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.