Turning Points in U.S. Labor History,Political Culture,and the Current Upsurge in Labor Militancy

The current upsurge in labor militancy has surprised many and drawn substantial attention from media, scholars, activists, and the public. The surprise is amplified against a backdrop of decades-long declining strike activity and union formation. Couple these general trends with a series of serious gaps—productivity/compensation gap, voice/representation gap, favorable public opinion for unions but low level of union formation—and it becomes clear why the current upsurge deserves attention.

We can mark the emergence of this upsurge with the wave of teacher's strikes in 2018–19 followed by another surge under pandemic conditions from a variety of industrial locations including large warehouse workers like those at Amazon, service workers like Starbucks baristas, health care and education workers, heavy equipment manufacturing workers like those at John Deere, and more recently the threatened stoppage by several railroad unions. Strikes, organizing activities, and worker protests have increased over the 2021–22 period. In their valuable report, Kochan et al. (2022, p. 16) ask: “Will the current upsurge in activism be merely a flash in the pan that dissipates in the face of strong employer opposition or a weakening labor market, or be a turning point in labor management relations that produces sustained growth in the number and ways in which workers organize and gain stronger voice at work?” (Emphasis added).

Forecasting from within an unfolding nonlinear historical process is risky business. I look to the past to acquire insight about prior turning points in labor history and their respective conditions of existence. After a brief on turning points, I assess several key conditions which could bear on the question at hand.

Turning Points in Theory and History

The question requires clarity on the meaning of turning point and applicability to the current moment. We can think about turning points in two ways. One is an inflection point, a point on a quantitative curve where a change in the direction of curvature takes place. The downturn in a measure of economic activity signaling a recession would be an example.

A second way of conceiving of a turning point is as a series of cascading transformative events, branching sequences of occurrences that generate deep qualitative structural reconfigurations. Because structures are articulated with other structures, an initial local rupture has the potential to bring about structural and political culture change through a cascading series of subsequent ruptures. The key distinction that I am making between a turning point as inflection versus one that is transformative is that the latter ushers in a new regime of social relations while the former signals more or less of the same relations in a process trajectory.

The transformative conception of turning point identifies the more momentous kind of social change. What examples do we have in U.S. labor history? From labor's perspective there have been three such positive transformative periods. The first was the emergence of a militant national labor movement during the last quarter of the nineteenth century that battled to produce the growth trajectory of union formation into the early twentieth century, all done against tremendous, often bloody, counteractions launched against it by employers and state agents. This was a monumental success measured not only in the trajectory of labor organizations, but through deep structural transformation that rearticulated labor relations, a mass assault on the ancient regime of master-servant relations that had long governed the workplace.

The second positive transformation occurred with the Great Depression and New Deal. Deep economic stagnation spawning widespread social and political crisis were the key macro-conditions. Widespread mobilization of unemployed workers signaled a possible turning point by contributing to the reemergence of a culture of solidarity in many working-class communities, collective resistance and common purpose fueled for many by a growing change in perceptions that widespread injustice could be changed by collective action. A combination of economic crisis, government and employer response, worker solidarity and creative tactical adaptation in the form of the sit-down strike fueled the industrial workers’ movement that, in turn, ushered in a series of legal changes along with the birth of the CIO and its industry-specific unions. Stemming from a recognition that labor rights and higher wages could help boost mass consumption and stimulate the economy, federal macro-economic policy was crucial to this turning point too. By encouraging collective bargaining, it created the expansion of unions and a deep transformation in capital-labor relations for a period of several exceptional decades.

The third turning point emerged during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here the militant energy of New Left movements (especially civil rights/Black liberation, antiwar, and women's rights) spilled over into workplaces revitalizing workplace activism. While this spillover influenced some segments of the private sector, its major impact was registered in public sector militancy and union formation (Isaac et al., 2006; Isaac & Christiansen, 2002). In all three turning points, political culture changed in significant ways.

Possible Conditions for Political Culture Change

How might the current upsurge become a transformative turning point for workers? Kochan and Liebman (2022) identify several factors that would be pivotal in shaping an answer to this question, including the degree to which there is: (a) growth and intensification of worker militancy and activism; (b) union support for new activists and new worker advocacy; (c) strong, intensive, and diverse coalitions between communities and social justice movements with unions; (d) receptiveness from the business community to engage in constructive discourse with labor; (e) meaningful labor law reform.

I take points (a) and (b) as axiomatic and address the remaining three conditions by starting with the premise that dominant political culture in the U.S. has always been, to varying degrees, anti-union. The force and mechanisms through which that anti-unionism was expressed varied. It was delivered in vicious and violent ways prior to the New Deal labor law reforms, shifted to contentious tolerance of unions during the New Deal Coalition era (basically mid-1930s to mid-1970s), and became forcefully anti-union again within the decline of the New Deal Coalition and the rise of neoliberalist developments since the 1980s. If the union movement is to expand again, political culture must change. How might this happen?

Social movement unionism centered on racial justice. A culture of narrow business unionism must be replaced by a unionism that recaptures the energy and power of movement. Others have advanced this position and there are a variety of social movement unionism paths that could be followed. Articulating the union movement with the struggle for racial justice is a good place to start. The most significant gains in the history of the U.S. labor movement grew from strong interracial solidarity; some of the greatest disasters stemmed from its absence.

On the disastrous side of the ledger, the racial divide between white labor and freed Black labor undermined the political and economic power of the working-class as a whole contributing to conditions for the growth of the Jim Crow regime, a point made forcefully by W.E.B DuBois in his Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. This tragic outcome set the stage for the emergence of racially-exclusivist organizing in some parts of the labor movement. Employers routinely mobilized this division (and others) pitting one segment of the working-class against another, thus diminishing white and Black worker's power (Isaac, McKane, et al., 2022).

However, during the industrial labor movement's major formative period, gains were made by the racially inclusive practices of the Knights of Labor, then the Industrial Workers of the World. Amid the Great Depression, the CIO emergent insurgency against the AFL launched an intraclass struggle predicated on interracial solidarity as a basis for articulating working-class unity. During the years of its independent organizational existence (1935–1955), the CIO was a potent expression of working-class solidarity producing one of the greatest surges of worker organization in U.S. history (Zeitlin & Weyher, 2001), and a major force for civil rights movement development in northern industrial cities.

Over the postwar decades, the southern civil rights struggle became a mass movement and a driving force as civil rights actions shaped labor militancy more that the reverse and did so most extensively in public sector workplaces. Civil rights movement militancy penetrated the labor movement through organizational pressure on the AFL-CIO hierarchy as well as specific affiliated unions. Funds in support of civil rights actions flowed from some unions and there were shows of support by unions in civil rights campaigns such as the 1963 March on Washington. Militant culture flowed between informal channels embedded in communities with dense labor and civil rights networks, and civil rights militancy informed labor militancy through overlapping movement personnel, “activists who had a foot in each movement culture” (Isaac & Christiansen, 2002, p. 727). “Bridge activists” like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Herbert Hill, Martin Luther King, E.D. Nixon, and Cleveland Robinson linked rank-and-file black workers to the white union leadership, and connected, if unevenly, the civil rights movement agenda to the organized labor movement. Inspired by urban rebellions and Black Panther activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black worker caucuses drove militancy especially in workplaces with substantial portions of Black workers, as in the Detroit auto factories.

While there was labor support for the civil rights movement over this period, there was not nearly enough. Labor benefited from civil rights movement militancy spillover, especially in the public sector, but not nearly enough in the private sector. With more extensive and deep interracial solidarity, both movements would have been much stronger. Michael Reich's Racial Inequality offers compelling evidence that interracial solidarity in union formation is one mechanism for reducing between-race economic inequality and increasing the income share of the Black and white working-class. In other words, there are good self-interested reasons for supporting racial solidarity in addition to humanistic altruism.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement represents a key force for racial justice that has the potential to animate social movement laborism strengthening both BLM and the labor movement. There are indications that BLM is spilling over and stimulating the current labor upsurge around racial justice issues. Will BLM inspirational force at the point of production expand in a sustained way? Older workers with experience in social justice movements can help animate “occupational activism” (Cornfield et al., 2019) directed at workplace racial injustice, while there is also evidence of a vibrant potential for coalition formation between unions and other social movements growing in emergent activist cultures among young workers (Cha et al., 2018). Both age demographics can be valuable sources of creative energy for a racial justice social movement unionism.

A transformation of political culture must go beyond the workplace. Effective framing of the core message for the role of unions and why they matter is necessary to combat a deep, long-term, and pernicious anti-union culture that has been produced and reproduced in a variety of cultural genres (Isaac, 2008; Isaac, Coley, et al., 2022; Isaac, Mckane, et al., 2022). A widespread evidence-based effort should teach why unions matter for providing greater on-the-job protections against unsafe working conditions and arbitrary supervisors, improving living standards, and for supporting freedom of dissent, the primary vehicle through which working people can mobilize pressure against political and economic elites. There is no other comparable force with the potential to be a countervailing factor against excessive political and economic inequality.

Discourse with business and political leaders. I have two observations here. First, some business leaders pay attention to public opinion, especially if they can see ways to profit from it. At 71% in Gallup approval, public opinion favoring labor unions is now at highest levels since the mid-1960s. With public opinion toward virtually all other institutions continuing to decline, this could be a telling signal. Businesses that go against this public opinion could very well be harming their bottom line. Social movement unionism can help business leaders see the way.

A second consideration is the need to establish a new intellectual and policy-based rationale for the existence of unions; in a word, a replacement for the role that Keynesian theory played during the New Deal Coalition era as rationale for the broad social importance of unions during an era of crisis-level stagnation. Understanding that economic depression was the result, in part, of insufficient mass consumption (ineffective aggregate demand), Keynesian theory implicated the role of wages in ameliorating the contradiction, thus making the working-class and unions representatives of universal (not special) interest.

The key economic crisis today is staggering economic inequality, a level of income and wealth inequality not seen since the early twentieth century. The extent of this problem has been widely documented by scholars, exhorted by politicians (e.g., President Obama referred to excessive inequality as the “defining challenge of our time”), and the driving force for the Occupy Movement. Tethered to important ethical issues are significant economic and political consequences of excessive inequality. The economy's dynamism works best when inequality is more moderate than presently exists; the period between World War II and the 1970s suggests as much, and research generally supports this idea.

The impact of the political fallout of excessive inequality is likely to be even more damaging. The share of income going to working and middle classes have declined dramatically for decades. The role of income and wealth in politics has become so skewed that the very meaning of democracy is threatened with dangerous levels of political polarization. Scholarly research indicates that high inequality reduces political interest, participation in elections, and the overall sense of political efficacy. It also tears the fabric of social cohesion, while increasing support for nativist political parties, rightwing extremists, and autocratic leaders. In short, it is a factor in weakening and destabilizing democratic institutions.

We know that the assault on labor unions and resulting decline over the past several decades is responsible for about one-third of the growth in massive economic inequality (Western & Rosenfeld, 2011). If union decline has been one of the key sources of excessive inequality growth—with all its associated economic, political, and social problems—union revitalization can be an important part of the solution, one that benefits most American citizens, not just union members. The crisis needs to be articulated with a robust labor movement as a key part of the solution.

Labor law reform? Two of the major historic transformative turning points benefited from important labor laws—the NLRA (Wagner Act) in the 1930s and public sector collective bargaining law changes in the 1960s and 1970s. Favorable labor law reforms are not likely soon. For example, in Glacier Northwest Inc. vs. International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Local 174, Glacier charged that during a strike by their cement truck drivers, trucks were abandoned containing cement which led to costly expenses absorbed by the company. Framing these costs as vandalism, Glacier sought recourse under both criminal and tort law. The trial judge found for the IBT that the NLRA preempts such rulings in this case. Glacier appealed to the Washington State Supreme Court and received the same ruling. Undeterred, Glacier petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court which in October agreed to rule on the case (Docket #: 21-1449, January 10, 2023). If the Supreme Court finds in favor of Glacier (a likely outcome given the current court composition), the ruling could have a chilling effect on decisions to strike because economic losses by struck companies could, by implication, be grounds for suing unions.

With Federal Reserve-induced interest hikes, most observers are expecting an economic slowdown this coming year which will likely cool the labor market. A Supreme Court decision in favor of Glacier coupled with an economic slowdown would most likely mute the current militancy upsurge. Yet it is important to remember that the consensus among mainstream economists in 1932, including George Barnett, the President of the American Economic Association, was that trade unionism was weak and declining in significance. We all know what came next.