eventually involved over 20,000 workers. For this the small union’s resources were was totally inadequate. Readily acknowledging the need for allies, Tillett sent for Tom Mann, the machinist-union and socialist activist. Soon, Tillett and Mann were joined by Tom McCarthy (of the Stevedores) and John Burns, like Mann a machinist and, then, a socialist activist. Together, they organized support for the strike from a headquarters at a pub, the Wade’s Arms. Less leaders than coordinators, the Wade’s Arms group facilitated the work of regular longshoremen, workers who discovered in themselves the ability to conceive, plan, and execute effective strike actions. Employers expected that hunger would soon force the strikers back to work or else they would be replaced by others in work that required little beyond brute strength. To prevent this, the strike committee set out to win public sympathy, and contributions. Thus came the famous strike processions through London, parades of striking dock workers with marchers “unmistakable casuals with vari-coloured patches on their faded greenish garments” joined by sympathizers such as the watermen in long scarlet coats, pink stockings and velvet caps with huge pewter badges at their breasts, like decorated amphibious hunts-

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Explaining the madness of moments men. And then there were the emblems carried by the marchers to drive home the moral of their struggle: the dockers’ dinner and the sweaters’ dinner, the dockers’ baby and the sweaters’ baby, diminutive and ample respectively. (Pelling 1987: 94; also Charlton 1999: 41–2; Jones 1971)

By dramatizing the strikers’ poverty and demonstrating their good order, the parades attracted the strikers public sympathy and helped to collect needed funds, perhaps as much as £20,000. This, however, would not have been enough to sustain the strike. On the verge of defeat, the strike was revived by support from a totally unexpected source. From Australian longshoremen came £30,000, collected largely from Irish immigrants happy to contribute to subvert the English ruling class. Irish nationalism helped in another way. London’s Roman Catholic Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808–92) played a central role in winning the strike. Son of a Governor of the Bank of England and brother to a dock proprietor, Manning was considered a radical, even a dangerous revolutionary, for his views on capital and labour. Close examination shows that he was never a socialist; instead, he had an almost medieval belief in the responsibility of the upper class to care for the poor. “The homes of the poor in London are often very miserable,” he wrote in 1874: These things cannot go on, these things ought not to go on. The accumulation of wealth in the land, the piling up of wealth like mountains in the possession of classes or individuals, cannot go on if these moral conditions of our people are not healed. (Manning 1874: 5) While he aligned himself with reform movements from the 1850s on, Manning consistently sought to channel reform so as to preserve social order and established hierarchies. He opposed socialism and his greatest fear, as he expressed shortly after the dock strike was concluded, was that “some fool or madman might step in and wreck all the efforts of the leaders to maintain order” (Charlton 1999: 51). In Cardinal Manning, we see again the intersection of Irish nationalism and class mobilization that characterized the dock strike. His support helped to attract the 40,000 Catholics in the East End to the strike; he discouraged defections from among the strikers, strike-breaking from among the unemployed, and his support brought money and encouragement to the strikers. But his most important role was in bringing employers to the table to negotiate with the strikers. Some workers were suspicious of the Cardinal but, a Congregationalist himself, Tillett trusted Cardinal Manning and was delighted to use his good offices to mediate the dispute. With the union leaders in line, the Cardinal arranged for negotiations between the dock owners and the union at Mansion House, residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Already losing the public relations war, the employers feared that rejecting the Cardinal’s mediation would

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alienate all public sympathy for their cause. They were, however, consoled in their defeat by the assurance from the Cardinal and the Mayor that they were reaching an agreement with responsible union leaders committed to maintain order rather than with “some fool or madman” seeking to use the occasion to build a revolutionary movement to spread popular democracy. Outside funding and public support together brought the London dock workers a signal victory that inaugurated a new era for the British Labor Movement. Hardly had the strike ended when Tillett took an organizing tour of the provinces, not only ports (such as Hull, Gloucester, and Bristol) but also the countryside, to promote unions of agricultural laborers. The dock strike brought into being a new kind of socialism, a popular and practical type of socialism. In the wake of the strike, the Independent Labour Party was formed (in 1893). The Trades Union Congress, too, was transformed by the New Unionism. Its membership more than doubled in the next two years, and the newly organized unions and workers moved it along the path from liberalism to socialism. On 3 May 1890, London marked May Day with over 100,000 demonstrators, including the aging Friedrich Engels, demanding the eight-hour day. The New Unionists now filled Hyde Park, the shock troops of the reborn British Labor Movement.

Crossing the Atlantic: the Socialists’ May Day in France It is curious how the AFL’s call for a May Day 1890 strike had a profoundly greater and different effect outside the United States than within. And it is a curious paradox how this conservative organization’s retreat from working-class unity elsewhere inspired a May Day movement that became a crusade for working-class solidarity. The story of May Day began when French liberals sought to bring labor into their coalition in defense of the French Third Republic. Looking to commemorate the Great Revolution of 1789, the government of the French Third Republic announced plans to hold an international congress to mark the Revolution’s centennial, and they called for an international labor congress to meet as part of this celebration. Perhaps it was fitting that this congress soon split between a small group of moderate reformers and a larger group committed to working-class revolution; it was this latter group that established the Second Socialist International. Eager to demonstrate the power of international solidarity, the socialist conference adopted a proposal by two French militants to take inspiration from the American call and promote May Day 1890 as an international working-class day of action to promote the eight-hour day. Raymond Lavigne and Jean Dormoy proposed that: The Congress decides to organize a great international demonstration, so that in all countries and in all cities on one appointed day the toiling masses shall demand of the state authorities the legal reduction of the working day to eight hours, as well as the carrying out of other decisions of the Paris

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Explaining the madness of moments Congress. Since a similar demonstration has already been decided upon for May 1, 1890, by the American Federation of Labor at its Convention in St. Louis, December, 1888, this day is accepted for the international demonstration. The workers of the various countries must organize this demonstration according to conditions prevailing in each country. (Trachtenberg 1932: 6)

In 1889, the various socialist movements throughout the world were weak minorities, small isolated groups, ridiculed, often persecuted. Even the German SPD, the strongest Socialist party in the world, won barely ten percent of the vote in the past election. Years later, the French socialist Albert Thomas recalled how the various national movements took comfort from their international connections and their ties to other socialists. “The international meetings,” he wrote: gave members of the Socialist parties a clear vision of socialist action and situating themselves within the great task which would be accomplished everywhere they took on a new confidence . . . the universality of their organization and it is undeniable that the moral effect obtained henceforth was enormous (Deneckere et al. 1988: 141) International action legitimized the eight-hour demand; and it inspired hopes for success, galvanizing the European labor movement into action. Thus was born May Day. As in the United States and Great Britain, divisions in Europe’s political elites also gave working-class movements reason to hope that they could leverage militancy through opportune alliances. Emerging from a two-decade struggle against monarchist and Bonapartist opposition, the French Republic had just barely survived a challenge from an ambitious right-wing general, General George Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger. The collapse of his movement in 1889 marked the end of the immediate danger to the Republic, but Boulanger showed the fundamental problem facing the Third Republic: political France was split nearly evenly, a division that ironically placed the labor left on the side of the governing republicans against an opposition that included many French employers. This political reality encouraged French workers to take their grievances to government officials, with the reasonable expectation that state officials might help them to wrest concessions from employers (Friedman 1988, 1990, 1998). The combination of international inspiration and political opportunity made May Day 1890 an explosive moment in France. On the day, socialist leaders led deputations to the authorities with petitions collected by trade or workplace. In Saint-Quentin, for example, a crowd of workers met at ten o’clock at the Circus to hear three socialist militants, Massey, Renard, and Langrand. After the speeches, the crowd brought out their picnics. French historian Michelle Perrot describes how “the gardens, the bar, the café, and corridors of the vast establish-

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ment were crowded; on all sides one could hear songs, cries of joy and bursts of laughter.” After dining, the crowd marched to the subprefecture where leaders presented officials with petitions from the workshops. “In the evening, it was back to the Circus for a concert, ‘where everyone could sing ballads, socialist songs or comic songs, as appropriate’ ” (Perrot 1984: 157). The AFL and the Internationalists called for May Day, but it was the people who made it the socialist holiday. As much as it was marked, May Day was celebrated. Here was a day for the workers to celebrate their rights, their unity, and their growing power. In Doyet-les-Mines (Allier), there was a parade where local conscripts played “music on drum, bugle and hurdy-gurdy.” Of course, behind the celebration was a powerful political message. The parade was led by a tricolor flag with a picture of Marianne (representing the Republic) on the white stripe holding a dagger in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other. And beneath Marianne was a worker in shirt-sleeves shaking a fist at a frightened bourgeois in a frock-coat; the Republican dagger is held over the head of the bourgeois while the wreath is over the worker as if on some Judgement Day, perhaps a future May Day?, the republic would, like God, reward the just and punish the wicked. The festive tone reflected the optimism that inspired workers to participate, an optimism fed by the success of this first international May Day. By the simultaneous timing of the demonstrations, the First of May campaign showed the strength of the proletariat and its emerging self-awareness, its ability to coordinate actions across the globe. The rituals chosen for the demonstrations linked this new working-class movement to some of the most powerful stories in the Western tradition, the communion of saints and the commemoration of sacrifice. As Perrot observes, [d]oing the same thing at the same time: this great principle of religious practice was now, by a stroke of genius, transferred to the labour movement, a new Moses leading the way to a new Promised Land. As the exaltation of a People united in a common celebration, the First of May was in fact the High Mass of the working class. The militants of the First of May took on the voices of prophets; “like the prophets, they were intoxicated with the future: in short they had faith” (Perrot 1984: 149, 158, 164). This faith drew to the movement workers previously too despairing, too discouraged, too absorbed in their personal struggles. In 1890 there were twice as many French strikers as in 1889, and the number who participated in demonstrations was still greater. Demonstrations attracted 4,000 in Troyes, 6,000 in Marseilles, 12,000 in Lens, and 20,000 in Lille. There were nearly 35,000 strikers in Roubaix, the center of French textiles, where strikers marched through the streets, bringing out the unskilled, women workers, and young people who had never before participated in strikes or working-class action. The new strikers experienced their moment of protest as a beginning, the dawn of a new day, a

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hope of things to come. Something was going to happen which would give new meaning to their lives (Perrot 1984: 158). As in the United States and the United Kingdom, May Day 1890 marked the beginning of the Labor Movement in France. By 1892, French union membership had more than doubled with unions spread beyond the Parisian crafts to the industrial working class in the factories of the Nord, the mines of the Pas de Calais, and elsewhere. Unions extended their organization, moving beyond a narrow craft orientation to include workers from all crafts in industrial and regional associations; May Day 1890, was followed soon by the formation, in 1893, of the Fédération des bourses du travail, in 1894 of the French branch of the Knights of Labor, La Chevalerie du travail française, and in 1895 of the Confédération générale du travail. Spreading hope and confidence, the May Day mobilization also had political ramifications; it was soon followed by the election of socialists Paul Lafargue to the Chamber of Deputies from the Nord (in 1891) and of Jules Guesde (in 1893). France had a Labor Movement.

What they left behind The heroic labor movements of the 1880s receded. May Day continued to be celebrated in London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere, but the parades were smaller, the crowds less spontaneous, and the sense of imminent change was lost. But if life returned to something like its old courses, it was changed. The movements of the 1880s and early 1890s left behind both new ideas and new hopes, and an institutional legacy, a Labor Movement of organized unions and socialist political parties. It was this institutional legacy that distinguished these from earlier upsurges. Throughout the capitalist world, there were new unions and expanded socialist political parties, staffed by officials, publishing newspapers, negotiating with employers and state officials, and planning demonstrations and strikes to win further gains. When this strike wave retreated, it left an ongoing movement. But the Labor Movement always evolved in tandem with its opponents. In some places there was more from the upsurges of the 1880s and early 1890s. No employer likes unions, and few politicians and state officials relished the competition presented by the new socialist parties. In most places, employers continued to compete with each other and state officials were too divided to respond effectively to labor’s challenge; weak because they were divided and unsure, they were forced to seek compromise by negotiating with union leaders who promised to reestablish labor peace at the price of higher wages and changed working conditions. Not that this was always necessary. In parts of the United States, for example, employers’ response to labor militancy was as powerful as labor’s attack. May Day in America left behind an emerging employer movement that was eventually to challenge Labor.

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When workers win Dilemmas of success

For all of the advances granted to the workers by this agreement, the employers received . . . the promise of a rational and peaceable method for securing adjustment of future controversies. Julius Henry Cohen, on behalf of New York City garment employers (Cohen 1916: 21)

Strikes, labor unrest, and the Labor Movement The strike precedes the union. At the beginning of the 1880s, strikes without union involvement were the norm.1 By striking, leaving their work together, workers discovered a collective power, the strength to compel employers and state officials to negotiate with them as equals. Coming later, unionization arrived when already active workers discovered the advantages of formal organization that was able to involve workers from a wider area in strike action, able to accumulate benefit funds to support longer strikes, and able to maintain experienced leadership. The transition from a labor movement of workers protesting their conditions of work and subordination to a formal Labor Movement of organized protest passes through strikes. From there, the growing Labor Movement changes the nature of collective action, not only enlarging and strengthening strikes but also organizing them, changing their timing, focusing them on particular issues, restricting them to maximize the union’s bargaining leverage. The Labor Movement disciplined labor. The early idealism of revolutionary workers to establish a democratic economy managed by the workers themselves is replaced by a calculated, organized, even bureaucratized, campaign for reforms, channeled into goals tolerable for management and governments. A century of disciplined struggle has brought rewards for working people, rising wages, improved working conditions. But rewards have come at the price of shedding labor’s most democratic ideals. Perhaps we would accept this bargain; but unfortunately, that is no longer an option. The equation of rewards for discipline has broken down, as it was bound to do. Union membership and socialist political support peaked in the late 1970s,

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but the Labor Movement’s decline began much earlier with the ebbing of militancy and strike involvement. Unions are formed as the crystallization of workers’ collective energies and like crystals their power comes from focusing and directing diffuse free energy. The problem then becomes that most unions and Labor Movement institutions do more than merely focus energy and spread militancy, they also restrain and redirect it away from radical strife towards conciliation and a peaceful settlement with capitalist authority. Negotiating a settlement that exchanges labor peace for specific gains for workers, unions become enforcers of this labor peace on their own members. Especially in the early years of the Labor Movement there was an energetic and often acrimonious debate among labor activists about the impact of union institutions, over why union leaders and formal union organizations often failed to deliver revolutionary change and why they often braked popular militancy. For some critics, the problem has been personal, a few self-serving labor bureaucrats, leaders that the American radical Daniel DeLeon called “labor fakirs.” Accused of betraying the working-class movement they came to lead, these traitors were attacked for protecting their own safety and position at the expense of the movement’s long-term vibrancy and success. Again and again, over the past century, labor radicals have complained of Labor leaders in power. Such recurring disappointment should suggest that the problem has gone beyond personal failings to an endemic problem of social movements. Domestication is no accident but is the natural path of social movements like unions not because it suits a desire for peace and security among the leadership but because it is part of the agreement, the deal, that leads to the establishment and institutionalization of the movement. By their nature, unions are not organs for social conflict. A strike, a demonstration, a protest march, a guerrilla band in the hills: these are conflicts. But a union in place speaks to a compromise; it is accepted, however begrudgingly, by management as well as by labor. Instead of continued conflict, the union represents by its very nature social pacification, an agreement between the classes. Unions can foster labor militancy by spreading resources and ideas, by giving militants a platform and legitimacy to support their radical preaching. Some unions continue to pursue class conflict, organizing education in democracy among an actively involved membership who push for ever more from management and the state to demonstrate to their membership the inadequacies of capitalism and bourgeois politics. Historically, however, such spark plug unionism has been overwhelmed by the reality of class agreement and social domestication inherent in the Labor Movement project of brokering a social contract. Once concessions are won, the union itself becomes responsible for maintaining the agreement, for enforcing social peace on the union membership. It is, therefore, in the nature of the union to discourage strikes and to substitute centralized negotiation, by bureaucrats and officials, for rank-and-file participation. Employers and state officials accept unions because the alternative has been unregulated popular militancy. But, of course, once unions have domesticated labor and taught workers to obey contracts and not to strike, then why should hostile employers and state officials continue to tolerate Labor?

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The downward path of strikes Unions depend on strikes. The collective effervescence of the labor movement, the occasion where workers directly confront management, strikes are the premier mobilizing vehicles for the Labor Movement, the battering ram forcing employers and state officials to recognize unions. But once established, strikes become the enemy of unions and regularized collective bargaining. For new unions, strikes create opportunities by roiling the seas of labor relations; this openness can be threatening, however, to established institutions and union leaders. Worse, spontaneous and local strikes can disrupt careful plans made by union leaders. They can make it difficult for unions to formulate a national policy towards management; they can violate union solidarity by favoring workers in strategic positions in the production process. And, worst of all, spontaneous strikes can threaten the union’s entire relationship with employers, relationships based on the union’s ability to restrain strikes. For a century, the rising tide of both union membership and strike activity masked the way the Labor Movement inhibited strikes. For a century after the beginnings of the Labor Movement in the 1880s, the strike rate rose with rising unionization rates because unionization promoted strikes. There are good reasons for this association of labor organization and strike activity.2 Unions tend to include the workers more interested in collective action, as shown by the fact that they have joined a union. Furthermore, unions facilitate strikes by providing strike funds, legal support, and institutional means to spread the strike. From the 1880s, strike activity rose steadily with increasing unionization until reaching a peak in the late 1970s when the share of workers striking was over seven times the level of the early 1900s (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). 30,000

Strikers (000s)

25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000 0 1901

1911

1921

1931

1941

1951

1961

1971

1981

1991

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Figure 6.1 Total number of strikers by year for sixteen countries since 1900. Note This figure shows the total number of strikers in sixteen countries for each year in the twentieth century.

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Annual striker rate

0.08

0.06

0.04

0.02

0

1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s Decade

Figure 6.2 Ratio of strikers to labor force, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900. Note This figure shows for sixteen countries the average number of strikers divided by the total labor force in the country for each decade since 1880.

This global increase in strike activity masked declines in particular countries. Strike activity began to fall in several countries as early as the 1920s. In the eleven countries where labor union membership has been declining most sharply since the 1970s, the share of the labor force striking peaked right after World War I, way back in 1919. In these countries, strike activity had two more peaks, after World War II and again in the 1970s, but the share of the labor force striking never again reached the 1919 level. In some cases, including Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, the generally maligned phrase “the withering away of the strike” applies where strong labor unions and corporatist political arrangements established after World War II replaced the strike. Elsewhere, strike activity drifted down after World War II, but remained at a fairly high level before dropping precipitously after 1980. But after a peak around 1979, the aggregate number of strikers in all 16 countries falls sharply, dropping by 90 percent by the end of the 1990s, falling to a level not seen since the beginning of the twentieth century when strikes were barely legal in some countries. The drop in strike activity came because union members have been growing less strike prone; the organized Labor Movement has been demobilizing spontaneous rank-and-file militancy throughout the century. The ratio of the number of strikers to union members has fallen from over 30 percent around 1900 to an average of only 17 percent in the 1950s and 1960s. After rebounding in the 1970s, to over 25 percent, the ratio of strikers to members plummets to 14 percent in the 1990s and under 7 percent in the 1990s (see Figure 6.3). This, at the same time, of course, that union membership growth fell to a crawl, and then turned negative (see Figure 6.4).

Ratio strikers/Union membership (%)

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Figure 6.3 Ratio of strikers to union membership, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900.

Average union membership growth rate (%)

Note For each decade since 1880, this figure shows for sixteen countries the average number of strikers divided by the previous year’s union membership.

25 20 15 10 5 0 5

1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s Decade

Figure 6.4 Union membership growth rate, decade averages for sixteen countries since 1900. Note For each decade since 1880, this figure shows for sixteen countries the average annual growth rate in union membership.

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How unions stop strikes Paternalists and individualist liberals knew how to deal with unions and labor unrest: denying that workers might have any legitimate grievance, they blamed strikes on radical activists. They blamed outside agitators for promoting discontent and disorder to attract dues-paying members to their organizations. “Professional labor agitators,” these are “unprincipled demagogues whose sole purpose is to live by the labor of others” (Corbin 1889: 414–15). The prefect of the French Rhone department wrote his minister that “most strikes have been fomented to advance a political agenda, to contribute to socialist propaganda.” A conservative French paper warned in 1884 that the miners of the Anzin basin “are the instruments of a revolutionary anarchist faction” who use the strike to spread hate. Yves Guyot, a leading French academic, agreed that strikes begin without legitimate grievances, brought on by revolutionary activists who use “intimidation, insults, threats, and even blows” to force workers to strike (Guyot 1894: 178, 181).3 No reasonable compromise is possible with strikers urged on by self-serving agitators and revolutionaries driven by an irrational hatred of the established social order. Instead, the appropriate response is to crush them with police and, if necessary, military force. But the sheer magnitude of rising strike activity combined with growing concern for poverty and sympathy with labor’s aspirations may lead some to question this simple interpretation. Instead of blaming strife on a few misguided or irresponsible agitators, liberals and other labor sympathizers faulted social circumstances, low wages, and harsh working conditions. Most of all, they blamed unrest on the “growth and development of large industrial establishments during the present century” which “has necessarily resulted in the creation of considerable bodies of workmen more or less separated in their lives and pursuits from those under whom they work.” Misunderstanding, ill will, and strife result in large establishments where “there cannot exist the intimate relation between the employer and workman” found in smaller work places (Royal Commission on Labour 1970: 120). Labor activists and their allies had long defended strikes as a response to low wages and harsh material circumstances.4 In the 1890s, however, a new voice ended the debate, giving official endorsement to labor’s interpretation as part of a broader argument that labor strife could be reduced by improving communication between workers and their employers through the establishment of strong trade unions and collective bargaining. Never popular with employers, who almost always preferred the simple assertion of their authority and right to manage, politicians especially turned to this view during crises, in response, for example, to strike waves and rising labor militancy during “moments of madness.” Reluctant to rely on repression, after the strike wave of 1889, Her Majesty’s government in the United Kingdom looked to promote collective bargaining as an alternative and appointed a Royal Commission on Labour to assess “questions affecting the relations between employer and employed, the combinations of employers and of employed, and the conditions of labour, which have been raised during the recent trade disputes in the United Kingdom.”

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As is usually the case, the Commission’s composition helped to determine its conclusions. The Commission’s chair, David Dale, was the namesake and nephew of Robert Owen’s partner at New Lenark. A director of Consett Ironworks, Dale was a Quaker who sought to promote social harmony on the basis of justice, good feeling, and a consensus built through open discussion. Denouncing strikes and lock-outs as “barbarous, cruel and stupid,” Dale sought to build social peace on the basis of voluntary collective bargaining between employers and a union of employees strong enough to make and to enforce agreements. He was the leading figure behind the creation in 1869 of “The Board of Arbitration and Conciliation for the Manufactured Iron Trade of the North of England.” The first president of the board, his character and persuasive powers were essential to winning the support of other employers, and his integrity was widely credited with the Board’s success (Odber 1951). Besides Dale, the Commission included others experienced in collective bargaining. Tom Mann was the only labor radical associated with the new unionism who was included. Other trade union representatives were conservatives. Edward Trow, for example, was a leader of the Association of Iron and Steel Workers who had worked with Dale in establishing and maintaining the North of England Iron Trade Conciliation Board and had helped to persuade workers to renounce striking and to rely instead on the Conciliation Board to resolve grievances. Among the most influential of the employers, the Commission included the Right Hon. A. J. Mundella. Son of an Italian political refugee, Mundella left school at age nine to seek his fortune in stocking manufacture. A Liberal MP, he served as President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s proIrish Home Rule government. Mundella’s principal political interest was to promote economic efficiency through the provision of education, particularly technical education, and by encouraging harmonious labor relations. A leading employer in the hosiery trade, Mundella helped to establish one of Britain’s first boards of conciliation, a model for all who followed. It was Mundella who persuaded Dale that conciliation boards could do “nothing without the organization of the union” and that a strong union is essential to ensure that the awards were enforced (Odber 1951: 211). Others supported Dale’s liberal reform position, including Sir W. T. Lewis, a self-made coal-mine owner; Gerald Balfour, brother of the Prime Minister; the former Liberal minister the Right Hon. H. H. Fowler, T. H. Ismay, the Liverpool shipping magnate; J. C. Bolton, the Cornish mine owner; and the Right Hon. Earl of Derby. The liberals who dominated the Commission organized its research to find underlying causes of unrest rather than to blame the work of radical agitators, and to present strong labor organizations as a cure rather than a cause of unrest. Much of the Commission’s time was spent investigating wages and working conditions, especially changes in the scale of production and relations between employers and employees; little was devoted to the agitators and radical agitation. Rather than blaming unrest on agitators, it sought the legitimate causes of discontent and sought ways to remove them (Royal Commission 1970: 8). The Commission, for example, hired the economist Robert Giffin to chart changes in

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nominal and real wages over the last thirty years, and it commissioned other reports on working conditions and the hours of work to establish the legitimate grounds for labor unrest. The Commission’s most creative energy was in its work on the role of unions in assuaging and avoiding disputes between capital and labor. In addition to investigating the causes of unrest, special attention was devoted to the state of employer and employee organization and particularly to bargaining relationships to find peaceful alternatives to strife. Unrest, the Commission concluded, was not a necessary consequence of low wages and bad working conditions, but came when these were combined with a failure of communication between management and labor. Lack of organization and employer repression could delay the outbreak of strikes, but the result, as in the case of the London dock workers, will be to produce more explosive and violent disputes when they finally erupt because the dispute will be unmediated by unions or other organizations. The key to avoiding strife and reducing its magnitude was to give the workers the opportunity to address their employers and to establish effective institutions to structure communication. Far from being the cause of unrest, trade unions, in the Commission’s view, are conservative institutions. Unions limit unrest both by reducing the causes of discontent, by negotiating for better wages and working conditions, by restraining spontaneous militancy, and by redirecting popular protest into peaceful channels and collective bargaining. The men of the Commission, and they were all men, wanted to improve working conditions and reduce poverty. But they were also successful and powerful within Victorian capitalism and favored reforms that would not challenge the underlying distribution of wealth and power within that world. They believed that trade unions had a place in this system, but it was because they were confident that collective bargaining would make unions an alternative to the unrestrained popular democracy of mass strike movements. Indeed, the Commission’s report was so critical of strikes that it was rejected not only by Tom Mann but by three of the Commission’s four conservative trade unionists as well. Besides Mann, the dissident group included William Abraham (a Welsh mine leader), James Mawdsley (a Lancashire textile union leader), and Michael Austin (an Irish union leader). This group signed a minority report calling for a greater state role in industry to promote democratic management and the redistribution of wealth: “With economic conditions such as we have described, the relations between employers and employed cannot, in our view, fail to be unsatisfactory” (Royal Commission 1970: 136). What was novel in the Royal Commission was the role the majority saw for labor unions and their leadership. It was revealing how the Commission casually dismissed unions’ sometimes radical rhetoric to argue that their chief objects were narrowly economic, and therefore subject to negotiation; here the Commission was as much normative, instructing unions on the correct choice of goals, as descriptive of actual union practice. Quoting Sidney Webb’s testimony, the Commission rejected traditional attacks on unions by concluding that “the essence of Trade Unionism is ‘collective bargaining.’ ”

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Rejecting the view of union leaders as radical agitators provoking unrest was crucial for the Royal Commission’s conclusion that unrest could be alleviated by strengthening unions. Reversing the traditional view, the Commission blamed recent unrest on the lack of organization among unskilled workers; had they had strong unions, unrest would have been avoided. Between individual workers and their employers there cannot be effective negotiations; grievances will fester until they explode in radical politics, strife, and violence. But collective bargaining between powerful organizations of workers and their employers would avoid this unrest by providing an alternative way to address grievances and by disciplining belligerent workers to contain spontaneous labor militancy. Once unions establish a secure monopoly of employment in a trade, they will address grievances by establishing better wages and working conditions, “improve the conditions of labour, protect members or groups of members from hard usage on the part of employers and manager” (Royal Commission 1970: 29). None of these goals pose a fundamental challenge to British capitalism or to British business; as simple quantitative goals, all allow for negotiation and compromise without challenging the rights of property or the power of capitalists over wage workers. Rather than restore social peace by repressing agitation, the Commission would reduce unrest by facilitating constructive collective bargaining to address the underlying causes of unrest and to enlist unions in restraining popular protest. Drawing on the experience of members Mundella and Dale, the Commission argued that constructive collective bargaining depended on strong unions to organize and discipline unrest. Strong organization, the Commission argued, is “a condition precedent to the establishment of permanent and effective joint boards of conciliation.” Established unions would fund full-time staff who would develop expertise that would command the respect of the workers. They would maintain benefit funds which would allow the union leadership to regulate strike action by restricting access to these funds. Without these elements of a strong organization, the Commission warned, it is difficult to obtain a satisfactory representation of workmen on such a board, and, even more important, it is difficult for the executive or leaders of the men to stop local strikes or to ensure that disputes shall be carried to the joint board, and that the decisions arrived at by that board shall be respected by the workmen. (Royal Commission 1970: 44) That is why the Commission recommended state intervention in a few cases, for workers seen as naturally powerless and unable to unionize. In a few cases, the Commission identified naturally powerless persons in need of protection, including “women, young persons, and children.” For these, the Commission would remedy the imbalance of power between employers and workers through direct state intervention. Because these “protected persons” are deficient in characteristics needed to form effective unions, the Commission would substitute state action for collective bargaining for them to maintain decent wages and

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working conditions. No such intervention is needed for adult men, however, where the Commission relies on the workers themselves to form institutions to redress the bargaining imbalance between employers and labor. Thus the Commission reversed the common employer approach to labor relations. Instead of upholding employers’ authority, the Commission labeled the condition where “each employer governs his establishment and deals with his own men with no outside interference” as a backward, “patriarchal condition.” Rather than looking to past forms of labor relations, the Commission warned that “from the evidence” where trade unionism is “in a weak and struggling condition” it “tends to increase the number and bitterness of industrial conflicts.” Strife is most common “[i]n weak organisations of no long standing,” where “the leaders or executive . . . have no great hold over the men, who are, in such cases, apt to abandon a union if its policy does not coincide with their own views.” A forward-looking, modern approach to labor relations would promote mutual respect and effective collective bargaining by supporting strong labor organizations (Royal Commission 1970: 44, 120). Here we see the true novelty of the Commission’s approach, the bargain it offers both workers and employers: to promote social peace, state officials and employers should support labor unions, a formal, organized Labor Movement, that would improve wages and working conditions through collective bargaining as a substitute for popular protest. Unions were to be agents of social harmony by forcing employers to negotiate while giving union leaders the tools to impose restraint on their membership. Notwithstanding occasional conflicts, the Commission found that “the increased strength of organizations may tend toward the maintenance of harmonious relations between employers and employed . . . peaceable relations are, upon the whole, the result of strong and firmly established trade unionism” (Royal Commission 1970: 60; Howell 2005: 64). New unions may be particularly strike-prone until they establish collective bargaining arrangements. But once established, lasting industrial peace is possible between rival organizations of employers and employed imbued with a desire for peace and led by leaders who, because of their broader perspective, are inherently more moderate than the union rank-and-file. Dismissing attacks on trade unions as both unwarranted and misguided, the Commission argued that the “only means of avoiding strikes is either to crush Trade Unionism or to perfect the machinery for working ‘collective bargaining’ ” and it preferred compromise and conciliation to war (Royal Commission 1970: 33). I dwell on the Royal Commission’s work because it represents a view to which state officials and some employers would turn in time of need to deal with rising tides of unrest. It gave encouragement to liberals and others sympathetic with unions, and provided arguments and evidence to combat repressive management policies. Still, few employers accepted its defense of strong unions; more preferred to remain “masters in their own house” or patrons de droit divin (divine right employers). But the Royal Commission presented an argument that would live on; resonating with liberals, it would remain available when repression and employer paternalism failed to contain unrest. For those times, the

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Royal Commission provided a roadmap, an alternative path towards social peace that maintained authority through collective bargaining, with labor discipline imposed by strong unions. There were two sides to the Royal Commission’s work: employers were to accept unions, and unions were to discipline their members. Employer’s respect was to be earned by the development of the means of industrial combat, large benefit funds and a large union staff able to compel employers to negotiate because they could regulate popular unrest. Employers, such as the ladies’ garment manufacturers in New York, “cannot, of course, surrender the control and management of their factories to the Union.” And they agreed to a contract with the union on the condition that the “Union indicates that it assents” to this “control and management.” In the New York case, employers would agree to hire union members and recognize sanitary conditions, wages, and hours agreed to with the union. They will even work “to strengthen the Union, if it be but well organized and wisely led” (Cohen 1916: 21; also Greenwald 2005). Unionization would give the workers, through the union, a voice in setting wages and working conditions, but this voice would be clearly secondary to the “control and management” reserved to the employers. Under these conditions, strong unions would bring real improvements for workers, but they would not bring participatory democracy because the essence of this form of organization is that the union leadership will restrain popular action. That is why many labor activists, like Tom Mann, rejected the Commission’s report, and later arguments like it. For them, the hierarchical organizations favored by the Commission abandoned their aspirations to build unions to promote self-management and rank-and-file democracy. Nonetheless, for many, the Commission’s promises were irresistible: build a strong organization and substitute the sure gains of collective bargaining for the repeated hazards of strikes. All that is lost is the utopian vision of popular democracy. If there was not a world to win, at least this could be a step forward. The Royal Commission’s arguments were widely disseminated by liberal academics and other advocates of moderate or reform unionism throughout the world. The French law professor Paul Pic, for example, advocated strong unions and collective bargaining in France. Comparing French unions with a somewhat ideal image of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, he argued that British unions were more effective than their French counterparts at raising wages because they had built strong organizations that could limit strikes in exchange for wage concessions from management. By comparison, French unions were ineffective because through persistent devotion to utopian ideals of revolution, they shunned the high dues and strong organization that would allow collective bargaining by giving the union leadership control over rank-and-file militancy. Weak, they have not done as much good as have their counterparts in the United Kingdom or the United States and, because of their weakness, they remained strike-prone. “Strongly organized, disposing of considerable resources,” he wrote, “unions that can support long strikes can bring employers to make concessions that will resemble peace treaties between two powerful rivals” (Pic 1903: 392, 391).

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Preaching the gospel of strong organization, labor discipline, and “responsible” unionism, Pic developed arguments that would flourish throughout the world in the twentieth century. Fred Hall, a young American economist, cited the Royal Commission’s work in his 1898 doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Denying that established unions cause strikes, Hall argued that “militancy” is a stage that unions pass through early in their lives before they have established strong organization. Once they develop their internal organization and bureaucracy, Hall expected unions to settle down to constructive collective bargaining and strike restraint. Addressing a joint conference of employers and unionists, Harris Weinstock warned of the great dangers to society coming from unbridled conflict between organized business and workers. “Modern society,” he warned: sees two great camps of workers and employer brought into life such as the world has never before seen. These great camps can become hostile, as they so often have become, and work for each others’ loss and injury, or they can work together for the common good. With its Boards of Conciliation and collective bargaining, Great Britain provides a model, saving “hundreds of millions of dollars” by avoiding strife through negotiation and responsible unionism (Hall 1898: 81; Weinstock 1911: 142; also see Cohen 1916: 28). Liberal social scientists were drawn into this discussion to argue that unions were not responsible for strikes. French economist Charles Rist, for example, used simple, but for the time advanced, statistical techniques to argue that even France’s radical unions were not strike-prone but rather that economic conditions were responsible for rising strike activity around 1900 (Rist 1907). Developed further by American economists John R. Commons and Selig Perlman, the argument that mature unions will discourage strikes came to be cited regularly to argue against repression and for public support for unions, dispute mediation, and collective bargaining (Bouglé 1908: 125). Nor was this approach restricted to those who favor capitalism. While advocating strikes which he believed could heighten awareness of class conflict, Lenin warned that trade unions would lead workers away from radicalism to focus on narrow economic demands to be achieved through class collaboration (Lenin 1944). Pro-capitalist liberals were attracted to an argument that defended unions because it allowed them to square the circle of their values. Responsible unions would promote social peace and maintain capitalism while ameliorating the system’s harshness and removing some of the greatest inequities. They would bring higher wages and better working conditions without disruptive strife because the strength of their organization would compel employers to negotiate and give responsible labor leaders the power to restrain improper rank-and-file militancy. Using such arguments, liberals were sometimes able to swing government support behind unions, as in the debate over the Wagner Act in the United States in 1935, or to defend French unions in the early 1980s. All that would be

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lost in the well-organized, bureaucratized, and centralized Labor Movement they advocated would be unions as democratic organizations spreading democracy from the political to the economic realm by empowering workers and training them in self-management. Instead, business unionists and their liberal allies would organize the strike, give workers real gains, higher wages, and some protection against capricious management, but at the price of accepting an institutional alternative to resort to random, spontaneous upheavals. Trading “responsible” behavior for material gains, the “responsible” Labor Movement would be a service organization, serving members not adherents, even a business giving workers collective bargaining services in exchange for dues and other support.

“Low dues and communistic soup” The Royal Commission and its followers proposed a disciplined union movement that would gain higher wages and better working conditions by balancing a union system of hierarchy and authority against the corporate organization of the capitalist employer. Not that advocates of bureaucratic unionism were necessarily indifferent to democratic concerns; on the contrary, some believed sincerely that a practical economic democracy could be built with strong, centralized labor organizations because only such unions could compel management to respond to the demands of workers. Nonetheless, this was a vision of democracy as a service provided to the workers by others, by union staff and experts hired by the union without requiring the direct participation of the workers themselves beyond paying dues; nor did it foster the development of new skills and knowledge among the workers. Such skills were shunned by a bureaucracy who would come to fear spontaneity as much as did the employer. Because it offered real benefits to workers, bureaucratic unionism has been attractive to many radical activists who came to choose organization over spontaneity. There was an active debate before World War I over the relationship between these two, between the Labor Movement and labor movement, and the heart of this debate was this relationship between union organization and strike effectiveness. Those who emphasize immediate gains would build strong organization even at the expense of limiting popular participation and democratic empowerment because they were convinced that only strong organizations could defeat employers in strikes. Agreeing with those who favored unions as vehicles for social peace, advocates of well financed, tightly hierarchical labor organizations called for high dues and union discipline because they thought these would win better concessions from employers, even winning higher wages and better working conditions through the mere threat of striking. Forgetting democratic ideals and abandoning any pretense of building a revolution through mass strikes, the Labor Movement ideal became that of building unions strong enough to intimidate management through control over their own membership. One delegate to the French printers’ union (Fédération du livre) congress in 1890

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expressed this view well. In the future, he argued, the workers’ interests will best be defended “by negotiations, by diplomacy . . . by mediation supported by the great, disciplined [emphasis added] union battalions . . . more than by frequent strikes, too often ruinous and which are the source of deplorable hostility, open or latent, between employers and workers” (Laroque 1938: 147). In the United States, this “business union” approach came to be associated with Samuel Gompers, long-time head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Assessing relatively high dues, as much as 2 percent of the average worker’s pay, business unions raised funds sufficient to accumulate benefit funds, including strike funds, and to hire paid staff to work full time on maintaining the organization. Financially independent of employers, and often paid significantly more than the average worker, paid staff allowed unions to better service their membership. Bureaucracy allowed unions to accumulate knowledge and expertise, to maintain institutional memory, and to maintain a presence even when the membership was working or enjoying leisure. High dues would also support insurance benefits such as for sickness, unemployment, or death. By providing financial benefits restricted to members in good standing, these benefits helped unions to overcome the collective action problem and avoid free riding; by replacing some of strikers’ lost income, strike benefit funds in particular allowed unions to sustain longer strikes.5 Control over these benefits also gave union leaders more leverage over their members, a reward for following official union policy and a penalty for violating them. Thus far, advocates of high dues were only establishing insurance programs little different from those provided by credit unions or other private ventures. But there was more than this involved in building “disciplined union battalions.” By funding union bureaucracies and benefit funds, high dues shift power up the union hierarchy; not only is the union leadership licensed to act in the name of the membership but it has control over knowledge and resources that allow it to impose its will on the workers. Implanted in the union through long-tenured officers and bureaucrats, knowledge and experience are great assets; but they also necessarily give authority and legitimacy to those, the leadership, who wield it even over the rank-and-file membership itself. Control over strike funds gives meaning to the nominal authority union leaders have to sanction or to reject rank-and-file strikes; paid staff give the leadership both patronage positions to reward allies and obedient adjuncts to express their will throughout the union in the name of the union. Paid jobs allow the union leadership to remain in office long enough to accumulate knowledge, expertise, and institutional memory; and long enough to entrench their control over the union. Power and discipline are not incidental to the bureaucratic union program; they are central because they create the conditions for labor statesmen; by demoting the strike to a weapon of last resort, they make their organizations respectable, even attractive to employers. Advocates of strong and centralized union institutions argued that through better planning and better strike support, business unions could win more strikes and other disputes to force greater concessions from management. Visiting France, AFL president Samuel Gompers berated French unionists for their low

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dues and lack of benefit funds or paid staff.6 Echoing comments made by a German unionist, Josef Steiner, he claimed that their strong union organizations and large benefit funds helped unions to conduct more successful strikes and gain larger wage increases (Steiner 1909). Such claims for the superiority of business unionism did not go unanswered. Responding to Steiner, the French metal-workers’ union leader Merrheim showed that French unions had conducted more effective strikes than had the Germans; and Georges Yvetôt similarly answered Gompers by pointing to the bloody failure of many American strikers (Merrheim 1909; Yvetôt 1909). Reviewing government statistics, the revolutionary syndicalist leaders of the French Confédération générale du travail, Victor Griffuelhes and Émile Pouget showed that French unions were at least as effective in winning strikes as were business unions in the United States or elsewhere (Griffuelhes 1906; Pouget 1907). Confirming this conclusion with modern econometrics, I found that before World War I, business unions (whether in the United States or in France) were associated with fewer strikes, longer strikes, and a different pattern of strike success, but no absolute superiority. Despite the lack of benefit funds and paid staff, revolutionary syndicalist unions were able to strike effectively by mobilizing large strikes that compelled government officials to intervene on their behalf before the strike dragged on long enough to overwhelm the union’s scant resources (Friedman 1988, 1997, 1998). If critics of business unions had reason to disdain “pitting the worker’s sous against the francs of the capitalist,” that does not explain why the claims of business unionism were so widely, even uncritically accepted (Yvetôt 1909). Certainly, the Royal Commission contributed, as did the reputation of established scholars, like the Webbs, and the claims of some prominent union leaders. And business unionism was the form best suited to the wishes of capitalists and managers looking for a vehicle to limit labor militancy. But, perhaps the simplest reason for the inflated reputation of bureaucratic unionism is that so many middle-class and academic observers wanted to believe that this form of unionism was more effective because, beyond strengthening the power of organized labor, it promised social reform and social peace within capitalism. If so, this would not be the first time, nor the last, that social observers saw what they wanted to see. A high dues union policy that drives away potential members without improving the union’s fighting ability appears without merit. But the stronger critique of business unionism is on different, more fundamental grounds. Business unionism is not only a different tactic than that followed by unions with lower dues and weaker organization, it is a different strategy with different goals. Separating the functions of management and planning from the union rank-and-file, business unions abandon the old union goal of cultivating democracy by empowering the workers themselves, substituting goals of improving the working conditions and income of the workers. Institutions like unions are schools, training their members in social life. By leaving control in the hands of the rank-and-file and building only enough organization to coordinate the

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spontaneous movements of the membership, revolutionary unions train their membership in democratic self-management. Business unions teach the need for hierarchy, to follow the lead, even obey the orders, of those who know better; they teach workers to sacrifice autonomy and democratic self-rule for higher wages and other material gain. And, because they are the organizations of the workers themselves, these centralized Labor Movement organizations teach lessons in hierarchy and obedience to authority even better than do capitalist managers.

Organizing the Labor Movement In the early years of the labor movement, demonstrations, strikes, and union drives were conducted with virtually no organization or paid staff. With hundreds of thousands of members in affiliated organization, the Knights of Labor in the United States or the Confédération générale du travail in France were managed by a skeletal staff: a secretary general (or “Grand Master Workman”), a treasurer, and an editor of the organization’s journal (Phelan 2000). Affiliated unions had little more organization. Instead of centralized, bureaucratic organization, the early labor movement relied on the self-organization of local workers themselves; what we might today call syndicalism. By leaving authority with the local workgroup, syndicalism teaches democratic values; it gives workers opportunities to learn to manage their affairs and directly manage their relations with management. There are, of course, real problems with syndicalism. The lack of formal organization inhibits communication between different workgroups and can hinder support, financial or even moral, from one group to another. Negotiations, either with employers or with state officials, are also hindered both by the lack of authority for labor’s agents, the multitude of independent groups, and the lack of information and expertise. Once agreements are made, gains often evaporate because syndicalist unions lack the means to police or to enforce them. Employers hesitate to make concessions to an organization that lacks authority over the workers. Ironically, the lack of organization in syndicalist unions can also limit labor protest. Without a centralized organization, protest depends on the resources, including the social connections, available to the local workgroups. Those with strong connections, including longer tenured workers, better paid workers, and those with skills in short supply or in a strategic position in the production process are often able to organize and strike on their own. But without help from a central organization, other workers often lack the resources to organize or strike. Thus organization changes the character of the labor movement, and can help to build a stronger labor movement. A continuing bureaucracy able to accumulate and to centralize expertise and funds can spread militancy, maintain campaigns over larger geographic areas, and sustain actions over time. Organization allows unions to enforce contracts by regulating protest. And by uniting the resources of otherwise isolated workers, organization multiplies workers’ power.

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The American socialist Irving Howe said: “The only certain way of preventing bureaucracy is to refrain from organizing, but the refusal to organize with one’s fellow men can only lead to acquiescence in detested power or to isolated and futile acts of martyrdom and terrorism” (Howe 1946: 211). But, and here is the rub, organization can change the goals of a movement. By removing the locus of decision making from the workers themselves, organization can empower union leaders against workers. Removing the movement’s direction from the workers themselves is not a neutral act with respect to the movement’s goals because it reduces the movement’s role as an educational institution for the working class. A local union run by the workers who are responsible for setting policy and living with the consequences is a school for conscious democratic political economy; a centralized, hierarchical union is a service organization that gives the workers wages, grievance arbitration, and other benefits and services in exchange for wages. One prepares workers to assume power in a democratically managed economy; the other improves the distribution of income and power within capitalism. At the inaugural convention of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in December 1914, Joseph Schlossberg pronounced “The ultimate aim of the Labor Movement is to bring the working class into its own, to transform it from a working class within a Capitalist Society into a free and democratic industrial republic” (Fraser 1991: 94). But this is not the type of union acceptable to employers, or even to many of labor’s liberal allies who feared class conflict and rank-and-file militancy. Instead, they made peace with bureaucratic unions whose essential role became one of brokering the exchange of material benefits for labor peace. At its best, bureaucracy and organization creates a very restricted form of economic democracy, one where a strong union limits the predations of capitalist management by balancing organized Labor’s countervailing powers against the force of capitalism (Galbraith 1993). Throughout the twentieth century, radicals have attacked union bureaucracy which they have blamed on the failings of individual labor leaders who are at best misguided, at worst duplicitous and mendacious. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, bitterly and personally attacked Social Democratic leaders Bernstein and Kautsky, along with the German union leader Karl Legien who she blamed for diverting the SPD from its proper revolutionary vocation to make peace with the capitalist enemy “in return for a limited number of places in society” (Nettl 1966: 1:247). Lenin too denounced the reformist politics of union and socialist organizations and suggested that “what is to be done,” is to find better leaders, a vanguard who would lead the workers to a revolutionary program. Some activists in the British Labour Left denounced the party’s leaders and their persistent betrayals for the Party’s failure to follow a revolutionary socialist policy. But can such consistent failures be attributed to individuals? Almost without exception, every union and every socialist party has followed the same trajectory from shop floor militancy to organization, collective bargaining, and the establishment of union hierarchy. First there is upheaval, a rank-and-file rebellion, demonstrations and strikes when, like the Chicago garment workers in 1910,

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“The movement’s desires were not yet encoded in the rational, utilitarian language and psychology of collective bargaining, its energies and forms of activity not yet encased in the bureaucratic procedures of ‘modern’ trade unionism and contractual obligation” (Fraser 1991: 54). New leaders, like Sidney Hillman among these Chicago garment strikers, arise from this unrest, to organize the movement and to bargain with management. New unions, like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, are established; at first, they maintain a decentralized structure with power exercised locally, democratically, close to the union’s rank-and-file. Then a union bureaucracy arises, not imposed from outside, but filled initially with the most active, aggressive, and politically committed cadre from the ranks of the union’s militants. Men like Hillman are not aspiring businessmen, and are certainly not deliberate traitors to the cause of labor’s emancipation. Nevertheless, step-by-step, they erect a bureaucratic union hierarchy where the workers who have assumed power through their own activity now obey the orders of their union leadership. Within a generation, men like Hillman, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, and others, may not have forgotten their democratic aspirations, but these dreams have been buried under the pressing business of managing a union as large as many capitalist corporations, and as hierarchically organized. The triumph throughout labor’s world of bureaucratic organization has been taken as evidence that organization is inevitable, that collective action requires bureaucracy and hierarchy. This is a widely held view, often ascribed to the German scholar Max Weber as well as France’s Jacques Ellul and Italy’s Robert Michels, and, for unions to Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Weber 2001; Ellul 1964; Michels 1949; Kerr et al. 1964; Webb and Webb 1911). In the Webbs’ classic work, Industrial Democracy, they acknowledge that early unions were run on the principle of “primitive democracy” with positions held in rotation and all major decisions made on the principle that “what concerns all should be decided by all.” The Webbs argue that hierarchy and authority enter into the unions because the growing volume of work requires the establishment of a union civil service with specialized knowledge and expertise. “In passing from a local to a national organisation,” they claim that “the Trade Union unwittingly left behind the ideal of primitive democracy. The setting apart of one man to do the clerical work destroyed the possibility of equal and identical service by all the members, and laid the foundation of a separate governing class. Growth consolidated this ruling elite: With every increase in the society’s membership, with every extension or elaboration of its financial system or trade policy, the position of the salaried official became, accordingly, more and more secure. The general secretaries themselves changed with the development of their office. The work could no longer be efficiently performed by an ordinary artisan. . . . The paramount necessity of efficient administration has cooperated with this permanence in producing a progressive differentiation of an official governing class, more and more marked off by character, training, and duties form the bulk of the members. (Webb and Webb 1911: 15–16)

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Here we have Weber’s “iron cage,” an image widely accepted among social scientists and even labor activists as justifying abandoning participatory democracy, whether in the union or the workplace or society. Yet I suspect that even the Webbs were not satisfied with the argument that I quote above. Specialization, the need for a trained secretarial and clerical staff, hardly explains the centralization of authority in the hands of union leaders. That is why the Webbs give another explanation of the decline of union democracy: the need for the union to focus its resources against its opponents. But it was, in our opinion, not so much the growth of the financial and secretarial transactions of the unions, as the exigencies of their warfare with the employers that first led to a departure from this ideal . . . and accordingly at all critical times we find the direction of affairs passing out of the hands of the general meeting into those of a responsible, if not a representative committee. (Webb and Webb 1911: 8) Unions, the Webbs conclude, abandon democratic forms because authority and hierarchy help to overcome opposition. The “iron cage” then is a social imperative, not a technological one and it rests on the allegedly superior fighting quality of the bureaucratic union. Thus the “iron cage” rests on a peculiar and flawed assumption. The question whether a decentralized and democratic syndicalist union or a centralized and authoritarian business union is more effective in conducting strikes is an empirical one. Would an authoritarian organization be better able to mobilize rank-and-file resources than one run democratically? On the contrary, as we discussed above, bureaucracy can even limit union effectiveness; democratic unions might be more effective because workers are more likely to support actions they choose than those directed from above by a distant and isolated leadership and because democratic unions tap into more resources and more talents by involving more of their members in planning and managing actions. Indeed, the decline in union growth rates over time and the declining impact of strike involvement on growth suggests this point: authoritarian unions are less effective at mobilizing the rank-and-file than were their democratic predecessors. If there is an “iron cage” and if bureaucratic unions are more effective, it is because they are better able to end strikes than to fight them, and, therefore, can bargain more effectively with employers by offering labor peace, whereas the most the syndicalists can offer is a truce until the next battle of an endless war to create economic democracy by expropriating capitalist property. By giving the union hierarchy control over the union and its strikes, bureaucratic and authoritarian unions can offer something valuable to employers, to end strikes and to honor long-term contracts. Repeatedly throughout the early history of the labor movement, employers conceded to strikes only to face more strikes and more unrest; as Luxemburg hoped, each strike led to more strikes leaving employers with little reason to grant concessions. The rise of bureaucratic, business unions changed this; by giving the union leadership control over the strike, it allows the

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union leadership to regulate and discipline strikes. And with the power to limit strikes, union leaders can negotiate for wage and other gains, offering labor peace in exchange. Suppose then that it is true that bureaucratic unions can win more concessions on wages and working conditions; why would that necessarily mean that workers will prefer that type of organization? Workers have many reasons to seek union organization, and advancing their personal material interests is only one, and not necessarily the most important. Collective action happens to achieve collective ends. After all, as I discussed earlier, those who only care to advance their personal material interests will shun all collective action because they can do better for themselves as strike breakers or scabs! Working-class collective action happens only because workers have other interests than material gains; it happens only because workers seek collective gains, gains in respect, in voice, in democracy that can only happen when their entire group, or class, is elevated. The question of the appropriate form of labor organization then is about ends rather than means. Perhaps business unions are better at achieving higher wages, but that is not particularly meaningful to organizations formed to achieve different goals. And if workers wanted an organization to achieve their collective goal of empowerment and democracy, then would they choose one where power resides in a hierarchically organized bureaucracy charged to deliver material benefits? Certainly, business unions and parliamentary socialist parties have brought great gains to workers, but they have not brought empowerment and democracy because that is not their goal. For workers, business unions become service organizations; at best, competent law firms, efficient insurance companies, or capable lobbying firms. Providing these services gives unions no particular claim on the public nor even on the loyalty of the workers themselves. Each service duplicates work done by other agencies; and because these services are particular, private to the workers, there is no particular reason for public interest. Business unionism did not triumph because it provided something special for the workers; instead, it has achieved nearly universal success because it represented a viable class compromise. For labor, business unions offered workers real benefits, higher wages and a certain check on management power. But if business unions require concessions from employers, they have been tolerated by employers and state officials because they do not challenge fundamental management prerogatives or capitalist property. Compared with syndicalist unions with their mass strikes, business unionism was acceptable; few in the economic and political elite found it desirable. Instead, most in these elites accepted business unions because they promised to regulate labor militancy and to discipline the strike. In short, they only accepted unions in times of upheaval and duress, and only those whose leaders promised to limit the scope of rankand-file democracy.7 The institutional Labor Movement represented a class compromise granting benefits to workers but conceding that power would ultimately remain elsewhere, with the union leaders who control labor’s institutions and, most of all, with the capitalists who will retain authority in the enterprise. That is why this

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unionism has been inherently unstable. To be acceptable to management, there must be the threat of militancy in the background; but the unions are organized precisely to minimize this militancy. Maintaining the class compromise proved as difficult as devising it. Because capital’s tolerance for even the most cautious and conservative unionism rests on its fear of unbridled labor militancy, how is the threat of militancy maintained without unleashing it? But union membership growth depends on involving the rank-and-file in militant action like strikes; how are unions and the spirit of worker militancy maintained while bureaucratizing labor relations? And if unions do unleash strikes and push for rank-andfile democracy, how is the militant genie released without so frightening capital that it would abandon any notion of class compromise?

7

The limits of social democracy Did success kill the Labor Movement?

To bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families Election Manifesto of the British Labour Party, 1974

Labour triumphant? In the fall of 1973, Edward Heath’s three-year-old Conservative Party government was visibly flagging. Elected in 1970, promising to reverse a century of relative economic decline, Heath sought to reinvigorate British industry, and to restore the purchasing power of the Pound, by restricting wage growth and reining in Britain’s increasingly militant labor movement. By the fall of 1973, he had failed in all of his goals and faced an economic crisis that would have challenged the strongest governments. Rapid worldwide economic growth in the early 1970s had driven up raw material and food prices even before OPEC, an alliance of oil-producing countries, took advantage of the Arab–Israeli war in October 1973 to raise oil prices by 400 percent. Combined with growing labor militancy, rising raw material prices threatened to produce a worldwide price inflation. By the end of 1973, British prices were rising at 15 percent a year and rising prices had driven Britain’s trade deficit to over 3 percent of national income; higher oil prices were expected to add another 2 percent to this, the British Pound was expected to drop still more, further exacerbating inflation. Economists writing about the economic crisis of the 1970s have emphasized the inflationary impact of rising raw material prices and global economic boom. In an oft-told tale, rising oil prices, declining trade balances, and accelerating inflation brought down liberal governments, pursuing Keynesian policies, from Sweden to Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These social democratic governments were replaced with conservative regimes, most prominently Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and the American Ronald Reagan, who promoted low inflation with restrictive macroeconomic policies, expanded global trade, and deregulation. But these political turns were based on more than the business cycle. Labor policy was central to the collapse of post-war Keynesianism and the swing to the right that came after 1975.

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In the United Kingdom, for example, Heath and his Labour predecessors and successors all faced a revitalized left rooted in a militant popular movement for economic democracy. After labor militancy and popular unrest drove Labour from power in 1970, Labour rode the same movement back to power in 1973. But unable, and unwilling, to follow it to economic democracy, the Labour Government was toppled in 1979 by the very tiger it rode to power. Trying to restore the conditions for capitalist investment and profitability by restraining wages and labor militancy, Labour followed an old script and offered labor peace for concessions from employers. But this time no one was listening. A growing number of British workers and labor activists had lost faith with class compromises that had abandoned the goal of economic democracy without delivering rising wages. Labour’s class compromises no longer satisfied business either. After twenty years of rising labor militancy British employers were no longer willing to compromise. After two decades of rising strike activity, they had lost faith in the ability of union leaders and Labour Party politicians to deliver labor peace, at the same time that expanded global trade and the rising scale and concentration of industry had given them new tools to defeat unions on their own. At the same time, Labour’s failure to discipline its rank-and-file persuaded British Conservatives and capitalists that the business union-brokered class compromise was no longer viable. Instead, they adopted a position of class war. Unwilling to satisfy its constituents, and unable to satisfy its opponents, the Labour Government collapsed in a bitter civil war within the working class, with rising strike activity, a veritable rank-and-file rebellion against union and party leadership that lasted well into the next decade. In its details, the British experience 1974–79 is sui generis. In its details the experience is unique, but it is representative in its broader meaning. Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey are specifically British figures, as, of course, is Margaret Thatcher. But the general pattern is found throughout the capitalist world of the 1970s. Everywhere, class compromise collapsed in the 1970s because workers wanted more: more power, more democracy than the old Labor compromise allowed. Disappointed with their union and party leadership, workers protested in an epic strike wave that caused capitalists to lose faith in the ability of Labor Movement leaders, union leaders, and socialist politicians to restrain labor unrest. Abandoned on both sides, the business unionists and their social democratic allies were left adrift.

“The finest Socialist Programme I have seen in my lifetime” By 1973, Britain’s Tories faced a renewed and refreshed Labour Party, reinvigorated with the energies of militant workers angry at attempts to limit earnings and restrain militancy. In the 1960s, rising rank-and-file militancy and a growing shop-steward movement had defeated efforts by Harold Wilson’s Labour government to rein in labor militancy, to restrain wages, and to promote productivity growth. Challenging the Government’s pay policy, a new generation of

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radicals assumed leadership positions within unions, committed to rank-and-file democracy and a renewed campaign for a socialist Britain.1 Wilson’s attempt to promote productivity growth through tripartite alliances, of business, unions, and the government, and shop-floor cooperation had also come to naught except that it left in its wake a set of larger multinational enterprises less vulnerable to local labor disputes and relatively independent of government. At the time, it was a reinvigorated shop-steward movement that undermined Wilson’s government; a surge of strike activity, 1968–70, and a sharp increase in wages notwithstanding the government’s attempts to limit inflation and to protect profits. By 1970, employers were disgusted with Labour’s inability to restrain popular militancy, but attempts to do so had left the alliance of unions and Labour Party parliamentarians in shambles. The Conservatives won a solid victory in that year’s elections over a demoralized Labour Party and a divided Labor Movement. Few expected the dramatic Labour resurgence that came next. In power, Heath’s Conservative government abandoned earlier conservatives’ compromises to encourage investment and industrial innovation by attacking trade unions; and where Labour’s voluntary restraint policy had failed, Heath imposed a statutory wage freeze and new legislation restricting labor militancy. Heath ran into a wall of unrest. The number of strikers during his government, over 6.2 million between 1970 and 1973, exceeded any other four-year period since the end of World War I. His aggressive policy failed to restrain wage inflation, but it quickly revitalized the alliance between unions and the Labour Party. In the late 1960s, radical union leaders like Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones led rank-and-file movements against Harold Wilson’s Labour Government; Heath drove them back into alliance with Wilson’s Labour Party. Soon Scanlon, Jones, and other radicals were meeting with Labor Party parliamentarians to plan joint actions (Coates 1980: 56–7). A new left alliance was formed uniting labor radicals recruited from the shop floor with the technocratic leadership of the Labour Party in opposition. The Labour Party of the 1970s was very different than its 1960s counterpart. At the beginning of the 1960s, Labour was an authoritarian party dominated by its Parliamentary leadership and a few union leaders who together used their control over the Party’s apparatus to restrict debate. Labour opened up in the 1960s, just in time to welcome a new wave of radical democrats to the Party. Inspired by the civil rights, feminist, anti-war, and student movements in the United States, France, and elsewhere, a growing number of young people, especially, joined in Britain’s “new social movements” against war, racism, and sexism. Frustrated with Heath’s old-style Tory government, they flocked to the unions and the Labour Party in the early 1970s. Seeking to reverse their recent electoral defeat, ambitious Labour Party politicians were happy to recruit militant voters alienated by Heath notwithstanding these voters’ radical inclination; some idealists, including some on the left of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well as leftist union leaders, saw democratic allies in these new social movements and an opportunity to reinvigorate socialist politics.

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Out of power, Labour committed itself to a dynamic and radical political program. In 1972, the party’s annual conference voted: to adopt a fresh approach to the relationship between government and industry . . . to mould industry into a more humane and democratic form . . . to redress the balance of power between giant corporations and the community . . . to attack economic inequality in all its manifestations. (Coates 1980: 86) To match these words, the party would establish a National Enterprise Board with compulsory planning agreements between government agencies and businesses to steer and to regulate investment; it would expand trade union rights and inaugurate a system of direct worker democracy within firms; and it would redistribute income through expanded pensions, price controls, public sector investments, and a steeply progressive wealth tax. Suspicious of politicians who had disappointed them before, union leaders insisted on a clear endorsement of this new, radical politics by Labour’s leadership; and the leaders delivered. Leftlabor leader Michael Foot endorsed “The finest Socialist Programme I have seen in my lifetime.” Denis Healey, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised that new taxes would produce “howls of anguish from the . . . rich.” Harold Wilson, the unions’ scourge as Prime Minister in the 1960s, defended industrial militancy and the right to strike against government wage restraints (Coates 1980: 3). British governments can call elections at any time within a five-year period, but most enjoying a secure parliamentary majority like Heath’s will wait before chancing another election. For this reason, Labour leaders and trade unionists expected to have several more years to hone their new programs and sort out the party’s leadership. But labor unrest brought Labour back to power sooner than expected. Angry at higher prices, and the great profits to be made by energy companies with the sharp run-up in oil prices, British coal miners rejected the Government’s offer of a 7 percent wage increase. Their strike was a direct challenge to Heath’s economic policy that Heath met by raising the ante. After imposing a three-day work week to save energy, Heath called for new elections for 28 February 1974 campaigning on a platform of “Who runs the Country?” Heath expected a victory that would allow him to stare down the miners and then to force unions to accept his wage and industrial relations policies. For its part, Labour campaigned on a program promising “far greater economic equality – in income, wealth and living standards.” A new Labour Government would “[i]ncrease social equality by giving far greater importance to full employment, housing, education and social benefits.” Most of all, Labour would “[b]ring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families” (Labour Party 1974). Labour would reach these goals with a radical expansion of democracy and popular power, including the “assertion of democratic control over the industrial decisions which determined the lives of every individual within our democracy.”

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The Party promised a renewed Social Contract with the unions to involve working people in managing society by expanding social regulation of capitalist property and by developing government policy in consultation with union leaders. Answering Heath’s platform question, Labour promised that its new Social Contract with labor unions would promote social peace on the basis of expanded democratic participation. Jack Jones, leader of the rank-and-file of the renewed Transport and General Workers Union, saw the Social Contract as creating “basic standards which no worker (or pensioner either) can be below, but which offers the right of negotiation about the whole complex range of subjects – including productivity – which are central to the lives of individual workers.” For Jones and other labor leaders, including leaders of Labour’s left, agreements between unions and the Labour Party had placed “Industrial Democracy . . . into the center of Party thinking and policy” (Coates 1980: 5–6). No doubt, some party leaders viewed Labour’s program as purely opportunistic, designed to do nothing more than renew the party’s electoral base. Others took it more seriously. Organic labor leaders like Jones and Scanlon and radical intellectuals were seeking in the early 1970s an alternative, working-class political economy to counter the period’s growing capitalist crisis. By draining the reserve army of the unemployed and encouraging working-class political militancy, nearly thirty years of Keynesian policies and relatively rapid economic growth had created a fundamental crisis of capitalist profitability. With profit margins shrinking, capitalists demanded lower wages and living standards and more control over working conditions in order to restore profitability through a production speed-up.2 Against this capitalist political economy, radicals developed an alternative vision where productivity would be increased by involving workers in management. Rejecting retreat, they would move forward further to restore the conditions for economic growth by raising productivity by encouraging better work by involved workers. Rather than undermining industrial development, radicals argued that democracy and equality would promote economic growth. This was the theory behind the Labour Party’s manifesto in February 1974 calling for a partnership between the government and organized labor: Only practical action by the Government to create a much fairer distribution of the national wealth can convince the worker and his family and his trade union that “an incomes policy” is not some kind of trick to force him, particularly if he works in a public service or nationalised industry, to bear the brunt of the national burden. But as it is proved that the Government is ready to act – against high prices, rents and other impositions falling most heavily on the low paid and on pensioners – so we believe that the trade unions voluntarily (which is the only way it can be done for any period in a free society), will co-operate to make the whole policy successful. We believe that the action we propose on prices, together with an understanding with the TUC [Trades Union Congress] on the lines which we have already agreed, will create the right economic climate for money incomes to grow

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in line with production. That is the essence of the new Social Contract which the Labour Party has discussed at length and agreed with the TUC and which must take its place as a central feature of the new economic policy of a Labour Government. (Labour Party 1974)

Coming to power Along with much of the media, Heath expected an easy Conservative triumph over newly radicalized Labour. Instead of this anticipated Tory win, however, Labour won the February 1974 elections with a plurality of four seats. The Left called Labour’s victory an endorsement of its program, and doubtless many were energized by these pledges and worked for Labour’s election to bring on a socialist transition. To be sure, Labour won by only an extremely narrow margin; and its share of the popular vote actually fell in its victory by almost six percentage points compared with 1970, falling to the lowest level since the 1930s.3 The party’s narrow parliamentary edge was due more to the Conservative’s loss of thirty-three seats than to Labour’s own gain of thirteen seats. The real winners in the election were the various minor parties, who gained twenty seats, including eight for Labour’s eventual coalition partners, the Liberals. The election was won by Labour’s pledge to end the three-day work week by restoring peaceful industrial relations, its promise to restore the class compromise of higher wages for labor peace. Labour won because of frustration with the policies of the Heath government and its industrial relations impasse; the most important promise in Labour’s election manifesto was the commitment to restrain inflation through cooperation rather than confrontation with the trade unions. “Today,” Labour promised at the beginning of its election manifesto, the people of Britain know that reasonable leadership by Government can achieve an honourable settlement of the mining dispute and get the country back to work. Only stubborn refusal by an arrogant Conservative administration stands in our way. The new Labour Government will see that the present dispute is settled by negotiation. We shall control prices and attack speculation and set a climate fair enough to work together with the unions. (Labour Party 1974) Like its predecessors in the 1960s, Labour’s new government was led by the economist Harold Wilson. Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England, in 1916, the son of an industrial chemist who supported the Liberal Party, Wilson was a child of the respectable English middle class. Leader of the Labour Party for 13 years, he was a technocrat rather than an organic leader who had risen from labor’s ranks. In 1934, at an age where young working-class men seek jobs or apprenticeships, Wilson won a scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford. There he studied history and was active in the Oxford Liberal Party until, under the influence of G. D. H. Cole, he joined the Labour Party and changed his field to

142 The limits of social democracy economics. His commitment to labor was honorable and, no doubt, sincere; but it was based on cognition and reasoning rather than personal experience of oppression. Wilson’s commitments were also paternalist, consistent with a Fabian vision where an intellectual elite brings justice to workers rather than the workers winning justice through their own efforts and their own assertion of power. Throughout his life he remained a technocrat who believed that social progress would come when an educated elite imposed better social policies on the mass of unsophisticated common people. After graduating with an outstanding first class degree, Wilson could have joined the working world, either in business or the trade union. Instead, he remained with other elite technocrats at Oxford where he became one of the youngest Oxford University dons of the century. There, he worked with William Beveridge, the intellectual architect of Britain’s postwar welfare state, contributing to Beveridge’s classic 1944 study, Full Employment in a Free Society. Wilson remained apart even during national traumas that bound together twentieth-century Britain. While his peers fought in North Africa, Italy, and France, Wilson spent World War II as a statistician for the coal industry, rising to the position of Director of Economics and Statistics at the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Recognized as a brilliant economist, Wilson was attractive to Labour’s leadership, notwithstanding his lack of movement credentials. After the war, he was “parachuted” into a seat in the House of Commons from Ormskirk, a small West Lancashire market town with some textile manufacturing, a charming old church, and several traditional English pubs. (The town is also the burial place of the Earls of Derby, including the reforming Earl who served on the Royal Commission of Labour in the 1890s.) Ormskirk meant little to Wilson; the seat was just a convenient parking space on his way to Westminster. A rising star in the Party, at thirty-one, Wilson joined the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, the youngest cabinet minister since William Pitt the Younger. There he presided over the final dismantling of wartime rationing and controls, celebrating, in his words, a “bonfire of controls.” Notwithstanding his bourgeois background and affinities, Wilson aligned with the left in the Attlee cabinet, even joining with Aneurin Bevan in resigning from the government in April 1951, to protest the introduction of NHS medical charges to finance the Korean War. After Labour lost the general elections in 1951, he chaired Bevan’s “Keep Left” group, even challenging moderate Hugh Gaitskell for the leadership in a 1960 campaign. Sound defeat scarcely slowed Wilson’s rise. On the contrary, combined with his training as a bourgeois technocrat, alignment with the party’s left made a perfect combination that helped him to win the leadership after Gaitskell’s death in 1963; and his technocratic brilliance helped him to lead Labour to victory in the next parliamentary election in 1964. Outside of office, Wilson used his wit and intellectual brilliance to mask divisions within the Labour Party. Once in office, however, he had to choose, and he quickly dropped alliance with the left. It was easy for the elitist Oxford econo-

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mist to abandon commitments to expand democratic regulation of markets and capital. As Prime Minister, Wilson soon dropped promised planning and development initiatives, to follow instead an orthodox program to renew British industry on the basis of lower wages and restored management authority. After devaluing the pound in 1967, he sought to hold down wages and living standards by reining in labor unions and strikes and limiting public sector spending. These policies split his party, leading thousands of constituent members to leave the party, and alienated Labour’s union base. Elected in a landslide in 1964, Wilson suffered a resounding defeat in 1970. With this background, Wilson would seem an unlikely revolutionary. Indeed, under other circumstances, Labour’s dramatic swing to the left after 1970 would have been matched with a change in leadership. (This may have happened if Heath had held off on calling new elections.) By rushing elections, Heath preempted a change in Labour leadership so that Labour fought the elections of 1974 with changed policies but with the same old leadership; whatever commitments or manifestos the Party had endorsed, it retained in Harold Wilson the same leader who governed from the technocratic center in the 1960s. Firmly planted by temperament and background on the party’s right, Wilson appointed established moderates, such as James Callaghan, Denis Healey, and Roy Jenkins, to prominent cabinet positions while consigning leaders of the party’s left, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, to secondary posts. Returning to office, Wilson saw his role as managing capitalism rather than overturning it; he would make it more humane by promoting higher productivity growth, higher wages, and better social services. But he had no concept of economic democracy, no intention of bringing “about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people.” He probably had no idea what this would involve or why anyone would want to do it. The new government installed in 1974 quickly settled with the miners, granting pay increases of over 20 percent. After that, the troubles began because the task facing the Labour Government was daunting. Labour inherited an economy facing a crisis that the Chancellor of Exchequer Denis Healey likened to “the Augean Stables;” it faced “the gravest situation” since the war (Healey 1989: 392). Labour assumed office after authorities in France, Germany, and the United States had begun to impose a slowdown and high interest rates to stem inflation due to rising commodity prices and labor unrest. By mid-1974, these policies had brought on the first general worldwide economic slump since World War II; after over twenty-five years of rising output, industrial production fell throughout the advanced capitalist world in 1974 and unemployment rose to postwar record levels. Britain appealed to its trading partners to reverse course; and Labour initially sought to lower unemployment by increasing government spending and higher living standards. This attempt to lean against the world-economic tide barely slowed the decline in British industrial output because increased consumption went to imports rather than domestic production. Soon unemployment climbed towards the politically charged figure of one million, even while prices continued to rise from

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9 percent in 1973 to 16 percent in 1974 and 24 percent in the government’s first full year of office in 1975. For a time in the early 1970s, aggressive trade-union action insured that wages rose with prices; real wages rose by 6 percent in 1970, and by over 7 percent and 5 percent in 1972 and 1973. By pushing wages up faster than prices, rank-and-file militancy insured that through 1973 workers were not paying the price for Britain’s economic slowdown. Instead, by 1974, British capitalists were besieged. Sharply rising wages had drained business profitability and falling investment threatened future growth. Popular unrest was making British capitalism untenable, forcing political leaders to choose between taming the unrest or finding a different way to manage the economy. For the moderates in the Labour Party leadership, this was no choice. Already in 1972, Denis Healey warned the Party Conference of “the need for realism and caution” because “our central problem would be inflation” (Healey 1989: 368). Every problem was magnified in 1974 by the run-up in oil prices which added £2.5 billion to Britain’s current account deficit, raised consumer prices by 10 percent, and reduced the Gross Domestic Product (the total value of goods and services produced in Britain) by five percent (Healey 1989: 379). By draining foreign reserves, the oil crisis weakened the British Pound, threatening further inflationary pressures that would undermine living standards in a country where a third of consumption was imported. And the high rate of imports threatened any expansionary policy because, without import restrictions, rising incomes would be spent on imported goods, lowering the value of the British Pound and raising the price of imported goods. With Britain’s trading partners sliding into recession, the new Labour Government had no easy options within the established international trading system. The problem they faced was addressed in the early 1960s by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell (1961). In the “impossible trilogy” principle, Mundell demonstrates that only two of the three following features are mutually compatible: fixed exchange rates, free trade and full capital mobility, and independent monetary and fiscal policy. In the British case, a fixed value for the Pound Sterling could not be maintained if Britain expanded its economy faster than those of its trading partners because, without trade restrictions, a relatively rapid economic expansion would draw in imports and limit exports. One element of the Mundell trilogy must be sacrificed: free trade, fixed exchange rates, or independent economic policy. Free trade and fixed exchange rates do not prevent expansive economic policy, but they constrain expansion to the rate of a country’s leading trading partners unless policy can prevent an expansion from undermining the balance of payments by limiting its effect on consumption, wages, and prices. Restrictions on economic expansion and the requirement that policy holds down wages constitute a hidden agenda for advocates of close integration; they praise integration “as a means to impose external discipline on inflationary forces in the domestic economy, in particular limiting government spending and aggressive wage claims” (Welteke 2002: 66). Once locked into fixed exchange rates and free capital and trade flows, governments

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must adhere to deflationary economic policies. This was the dilemma facing the French Popular Front in the 1930s and the French socialists in the 1980s, forcing them to impose “une solution de rigeur” and the “franc fort” at the expense of their own constituents’ wages and living standards (Moss 2005; Friedman 2005a; Coates 1980: 223ff.). But the impossibility theorem does not mean there are no alternatives, only a choice must be made among open markets, fixed exchange rates, and economic autonomy. For the new Labour government committed to renewed economic growth, the world economic crisis of the mid-1970s posed a stark economic choice: either extraordinary measures to reassure capitalists by restraining labor unrest to restore profitability or revolutionary measures to replace private investors as the motor of economic action and to renew industry on the basis of worker self-management. The latter choice, the Alternative Economic Programme (AEP), was championed by some trade unionists and by the left of the parliamentary Labour Party including, within the cabinet, Tony Benn, the Minister for Industry and, later, Minister of Energy.4 Rather than protect Sterling by accommodating international capital markets, under the AEP Britain would substitute managed trade and capital flows for free trade, eliminating free trade from the Mundell trilogy to allow stable exchange rates and an independent monetary and fiscal policy. By removing the free trade and capital flow constraints, the Government could address problems of unemployment and slow productivity growth without concern for the trade balance. By directly restricting imports, it could, for example, lower interest rates to encourage investment and reflate the economy with increased spending on social services and industrial policy without concern for any effect on the value of the British Pound. The vision behind the AEP was of a society managed democratically by consumer and producer cooperatives working under the aegis of a national economic plan to coordinate economic activity. The goal was not only to promote economic growth and to raise productivity through planning and democratic self-management, but to transform society into one managed democratically rather than on the basis of ownership of capital; to “progressively transform the constraints imposed by established economic and political structures rather than pursue limited gains within these constraints” (London Working Group 1980: 133). The AEP posed a stark choice to the Labour Government: continue in a failing program of reform or abandon reform to try a revolutionary transformation of British capitalism into a true democracy. “We are not here,” Benn declared, “to manage capitalism but to change society.” As Jack Jones said in March 1976: Industrial democracy is not a marginal luxury. We will not overcome the problems we face until we provide for the individual worker a rightful place in the nation’s industry. Legislation has been promised for the next session of parliament. Trade Unionists will expect this promise to be kept. . . . The crisis we have to face in Britain today is deep seated. When we have won our battle against inflation, and it is trade unionists who are in the front line

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The limits of social democracy of that battle, we will still face many problems. What we seek is nothing less than a regeneration of British industry. . . . Essential to this, indeed central to the struggle, if we believe the prospects for economic recovery depend on industry, is the need for a new basis of consent and involvement in industry. . . . Participation without a sharing of power is not worthy of the name . . . democratic camouflage for authoritarian structures. To influence corporate strategy, and not just in a negative way, we must have trade unionists sitting on the top boards of all the large companies in this country. And they should have parity with the shareholders’ representatives. I do not think any other system will work.5

Here then was the real choice facing Labour’s leaders: a clear break with capitalism to promote economic democracy or a policy that by accepting the constraints of international markets would have to impose wage restraint and lower living standards on the party’s own constituents.6 Whether the AEP, or some similar proposal, would have been economically viable, it was dismissed by the cabinet’s leaders who, it appears, could not even imagine a democratic break with capitalism. A foreign exchange crisis in the summer of 1976 forced a cabinet debate over whether to break with international markets or to follow economic orthodoxy and seek help from the International Monetary Fund to protect Sterling on condition that the Government cut public-sector spending, lower taxes on the rich, and reach an accord with the unions to restrain wages. At one point in the debate on the AEP, a majority of ministers spoke against austerity and for moving towards some form of managed trade. But this was the high-water mark. Within forty-eight hours, the cabinet’s leadership, Callaghan (who had replaced Wilson as Prime Minister after Wilson’s resignation) and Healey, were able to break the opposition’s tenuous majority; the AEP was rejected and the IMF conditions accepted, including drastic cuts in public sector spending and further restraints on wages. To be sure, socialist-protectionism may have been politically impossible for Labour, 1974–79. Even before Labour’s paper-thin majority in the Commons disappeared due to by-election defeats, its tenuous hold on power precluded policies that would alienate the party’s right wing and essential parliamentary allies in the Liberal Party and elsewhere. Labour could have forced through an alternative policy only in response to imminent economic crisis, perhaps due to trade union action; and militant actions would have risked alienating enough moderate Labour Members of Parliament to force new elections. Could Labour have won an election on a campaign of trade restraint, reflation, and economic democracy against orthodox policies of free trade, IMF-imposed deflation, and restored managerial authority? We will never know. Instead of pursuing the left alternative, Labour tried to win the confidence, if not the full support, of British capital as the party best able to restore profitability by restraining labor unrest. For the leadership, this was always the policy. Immediately after assuming office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Healey committed himself to orthodoxy. Without even a nod to Labour’s commitment to

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promote growth through democratic management, he promised to control inflation and improve the balance of payments by shifting resources to exports and investment, limiting growth in the money supply and restraining wages through the Social Contract with the union leadership. Thus Labour entered office committed to an orthodox economic policy. Uttering hardly a word that could not have been said by the Conservative Party’s shadow Chancellor, Healey announced that he would be an orthodox Chancellor operating without regard for his party’s election promises. After six months in office, in his November budget address, Healey showed how far he would go to promote an orthodox policy when he threatened to seek statutory wage controls if wages were not restrained within the guidelines imposed by the government and the Trades Union Congress. Abandoning the priority promised to expanding public sector services, he announced that increases in public sector spending were secondary to the campaign to protect Sterling by limiting living standards when he instructed local authorities “to limit the rise in their expenditure to what is absolutely inescapable.” With this innocuous language, Healey signaled cutbacks in quality and scale of social services and social wage, reversing Labour’s claim to deliver its side of the Social Contract. Instead, he committed Labour to an assault on labor.

The winter of our discontent Over the next five years, the Labour Government played out its string with concessions that sapped the spirit of its followers without ever appeasing its enemies. In the process, this Government of one of the world’s premier social democratic parties exposed the fundamental fallacy of reform: rather than building a movement within capitalism, by committing to govern within capitalism, social democracy drains the spirit of the working class by teaching it that change is impossible because, of course, tautologically, fundamental change is impossible within the existing structures of capitalism. From the beginning Labour tried to buy capital’s tolerance with concessions on government spending and wages. Days before the Government presented its first full budget in November 1974, the Director General of the Confederation of British Industry warned Wilson publically of drastic measures if the government did not act to restore profitability by removing price controls, lowering taxes, and restraining wages. Soon after, several large companies launched a public “capital strike” by announcing that they would shelve major investment plans “until such time as essential changes are made in taxation and price control.”7 Then began Labour’s steady retreat. Having committed to orthodox economics, Healey abandoned any option but to restore profitability at the expense of labor’s constituents. Conceding to capital, in the November budget, Healey reduced corporate taxes, loosened price controls on business, and granted state handouts for industry, all while restraining public expenditure for the duration of the government. Later budgets contained further cuts in social spending to bring down the public sector deficit to satisfy skeptical bankers and the International Monetary Fund.

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Labour’s constituents paid for its concessions to business profitability. From the beginning, the implementation of the Social Contract was contentious because the government had no real intention to honor their commitments to economic democracy but only sought to use union concessions to restrain wages. After one year in office, in his April 1975 budget address, Healey blamed rising inflation on the unions who he charged had defaulted on their part of the Social Contract by failing to restrain wage increases (Healey 1989: 394). Frustrated, he threatened again to return to a statutory wage policy like that of the Heath administration. He agreed to continue with voluntary wage restraint only under an agreement that the Trades Union Congress (TUC) would hold union wage increases to under 10 percent or £6 per week; concern with the “depth and gravity of the crisis” and fear that hyperinflation would bring down the Labour Government brought the TUC around. While the rate of wage increase and inflation fell sharply under this agreement, it was tightened further under pressure from the IMF in a “Stage 2” which lowered the limits to five percent or £2.50 (with an upper limit of £4). Governing within constraints imposed by British capital and financial markets, the Labour Government sounded more and more like its Conservative opposition. Addressing the Labour Party conference at Blackpool in September 1976, Callaghan blamed unemployment on high wages: “Quite simply and unequivocally it is caused by paying ourselves more than the value of what we produce” (Callaghan 1987: 425). By the summer of 1977, the Labour Government had used the mechanism of the Social Contract and loyal support from the trade union leadership to preside over the sharpest fall in British real wages since World War II, a fall of 2 percent in 1975 and 1976 and then a drop of over 6 percent in 1977. The dramatic slowdown in wages had brought inflation down, but there was little to show in any other area of the Social Contract. Because this was a Labour government, efforts were made to shield the poorest workers from the pain of declining living standards; but this also undermined support for the Social Contract among better paid workers by eroding differentials. The flat-rate increase of £6/week in the first round, for example, squeezed higher-wage workers while giving many low-wage workers what they could have expected from free bargaining. The result was to compound the squeeze on the skilled, lowering both their real incomes and their differential over their common labor counterparts. By the end of Stage 2, the Government faced an internecine civil war within the British Labor Movement, between leaders who loyally supported the Government and a rank-and-file furious at falling wages and narrowing differentials. In its corner, the Government had the best support a government could receive from two of Britain’s most prominent left-wing union leaders, Jack Jones, leader of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), and Hugh Scanlon, head of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). These were powerful leaders whose leftist credentials and rank-and-file experience gave them unique credibility to bring British labor in line with the Social Contract. Born in 1913, the son of a Liverpool docker, like many of his generation

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Jones was converted to socialism in his teens by reading Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a book passed hand to hand among Labour activists. In 1931, he became secretary of the Liverpool Labour College where he used extracts from the writings of Tressell, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, H. G. Wells, James Connolly, and others in his teaching. Wounded fighting in the International Brigades in Spain, Jones returned to Liverpool where he worked on the docks and as an organizer for the TGWU. Active in the shop-stewards’ movement against the unions’ conservative leadership in the 1960s, Jones was elected the union’s General Secretary in 1968; at the time, his election was seen to be a rebuff to the pay policies of the sitting Labour government. Scanlon, too, emerged from the Labour left. Born in Australia in 1913, he was raised in Manchester, England, where he took an apprenticeship in engineering where he learned to be a skilled instrument maker, as well as being an active amateur boxer and football (a.k.a. soccer) player. Joining the AEU while working at the giant Metro-Vickers factory in Manchester, Scanlon rose quickly in the AEU hierarchy. A shop steward and divisional organizer in Manchester, he was elected to the union’s executive council in 1963, and then president in 1968. Winning with Communist support, Scanlon campaigned for workers’ control of industry and against government involvement in industrial relations. Like Jones, his election was a rebuff to Wilson’s Government. In March 1968, he said that democratically elected committees should supervise the appointment of shop managers and foremen, the deployment of labour, promotion, the hiring and firing of workers, safety, welfare and disciplinary matters. They should also have special responsibilities for training and education, and other responsibilities delegated from the combine or group workers’ council.8 As AEU president, Scanlon led the successful opposition to the Labour government’s attempt to legislate reform of the trade union laws. It was this opposition that led Wilson to ask him to “get your tanks off my lawn, Hughie.” In the Spring of 1974, one could say of Jones and Scanlon that the men and the hour were met. Together, they had brought down two governments, in the campaign against Labour’s pay restraint policy in the late-1960s and against the Tory government’s industrial relations and pay policies in the early-1970s. After years of fighting government and employer authority, now they were thrust into their own positions of authority to bring about “fundamental and irreversible shift” in wealth and power towards working people. The Social Contract was to be a landmark in trade union politics, inaugurating a new epoch where unions were to sit as partners with government. But Jones and Scanlon were allied with a Labour Party whose fundamental commitment in government was to manage capitalism rather than to transform it. To protect this alliance, and to shore-up the government against its Conservative opponents, Jones and Scanlon were to spend their accumulated prestige and

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credibility to make a social contract work even when it became a weapon against labor. Two years of successful pay restraint stand as clear evidence of their loyalty to the Labour Government and the support they had and the Government had among the union rank-and-file. But after Stage 2, their credibility was spent. The TGWU repudiated Jones himself by voting down another round of restraint; and Scanlon lost a similar vote in the AEU. In frustration, Jones told the London Times in November 1977 that “We need import deposits or controls, a measure of reflation, a prices freeze and very substantial increases in old age pensions. We need an alternative economic policy, and it is not coming.” By this time, the Social Contract had been drained of any balance; it had become a tool to enforce capitalist political economy on labor. Jones, Scanlon, and other labor leaders defending the Contract failed because the Contract as implemented was completely one-sided and offered nothing to labor. Along with TUC head Len Murray, Jones and Scanlon sat on the “Neddy 6” with Healey, Michael Foot, and other cabinet members with whom they negotiated the terms of the Social Contract. No doubt, the unionists were thrilled to sit in the halls of power, but it was soon clear that their positions were purely honorary without any real influence over a government firmly committed to an orthodox economic policy. By 1977, if not earlier, the union leaders’ arguments for workers’ control and democratic management only frightened Labour ministers wary of antagonizing international capital markets. In 1978, when the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) reviewed the nineteen specific commitments in the Social Contract, they concluded that The Government’s policies have been at variance with the letter and spirit of the original Social Contract . . . the Social Contract has been transformed, in the eyes of trade unionists, from an agreement about economic and social priorities into a vehicle for implementing a policy of wage restraint – and nothing more. (Coates 1980: 82) Yet, trade union leaders stood by the Labour Government, and even after Stage 3 was rejected by their membership they continued to help the Government press for wage restraint. The same leaders who had eagerly campaigned against an earlier Labour Government, bringing it down for conducting an orthodox economic policy of relatively mild pay restraint, now endorsed much harsher policies. For Murray, Jones, Scanlon, and other union leaders, the problem was that Labour’s hold on power was so tenuous that it could collapse at any time, at any provocation, and it would be replaced by a truly frightening Conservative regime. Disgusted with Labour’s inability to restrain labor unrest, British business was clearly ready to abandon class compromise. The Conservative Party had turned to the right under Heath but his replacement, Margaret Thatcher, was made of far sterner stuff. Bad and unbalanced as the Social Contract had become, union leaders feared, correctly, that there was worse to come from a Thatcher government ready to lead a frontal attack on unions.

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Labour ministers used the fear of Thatcher’s Tories to control union leaders. Prime Minister James Callaghan recalled that Jack Jones “consistently made it clear . . . that whatever differences might exist on policy his overriding passion was to maintain a Labour Government.” Seeking an agreement on the second round of pay restraint, Callaghan warned the TUC General Council that “failure to reach an agreement . . . would mean the immediate end of the Government’s life;” agreement was reached. Callaghan concluded that it: was always on the cards that the Government would get such an agreement . . . so keen were the trade unions to maintain the Government’s credibility in office, and also . . . because they did not doubt that I meant what I said about the Government’s future. (Callaghan 1987: 416–17) Paradoxically, it was the Labour Government’s weakness that gave it power over its friends. The well-educated middle-class technocrats who dominated the Labour Party and the Labour government had little direct, personal experience with roots in the trade union movement, or with the working class they represented. Even leftists like Tony Benn or Michael Foot were from the aristocracy or the professional middle class, respectively. Union leaders like Jones and Scanlon were crucial for the implementation of the Social Contract, negotiating with the Labour Government, exchanging labor peace for concessions on wages and other conditions, just as they would with private employers. But from this perspective, Jones and Scanlon were poor bargainers. At first, they retained the credibility, as well as the force of personality, to sell even bad agreements to their membership. But several years of declining wages, narrowing differentials, and the Government’s clear disinterest in establishing a democratic workplace undermined support for the Social Contract. Failure provoked an open revolt in the British unions. Shouting down union leaders who called for pay restraint, rank-and-file critics denounced the Social Contract as the “social con-trick.” Even Jones and Scanlon, former leaders of rank-and-file rebellions were denounced for complicity in falling living standards, and for their resistance to direct action and strikes. They were swept away by the fall of 1978, replaced by weaker successors with much less personal standing to help the Labour Government, and little interest in doing so (Healey 1989: 398). Once the Social Contract began to unravel, it collapsed in a rush because no group of workers wanted to be the last to agree to contract terms that followed the Government’s wage guidelines. An avalanche of discontent was let loose. In November 1977, a special conference of the Fire Brigades Union rejected their leaders’s recommendations and voted to take industrial action to win a 30 percent pay increase. Despite press attacks and the use of troops – sent by a Labour Government! – to break the strike, the action remained solid for over two months before conceding within the State 3 norms of 10 percent, albeit with a promise of exemption from the pay policy norms in the next agreement. But

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the floodgates were opening on a rank-and-file rebellion as much against the policies of the union leadership and the Labour Government as against the employers. Strike activity soared fourfold in 1979, reaching the highest level in decades. Across private industry and the public sector, workers struck without union authorization or with grudging authorization, while ministers and union leaders ran from crisis to crisis trying to restore some semblance of a coherent pay policy. With the Prime Minister distracted by an international conference in the Caribbean in January 1979, a massive strike wave erupted with almost the greatest number of strikers in any month in British history. The strike wave climaxed with the notorious sanitation strike that literally filled the streets of London with piles of garbage. No government could expect to survive such a stink. The sanitation strike gave the winter of 1978–79 the title of “winter of discontent.” Could there have been a better ending to the failed Labour Government and its overripe, or over-dead, Social Contract? Out of time, and ideas, Callaghan had to call elections, which ended, predictably, in the election of a Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher and committed to reining in the power of trade unions and their militant rank-and-file. The government’s collision with labor’s democratic roots and its own rank-and-file had ended in a complete disaster. Acting as capital’s policeman maintaining wage restraint and capitalist authority, the Labor Movement’s leadership tried to maintain its traditional role brokering labor restraint for collective bargaining agreements. This time, however, it was discredited both in the eyes of the rankand-file and, because it failed to restrain unrest, in the eyes of business as well. And by executing an ineffectual policy, the Labor Movement was discredited in its own eyes. Thus success destroyed the British Labor Movement of the 1970s.

Ashes and dust Labour’s failure changed British politics. Callaghan was succeeded by Margaret Thatcher whose motto was the maxim TINA, “There Is No Alternative.” Holding fast to the Mundell theorem, and rejecting the possibility of trade restraint or further devaluation of the Pound Sterling, Thatcher insisted that the only possible economic policy was to bring British growth rates and wages into line with that of its trading partners, especially Germany and the United States. There was no place in Thatcher’s Britain for democratic regulation of the workplace, nor even of an economic policy independent of the wishes of currency traders and bankers in international capital markets. And, of course, there was no place for unions. Thatcher reversed over a century of British policy dating back to before the Royal Commission on Labour (Howell 2005: 131ff.). Her attack on unions had echoes throughout the world. For the Labor Movement, the problem has been that the British Labour Government’s experience has been echoed in other reform administrations that, like the French Popular Front of Léon Blum, or the

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French Socialist François Mitterand, came to power fraught with hope on a wave of great popular excitement only to dissolve in disappointment and recrimination. In each case, initial enthusiasm was followed by retreat, a “pause,” where leaders tried futilely to buy cooperation from business with offers of labor peace and a crackdown on labor militancy. Socialists and supporters of labor unions, they returned to the traditional Labor Movement program enunciated by the Royal Commission in the 1890s, a union-brokered class compromise between workers and employers. But the compromise only works where Movement leaders can credibly promise employers labor peace and it is, therefore, undermined by retrenchment and moves to restore capitalist authority and profitability; it can only succeed where it denies the workers’ continued yearning for autonomy and opportunity. Discontent and continued worker militancy undermines the compromise for management, convincing employers that they must attack unions directly because labor’s leaders cannot deliver on promised social peace. Finally, owners of capital rally and strike back, in the form of Thatcher, Vichy, or the show trial of the Haymarket anarchists. Without regard for the position of the labor union leadership, continued labor militancy leads employers to jettison class compromise for class war. The pattern of explosive militancy leading to Labor Movement compromise undermined by popular disappointment and renewed militancy has been with us since the beginning of the labor movement. But two changes in the late 1970s together made that period the end of the era of social democracy, the idea that a reformist Labor Movement can adjudicate a compromise between militant workers and their employers. First, rising labor unrest and strike activity in the 1960s and 1970s taxed employers’ patience, undermining faith in the ability of Labor Movement leaders to manage their constituents. Worse, the entrenchment of labor leaders and their undemocratic practices fractured the alliance of labor with bourgeois reformers. Abandoning faith in the Labor Movement as a democratic force, and with it the belief that Labor could manage a capitalist economy more democratically, liberal reformers have sought a “Third Way” between the politics of Thatcherite conservatism and the traditional Labor Movement. The growth of “Third Way” politics has sapped political and state support for the traditional Labor Movement, and, also, undermined the movement’s popular legitimacy. The first of these “Third Way” movements grew directly out of the collapse of the British Social Contract in the late-1970s. Angry at both the failure of trade union leaders to restrain rank-and-file unrest and the unwillingness of Labour Party politicians to make a clean break with the unions, four prominent Labour ministers left the Labour Party to form a new, centrist political movement. Condemning the role of trade unions in the Labour Party, they sought to “eliminate poverty and promote greater equality without stifling enterprise or imposing bureaucracy.” They sought to promote innovation and “a competitive economy with a fair distribution of rewards,” and would have Britain “play a full and constructive role within the framework of the European Community” and NATO (Jenkins, Owen, Rodgers, Williams, 1981). The “gang of four,” as they came to

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be known, formed a new political party, the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had a brief moment on the British stage before fading into a merger with the Liberal Party. Unsuccessful as a political movement, the Social Democrats paved the way for a new reformist politics. It is significant that Tony Blair’s Labour Party fought the 2001 general election under the SDP colors of red and purple instead of Labour’s traditional red and yellow; and New Labour’s campaigns have been financed by David Sainsbury, now Lord Sainsbury, the supermarket heir who had previously bankrolled the Social Democrats. But the SDP developed a program that has been followed not only in Tony Blair’s New Labour, but by reform parties throughout the world, including Bill Clinton’s American Democrats, Gerhard Schröder’s German SPD, and Ségolène Royal’s French Socialist Party. Abandoning a commitment to labor unions or the traditional aspirations of the labor movement, these parties of the left have adopted the SDP politics of “tough and tender.” Accepting the “tough” Thatcherite economic reforms attacking economic democracy (such as anti-trade union legislation and the privatization of state industries) they soften them with the “tender” provision of expanded and paternalist welfare programs. Thus reformers have distanced themselves from the Labor Movement and its democratic aspirations to promote hierarchical social reform that does not disturb the exercise of capitalist authority at work or the assertion of state authority elsewhere. Instead of building democracy through popular struggles, “Third Way” politics would impose social reforms developed by elite technocrats; instead of finding liberty through solidarity, they treat liberty as a matter of individual choice through markets. In adopting “Third Way” politics, these parties have abandoned not only an alliance with labor but the fundamental principles of participatory democracy that inspired the labor movement. The collapse of socialist politics came from the fundamental contradiction in Labor Movement between reform and revolution, between capitalist authority and participatory democracy. Out of power, the Labor Movement can promise workers the ends of the labor movement, better wages and working conditions, respect, democracy. But in power, wielding authority within capitalism, Labor Movement leaders have tried only to manage capitalism by maintaining capitalist profitability and authority, leaving little for their increasingly disgruntled constituents. As Harold Wilson bemoaned, “whichever party is in office, the Treasury is in power.” Even in the heyday of the Labor Movement, few capitalists ever embraced the Royal Commission’s defense of trade unionism. Some British capitalists were remarkably tolerant of labor organization; but throughout the world most capitalists turned to unions only when confronted with a clear disaster and an explosion of labor unrest. Not for them the cost of unionization, they accepted the gamble that union leadership could restrain militancy only under duress, in desperate times when they could no longer manage on their own, such as wartime, or during social revolutions such as in Germany 1918–19, briefly in France 1936, or Italy 1969.

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Experience may have proven these capitalists right. In the Labor Movement’s class compromise, union leaders and socialist elected officials have offered what they did not have in exchange for what capitalists ultimately would not give; no capitalist would write a blank check for wages or concede real power in the workplace to workers. Whatever the objectives of the reformist Labor Movement, the labor movement on the ground is, has, and always will be about ending workplace hierarchy and vesting authority democratically in the workers themselves. This is precisely the type of contract that cannot be reached. This leaves an insoluable problem for reformers: there are no grounds for lasting compromise between capital and labor. Union leaders and socialist politicians seek compromise by giving workers a larger return for their work at the price of conceding ultimate workplace authority to employers and managers. But authority is precisely what leads workers into unions in the first place. Yes, workers want more, they want higher wages and better working conditions; employers will resist giving these and Labor Movement leaders will fight for them. But workers can pursue higher incomes and better working conditions on their own. In the final analysis, they join a collective movement to gain something else, something they cannot get as individuals, and something capitalists cannot ever concede: respect and democracy.

8

Reigniting the Labor Movement Restoring means to ends in a democratic Labor Movement

I concede to my radical friends that my trade-union philosophy always made me conservative. It is not revolutions and strikes that we want, but collective bargaining on something like an organized equilibrium of equality. This I take it, was the social philosophy of Samuel Gompers. John R. Commons (1963: 73) If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Eduard Bernstein was not the first to promote a reformist Labor Movement that would follow an “evolutionary” path to social progress. Six years before he published his book Evolutionary Socialism, the American labor leader and longtime head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers urged unions to be “conservative in methods” and “evolutionary in outlook.” Rather than trying to transform power relations and overturn capitalist authority, labor should concentrate on gaining higher wages, shorter hours of work, and better working conditions. Abandoning his youthful flirtation with socialism, Gompers proposed a platform “around which moderate trade unionists and social reformers might gather to reconcile the interests of labor and employers” (Gompers 1893; Stromquist 2006: 51). Building a reformist Labor Movement became Gompers’ life’s work. It is curious, therefore, that when he testified before the United States Industrial Commission, Gompers was hard pressed to explain the goals of the Labor Movement he led. Finally, he put its objectives in the most concrete and pragmatic terms. We work, Gompers explained, “along the lines of least resistance; to accomplish the best results in improving the condition of the working people” (U.S. Congress, Commission on Industrial Relations, 1916: 1529). This may be a fine strategy in pursuit of commendable goals, but I suspect that Gompers knew well that it provides a poor defense for a collective labor movement. Why should individual workers sacrifice for a collective project to achieve higher

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wages and better working conditions when these goals can be better advanced through individual action and collaboration with the employer? And, for those outside the working class, why support a collective movement of workers when there are many others equally or, perhaps, even more deserving of material support, and often better ways to raise living standards than support for what appears to be nothing but a labor cartel? A Labor Movement that accepts the capitalist allocation of power and authority in the workplace becomes part of the existing system, with no special claim for outside support, or even for the support of the workers themselves. Still, for a century, this was enough. The Labor Movement followed Gompers’ path; unions and labor reformers improved life within capitalism while would-be revolutionaries were satisfied to walk a road that they hoped would pass through reform to revolution. For many who believed in popular democracy, reformist means and revolutionary goals formed a seamless whole. By improving circumstances, negotiating better contracts, and gaining social legislation, even reformist Labor Movements would encourage workers for the larger struggle to seize power. Revolutionary activists built reformist organizations because they thought that these organizations would accumulate resources and attract members to help bring on a revolution when appropriate. Critics complained when larger goals were forgotten in reformist institutions organized to provide services rather than as vehicles for democratic empowerment. But they were quick to blame these failures on individuals, the personal failings of a Samuel Gompers or a Harold Wilson. Even Labor Movements that forgot democracy claimed public support because they raised workers’ living standards by redistributing some of the capitalists’ wealth. In this way, labor’s friends, vaguely disappointed with an increasingly authoritarian and bureaucratic Labor Movement, continued to support a movement that had lost its democratic inspiration. No more. The decline of the reformist Labor Movement, the institutions established at the end of the nineteenth century to organize and structure labor unrest, forces us now to question the viability of this type of social reform organization, either as a path to democracy or in their own right. When a reformist orientation took the Labor Movement away from larger democratic goals, it undermined the broader democratic agenda for all of society. By abandoning internal democracy and the campaign to democratize the economy, Labor compromised the very idea that popular collective action could improve life, the premise that active, conscious participation in communal life is a good thing to be fostered for the healthy functioning of our democracy. The reformist compromise exchanges order for concessions. The very idea of reform implies social reconciliation where all disputes between capital and labor can be peacefully adjudicated by the exchange of money for recognition of the capitalist’s continued control over his property and the production process. Eventually, therefore, all reformers come around to accept the distribution of authority and power within society, to argue for class harmony if only the capitalists grant slightly higher wages and better working conditions to labor. This

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leaves no grounds for collective action by workers. If there is no inherent conflict between labor and capital, what is the collective problem that requires solidarity among all workers? Why should workers and activists risk so much for a collective solution to personal economic problems? If higher wages are the only goal, then why chance the uncertainties of collective action to achieve something that could be reached through private action? Indeed, why should labor leaders sacrifice to win gains for their members when all that is at issue is position within the established capitalist order; what remains to prevent them from using their position in the Labor Movement to advance their own interests (see Fitch 2006)? To justify sacrifice and commitment to collective projects, activists need to point to collective goals beyond any that individuals can achieve on their own. Having abandoned democratic aspirations, denying broader aspirations, reform unions and political parties become specialized businesses providing services, insurance, and collective bargaining to workers. To maintain their side of the reform bargain, they develop hierarchies and authoritarian organizations. Buying higher wages and other reforms with labor peace regulated by authoritarian union and party leaders, they promote social reforms by undercutting democracy. Internal union and party hierarchy denies workers the opportunity to develop democratic skills through managing their own collective institutions. Worse, by exchanging labor peace for limited social reforms these organizations teach subordination to authority, and, being from within the working class itself, they do so more effectively than can the capitalists themselves. It is easy to discount the words of managers telling workers to “obey” because they have an obvious selfish interest in maintaining authority and hierarchy. But when union leaders say the same thing to enforce contracts, they teach that authority and hierarchy are necessary for the functioning of society and that democracy is an impossible dream. The loss of the labor movement’s democratic spirit is a problem for all democrats, indeed for all of society. The problem of the modern age has been to protect individual liberty in a world where all are equal, to prevent a democratic tyranny of the majority from crushing individualism. The only sure defense against this threat has been to build a democratic civil society where all are trained in democratic self-government through participation in democratic life. Labor should contribute to this process, training workers in democracy even while uniting them in a movement to limit the power of wealth. Reformism undermines this democratic campaign; without an active democratic labor movement, the Labor Movement’s contribution to democracy is limited to the countervailing power balancing labor organization against capitalist property. Beyond this, reform unions bring nothing to the democratic process. Here is the ultimate limit of the Labor Movement as we have known it. It can never lead to democracy because democratic values and the skills of collective self-government cannot be taught within a hierarchy and cannot be won through the compromises of collective bargaining. Democracy, self-government by equal individuals all of whom have access to the information and skills needed for

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responsible participation, can only be learned through participation in democratic institutions, precisely the experience inhibited by the Labor Movement’s hierarchical structure and class compromise. At best, a reformist Labor Movement leads to a better, more humane and egalitarian capitalism; at worst, it is a dead end with defeated workers confronting triumphant, autocratic capitalism legitimized by Labor’s own undemocratic policies. If it is not democracy, a more humane capitalism may well appear a worthy goal except that even this laudable goal becomes a mirage before a reformist movement. The reform road becomes a dead end because reformist compromises undermine the Labor Movement itself. Labor has sought concessions from management by promising to restrain labor unrest and to channel popular protest into peaceable collective bargaining. This places Labor Movement institutions in an untenable position. Should they successfully restrain labor militancy and demobilize popular unrest, then they remove the grounds which makes capitalists fear them; without the threat of unrest, then why continue to make concessions to Labor? On the other side, should the Labor Movement institutions fail to demobilize the base, if worker militancy continues despite the efforts of labor’s leaders, then reformers are caught between unrest and management; having reneged on their commitment to control the workers, they lose the grounds to demand further concessions from management. Given this choice, reformist leaders of Labor Movement institutions opt for hierarchy and restraint, making the institutions of the Labor Movement something apart from the workers, even above them to honor commitments to management and state officials that can only be fulfilled by controlling the workers, demobilizing and discouraging popular militancy. At best, when successful, this strategy leaves the Labor Movement a hollow shell. Abandoning its broader goals, the Labor Movement loses popular support and rank-and-file activism. Vulnerable to attack by hostile employers, the Movement is prey to the cooption of ambitious leaders. And where it fails to control labor unrest, the Labor Movement reneges on commitments made to employers who then abandon their class compromise, attacking a labor movement separated from its institutions. As long as the Labor Movement grew, activists and allies hoped for the best and ignored the growing contradiction between its aspirations and its behavior. With decline, we can no longer ignore the crisis of the Labor Movement. Instead, steadily shrinking public support for Labor has now been followed by a terminal loss of credibility; Third Way labor leaders have openly abandoned the democratic aspirations of the movements they now lead while many of Labor’s natural allies, on the egalitarian left, have abandoned any hopes for the Labor Movement, and offer it, at most, a begrudging support. Behind all of these is the larger problem that the Labor Movement’s means do not match its goals. Reformism makes the Labor Movement a tool for social pacification where labor needs an instrument for social change to give workers power, control over their lives. Only a democratic movement can build democracy; and such a movement cannot be merely reformist in a capitalist society resting on hierarchy and authority. Based on private property and the owner’s

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authority over the wage worker, capitalism cannot accommodate full democracy. A century ago at Salle Petrelle there appeared to be a viable choice whether to demand what we want or to accommodate ourselves to capitalist authority. Now we see that there never was a real choice. We cannot sustain a reformist movement; capitalist authority will reassert itself inexorably unless we transform the economy, like the state, democratically. What remains then? If the old Labor Movement is well and properly dead, what is to be done? Happily burying the old, many on the left would cheerily look to new social movements arrayed against the various other oppressions that afflict us: sexism, racism, heterosexism, imperialism, et al. By ending the working-class’s exclusive claim to the Left, the decline of the Labor Movement has opened space to advance these “different ideas.” Frances Fox Piven, for example, sees “many hopeful currents of activism” and much reason for hope in a “varigated contemporary left” that “has not yet settled” on a single “electrifying idea” for emancipation. She applauds the “many lefts” that have arisen in the space opened by the Labor Movement’s collapse, lefts committed to “greater social equality” but ready to “identify different vanguards, organize in different institutional contexts, and advance different ideas and programs” (Piven 2007: 85, 84). Many reading this would share Piven’s enthusiasm for these other lefts. Certainly labor has failed because it has neglected other forms of oppression outside of the capitalist–worker relationship at the workplace; the Labor Movement as a whole has shamefully neglected discrimination in the workplace against women workers and workers of color. Focusing on autocracy and oppression in the workplace risks perpetuating other forms of discrimination outside the workplace, within the family or in racist communities. As a democratic movement, the labor movement has no exclusive claim to the left. Part of a larger movement, its decline does not necessarily signify the decline of that larger campaign. But if a revived, reignited, egalitarian movement for democracy must go beyond the old Labor Movement to struggle outside the workplace, it cannot on that account neglect authority at work. If autocracy is wrong in the family, it is wrong at the workplace! For their part, democrats must support all of these “lefts” because all contribute to building a democratic society. The goal for all is to overcome the principle of divine right rule, the idea that democracy is impossible and equality a fantasy because some people are inherently inferior and unworthy of full participation in humanity’s life. Whether taught at home, in the community, or at work, the principle of autocracy threatens democracy; if democracy is to survive, autocracy must be extirpated and replaced with democratic participation. Thus, in the broad democratic struggle, a reignited labor movement has a unique place. Labor directly confronts authority in a center of human life, as workers and producers. A democratic workplace is essential for a democratic society because work, constructive and socially meaningful labor, is central to human identity and so long as it is coordinated autocratically and devalued within a hierarchy, undemocratic authority remains entrenched. Before it was

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side-tracked into an instrument for collective bargaining and contract enforcement, the labor movement was part of a broad democratic movement because it campaigned to make work meaningful by making it democratic, chosen freely by equal citizens. Even when Labor Movement institutions moved away from their original democratic ideals, this vision of freely chosen purposeful labor has never been completely forgotten. Now, when the Movement has lost so much of its strength and motive force, it can find new life and meaning in a return to these cardinal roots. To refound itself, to begin again, to be reignited, the Labor Movement must return to its own democratic origins. What would a democratic labor movement be like? We may have some answers to the first question in models from the early years of the movement before the rise of dominant hierarchical organizations. As mentioned earlier, critics like Michels or Weber are wrong to blame organization itself for the decline in union democracy. By itself, organization is not the problem; rather, the problem is that business unionism has built organizations to control the workers rather than to empower them. The problem is that reformist goals do not mix with democratic self-management. Labor organizations need to be democratically controlled and oriented towards promoting popular empowerment rather than facilitating the market exchange of labor power for wages. The goal of democratic labor institutions is always to facilitate popular action rather than to direct it, because self-directed popular action builds democratic capacities. In the Chicago movement of the 1880s, for example, or the early Bourses du travail in France, or the left-wing unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, we see institutions designed to spread militancy, to involve workers in democratic management of their own movement institutions, and in a campaign to democratize society. The “Chicago idea” in the United States in the 1880s held that labor organizations should be models of a future society, democratic institutions, managed by equal participants, and building democratic capacities by spreading information, including knowledge and skills in self-government. Little democracies, they were the beginnings of a new society that would be a “self-governing community of equal producers.” Managed by the workers themselves, their leaders did not direct but only articulated the workers’ grievances. Union meetings were designed for discussion, “for group learning and for individual intellectual growth” rather than to communicate the ideas of the leadership to the rank-andfile. Following this model, left-wing CIO unions in the 1930s and 1940s negotiated contracts “distinguishable by their democratic thrust, their quest for power on the shop floor, their attention to racial and gender inequities.” Most important, these CIO unions refused “to enter into the CIO mainstream’s endorsement of the politics of stability over conflict” (Green 2006: 130, 128; Avrich 1984: 73; Schottler 1985: 110ff.; Feurer 2006: 235). Without disdaining bread-and-butter gains for workers, in higher wages or better working conditions, democratic labor would never sacrifice worker autonomy and control for these reforms. Gains are never accepted as part of an exchange where the union on behalf of the workers assents to the employers’

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“control and management” (Cohen 1916: 21). The goal is to empower the workers; every concession is evaluated in terms of this goal. With a different orientation, democratic unions are organized differently. Rather than enterprise unions organized by workplace, a reignited labor movement will reach outside the workplace to mobilize workers and other community members around the idea of democracy and equality. There have been models of this type of organization, like the Knights of Labor, the Bourses du travail, the Social Democratic Federation, and the continental socialist movements. More recently, there have been models for this type of movement organization in the United States in some of the immigrant rights campaigns in the United States, in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and in some union organizing campaigns, such as “Justice for Janitors.” Because the emphasis is on democratic rather than economic aspirations linked with a particular enterprise, there is only a porous line in these organizations between union and movement. By keeping labor at the center of the democratic movement, the wide range of the labor movement facilitated union growth during upheavals. Focusing on labor’s democratic aspirations also creates natural alliances between labor and other social movements. A broad democratic movement seeks egalitarian changes in the distribution of income, in education, and in control over society’s resources. It will have reformist goals, such as a higher minimum wage and higher marginal tax rates on high incomes. But these are always part of a larger goal: the democratization of society including its economic life. To achieve this goal, it will need more than traditional political means. It will use the old weapons of the Labor Movement, the strike, the boycott, and electoral action, but must bring back both the forgotten weapons of the older labor movement and the tools of the new social movements: mass public demonstrations and direct challenges to private property through sit-downs and the occupation of workplaces. Throughout, at every step, the movement’s primary concern must remain to promote democracy and solidarity. Can such a movement survive where a Labor Movement designed to conciliate employer opposition has failed? The experiences of the Knights of Labor, the pre-World War I French revolutionary syndicalist movements, Britain’s New Unions or the later general union movement, or even the American CIO are not encouraging. Of course, another question may be whether the old Labor Movement can survive. For over twenty years, advocates for union revival have been developing programs and policies, laws, new organizing strategies, new forms of Labor Movement organization. But these efforts have been to no avail because the essential compromise that allowed the old Labor Movement is gone and it is not coming back. There are no longer grounds for Labor’s class compromise; having lost faith in the ability of Labor organizations to discipline labor, and confident in their own ability to navigate labor unrest on their own, most employers have dismissed unions as social partners. A democratic labor movement may fail; but we know that reformist movements have failed. But democracy itself may be a reignited labor movement’s greatest asset.

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Reaching out to all who believe in democracy, the reignited labor movement will rely on the only real power people have against their rulers: as the American songwriter Woody Guthrie said, we outnumber them. Labor cannot depend on connections, money, or political support because capitalists and labor’s other opponents have all of these in greater supply than labor can ever muster. Labor’s true strength is in the ingenuity and talent of the great number of common people. If the people are to win, it must be because they act themselves to seize their rights; this is what a reignited Labor Movement must help them to do. Over a century of the reformist Labor Movement teaches one lesson: if we do not demand what we want, then we are sure to get something else. Enriched by a century of struggle, the Labor Movement can only be reborn, even reignited, as institutions for revolutionary struggle rather than reform, but only if its means reflect its ends, its democratic aspirations. Either labor acts on its belief that all are entitled to an equal voice, or we accept autocracy; either autocratic institutions are revolutionized and democratized, or they remain autocratic; either we are revolutionaries, or we are conservatives who believe in divine right. For one, I am a democrat who would, as Eugene V. Debs said, transform “a republic in name into a republic in fact” (Debs 1904: 2).

Appendix

1

Union membership sources are in Table A1.

1906–2000 1921–98 less 1934–46 1945–97 1880–2002 1899–1997

1945–98 1884–1996 less 1915–17 and 1940–44 1891–1998 less 1932–46 and 1990 1951–97 1946–2000 1913–98 less 1942–44 1900–97

1890–1998

1913–97 1892–1996

1880–2000

Australia Austria Belgium Canada Denmark

Finland France

Italy Japan Netherlands Norway

Sweden

Switzerland United Kingdom

United States

1911–67: Bain and Price (1980); 1968–2000: Australia Bureau of Statistics (annual) 1919–33: Visser (1989); 1947–98: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1880–1910: Friedman (1999); 1911–2002: Canada Department of Labour (annual) 1899–1976: Bain and Price (1980); 1977–84: Visser (1989); 1985–97: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1945–98: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1884–1914: Friedman (1998); 1918–39; 1945–79: Visser (1989); 1980–95: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1895–1931 and 1947–77: Bain and Price (1980); 1978–84: Visser (1989); 1985–2000: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1951–97: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1946–2000: Japan, Institute of Labour (annual) 1913–41 and 1945–85: Visser (1989); 1986–98: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1900–76: Bain and Price (1980); 1977–85: Visser (1989); 1986–97: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1890–1977: Bain and Price (1980); 1978–85: Visser (1989); 1986–98: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1913–44: Visser (1989); 1945–97: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1892–1977: Bain and Price (1980); 1978–84: Visser (1989); 1985–96: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) 1880–1914: Friedman (1999); 1915–76: Bain and Price (1980); 1977–2000: Bureau of Labor Statistics (annual)

Sources

Notes Denmark: Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) membership series is 99.577 percent of the Visser (1989) series in 1985. Ebbinghaus and Visser series adjusted upwards for later years by this amount. France: The Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) series is 96.1 percent of the Visser (1989) in 1979. Membership after 1979 is from Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) adjusted upwards by this amount. (continued)

Germany

Coverage

Country

Table A1 Countries in union membership data set and periods of coverage

166

Appendix

(Table A1 Notes continued)

Germany: White collar membership included from beginning. Membership in white collar unions estimated 1891–1905 based on share of total membership in 1905. The year of reunification has been excluded. Membership in the Bain and Price (1980) series is 104.5 percent of the Visser series which is adjusted upwards by this amount. Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000) series in 1984 is 98.8 percent of the Visser series; the Ebbinghaus and Visser series is adjusted up by 103.26 percent (or .988*1.045). Italy: Membership is reported membership including self-employed. Netherlands: Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser series in 1985 is 96.9 percent that in the Visser series. Ebbinghaus and Visser series adjusted upwards for later years by this amount. Norway: Membership outside LO interpolated 1900–56 assuming constant percentage changes between benchmarks in Bain and Price (1980). Membership in Visser series is 98.4 percent that of the Bain and Price series in 1976; the Visser series adjusted up in later years by this amount. Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser series in 1985 is 100.5 percent the Visser series; membership after that year adjusted up by 98.7936 percent. Sweden: Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser series is only 89.0 percent that of the Visser series and is adjusted upwards by this amount. Switzerland: Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser series is 104.0 percent that of the Visser series and is adjusted down by this amount. United Kingdom: Membership in the Ebbinghaus and Visser series is only 99.2 percent that of the Visser series and is adjusted upwards by this amount. United States: Beginning in 1951, membership includes members of professional associations (such as the National Education Association). Canadian members have been excluded.

2

Political variables a

b 3

The number of strikers is from a

b 4

Governments and elections. i European government data are from Cook and Paxton (1978, 1998). Election results are reported in Cook and Paxton (1978, 1998) and in Parties and Elections in Europe (2007). ii Government and election data for outside Europe are in Mackie and Rose (1991). Australian governments and election results are in Australia Politics (2007); Canadian are in Elections Canada (2007); Japanese are in Reed (1992) and Center for Democratic Performance (2007). United States election results are at United States, Department of Commerce (annual). Parties considered pro-Labor are in Table A2.

Before 1920: For European countries Flora et al. (1987). For Australia, Australia Bureau of Statistics (annual); Canada, Canada Census and Statistics Office (annual). For the United States, Friedman (1998). After 1920, International Labour Office (annual).

Gross Domestic Product, the export share of output, and the size and distribution of the labor force are from Maddison (1989); Flora et al. (1987); International Labour Office (annual); and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (annual).

Appendix

167

Table A2 Pro-Labor political parties Country

Pro-labor parties

Australia

Australian Labor Party (1901–); Communist Party (1931–); New South Wales Labor Party (1931–34); Non-Communist Labor Party (1940); State Labor Party (1940–43); Land Labor Party (1946–49); Democratic Labor Party (1955–); Queensland Labor Party (1958–61) Social Democratic Party (1907–); Communist Party (1945–) Workers Party (1892–1912); Communist Party (1946–); Belgian Socialist Party (1919–78); Parti Socialiste (1981–); Socialistische Partij Anders (1981–99) Labour (1900–40); Communist Party (1921, 1933–); Cooperative Commonwealth Party/New Democratic Party (1935–); Social Credit (1935–) Social Democratic Party (1884–); Communist (1945–88); Socialist People’s (1960–); Left Socialist (1968–88); Unity List (1990–) Social Democrats (1907–); Socialist Workers (1922–30); Finish People’s Democratic Union (1945–87); Social Democratic League (1958–72); Democratic Alternative (1987); Left Alliance (1991–99) Socialists (1884–); Independent Socialists (1906–10); Communists (1920–); PSU (1973) Social Democratic Party (1880–); Independent Socialists (1919–20); Communists (1920–); PDS (1990–) Socialists (1895–); Independent and Reformist Socialists (1913); Communists (1946–); Social Democrats (1948); Left Communists (1968–) Japan Communist Party (1946–); Japan Socialist Party (1946–); Left Wing Socialist (1952–55); Right Wing Socialist (1952–55) Social Democratic League (1888–91); Social Democratic Workers (1894–99); Communist (1918–); Socialist Party (1918–25); Revolutionary Socialist Party (1929–33); Labour Party (1946– ); Pacifist Socialist Party (1959–89) Labour Party (1894–); Communist Party (1921–); Socialist Left (1961–); Red Electoral Alliance (1973–) Social Democratic Workers’ Party (1902–); Socialist Left (1917 –); Communist Party (1921–44) Social Democratic Party (1896–); Communist (Workers) (1922–); Solidarity (1999–) Labour (1900–); Communist (1922–79); Independent Labour (1931–35); Commonwealth (1945) Greenback (1880–82); People’s (1884); Populist (1890–96); Socialist (1898–1972); Communist (1920–); Farmer Labor (1920–22); Progressive (1924); Progressive (1948)

Austria Belgium Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Italy Japan Netherlands

Norway Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States

Notes

1 Labor’s democratic dilemmas 1 Subsequent congresses included Brussels (1891), Zurich (1893), London (1896), Paris (1900), Amsterdam (1904), Stuttgart (1907), Copenhagen (1910), and Basel (1912). In 1900, a permanent Secretariat was created in Brussels, with the International Socialist Bureau to coordinate Congress resolutions (Eley 2002: 86; Joll 1974; Cole 1956). 2 See the discussion, for example, in Kolakowski (1978: 31–65). In addition to Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism, other examples of Kautsky’s popular works, see Kautsky (1971a, 1971b). 3 This approach, of course, is rooted in the ideas of Alexis de Tocqueville (2004). 2 Has the forward march of Labor halted? 1 Kautsky (1946: 28). 2 See L’Humanité (2 Mai 1978), 1, 5; (2 Mai 1967), 1, 3; (2 Mai 1957), 1; (2 Mai 1947), 1. 3 In addition to the 16 countries in this analysis, membership also peaked in 1980 in Ireland and Spain; see Ebbinghaus and Visser (2000: CD-ROM supplement). 4 This is especially true for so-called “Third Way” politicians and ideologues. In his essay The Third Way and its Critics (Giddens 2000), for example, Anthony Giddens never even mentions labor unions. 5 Barkin to Arthur Goldberg (9 Feb. 1962) in Barkin Papers (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). 6 It is too often forgotten that Cassandra was right. 7 Troy, presidential address to IRRA (1961). Clipping in Barkin papers, box 15. 8 For a small sample of this very large literature, see Adams (1974, 1989); Weiler (1983); Freeman and Medoff (1984); Kochan et al. (1986). An exceptionalist orientation also informs Forbath (1991); Voss (1993); Hattam (1993); Friedman (1998). 9 Even then, the British Labour Party in 2005 received its lowest share of the vote since the 1920s and individual membership in the Labour Party fell by nearly 70 percent during the late 1990s, to the lowest level since individual membership began in the late 1920s; see Harmer (1999: 12). 10 This was the spark that launched the Matchgirls’ strike at Bryant & May in the East End of London, 1888, leading to the great London Dock Workers’ strike of 1889. 11 Strike waves are defined here as years when the number of strikers is either 50 percent more than the average of the preceding five years or 100 percent more. Using the former definition, there were fourteen strike waves between 1880 and 2000; there were only four using the latter definition. These definitions differ somewhat from that used in Shorter and Tilly (1974).

Notes

169

3 Labor’s liberty is a social product 1 Note that Bourgeois’s use of the term solidarité was anticipated by the radical and institutional economist Charles Gide in an 1889 lecture entitled “L’Ecole nouvelle” (Gide 1912: 550). 2 This argument has been emphasized by Albert Hirschman (1991) and Barrington Moore (1978). 3 Also see Axelrod (1984); Olson (1971). 4 This is also a warning in Rosanvallon (1998). 4 How unions grew, and why they stopped 1 For an alternative, see Cronin (1979) and Friedman (1998). 2 Luxemburg’s move to Berlin was part of an elaborate plan to help her mentor Leo Jogiches. To gain German citizenship, Luxemburg married Gustav Lübeck. Inexplicably, the marriage license gave her date of birth as 25 December 1870 (instead of 5 March 1870). It took five difficult years to dissolve the marriage; see Ettinger (1986: 70–1). 3 It would be over fifty years before the Party would officially adopt his policy when it renounced revolution at the Bad Godesburg conference of 1959. 4 Shorter and Tilly (1974: 105–7) define strike waves as years when the number of strikers and the number of strikes exceeded the mean of the preceding five years by at least 50 percent. For later work on strike waves, see Sidney Tarrow (1994); Clawson (2003); Friedman (1998, 1999). For another view that sees less value in organization, see Piven and Cloward (1979). 5 I prefer this definition of a strike wave to Shorter–Tilly’s because it focuses on the number of strikers, the key to my concern with the transformative power of strike participation on worker consciousness. It also avoids some of the problems with the bureaucratic definition of a “strike.” 6 This is from a regression for annual union growth rates for all sixteen countries. 7 At the Radical Party’s Biarritz congress in October, future Prime Minister Camille Chautemps authored a unanimously approved resolution both pledging continued support for the Popular Front and condemning the occupations. The important point, however, is that L’Humanité praised the Congress’s decisions (Kergoat 1986: 206). 8 Ironically, Daladier and Reynaud had supported Blum’s bid for a National Union government that would have preserved the Popular Front and many of its gains (Shirer 1969: 332). 9 Historians who have associated the general weakness of the American Labor Movement with intrinsic features of the American experience or deep historical patterns may be surprised to note here that the American Labor Movement was relatively successful in the 1930s through World War II. 5 Explaining the inexplicable: accounting for the madness of moments 1 For one example, see www.uaw.com/solidarity/05/0805/feature02.cfm. 2 These estimates are from nonlinear regressions of annual union growth rates including both the number of special circumstances in the country and the year and the number squared. These regressions are available upon request. 3 These years with special circumstances, furthermore, include the highest growth years among these high growth years. Union growth rates in the forty-two high growth years with special circumstances averaged 42 percent compared with 33 percent for twenty-four years without special circumstances. In the years with special circumstances, unions added an average of 597,800 members compared with 340,800 in the other years.

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4 The 1831 revolt of the Canuts gave the world the Black Flag as the emblem of anarchism, but even this legacy was only set in the 1880s. It was voted as the anarchist emblem in 1882 at a meeting at the salle Favie in Paris, and the flag was first flown at a demonstration of the unemployed in Paris in March 1883. 5 Throughout Europe there was a sharp increase in socialist voting after 1885 (Bartolini 2000: 55). 6 Only twenty organizations were represented at the fourth convention of the FOTLU in 1884, with only $731 raised over the previous year; American Federation of Labor (1906: 6, 19). 7 On the attitudes of early labor leaders, see Mussey (1927); Kaufman (1973). 8 For a few cases, see Avrich (1984); David (1958); Fink (1983); Green (2006); Trachtenberg (1932); Commons (1966: 2:384). 9 The winner in New York presidential elections won with only 49.6 percent of the total vote between 1876 and 1892, with an average margin of fewer than 23,000 out of over 1,200,000. In 1884, a shift of only 700 votes in New York would have elected Blaine over Cleveland. 10 London Times (29 August 1889), 8. 6 When workers win: dilemmas of success 1 A majority of strikes in the United States were conducted without formal union involvement as late as 1881 and a majority of strikes in France until almost 1900. These data understate the share of nonunion strikes because government reports are more likely to miss smaller and short strikes, including many of those conducted without union involvement. On union involvement in strikes in the United States, see Friedman (1988, 1998); Perrot (1975); Shorter and Tilly (1974). 2 See, for example, the discussion in Tilly (1978); Shorter and Tilly (1974). 3 Liberté (7 mars 1884) in Archives Nationales de France, F712773; Prefect Rhone to Ministère du commerce et industrie (10 avril 1891), in Archives Nationales de France, F124667. 4 See, for example, Illinois, Bureau of Labor Statistics (1881: 229). 5 Strike aid is associated with longer strikes in the pre-World War I period in France and in the United States. The greater availability of aid in the United States explains the greater effect of American unions on strike duration; Friedman (1988: 11). 6 See Voix du peuple (25 juillet–1 août 1909), 1; Voix du peuple (1–8 août 1909), 2; and Gompers (1910: 15–20). 7 This argument is similar to Piven and Cloward (1979). 7 The limits of social democracy: did success kill the Labor Movement? 1 Among these were the so-called “terrible twins,” Jack Jones (of the Transport and General Workers Union) and Hugh Scanlon (of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers). 2 For macroeconomic trends and the crisis of profitability after 1970, see Bowles et al. (1983); Armstrong et al. (1991); Marglin and Schor (1990). 3 No party elected a majority of the Commons in the February elections. Wilson called new elections in October which resulted in a narrow Labour majority; in those elections, Labour’s share of the popular vote rose by two percentage points over the February results. 4 The Alternative Economic Programme was developed by a group of leftist economists and labor activists including many in the Conference of Socialist Economists; see, London Working Group (1980). 5 Speaking at Telford, 5 March 1976; quoted in www.atholbooks.org/archives/publicarchives/workerscontrol/wandi1.html.

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6 The AEP was dismissed by orthodox economists; see, for example, Burk and Cairncross (1992). It also receives little respect from the left; such as Coates (1980) and Howell (2005). The debate over the left alternative is described briefly in Healey (1989: 427–33) and Callaghan (1987: 434–43). For another perspective, see Panitch and Leys (1997); and Benn (1989). 7 Pilkington’s, for example, shelved a £150 million investment; quoted in www. marxist.com/hbtu/chapter_22.html. 8 Quoted in www.atholbooks.org/archives/publicarchives/workerscontrol/wandi1.html.

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Index

Abraham, William 122; see also Royal Commission on Labour absolutism 1, 33; see also capitalism Action française 73 African-Americans 99 Akron, Ohio, rubber workers’ sit-down strikes 80; see also sit-down strikes Algeria, war in 9 allies, friends of 12–16, 33, 20–22, 40, 44–48, 49, 55, 57, 58, 61, 71, 72, 73–83, 86, 90, 114–127, 132–135, 141, 142, 145–147, 151, 153, 154, 153–154, 160, 161; loss of support for 14–15, 153–154, 160–161 Alternative Economic Programme 145, 146, 150, 170, 171; see also Benn, Anthony Wedgewood; Labour Party (UK) Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) 12, 13, 131, 132 Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) 148, 149, 150 Amalgamated Wood Workers 60–61 American Civil War 99–100 American Economic Association 44, 83 American Exceptionalism 16, 29, 82–83, 104, 169 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 5, 10, 13, 59, 82, 84, 94, 97, 103, 112, 113, 128, 156, 170; see also Federation of Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 15 American Federation of Teachers 15 American Legion 81

Anzin 120 Aron, Raymond 41, 43 Arrow, Kenneth 22 Austin, Michael 122; see also Royal Commission on Labour Australia or Australian 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 94, 95, 110, 149, 165–167 Australian longshoremen, aided London dock strikers 110 Austria or Austrian 1, 19, 20, 22, 118, 165–167 Autocracy 1, 50, 51, 160, 163 Aveling, Edward 105 Balfour, Gerald 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour Barkin, Solomon 12–16, 45, 58, 168 Barnett, George 84, 85, 93 Belgium 16, 20, 22, 165–167 Benn, Anthony Wedgewood (Tony) 143, 145, 151, 171 Bernstein, Eduard 2, 63, 131, 156; see also Evolutionary Socialism Besant, Annie 105–106; see also Bryant and May; match girls’ strike, 1889; Laws of Population; Link Bevan, Aneurin 142 Beveridge, William 142 Bisno, Abraham 101 Blair, Tony 154 Blum, Léon 74–79, 81, 152, 169; see also Popular Front, France Board of Arbitration and Conciliation for the Manufactured Trade of the North of England 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour

186

Index

Board of Trade, United Kingdom 121, 142 Bolton, J. C. 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour Bonfield’s Detective Agency 103 Booth, Charles 104, 105 Bouglé, Céléstin 41, 126 Boulanger, General George Ernst Jean Marie 95, 112; see also divisions among elites, France Bourgeois, Léon 43, 44, 169 Bourgeois Revolution 2 Bourgin, Hubert 41, 43 Bourse du travail 9–10, 114, 161 boycott 96 Bradlaugh, Charles 105 Breguet Aerospace, Le Havre, France, sit-down strikes 74; see also Popular Front, France; sit-down strikes, France Brentano, Lujo 41 Bronfenbrenner, Kate 61 Bryant, Theodore 106; see also match-girls’ strike Bryant and May 55, 105, 106, 168; see also match-girls’ strike Burns, John 109 business unionism 128–135, 137, 138, 161 Callaghan, James 143, 146, 148, 151, 152, 171; see also Labour Party (UK) Callan, John 59–60 Canada 16, 17, 165–167 capital strike France 78, 79; United Kingdom 147, 171 capitalism 3, 4. 6, 11, 13, 16, 22, 26, 31–34, 38, 48, 58, 64, 70, 77, 78, 86, 107, 116, 122, 123, 126, 129, 131, 143–147, 149, 153, 157, 159, 160; challenges to capitalist authority 4, 5, 22, 28, 31–43, 50, 58, 70, 135–141, 144–147, 150–154, 155–157, 160, 171; fundamental nature of 26, 33, 57; maintaining and legitimizing capitalist authority 4, 5, 22, 28, 31–34, 38, 50, 58, 70, 116, 124, 125, 152, 153, 154, 156, 160, 171; see also

employers; strikes, inherent political content Catholic Church 1, 41, 45, 63, 110 Chamber of Deputies, France 32, 73, 74, 76, 79, 114 Chamberlain, Joseph 95 Champion, H. H. 109; see also London dock strike; Social Democratic Federation Chancellor Kent (New York) 37 Charivaris 27; see also strikes, history and early development Chiappe, Jean 73 Chicago, Illinois, United States 98–104, 131, 132, 161 Chicago Tribune 102 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States 98 citizenship rights, workers as citizens 34, 35–40, 47, 49–53, 98, 125, 134, 135; see also liberty, social conception Citrine, Walter 5, 6 Civil Rights Movement 15, 22, 35, 138, 162 Clark, John Bates 48 class compromise 134, 135, 137, 144–147, 150, 152–155, 157–162 class conflict 3, 4, 29, 31–54, 57, 65, 66, 70, 116, 126, 131; see also class consciousness class consciousness, built through participation in collective action 3, 64–67, 157–163 Clawson, Dan 67, 169 Clemenceau, Georges 38 clergy 1, 41, 45, 56 Clinton, Bill 154 coal miners 1, 17, 120, 139, 143 Cold War, 22 Cole, G. D. H. 141 collective action 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 20, 24, 25, 28, 30, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58–62, 65, 57, 59, 71, 74, 81, 83, 86, 87, 94, 115, 117, 128, 132, 134, 157, 158; collective bargaining 6, 8, 13, 15, 20, 27, 29, 30, 40, 51, 56, 58, 76, 77, 82, 85, 117, 120–127, 131, 132, 152, 156, 158, 159, 161; transformative effects of participation

Index 187 in collective action 25, 28, 50, 51, 52, 64–77, 80–83, 90, 92, 99, 129–135, 159–161; see also class conflict; class consciousness, built through participation in collective action Columbia University 12, 126 Commons, John R. 50, 57, 97, 126, 156, 170 Commonwealth v. Tewksbury (Massachusetts, 1846) 37 Communist Party, France (PCF) 9, 10, 73, 75–78 Compagnie parisienne de l’éclairage et du chauffage par le gaz, or the Paris Gas Company (PGC) 31–34; see also employers, paternalism and; employers, repression of unions and unrest and; paternalism, or patronage Confederation of British Industry 147 Confédération générale du travail (CGT) 5, 75–78, 81, 94, 129, 130 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 13, 79–82, 161, 162 Connolly, James 149 Conservative Party, United Kingdom 136–138, 141, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152 Conrad, Johannes 41 Crane, Walter 105 Crusoe, Robinson 39 Dahl, Robert 36 Daladier, Eduard 73, 79, 169 Dale, David 121, 123; see also Royal Commission on Labour Davy, Georges 41 Debs, Eugene V. 163 Decazeville 1 de Gaulle, Charles 10, 84, 85, 93 DeLeon, Daniel 116 democracy 1–8, 9, 11–13, 23, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33–36, 38–40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49–54, 58, 54–67, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 82, 83, 99, 100, 111, 116, 122, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132–135, 136–155, 157–163; bourgeois democracy 1–2; economic democracy 3, 4, 30, 35–37, 70, 127, 131, 133, 137, 143, 146, 148, 154; industrial democracy 26, 46, 47,

132, 140, 145; legal implications of democracy for property rights 36–39; opponents of democracy 11, 31–34, 48, 49, 50, 54, 120, 125; participatory democracy 7, 125, 133, 154; rank-and-file democracy 7, 52, 125, 138; shop-floor democracy 7, 82; social democracy 44, 65–68, 136–155; unions and democracy 5–6, 49, 133–135, 137, 139–141, 143–146, 147, 149, 150–155, 156–163; see also capitalism, fundamental nature of democracy in America 42; see also democracy; Tocqueville, Alexis de Democratic Party, United States 100, 101, 103, 104 democratic revolutions 35, 54; see also American Civil War; divisions among elites; English Revolution; French Revolution democratic values, barrier against tyranny of majority 2, 8, 32, 33, 42, 48–54, 88, 130, 158–163; see also Tocqueville, Alexis de Denmark 21, 165–167 Derby, Right Honorable Earl of 121, 142; see also Royal Commission on Labour Dictatorship, of majority 2, 50 Die Neue Zeit 2 de la Division du travail social 41, 42, 43; see also Durkheim, Émile divisions among elites 94; France, 95, 111, 112; Germany 95; United Kingdom 95–96; United States 95, 97, 100–103, 170 Dobb, Maurice 86 Dormoy, Jean 111; see also May Day, Socialist International Doyet-les-Mines, Allier, France 113; see also May Day; 1890 Dreyfus Affair 21, 41, 76; see also Divisions among elites, France Durkheim, Émile 40–47; see also de la Division du travail social; social science École Normale Supèrieure 40, 76

188

Index

education, participation in organized Labor Movement and lessons in subordination 5–8, 50, 70, 115, 116, 130–135, 158; paternalism and training in subservience 32, 33, 50; transformative effect of participation 3, 7, 10, 11, 28, 41, 45, 74, 75, 80, 98, 116, 129, 149, 162 Edward, Earl of Clarendon 35 Edwards, Richard 16, 20, 21 eight-hour campaign 10, 17, 28, 84, 96–106, 111, 112 Election Manifesto, Labour Party 136, 140, 141 Ellul, Jacques 132 Ely, Richard 34, 43, 44, 46 employers 3–6, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31–35, 41, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56–59, 61, 65, 69, 70–83, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 101–112, 114, 115–117, 120–128, 130, 131, 133, 134–138, 150–155, 156, 159, 161, 162; declining interest in class compromise 92, 93, 153, 154; declining interest in class compromise, France 41, 73–79, 82, 153; declining interest in class compromise, United Kingdom 137, 138, 150–154; employers, United Kingdom 104–111, 120–127, 137–138, 153–155; employers, United States 16, 17, 21, 79–83, 96, 98, 101–104, 114, 115; employers, United States, South, 60, 81, 82; repression in France 78, 79; labor peace 6, 21, 23–24, 27, 30, 51, 56–58, 61, 65, 70–73, 76–78, 89, 92, 101, 104–111, 112, 114–117, 120–128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 138, 153–155, 156, 159, 161, 162; paternalism 31–34, 41, 70, 120, 124; repression in France 78, 79; repression of unions and unrest 16, 17, 26, 27, 30, 49, 51, 54, 56–60, 70–73, 78, 79, 81, 82, 89, 98, 101–104, 114, 116, 120, 124, 159, 162; repression in United States 81, 82, 101–103; see also capitalism Engel, Ernst 41 Engels, Friedrich 2, 3, 63, 111, 149

English Revolution 35 equality 1–3, 22, 32–34, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 53, 74, 139, 140 153, 156, 160, 162 Evolutionary Socialism 63, 156; see also Bernstein, Eduard; revisionism debate Fabian Society 44, 95, 104 fascist 9, 22, 43, 53 Fauconnet, Paul 43 Fédération des bourses du travails 114 Fédération du livre 127, 128 Federation of Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) 10, 96–99, 103, 170; see also American Federation of Labor; eight-hour campaign Finland 21, 165–167 Fire Brigades Union 151 Flint, Michigan, United States 80; see also sit-down strikes, United States Foot, Michael 139, 143, 150, 151 foreign exchange crisis: France 78, 79, 145; United Kingdom 136, 143–147; see also impossible trilogy Fouillée, Alfred 43, 47 Fowler, Right Honorable H. H. 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour Franc, French 78, 145 France 1, 2, 5, 6, 9 18, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32–34, 37–45, 47, 49, 51, 57–59, 67–84, 94–96, 100, 111–114, 120, 125–130, 138, 143, 145, 152–154, 161, 162, 165–167 Franco-Prussian War 40 fraternity 1–3, 34, 42, 47 free riding 24, 49, 57, 59, 71, 128 Freeman, Richard, and James Medoff 16, 17, 168 French Revolution (1789) 1, 2, 32, 34, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 49, 100 French Third Republic 33, 39, 40, 41, 43, 45, 73, 111, 112 Friedman, Gerald 33, 37, 46, 67, 96, 99, 100–103, 112, 129, 145, 168–170 Friedman, Milton 22 front nationale 10 Fruits of Philosophy 105; see also Charles Knowlton

Index 189 Full Employment in a Free Society 142; see also Beveridge, William; Wilson, Harold Gaitskell, Hugh 142 gas workers union, London 106–108 General Motors, GM 80, 81; see also Flint, Michigan German Historical School 40, 43; see also Verein fur Socialpolitik Germany, or German 1, 2, 5, 9, 19, 22, 17, 21, 22, 29, 40, 43, 45, 51–53, 63, 78, 79, 94, 95, 104, 108, 118, 129, 131, 136, 143, 152, 154, 165–167 Germer, Adolph 81 Gide, Charles 43, 169 Giffin, Robert 121, 122 Gladstone, William 96, 104 Godcharles v. Wigeman, Pennsylvania, 1886 38 Godkin, Edwin 100 Gompers, Samuel 1, 4, 5, 6, 59, 84, 97, 170 Great Depression 13, 22 Green, James 100, 101 Greenawalt, E. R., President of Pennsylvania Federation of Labor 39, 40 Gresham, Walter 8 Griffuelhes, Victor 130 Guesde, Jules 33, 43, 114 Guthrie, Woody 163 Guyot, Yves 120 Halbwachs, Maurice 41, 43 Hall, Fred 126 Harrison, Boyden 11 Harrison, Carter 101; see also Chicago, Illinois, United States; Haymarket Affair Hayes, Rutherford 8 Haymarket Affair 101–103 Healey, Denis 137, 139, 143, 144, 146–148, 150, 151, 171 Health Workers Local 1199 15 Heath, Edward 136–139, 141, 143, 148, 150; see also Conservative Party, United Kingdom Herr, Lucien 43

Hicks, John 23–25; see also strikes, causes of, rational-choice models Hill, Christopher 35, 86 Hillman, Sidney 12, 13, 132; see also Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA); Barkin, Solomon Hobsbawm, Eric 1, 11, 29, 85–87 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 37 House of Commons 45, 104, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146 Howe, Irving 131 Howell, Chris 124, 152, 171 Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom 141 l’Humanité 10, 41, 75, 76, 168, 169 Hyndman, H. H. 104 impossible trilogy 144, 145, 152; see also Mundell, Robert In re. Jacobs (New York, 1886) 38 individualism, methodological individualism 3, 16–18, 20, 86; against collective action 3, 24–26, 61–62, 86, 127; individual liberty and individuality 42, 158; see also Durkheim, Emile Independent Labour Party 111 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union 34 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 146, 147, 148 international trade: Internationale, l’ 73, 74; may strengthen worker rights 21; undermines British Labour government 1973–79 144–147; undermines French Popular Front 78–79; undermines nineteenth century European political system 95–96; undermines unions by leading to industrial changes 16–17 Ireland 95–96, 100, 101, 104, 107, 110, 121, 122, 168 Irish Home Rule 96, 104, 107, 121 Irish Land League 96; see also boycott “Iron cage” 133; see also Jacques Ellul; Max Weber

190

Index

“Iron Law of Oligarchy” 52–53, 130–135; see also Michels, Robert; Political Parties Ismay, T. H. 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour Italy 8, 11, 16, 17, 22, 29, 51, 53, 73, 121, 154, 165–167 James, C. L. R. 74, 77 Japan 17, 29, 95, 165–167 Jaurès, Jean 1, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 76 Jenkins, Roy 143, 153 Jones, Jack 138, 140, 145, 148–151, 170; see also Social Contract Jouhaux, Léon 5, 6 “Justice for Janitors” 162 Katznelson, Ira 44 Kautsky, Karl 2–4, 9, 34, 131, 168 Kelly, Representative William 97 Keynes, Keynesian policies, Keynesianism 78, 136, 142, 143 Knights of Labor (KOL) 10, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 107, 114, 130, 162; in France 114; in United Kingdom 107 Knowlton, Charles 105; see also Fruits of Philosophy Korean War 142 Ku Klux Klan 81 Labor Movement, institutional unions and socialist political parties 1–8, 10–13, 15–18, 20, 22–25, 27, 29, 30, 45–57, 51–54, 55–58, 60–62, 64, 65, 71, 73, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 93, 93, 96, 98, 104, 111, 114, 115–118, 124, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136–138, 148, 152–155, 156–163, 170; contradictions at heart of 8, 51–54, 56, 58, 64–67, 72, 74, 76–79, 83, 115–117, 127, 125–135, 130–135, 146–153, 154–163; labor bargain for labor peace 21–23, 64–66, 83, 116, 117, 120–135, 154–155, 155–163; organization and labor bargain undermines democratic spirit of popular 4–8, 30, 51–54, 56, 64, 65, 76, 79, 110, 131–134, 158–161; popular 2–4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21,

24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43, 46, 56, 58, 61, 64, 75, 83, 84, 93, 96, 97, 101, 102, 107, 112, 115, 117, 128, 130, 133, 136, 153–155, 156–163; see also unions; Socialist Party; social democracy Labour Party (UK) 11, 22, 135–155, 168, 170 labor peace 4–8, 22, 27, 51, 56, 61, 65, 70, 76, 77, 82, 110, 114, 116, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137, 141, 151, 153; participation in government and management 51, 61, 65, 70, 82, 116, 122–127, 127, 146 Lady Armstrong 108; see also London dock strike; 1889 Lafargue, Paul 45, 114 Laws of Population 105; see also Besant, Annie Layvigne, Raymond 111; see also May Day; Socialist International Legien, Carl 4–6, 131 Lenin 6, 127, 132 Lens, France 113; see also May Day, 1890 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 43 Lewis, Sir W. T. 121; see also Royal Commission on Labour Liard, Louis 40, 41 Liberal Party, United Kingdom 104, 107, 141, 146, 154 liberty 1–3, 10, 31–54, 77, 154, 158 liberty, individual freedom and 2, 3, 88, 90, 92, 95, 158; individual and private property 35–37, 77; social conception of liberty 1–4, 6, 8, 23–26, 30, 31, 36–54; see also individualism and individuality Lille, France 113; see also May Day, 1890 Link 105–6; see also Besant, Annie Liverpool, United Kingdom 121, 148, 149 Lochner v. New York (United States Supreme Court, 1905) 38 London, United Kingdom 9, 27, 44, 51, 55, 94, 96, 104–111, 114, 122, 152 London dock strike 107–111, 168; see also New Unionism, Great Britain

Index 191 London Eastern Post 108 London Times 96, 105, 108, 150 Luxemburg, Rosa 58, 61–68, 71, 131, 133, 169; see also strike waves Lyon, France 73, 93, 170 Madrid, Spain 9 Manchester, United Kingdom 149 Mann, Tom 107, 109, 121, 122, 125 Manning, Henry Edward 110–111; see also London dock strike Marseilles 113; see also May Day; 1890 Marseillaise 1, 7, 74 Marx, Eleanor 106; see also Aveling, Edward Marx, Karl 3, 11, 65, 100, 106, 149 Marxism 3–4, 41, 86 match-girls’ strike 105–107, 168; see also Bryant and May materialism 3, 41 Mauss, Marcel 41, 43 Mawdsley, James 122; see also Royal Commission on Labour May Day 9, 10, 12, 28, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102–104, 107, 111–114; 1886 10, 28, 98–104, 107; 1890 10, 28, 111, 112, 115; Austria 1; France 9–10, 73–74, 111–114; United Kingdom 107, 111; United States 10, 12, 96–104 McCartin, Joseph 47 McGuire, Peter 97 McNeill, George 39, 50 Memphis, Tennessee also, striking sanitation, 1968 34 Merrheim, Alphonse 130 Michels, Robert 51–54, 132, 161; see also “Iron Law of Oligarchy;” Political Parties Mill, John Stuart 49, 51 Millerand, Alexandra 21 Mills, C. Wright 6 Mitchell, John 60 Mitterand, François 10, 153 moments of madness 28, 48, 62, 86, 87, 94, 98–100, 108–113, 120 Montgomery, David 97 Mundell, Robert 144, 145, 152; see also impossible trilogy

Mundella, A. J. 121, 123; see also Royal Commission on Labour Murphy, Frank 81 Myrdal, Gunnar 22 Nagler, Isidore 33, 34 National Enterprise Board 139 National Federation of Labour 107 National Labor Union 60, 93 National Union of Public Employees 150 Nazi 9, 22, 73, 78, 79 Netherlands 17, 165–167 New England 41, 51 New Labour 154; see also Blair, Tony; Social Democratic Party (UK) New Left 20, 67, 138 new social movements 138, 160, 162 New Unionism, Great Britain 13, 94, 104, 107, 111, 121 New York City, United States 9, 12, 33, 38, 49, 98, 101, 115, 125 New York Times 99–100 Nord, France 28, 114 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 153 Norway 165–167 O’Connell, James 58 Operation Dixie 13 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 136, 139, 144 Ormskirk, West Lancashire 142 Owen, William 60 Oxford University 23, 141, 142 Pall Mall Gazette 106 Paris (city of), France 1, 4, 9, 10, 15, 28, 31, 33, 40, 41, 51, 73, 74, 76, 79, 94, 95, 100, 111, 114, 170 Parnell, Charles Stuart 96, 104; see also Irish Home Rule Parsons, Albert 99 Pas-de-Calais 114 Past and Present 86 paternalism, or patronage 31–33, 37, 39–40, 42, 50, 82, 124 pay policy 136–139, 143, 144, 147–152, 151, 152; see also Social Contract, UK

192

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Pease, Edward, 107; see also Fabian Society Péguy, Charles 43 Perlman, Selig 45, 126 Perrot, Michelle 25, 112–114, 170 Pic, Paul 125–126 Pitt, William, the Younger, 142 Piven, Frances Fox 160, 169, 170 Place de la Bastille, Paris 10 Place de la Concorde, Paris 73 Place de la Nation, Paris 9 Place de la République, Paris 58, 59 Political Parties 52, 53; see also Michels, Robert; “Iron Law of Oligarchy” Pompidou, Georges 85 Popular Front, France 9, 73–79, 82, 145, 152, 169 Potter, Beatrice, a.k.a. Beatrice Webb 104–105, 129, 132–133 Pouget, Émile 130 private property 2, 3, 6, 26, 35, 36, 43, 47, 75, 78, 159, 162 Pullman, George 34 Pullman Strike (1894) 8 Radical Party, France 9, 10, 83, 74, 79, 169 Ragged Trousered Philanthropist 149; see also Tressell, Robert Reactionary challenges to bourgeois states 45 Reagan, Ronald 17, 136 reform and reformism 11–13, 20, 27, 38, 39, 41–47, 65, 78, 79, 81, 97, 104, 110, 121, 125, 129, 145–155, 156–159, 163; reformist compromise and labor bargain 21–22, 27, 30, 47, 56–58, 64–67, 72–81, 120–127, 162; see also revisionism debate republic 7, 37, 131, 163 republic, France 1, 9–10, 33, 37, 39–41, 43, 45, 73, 77, 95, 111–113 republic, United States 7 revisionism debate 63–66, 110, 145, 146, 157–159, 163 revolution, fear of 21–22, 35, 45, 54, 56, 58, 74–78, 81, 82, 92, 115–117 Reynaud, Paul 79, 169

Reynolds, James, 6 Rhone, France 120, 170 Rist, Charles 43, 126 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 12, 79, 81, 82 Rosanvallon, Pierre 8, 33, 49, 58, 169 Roscher, Wilhelm 41 Ross, Steven 98 Roubaix, France 113; see also May Day, 1890 Royal Commission on Labour 6, 120–127, 129, 142, 152, 153; appointment 120; impact 124, 125–127, 152; membership 121 Royale, Ségolène 154 Russian Revolution (1905) 66–67, 71 Sainsbury, Lord 154; see also Social Democratic Party (UK); New Labour; Blair, Tony Saint-Exupery, Antoine de 156 Saint-Quentin, France 112; see also May Day, 1890 Salengro, Roger 75 Sauvy, Alfred 78 Salle Petrelle (Paris) 1, 21, 22, 34, 160 Salus populi suprema lex est 37, 39 San Francisco 9 Scanlon, Hugh 138, 140, 148–151, 170 Schilling, George 99 Schmoller, Gustav von 40, 41, 44 self-government, effects of participation in 3, 5–7, 36, 42, 47, 50, 52, 70, 116, 127, 140, 146, 157–160; see also democracy Seligman, Edwin 44 Shaw, George Bernard 105; see also Social Democratic Federation Shaw, Justice Lemuel 37 Sic utere tuo, ut alienum non laedas 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43 Simiand, François 41, 43 Shorter, Edward 67, 168–170 sit-down strikes 28; France, 74–79, 80; United States 80–81 Sloan, Alfred 81; see also General Motors Social Contract 116; in the United Kingdom 140, 141, 147, 148, 149–153

Index 193 Social Democracy 162; Austria 1; Germany (SPD), 1, 22, 51–53, 63–67, 112, 131, 154, 169; Polish 63–65 Social Democratic Federation, United Kingdom 95, 104–106, 162. Social Democratic Party, United Kingdom 154 Socialist Labor Party, United States 101 social science 3–4, 40–43, 93; see also Durkheim, Émile, socialism 1–4, 6, 10, 20, 22, 31, 32, 41–44, 48, 51, 52, 53, 63, 64, 76, 89, 95, 101, 105, 110, 111, 112, 149, 156 Socialist International 1, 10, 63, 94, 117, 168 Socialist Party, Poland 63, France 21–22, 73, 75–76, 153, 154 Solidarité 43; see also Bourgeois, Léon Sorbonne 41 Soviet Union 6 Spain 149, 168 Spanish Civil War 149 Spies, August 99 State, officials and politicians 58, 97, 98, 101–104, 111, 112, 120–127, 154; France 71–79, 126; United Kingdom 120–127, 154; United States 79–83, 126 Steiner, Josef 129 Sterling, British Pound 144–147, 152; see also foreign exchange crisis, United Kingdom strike waves and mass strikes 9–11, 26, 28, 29, 48, 61, 62, 65–83, 84–92, 94, 97–104, 106–114, 120, 134, 137, 151, 152, 168, 169; against pay restraint in United Kingdom 139, 151, 152; defined 28, 168, 169; excitement, collective effervescence, and the transformative effect of participation 28, 48, 56, 61, 62, 66–73, 74–77, 80, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89–91, 93, 97–104, 106–114, 115–135; see also moments of madness; strikes strikes: causes of 8, 23–29, 56–63, 122–127, 130–135, 151, 152, 170; class compromise 4, 6, 21, 56, 58, 61, 70, 76–79, 80–83, 101–103, 116–135, 147–152; conduct 1, 7, 9–11, 25, 26,

28, 5, 64, 67, 74, 75, 79, 80, 101–104, 106–111, 111–114, 170; in France 1, 74–79, 111–114; inherent political content 8, 25, 26, 70, 115, 116, 127–135; history and early development 4, 6, 10, 24, 25, 27, 115, 116, 170; models of non-rational behavior 8, 24–26, 58, 67–72, 85, 89, 90, 97–103, 106, 112–116; rationalchoice models 8, 23–29, 57–58–63, 122–127; in United Kingdom 106–111, 151, 152; in United States 7, 79–83, 97–104, 170; weak unions 124–126, 127, 128–130, 170 strikes, decline, withering away 21, 24, 28, 29, 58, 61, 116–119, 124–127, 152, 153 strikes, employer reactions 8, 23–25, 56, 58, 70–72, 75–79, 80, 81, 93, 101–104, 106, 116, 117–127, 151, 152 strikes and institutions 6, 58, 61, 64, 70–72, 75–79, 80–83, 97–103, 106–110, 112–135, 147–152, 170; union growth 24–26, 48, 56, 61, 67–83, 85, 89–93, 97–104, 106–116, 117–135, 170 successful strikes: union strategy 128–130, 133–135, 170; encourages more strikes 94, 96, 99, 106, 107, 111 Sweden or Swedish 22, 136, 165–167 Swinton, John 101, 102 Switzerland or Swiss 53, 63, 118, 165–167 Sylvis, William 34, 100 Tarrow, Sidney 59, 67, 169; see also strike waves Tea Operatives’ and General Labourers’ Union 108, 109 Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC), Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) 13 Thatcher, Margaret 11, 17, 136, 137, 150, 152, 153; see also Conservative Party, United Kingdom “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) 152; see also Margaret Thatcher Third Way 153, 154, 159

194

Index

Thomas, Albert 112 Thompson, Edward P. 86 Thorez, Maurice 77 Thorne, Will 106–108 Tillett, Ben 108–111 Tilly, Charles 27, 57, 67, 168–170; see also strikes, history and early development; strike waves Tocqueville, Alexis de 41, 49–51, 168 Tolain, Henri 58 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 5, 111, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151 Transport and General Workers’ Union 140, 148 Tressell, Robert 149; see also Ragged Trousered Philanthropist Trevellick, Richard 60 Troy, Leo 14, 16, 17, 20, 99, 168 Troyes, France 113; see also May Day, 1890 tyranny, of capitalists and managers 33, 40, 50, 98 tyranny, of majority 2, 50, 158 union activists and organizers 59–61, 99, 105, 106–9, 120–127; employers’ views of 120; allies views of 122–5 unions and democracy 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12–14, 30, 49–54, 70, 95–101, 116, 124–135, 127, 129, 133–135, 141, 158, 161, 162; institutions and leadership 1, 5, 7, 12, 13, 30, 57–61, 62, 70, 116–131, 149–151; institutions and leadership “Labor Fakirs” 116 unions 2, 4–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12–24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 40, 44–46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55–85, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99–103, 107, 108, 111, 124, 116, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125–135, 137–141, 143, 146–155, 156–158, 161, 162; Australia 16, 17, 165–167; Austria 19, 20, 165–167; bargaining with employers, labor peace 6–8, 26, 27, 30, 51, 58, 61, 70–72, 76–79, 82, 90, 93, 116–141, 146–155, 158, 159; Belgium, 20, 165–167; Canada, 15, 17, 165–167; construction trades 59, 97, 103, 104; craft or industrial

organization 10, 13, 19, 20, 95–115, 161, 162; dues 59, 64, 107, 125, 127–130; France 33, 59, 73–79, 94, 111–115, 165–167; Germany 17, 64, 67, 129, 165–167 unions, growth and membership 1, 4, 7, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18–20, 28, 55–83, 84, 85, 86, 90–115, 124–126, 169; business cycle 87–89; declining effect of strikes 92–93; effect of socialist politics 87–89, 170; effect of strikes 67–73, 74–77, 80–83, 87–90; ideology and goals 6–8, 12–14, 21, 22, 55, 70, 115–118, 120, 122, 124–135, 137, 139–141, 143–147, 149, 150, 152–155, 156–163; irregular growth rates 68–83, 84–87; Italy 17, 165–167; Japan 17, 165–167; membership decline 84, 90–93; membership decline due to economic circumstances and industrial change 14–17, 19, 20–23, 55–58, 84; models of ‘irrational’ behavior 59, 61, 62, 64–67, 67–71, 85–87; models of rational behavior 57–58, 61, 67; Netherlands 17, 165–167; public sector 15, 16, 17, 20, 74, 150, 152; ‘special circumstances’ 90–92, 169; state policy 87–89; United Kingdom 16, 17, 28, 94, 108–112, 125, 138–154, 165–167; United States 10, 14–16, 19, 20, 59–61, 80–83, 94–105, 125, 129, 161, 165–167 unions and strikes 18, 24, 28, 29, 67–71, 73–83, 90, 94, 100, 106–110, 116–118, 120, 125, 127, 128, 133–135; do unions cause strikes? 117, 118, 120; do unions reduce strikes? 116, 118, 120–127 United Auto Workers (UAW) 80–81, 132 United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners 103–104 United Kingdom 5, 11, 16, 17, 18, 22, 28, 29, 35, 45, 55,71, 85, 86, 94–98, 104–112, 114, 120, 123, 125, 126, 131, 135–154, 165–167 United Mine Workers (UMW) 20, 60 United States 5–7, 10–21, 28, 29, 33–35,

Index 195 36–39, 42, 44–46, 48, 49, 50, 53, 57–61, 72, 73, 79–84, 94–104, 107, 111–114, 125, 126, 128–132, 136, 138, 143, 152, 154, 156, 161–163, 165–167 United States Steel 80 United Steel Workers (USW) 20 universal suffrage 1, 31. upheaval 4, 23, 24, 61, 62, 64, 65, 93, 131, 134; see also strikes; strike waves Vandervelde, Émile 63 Vanguard, union leadership 7; in Lenin 6, 131; see also Union activists and organizers Verein fur Socialpolitik 41 Vietnam, war in 9, 22 Voos, Paula 61 Voss, Kim 61 Wade, Senator Ben 97 Wade’s Arms 109; see also London dock strike Wagner Act 81, 82, 126 Wagner, Adolph 40, 41 Wealth Tax 139; see also Manifesto, Labour Party Webb, Sidney 44, 105, 129, 132, 133 Weber, Max 53, 132, 133, 161 Weinstock, Harris 126

Wells, H. G. 149 The Who 51 Wilson, Harold 137, 139, 140–142, 145, 146, 148, 153, 157, 170; see also Labour Party (UK) Wilson, Joseph 107 Wolman, Leo 12 women workers 27, 99, 55, 75, 80, 99, 105–106, 113, 123, 160 Worker Militancy and its Consequences, 1965–1975 15; see also Solomon Barkin World War I 21, 28, 33, 59, 71, 84, 118, 127, 129, 138, 162 World War II 9, 13, 17, 22, 24, 60, 71, 82, 86, 118, 142, 143, 148 Wright, Carroll 58 years: 1789 1, 42, 47, 111; 1793, 2, 17; 1886 1, 10, 28, 38, 94, 97–104, 107; 1889 1, 4, 8, 10, 21, 28, 55, 84, 86, 94, 102–104, 107, 108, 112, 113, 120; 1890 1, 5, 10, 28, 84, 94, 103, 104, 111–114, 127; 1919 4, 28, 63, 67, 118; 1936 4, 9, 10, 154; 1968 9, 34, 67, 74, 84, 85, 138, 149; 1969 154; France 73–79; United States 79–81 Yvetôt, Georges 130 Zolberg, Ari 28, 62; see also moments of madness