[...] Since the Depression of 2007, they have all discovered that the economy no longer has room for most of them. But their alienation is more than economic. Joblessness and declining material prospects may be solved within a political system willing to accommodate at least some of the disaffected. What the system cannot do is address the political and cultural disaffection that economic alienation has bred. Like the New Left, whose members for the most part shared the material comfort produced by the United States’ favorable position in the global economy and its domestic advantages as a permanent-warfare state, the current generation of the “new middle class” harbors a deep critique of the system, one that cannot be healed by the same left-liberal program of jobs, jobs, jobs. Too many of the jobs produced now do not heal the lives of those who take them.

Why did GM, U.S. Steel, GE, and other large, oligopolistic corporations agree to unionization? Part of the answer, at least for GM and the four major rubber corporations, was the factory occupations in Flint, Detroit, Cleveland, and Akron: they preferred peaceful organization to such baptisms of fire. And there may have been another equally compelling reason. Collective bargaining is one way to make labor a predictable factor in production. Of course, unionization obliged these major industrial corporations to yield higher money wages and assume the burden of the social wage (benefits), especially when the New Deal funds that provided elements of the social wage through federal taxation had been exhausted. On the other hand, the contract provision that addressed shop floor grievances through negotiation and arbitration was less disruptive and costly than strikes, slowdowns, and sabotage. The unions traded their autonomy for job security and a private social welfare arrangement. Contracts increasingly banned strikes for the life of the agreement. Equally important, the union often became an ally of the company in matters of worker discipline.

The conclusion one might draw from the dismal record of the last thirty years of union concessions is that collective bargaining, once an effective, although two-edged, weapon in labor’s struggle, has reached a watershed. Today, collective bargaining in production, service, and public sectors is more a blunt instrument of management than a workers’ sword. There are a number of reasons why this is so. Certainly, the paramount factor is the historic three-way bargain between the unions, the state and corporate capital, which, as we have seen, chained labor to a legal framework that inhibited its freedom of action. It is true that for at least a generation, millions gained from this arrangement. But the regular wage and benefits increases that were characteristic of the postwar period until the 1970s presupposed the continued dominance of the United States in the global economy and global politics. When Europe and Japan revived from wartime devastation and became exporting nations, and when in the 1990s China emerged—with the help of American capital—as a potentially major economic power, U.S. capitalists moved to reign in workers’ living standards by sharply resisting money wage and social wage demands. And companies lost no time introducing labor-saving technologies into the workplace, while demanding expanded management prerogatives aimed at increasing productivity, presumably to reduce labor costs. Claims of economic necessity formed the ostensible reason for capital’s offensive. But as labor’s share of the social product was sharply reduced by technological innovations, a more important reason became clear: the subordination of workers and their unions. That is, capital saw in the new world economic order a chance to reduce workers’ power to determine working conditions and, especially, to limit its control over the pace of production.

I am a member of a large (1.4 million-member) national union, the American Federation of Teachers, that offers high-interest credit cards, average-price auto insurance, long-term care insurance, and low-priced periodical subscriptions. It also spends a portion of my dues to support Democratic congressional and local candidates with the excuse that we need “pro-labor” legislators. ir fear of the insurgent right, labor’s leadership is prepared to accept paltry political returns in exchange for the guaranteed protection of federal and some state governments. Having given up hope and ambition for significant gains, they have settled for a status quo that increasingly deteriorates but falls short of absolute catastrophe.

The labor movement has always advanced when workers were willing to risk their jobs to make gains—and even, on occasion, willing to risk their lives. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many who fought capital were virtually exiled from their homes and communities, especially in one-industry towns, where mining, textiles, steel, or electrical manufacturing was the only game to play in. Under these circumstances, job security was won by prolonged labor struggle; it was the legacy of countless heroes who were willing to sacrifice life and limb for the workers’ cause. Like academic tenure—the job security program for professors, most of whom are not troublemakers—when not accompanied by struggle, job security has become a way to fold workers into the system, to reward their acquiescence to the austerities imposed on them by capital.

[...] New York’s other unions, some of them among the largest and most powerful in the country, were mostly indifferent to public employees and particularly unsympathetic to teacher unionism: teachers were college-educated and their collective profile did not fit into a labor movement of more than a million industrial, construction, and transportation workers, many of whom were not even high school graduates. In general, the unions shared the prejudice that professionals—including teachers, doctors, nurses and many other categories of public employees—were not organizable.

In 1975–76, New York City declared a fiscal crisis when the large financial institutions refused to extend their usual short-term loans to the city government unless the political establishment and the public unions agreed to severe budget reductions. The unions and the Democratic mayor, Abraham Beame, prepared for the worst, and they were not surprised when the city’s finances were taken over by a bank-controlled Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB). District Council 37 agreed to the layoff of 50,000 non–civil service employees, many of whom were black and Latino, and other municipal unions accepted reductions as well. Education budgets were slashed; improvements in teachers’ working conditions were put on hold and pay increases were frozen and then reduced.

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) accepted the financial board that Wall Street had forced on the city and also accepted the EFCB’s proposal to transfer some of the municipal government’s autonomous functions to the state. The union further endorsed the board’s layoff of thousands of paraprofessional school workers, many of whom assisted classroom teachers. City government imposed unpaid furloughs on those remaining on the payrolls. Local union leaders, most of them Shanker and Feldman loyalists, all but abandoned their earlier industrial-union militancy

The propagandists who disseminate the unblemished benefits of the technological revolution—including a considerable portion of liberal economists and commentators—claim that in the long run Americans will benefit from the demise of the old Rust Bowl industries, even if in the short term some will suffer. Both liberals and the right vehemently deny that the final tendency of the contemporary technological revolution is to permanently decrease the number of good jobs. They also reject the idea that if jobs are to become scarcer, shorter hours and guaranteed income become imperative solutions, and that refusing them will mean an inevitable reduction in living standards for perhaps a majority of the population. Instead, they stress the importance of further schooling and job training to facilitate the workers’ transformation from industrial laborers to what the former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich once termed “symbolic analysts.” What is missing from this optimistic forecast is the ratio of workers made redundant by the new technologies to the number of new good jobs that the technologies create.

The other side of technological change is the race to the bottom. Over the past thirty years, the gradual disappearance of the mass industrial worker and the weakening of the unions based on the semiskilled workers and the degradation of skilled occupations to semiskilled status has resulted in wage stagnation and decline, large-scale housing foreclosures, and growth in the number of the poor, a class largely composed of former industrial workers—now unemployed, or low-wage, or condemned to part-time service work. And the “new poor,” a class composed of the young, older workers, and some types of professionals, such as lawyers and managers, has not been created only by the depression that began in 2007; it, too, is partly the result of technological progress.

Some glib boosters do acknowledge the social and economic costs of technological change. For most of them, the solution is to accelerate the expansion of schooling, both for the young and for displaced adults. Characteristically, and in conformity with the austerity thinking that has gripped much of America, the most recent proposal and practice is to fulfill the promise of new career education by offering online courses. Once the province of for-profit colleges, Internet-driven online learning has been dramatically introduced into the mainstream and is now sponsored by elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, some of the leading public research institutions such as Illinois, and the largest urban university in the United States, the City University of New York. Faculty at these institutions are encouraged to upgrade their Internet skills to be able to take advantage of electronic study aids such as Blackboard or, more extensively, to enlist themselves as instructors in online courses.

Unwillingness to recruit professionals to the movement mirrors the unions’ similar neglect of supervisory workers. The National Labor Relations Act excludes managers from the protection of the law, and so unions came to believe that “management” was their main adversary and that supervisory workers included in bargaining units during representation elections would naturally vote against unionization. Rather than fighting for the right of managerial workers to be organized, they approved, or were indifferent to, the NLRA’s legal exception of them.

The boldest union adaptation to new technology was made by the West Coast’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). The industry wanted to introduce containerization, an automated shipping and cargo-loading process that replaced most of the hand-loading that had defined longshore work for centuries. The proposal provoked an intense period of debate and disagreement. ILWU leadership was convinced that resistance to technological change would condemn the ports under their control to oblivion, that other countries, particularly Canada and Mexico, and their domestic rival, the Gulf Coast, would agree to containerization and the stevedore companies would shift West Coast work to those regions. So they demanded an unusual adaptation to the new technology: the company would adopt containerization, and qualified workers would be paid whether they worked or not. This quid pro quo was radical in its implications: for the first time in U.S. history, the workers were claiming a share in the enhanced profits of enterprise not as a bonus but as a right. Under the ILWU/Pacific Maritime Agreement, as long as employees in the “A” category reported for work, they were paid full salary, whether or not they were assigned to move cargo that day. The agreement also provided for a “B” category of employees not covered by the guaranteed wage. A similar deal was concluded by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), which represents workers on the East and Gulf Coasts. The only parallel agreement can be found in the newspaper industry, where printers in the International Typographical Union (ITU), whose hand-typesetting skills were made obsolete by machines, were paid to take extended furloughs for as long as six months or more. But the pattern in other branches of industrial production was that unions simply conceded the usual layoffs. In some agreements, workers were offered severance pay if they accepted permanent displacement; in others, such as the Auto Workers’, laid off employees with sufficient seniority on the job received full pay until they were offered a new job by the company. They were also allowed to refuse relocation to sites outside their residential area, but if they were offered transfers within their region they were obliged to accept them or lose their wage guarantees. The UAW Big Three and farm-equipment agreements have a “thirty and out” provision: a fifty-five-year-old worker can receive a pension after thirty years of employment. In 2000, the pension exceeded $3,000 a month. For those eligible for Social Security benefits, the retirement package has equaled their straight-time hourly earnings.