Back to the Future? US Labour in the New Gilded Age
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Ruth Milkman |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12047 |
Back to the Future? US Labour in
the New Gilded Age
Ruth Milkman
Abstract
This article argues that the twenty-first century US labour movement has
increasingly come to resemble its counterpart in the Gilded Age 100 years ago.
Starting in the 1970s, deindustrialization and deregulation have gradually
undermined the New Deal labour relations system, and have led to the prolif-
eration of precarious labour. The labour movement then began to experiment
with alternative labour organizing strategies and increasingly sought out politi-
cal alliances with other progressive movements, reproducing practices that were
widespread among US unions prior to the New Deal era. Although many of
these experiments have succeeded on a small scale, they face intransigent
opposition from employers and anti-union organizations, and whether they can
be expanded enough to generate a new labour movement upsurge remains to be
seen.
1. Introduction
In December 2012, despite vigorous protests from union supporters, the
Michigan state legislature passed a law prohibiting ‘union shop’ provisions
(clauses that require union-represented workers to pay dues or equivalent
fees for union representation) in labour-management contracts. This ‘right-
to-work’ law was similar to those already in place in 23 other states, mostly
in the US South and West. In January 2012, Indiana became the first state in
the nation’s Midwestern ‘rustbelt’ to enact such a law. When Michigan — a
former bastion of industrial unionism and well to the left of Indiana on the
nation’s political spectrum — followed suit later that year, it resonated
widely as a symbol of the US labour movement’s distress. Adding insult to
injury, 2012 was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the massive sit-down strike
in Flint, Michigan, through which the iconic United Automobile Workers’
Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12047
51:4 December 2013 0007–1080 pp. 645–665
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
union had first won recognition from General Motors, then the world’s
largest industrial corporation (Yeselson 2012).
The Indiana and Michigan right-to-work laws were vigorously promoted
by well-funded conservative political advocacy groups such as Americans for
Prosperity (AFP) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
both of which receive funds from billionaire brothers David and Charles
Koch and other right-wing corporate interests (Confessore and Davey 2012;
Eidelson 2012). These organizations seized the opportunity presented by
the 2010 midterm elections, in which Republicans won governorships and
legislative majorities in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. In early 2011, all
three of those states passed variants of ALEC’s model legislation limiting
public-sector collective bargaining rights, and their newly elected governors
promptly signed the measures into law. Despite massive grass-roots protests
in Wisconsin — including weeks-long occupation of the state Capitol
building — its new public-sector law survived intact, as did Indiana’s; only in
Ohio was the legislation repealed (by means of a referendum). Emboldened
by these initial successes in passing anti-labour legislation in the formerly
impenetrable Midwest, AFP and ALEC turned their attention to campaigns
for right-to-work laws in Indiana and Michigan, this time targeting unions in
the private sector (Center for Media and Democracy 2013: 9–17). As the
Michigan AFP director explained, ‘We would like . . . to take the unions out
at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles’ (Eidelson
2012).
These developments constituted a final coda to the era of US labour
history whose centrepiece was the legally regulated system of collective
bargaining created by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Although signs of labour movement decline had been accumulating for
decades, well into the twenty-first century many unionists continued to
believe that labour law reform could restore the viability of the New Deal
system. As recently as 2003, the American Federation of Labor–Congress of
Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), along with many individual unions
and labour-oriented advocacy groups, poured vast resources into a national
campaign for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a proposed overhaul
of the NLRA designed to reverse its de facto capture by employer interests
during the preceding decades.
Yet, even after Barack Obama’s election in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis, EFCA failed to win passage in the US Congress. During his presi-
dential campaign, Obama had repeatedly signalled his sympathies for
workers and their unions, and soon after taking office he made a series of
labour-friendly political appointments. But EFCA failed to secure the 60
votes needed to win passage in the US Senate, and the effort was finally
abandoned in late 2009. The relentless decline of union density and power
continued, now accompanied by persistently high unemployment and aus-
terity policies that disproportionately affected the working class. Against
this background, the passage of Michigan’s 2012 right-to-work law was all
the more devastating.
646 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013.
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