[...] To win passage of the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised by exempting two occupations dominated by African Americans—agricultural and domestic labor—from the provisions of the NLRA. This effectively condemned many African Americans to a second-class status under the first national labor law covering workers across the private sector. (This provision is still the law of the land, and today also represses many Latinx and other people of color.) Government workers were also excluded. It would take almost thirty years until another round of worker pressure, stemming from the civil rights movement, and a 1962 executive order by John F. Kennedy, to begin to soften the path for public-sector unionization, which I’ll discuss later in this chapter.

The industries the unions were targeting to make major gains for all workers included steel and automotive industries, where the employer class was making the biggest profits. The unions knew that the governors controlled the state-based National Guard units. Unions went all out, raising more money for the campaign in 1936 than all previous union donations combined for the elections from 1906 through 1935. They also put record numbers of boots on the ground, not only for FDR, but also for the governorships in Pennsylvania and Michigan, the two states that housed the biggest workforces in the targeted industries. After FDR’s reelection and the election of progressive governors in both of those states, unions started to build the foundation of the American Dream and chip away at inequality. When General Motors workers in Flint, Michigan, held a sit-down strike—they stopped working but stayed in the plants—they prevented any potential replacement scab workers from coming in to replace them. If Michigan’s governor had called out law enforcement to forcefully remove the striking workers, GM management would have won—but because unions had worked hard to help elect a governor they could better control, they worried less about the threat of law enforcement. Similar dynamics played out in the big steel strikes in Pennsylvania. After much effort on the part of unions, the federal government occasionally sent those forces first to defend unionizing workers, and, later, African Americans during the civil rights movement. Shifting the federal government’s apparatuses toward defending the rights of workers to unionize and strike, and later the rights of African Americans to vote and challenge discrimination, was all it took to build massive, decades-lasting structural achievements.

Throughout the late 1930s and through the 1940s, workers continued to form unions in record numbers and income inequality steadily fell. In just four years, from 1934 to 1938, the percentage of nonagricultural workers in unions jumped from 11.5 percent to 26.6 percent. This would have been unimaginable in 1932. The gap between the billionaires and workers declined because the power equation shifted. The workers made that shift by making strong organizations of their own, bargaining collectively, and holding the kind of strikes that could create a crisis when employers were unreasonable. Big gains for the whole of the working class were being extracted in key profit sectors of the economy. The mobilization for World War II and the tight labor markets it produced, however, overshadowed serious dangers on the horizon for workers and their new unions.

Even though the Supreme Court upheld the NLRA in 1937, it also issued perhaps the most serious blow to American workers, one not well recognized at the time as the key weapon that would slowly undo workers’ ability to fundamentally redistribute power and therefore wealth: the Mackay Radio & Telegraph decision. In Mackay, the same justices who upheld the NLRA ruled that striking workers could be permanently replaced by strikebreakers. Labor scholars have pointed out the uniquely schizophrenic nature of the court’s rulings that year—one decision affirming that workers have the right to strike and can’t be fired for doing so, but on the other hand, another legal decision that gave employers the right to permanently replace them if they did—which had the effect of firing workers for striking.

Mackay wasn’t well understood at the time as a knockout punch to unions. In just a few short years of serious organizing and real gains via strikes, the societal norms constructed under the New Deal had effectively made it culturally unacceptable to replace striking workers. Another forty-four years would pass and two more rounds of the employer offensive would be launched before President Ronald Reagan weaponized the Mackay decision and replaced 100 percent of the nation’s 12,000 highly skilled air traffic control workers during a strike in 1981. The “societal norms” and “culture” that prevented employers from using Mackay were created because of the brilliant strategy of the early years of the CIO, and by the agency of workers fully engaging the entire community in labor fights.

Imagine the frustration of the billionaires. They had legally secured the right to replace strikers via Mackay, but in effect they had their hands tied by smart worker-organizing strategy. [...]

For the first time in sixteen years, in 1946, the Republicans took control of Congress, winning majorities in both the House and the Senate. And for the second time in twelve years, the threat of a genuinely united American working class forged a tactical alliance between big corporations in the North and their racist pro–Jim Crow Southern allies. It didn’t take long after the new Congress was sworn into power in 1947 to gut the NLRA. Congress passed the Labor-Management Relations Act (commonly referred to as Taft–Hartley for the bill’s lead sponsors, Ohio Republican Robert Taft in the Senate and New Jersey Republican Fred Hartley in the House), a sweeping amendment to the NLRA that was so extreme it was vetoed by President Harry Truman. But the racist, anti-worker, pro-corporate majorities in Congress had enough power at that point to override Truman’s veto.

The list of changes was significant. It included making it permissible, once again, for employers to use paid work time to actively campaign against unionization; a ban on sympathy strikes and boycotts; an end to wildcat strikes (where workers simply walk off the job with no notice, sometimes in defiance of their unions, not just their employer); an end to the closed shop (whereby employers could hire only people who were union members); the creation of so-called right-to-work laws, which gave states the option to make union membership voluntary; and a clause mandating that union leaders and members had to sign affidavits stating they had not been a member of the Communist Party or socialist parties. With the zeal of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions, the practical impact of this last provision was that thousands of the most successful rank-and-file organizers were purged from the unions, regardless of whether they had ever been official members of any party.

ONE MAJOR CORPORATION STOOD OUT for its lasting contribution to the development of professional union busting: the retail giant Sears, Roebuck. Sears had always fought its workers’ attempts to unionize, but the NLRA made it considerably trickier when it outlawed overt intimidation by management, like firing workers who wanted to unionize. In 1935, with the NLRA the new law of the land, Sears hired Nathan Shefferman as its human resources director with explicit instructions to fight unions tooth and nail despite the law. Shefferman turned the human resource department into a laboratory that developed cutting-edge union-avoidance strategies that remain central to the industry even now. Working with some of the top academic institutions of the era—including world-renowned behavioral psychologists at the University of Chicago, in addition to the industrial relations psychologists—they began experiments to predict which workers might be prone to join unions.

To pinpoint workers in the company who might want to unionize, management developed tools like employee-attitude surveys that allowed a human resources department to avoid violating the anti-spying provisions in the NLRA but still collect information on employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Employees would be fooled into believing the company was genuinely interested in their feedback, but these increasingly sophisticated surveys helped management weed out potential threats without violating the new labor laws. With the surveys, management developed a method to ascertain which workers they wanted to promote, which ones to surveil, and which to dispose of, lest the idea of workers deserving something better than wage slavery begin to spread.

Shefferman hooked his clients on the idea that the unscrupulous tactics required to keep, or make, companies union-free would best be done at arm’s length, so the companies would not be liable for the kind of illegal tactical warfare required to thwart a very natural human desire for their betterment. Despite LRA’s successes, and because there were still some members of Congress who were sympathetic to unions, some of Shefferman’s aggressive antiunion behavior, notably bribery and racketeering, was exposed by congressional investigations. By the late 1950s, LRA was forced to close. But the dozens of consultants who worked for LRA began to found their own union-avoidance firms, and those union buster names—Modern Management Methods (3M), the law firm Jackson & Lewis, and John Sheridan of John Sheridan Associates—are very familiar to organizers today.

Public-sector workers didn’t secure the right to collective bargaining until the civil rights movement made unionization a central issue. African Americans moved into government positions in large numbers on the heels of black veterans returning from World War II. And as the civil rights movement grew, so did the demand for unions in the public sector. At the big municipality level, New York City was the first to create a legal collective bargaining framework, in 1958. At the state level, Wisconsin was the first to grant state employees the right to collectively bargain in 1959. And in 1962, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order giving federal government workers the right to collective bargaining inside their agencies. The main federal government workers’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, grew from 71,000 members in 1961 to 301,000 by 1970.