Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight over the U.S. Labor Movement

Contemporary debates over the past, present, and future of the labor movement never end. Organized labor’s long decline since its peak of the 1950s, the seeming unwillingness of many unions to spend resources on organizing, issues of staid leadership and union democracy, labor’s relationship to the Democratic Party, and many such issues have led to sharp debates in the movement and among scholars for decades. The recent strike surge and attempts to unionize leading corporations of the twenty-first century, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have led to media coverage, but no reversal in the declining percentage of American workers with a union contract. Debates among the labor intellectual community around these issues are woven in with ideological preconceptions and often grievances with particular unions or other scholars.What these debates often lack is a deep grounding in the empirical study of the structural issues around organized labor. Judith Stepan-Norris and Jasmine Kerrissey’s fantastic new volume Union Booms and Busts provides a scholarly overview of American labor from the perspective of historical sociologists looking for multifaceted understandings of the rise and fall of the labor movement.The authors divide American labor history since 1900 into three periods, based largely on the relationship of unions to the government. The Unregulated Period covers the period through 1934. The Regulated Period is between 1935 and 1979. Then comes the Dis-Regulated Period, which starts in 1980. For the purposes of their analysis, they end in 2015, but they clearly state that we remain in this last era.Within each of these periods, the authors analyze several factors. The first is the state and macro context, which includes how both employers and unions have shaped and reacted to larger national and international events to gain and leverage power. The second is the cost of replacement workers, whether through technology, labor surpluses, and globalization, or subcontracting and contingency. Third, they discuss how both unions and employers organize to promote their interests, a critically important issue given that we sometimes downplay employer organizing strategies due to our interest in worker organizing. Fourth, and somewhat less critical to their analysis, are race and gender dynamics. They call this more of a correlate than a mechanism to understanding these issues, and that may well be true, but these discussions enrich the book.For labor historians, the timeline will be familiar. Most major events receive at least a mention, though they are far less concerned with storytelling than they are data-driven analysis. The greatest value is in the Dis-Regulated Period. The term works well. By it, they mean to “capture the extent to which workers’ rights were dismantled” (156). At the time of writing, the basic outline of labor regulations continues to exist, though several major companies are attempting to have the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared unconstitutional.In understanding these years since 1980, Stepan-Norris and Kerrissey contribute because this history is so hotly debated and so unfinished. It’s not that the story is surprising per se. It’s that they cut out the easy talking points about contemporary labor and engage in a deep dive into the hard, structural issues. Many industries sent jobs overseas. Automation and technological improvements have led to smaller labor forces. Trade agreements have not helped. The NLRB’s politicization has paralyzed any long-term changes for workers coming out of the agency. Even union-friendly states are slow to recognize public employees’ right to strike. Reagan gave employers the green light to replace strikers in the private sector. Intensive employer organization has moved the nation’s political institutions significantly to the right, and not only on labor issues. Employers have also created or expanded on ways to divide their workforce and avoid responsibility for direct employment, including temporary workers, subcontracting, and the use of independent contractors, especially in trucking.How could any movement overcome this onslaught of challenges, all happening at the same time? The authors give credit to John Sweeney’s administration at the AFL-CIO, the rise of worker centers, and the unionization of women, especially women of color, as strategies that helped. But imagining that a different kind of union leadership could have led to a massively different movement in the face of all this remains difficult, for me at least. They most certainly do not ignore the importance of quality union leadership, but it remains a largely secondary concern in the bigger picture.For all the raucous debates over union democracy and leadership, the fact of the matter is that the labor movement is unable to maintain success when the government and corporate America are united against it. The government itself is not quite united on this point in the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court has shown itself repeatedly willing to do corporate bidding. One thing that Stepan-Norris and Kerrissey demonstrate is that the labor movement is exceedingly unlikely to rebuild itself and move beyond the Dis-Regulated Period without electing politicians who will do unions’ bidding. They provide a series of lessons to conclude the book, which emphasize the importance of state intervention in labor relations, that unions need to fight harder to increase the replacement costs for workers, the need for vastly increased organizing, and to continue centering women and people of color at both the grassroots and in leadership. All of this might leverage enough power to counter employer organizing and domination of politics and the courts.There are a couple of factual errors that might make historians raise their eyebrows: Grover Cleveland would be quite surprised, for example, to learn he was a Republican! But these are minor errors in a fantastic book. What’s especially useful here is the lack of simple answers. Understanding both labor history and the labor present requires moving away from singular mantras about what labor should do and instead engaging in the multifaceted analysis these wonderful scholars provide.