Towards Neoliberal Trade Unionism: Decline, Renewal and Transformation in North American Labour Movements
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12040 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Ian Thomas MacDonald |
Towards Neoliberal Trade Unionism:
Decline, Renewal and Transformation in
North American Labour Movements
Ian Thomas MacDonald
Abstract
The article argues that ‘renewal’ and ‘crisis’ are inadequate descriptors of the
current state of the American and Canadian labour movements. Many of the
structural and strategic shifts that have remade labour unions in North America
over the past two decades — including new organizing strategies, bargaining
outcomes and political strategies — speak rather to a contradictory reconsti-
tution of organized labour along neoliberal lines and the impasse of the renewal
project. If there is a crisis in the labour movement, it is a crisis in the nature of
trade unions as working-class organizations. The article builds this argument
through, in turn, a historical overview, a critical reading of the labour renewal
literature and a discussion of current trade union practice.
1. Introduction
No reader of North American history can fail to be impressed by the turbu-
lence that has marked working-class formation on this continent.1Nearly
all writing on labour history stresses the rhythmic character of the labour
movement’s organizational composition and decomposition. Rather than
proceeding towards any given end (national structures of representation,
industrial forms of organization, class consciousness and political party for-
mation), the Canadian and American labour movements have followed the
irreducibly indeterminate rhythm of class struggle that has arisen in counter-
point to an especially restless geography of capitalist development. We can
identify two moments within this rhythmic pattern. The first is a moment of
creativity in which working people have experimented with new forms of
workplace organization to defend their interests in the face of revolutions in
the field of production, managerial strategies and state restructuring. When
Ian Thomas MacDonald is at Cornell ILR.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12040
52:4 December 2014 0007–1080 pp. 725–752
© 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.
these new forms have proven effective in particular conjunctures, they
have been generalized across different regions and industrial lines in great
upsurges of organization. The second is a moment of destruction, in which
capital accumulation shifts rapidly to new spaces and methods of production,
shaking loose class compromises that had once seemed rational but that
appear later to be untenable. In these moments, existing forms of working-
class organization have been found wanting and have subsided as rapidly as
they arose.
In these latter moments of disorganization, the sanguine approach in
labour studies has been to take the long view. John Dunlop, Secretary of
Labor in the Ford administration and chair of the Dunlop Commission on
the Future of Worker–Management Relations formed under the Clinton
administration, permitted himself this perspective in the crisis years of the
early 1980s:
Henri Seé, the French historian, used to emphasize that a social movement operates
like the waves of the sea eating away at the base of a cliff. For years nothing seems
to happen. Then, one day, the side of the cliff falls in. That’s the way our labor
movement has grown. . . . The labour movement has always grown in surges (cited
in Goldfield 1989: 4).
Even if we are to accept the salience of Dunlop’s invocation of Seé’s meta-
phor, the absence of any significant surge of organization in the private sector
of the economy over the past half-century raises some doubt as to whether
the cyclical pattern of surge and subsidence still applies to class formation in
North America. Even by the narrowest institutional metric of trade union
power — the proportion of workers represented by trade unions or covered
by a collective agreement — we are looking at a major erosion of working-
class organization in North America spanning a historically unprecedented
period of 50 years. The appropriate analogy would appear to be the opposite
of that which Dunlop reached for in 1982: repeated waves of capitalist
restructuring battering the severely eroded cliff of organized labour. At the
very least, it is necessary to acknowledge that taking the long view provides
no basis for complacency among labour studies scholars. The continued
relevance of trade unionism in North America is very much an open question.
Let us briefly review the historical trajectory of major indices of labour
organization and power before returning to an evaluation of the present
conjuncture. Even with the emergence of public sector unionism in the 1960s,
union representation in the USA has declined steadily, in relative terms, from
the 1950s onwards due in roughly equal measure to fewer organizing
attempts, a falling success rate in certification elections and employment loss
in the strongly unionized industries of the Northeast and Midwest (Dickens
and Leonard 1985; Figure 1). As early as 1962, an observer of the US labour
movement was arguing that ‘the unwillingness of employers to accept unions
and collective bargaining as an integral part of the industrial system’ was one
of ‘the most serious obstacles to the growth of unionism in America’ (Barkin
1962: 16). The late 1970s and early 1980s represent a sharp break, with large
726 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2013.
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