In the 1970s and 1980s, labor’s forward march slowed and then halted. The ostensible cause was the fiscal crisis in state and local communities, which politicians, the mainstream media, and many economists ascribed to the disparity between rising public-sector labor costs and restricted tax revenues. Since this was also the period when many manufacturing facilities began migrating from the Northeast and Midwest to the American and global South, many cities and towns, in the vain hope of reversing or slowing down capital flight, scrambled to offer tax advantages, subsidies, and infrastructural concessions to business interests. Meanwhile, school budgets were slashed, some hospitals were closed, and local street and highways remained unrepaired.

During the two periods of twentieth-century labor upsurge, collective bargaining was achieved, initially, through worker disruption. This direct action was followed by legislation giving workers the opportunity to vote in state-supervised Labor Board elections for bargaining rights. But it was the employers who demanded and eventually benefited from the establishment of an electoral road to union recognition: in time, union leaders came to rely less and less on members’ power and more and more on the law, and made steep compromises in order to retain the right to bargain. The real story of the past seventy-five years of labor’s journey is the successful subordination of unions. The union contract is a legal vise; the law that is supposedly the worker’s weapon is in fact a double-edged sword. When unions agree to long-term contracts of as much as six years, they are prohibited from striking for the length of the agreement. For the modest gains unions have made in legal guarantees, they have been obliged to surrender important rights. Labor law obliges a union to enforce its contract against illegal worker insurgencies, and in some states penalties are fairly stiff if union leaders sanction such actions. The law once helped unions to grow their membership, but after years of relentless and relatively successful right-wing attacks on workers’ rights, some unionists have come to realize that the Labor Relations laws at the federal and local levels are mostly rigged against labor. In the 1980s, AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland proposed the repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, because it had become so watered-down, it no longer served workers’ interests. Yet this idea has not been introduced into the dominant vocabulary of union discourse; far from fighting to repeal the law, union leadership is reluctant to challenge or even strategically evade it. Labor remains committed to “reforming” it. But the sorry history of forty years of that effort attests to its futility, even in states where Democrats have had legislative majorities.

But it would be shortsighted to count on a new labor movement emerging within the confines of the existing unions. Throughout the country, new organizations are struggling to survive. Some of these are workers’ centers; others are unions formed, especially by the working poor, without early prospects for achieving collective bargaining. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, with about 15,000 members, relies almost exclusively on brief strikes, highway blockages, and city hall demonstrations to win its demands. The members negotiate informally with the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission. The workers’ centers mobilize strikes, but not for the purpose of gaining union recognition, which, especially in manufacturing sectors, could result in capital flight. What they usually want is unpaid back wages, better safety conditions, and reinstatement of workers who have been fired for union activity.

[...] the state has often paid for its bailout of large companies and financial institutions by imposing the costs on working- and middle-class people. Such a “bailout” is a politically legitimated transfer of wealth from the majority to a tiny minority based on the fallacious assumption that big corporate interests are at the heart of job creation and economic stability. Production, distribution, and consumption are entwined with actions of the state not only through regulation but also by this proclivity of governments to rescue the largest banks and industrial corporations in times of crisis. At least since World War II, this has partly been accomplished through the awarding of a huge volume of government-funded war and education contracts; the building of federal highways, which have become vital means of commercial transportation, and of recreational facilities; and the enormous expansion of public employment. Until the recent austerity measures insisted on by business interests and dutifully imposed by federal, state, and local governments, public employment was, for thirty years, effectively the only major growth sector for decent-paying jobs. [...]

Our current general economic crisis at a time of very concentrated wealth and extreme income inequality has its own peculiar features, but in broad outline it is by no means new. Such crises have afflicted all levels of our government for centuries. During our nineteenth century’s Gilded Age, the emerging trusts exercised an almost unchallenged rule over the private-sector workplace and government at all levels. The labor movement then—both unions and radicals—was very weak, and it was relatively easy for ruling elites to address a crisis by shifting its burden onto workers and local communities.

There were, of course, some real struggles to break the success of these relentless capitalist offensives: the great rail strikes of 1877, 1884, and 1894; the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892; turn-of-the-century coal- and copper-mining struggles; and, in 1886, the beginning of labor’s half-century fight for the eight-hour day—a revolutionary concept at a time when the workday ranged from ten to fourteen hours. Unions also fought for legislation against child labor and (egregiously) against women’s right to work nights and operate some machinery. Many of these battles were lost, but they planted the seeds of a major reversal in the relationship of political and social forces between capital and labor. Meanwhile, their failure to pass and thus mitigate the extreme concentration of wealth and curb the reckless accumulation of further wealth set the stage for the crash of 1929 that launched the Great Depression.