Declension-and-Construction-SAPD-2002

1 Declension and Construction Themes in the Study of Labor Politics in the United States Stephen Amberg Department of Political Science and Geography The University of Texas at San Antonio San Antonio, Texas 78249-0655 210 458-5618 samberg@utsa.edu The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and an employer during the last 25 years of the 20th century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition For a generation labormanagement bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests (1) Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention Why this is has gained a lot of scholarly attention, but the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate Some recently have written that the AFL-CIO is still a powerful force in national politics because of its ability to influence the direction of Congressional debates about such policies as the minimum wage and health insurance (2) Even granting the evidence in these cases that this is so, an important question is why the labor movement has focused on legislative activity rather than on unionizing workers Its historical mission as well as its appointed task under federal law is to represent employees in negotiations with employers The studies by Taylor Dark and Marie Gottschalk, however, contribute to a useful debate about what we should be investigating Not only have unions sustained influential lobbying operations, they are premier mass electioneers Moreover, alongside union-management relations a wide array of individual workers’ rights has been established by federal and state law and court doctrine Differentiation of labor regulation may be a better characterization of what has occurred than union decline What we should investigate is the political construction of the field of labor-management relations, how it was managed and what conditions led core institutions to atrophy or be bypassed The concept of a field is not an explanation, but a type of conceptualization that focuses on the simultaneous institutional and social elements (interest formation and definition and perceptions of appropriate action) that together constitute forms of order I want to emphasize the constructed quality of fields rather than only the bounded institutional processes that are the focus of many sociological and rational choice theories (3) Ignoring the deliberateness of industrial order leads to economism or behavioralism (4) Thus, regardless of comparative evidence that suggests something less than a universal logic of labor-management relations, it is sometimes claimed that the decline of American unions simply represents the changed bargaining conditions since the late 1970's in which international competition and/or an altered political and legal environment has made it more difficult for unions to win such contract terms as to make it worthwhile for workers to join unions and engage in union activities In this sort of analysis, the institutional conditions and structure of motivations are taken for granted: rational economic action determines the outcome I have more to say below about how we should conceive rational action when markets are institutions that not exist apart from political action and social norms, but here consider the usefulness of this kind of explanation for the 1990's In contrast to the late 1970's and 1980's, for most of the 1990's labor market demand strengthened while workers' earnings fell adjusted for inflation until 1998 Rational calculation should lead to confident collective action, but it did not The opposite problem of economism is to totalize the field of employment relations and to imagine that every other field is ordered in the same way That industrial relations was ordered in a pluralist way does not require other fields such as foreign economic policy to be pluralistic also (5) The argument of this paper is that the rise and fall of collective bargaining was bound to a particular project of political order rather than that the contemporary failure of collective bargaining stands for the complete failure of all elements of the New Deal or that it means new reform projects are impossible (6) The New Deal collective bargaining policy constructed a domain in the field of employment relations that oriented and motivated workers (and managers and others) to act in favored ways to compose the terms of work The policy resonated with what many individuals were thinking and what they and organizations were already engaged in doing but it also provided the structuring dimension for the agents However, rather than look only to the changed structuring context for the policy or to endogenous developments in industrial relations, constructionist analysis suggests a focus on the interactions between the play on the field of industrial relations and new projects that disrupted the field This approach is part of a broader inquiry about orders and regimes beyond the case of the New Deal (7) How are regimes established and transformed? One of the key themes of American political development studies is the relationship between institutions and participation (8) The forms of participation favored by projects of order may be more or less conducive to broad citizen involvement in self-government Regimes are known by their governing projects The explanation of development in the New Deal regime that is presented here is that pluralist labor-management relations was a core project of New Deal reformers but the subsequent management of the labor-management field contributed to a loss of perception of the politically structured quality of workers’ interests and participation The innovative possibilities of interest formation that connecting work and politics would encourage were stunted by a management style that separated them Moreover, the stability of the field created organizations that were highly influential in protecting their carefully demarcated domains The domain of New Deal labormanagement relations was a delimited field in another sense: reformers were not successful in extending the project to large sections of the country, certain industries, and the workers who labored in these arenas because other political forces dominated in those spaces New Deal labor-management relations was displaced in the 1960’s and 1970’s by new projects promoted by insurgent groups in the periphery and among elites The theory of the political order of fields draws our attention to the characteristic forms and practices by which institutionalized stability is reproduced and transformed (9) The idea is that regimes are established by the construction of domains on fields A field targeted for construction is already ordered, however, and in a relationship with other fields Therefore, the construction of a domain on a field also means that the relationships among fields are reconfigured The domains are relatively autonomous from one another, but each is characterized by a hierarchy of positions, which includes a manager of the field who represents to the agents what is appropriate The manager may be a judge, a party, a bureaucratic agency As long as the distribution of authority is acceptable to the agents, the functioning of the domain is reproduced Thus, on the other hand, although a domain is an ordering of relationships it does not end disorder, viz the everyday interactions of agents The actual distribution of authority depends on what agents want and do: although they “normally” abide by the already-existing distribution of authority and benefits that may be obtained on its basis and accept the guidance of the manager, they may also find the organization of the field unsatisfactory and the distribution of entitlements not creditable They may soldier on or they engage in insurgent action that has the effect of dislodging the hierarchy, redistributing authority, and re-allocating benefits In short, political action may lead to authoritative new ordering Nevertheless, new and old institutions alike remain in a managerial relationship with the unstable social relations that are the subject of ordering The analysis of fields focuses attention on the construction of the hierarchy among fields as well as within them based on the priority goals of the leaders of the regime (10) Regimes change when the priority of fields changes; this entails an adjustment within adjacent fields as authoritative decisions are made about how to adjust to the new political configuration Before turning to a discussion of the construction of the industrial relations field, the nature of the problem needs clarification My use of the phrase "empowered liberal democracy" to characterize the New Deal may be challenged because many critics faulted liberal Democrats because they did not extend democracy into the workplace Certainly American workers did not, as a result of the National Labor Relations Act, become co-determiners of the course of industry That fact is important to the explanation of what was accomplished, as I will discuss below Yet the NLRA did establish a new industrial order of relationships that aimed to equalize the power of workers and employers The Congress did create a new government agency, the NLRB, to implement the legal project of recognizing workers' rights to organize and to bargain collectively Over many years, the NLRB (and judges, arbitrators, mediators and faculty in the new industrial relations schools, plus the return of the Congress on occasion) and unions and employers developed a comprehensive "web of rules" (as Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel called it in 1955) (11) to govern union-management relations as they pertained to wages and working conditions The effect of the NLRA for thirty years was to empower employees and limit the authority of managers From another thirty years on, however, the view looks quite different: the practice of collective bargaining has shrunk considerably The bare facts outline a stark picture of collapse Today approximately 9% of non-managerial employees in the private sector belong to a union that negotiates with an employer about mutually agreeable terms of work This rate is one-fourth of the peak rate reached forty-five years ago In comparative terms, the rate is the second lowest in the OECD world; the U.S is in a group of nations with the sharpest fall-off of union membership in the last 25 years In contrast, several countries have experienced increases in unionization during the same period See Appendix, Table What happened? There is a huge labor literature that explores these trends, which includes many fine and informative case studies (12) But few even of the best case studies take a broad approach to employment relations that take into account the political structuring of the field This may be a consequence of the fact that almost all studies have been conducted by professionals in fields outside of political science (13) Be that as it may, the most orthodox literature explains the decline of collective bargaining by pointing to changing market conditions that make the cost of bargaining too great for industrial employers and individual employees and/or that contributes disproportionately to the political resources of employer interest groups versus labor groups (14) These neo-market explanations that focus on the terms of economic exchange are orthodox because they take the boundary conditions of the field for granted Just as the critique of economic theories of politics pointed to the significant costs of translating economic interests into public policy through organization, the institutions of labor-management create incentives and impose costs on the expression of interests (15) This paper suggests that orthodox explanations will not suffice because the boundary conditions help construct the interests of the players on the field There are several ways in which the boundary conditions are evident but missed by the orthodox literature First, what has not happened with the decline of collective bargaining is a return to laissez-faire employment relations On the contrary, the federal government and almost every state government—their legislatures and/or state courts—have established worker rights by statute and legal doctrine regardless of the existence of a written contract between an employee and employer Moreover, the judicial doctrine of federal preemption can place unionized employees at a disadvantage with non-union workers in certain kinds of employment rights disputes (16) The implication of state protection for employees is that the market model is not being followed when it comes to some of the terms of exchange even though employees are not able to bargain effectively about working conditions Second and more broadly, the reality of state protection suggests that labor-management relations are not a direct function of market conditions; on the contrary, in significant ways markets are a function of power because they are organizational fields (17) Also, the terms of labor-management exchange are influenced by decisions made in fields that are ostensibly separate from industrial relations For example, industrial relations were profoundly influenced in the early 1980’s when dramatic developments in interest rate policy, taxation, and trade contributed to the loss of millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs (18) and put intense pressure on both unions and firms to re-negotiate contracts in order to lower labor costs This example of jointed policy fields calls to mind the axiom that what we want more is an enemy of what we want less (19) It also reflects how fields may not be linearly coordinated Fundamentally, government policy assigns rights and entitlements to categories of economic actors—helping to constitute those categories—the basis for which is ideology, strategy and political authority (20) All of these observations suggest that the shrinking practice of collective bargaining is an outcome of the changing forces that structure the field rather than simply a function of worker and employer preferences Finally, this analysis cuts against another line of argument popular with pro-labor critics of unions A long line of analysis of the labor movement points to the bureaucratization of union leadership as the primary cause of the loss of organizational élan (21) as though the leaders are autonomous economic actors who rationally calculate how to enhance their economic positions rather than strategists in a field of play A broader understanding of bureaucratization is suggested here A popular image is that contemporary America is a permissive economic environment in which individuals make rational calculations as they seek their best economic advantage, but it would be more accurate to describe the current context of collective bargaining as a politically permissive environment in which workers are outsiders in the current organization of politics This paper now turns to a critical review of leading explanations of union decline and it argues that the many single factors identified in the literature are better conceived as components of changes in the field as well as in the boundary conditions of the field I distinguish a political constructionist understanding of employment relations from varieties of functional and institutional explanations and outline the kind of argument about the New Deal that would help us understand developments in the labor field in the last half of the 20th century The paper then re-analyzes the National Labor Relations Act and it suggests how the constructionist theory works better to account for the developments in industrial relations since the New Deal Finally, the paper makes some suggestions about how the study of the changing political status of labor is a crucial vantage for arguments in American political development Governing Labor: Collective Bargaining Decline and the Political Ordering of Industry Several single factor explanations for the decline of collective bargaining compete in the labor literature and are reviewed below, but the decline cannot be taken out of the context of the broader political ordering of relationships and of the competing approaches to explaining those relationships The theoretical framework against which the accomplishments of the New Deal in labor relations (and other fields) was long understood was the functional acquisition of state capacity (with many or fewer caveats) to manage problems that arise from industrial development The specific "labor problem" was the inequality of the individual worker in "modern" corporate industry and the type of solution to the problem was to create new institutions, preeminently the National Labor Relations Board, which could re-order the relationship between employees and employers by assuring workers of the new rights and status assigned to them by the Congress The issue now is that this labor problem still exists (22) but the old solution is no solution This outcome poses a problem for the old framework because the state established collective bargaining but the practice is withering away Do the institutional incentives no longer apply? How institutions gain and lose their ability to govern? (23) There are five factors commonly cited to explain declining participation in collective bargaining: industry structure change; hostile public opinion; employer opposition; flaws in labor law administration; and contextual qualities of the state (24) The structure of industry, especially the declining share of the national economy based on manufacturing, has undermined unions, but the influence of structural change on unionization is not as straightforward as it might seem There is no doubt that the slump in manufacturing employment in the early 1980's undermined the historical strongholds of organized labor and grabbed a lot of attention but, as noted previously, the tax, trade and monetary policies of that era encouraged the export of jobs The shocks of the late 1970's and 1980's cold-cocked unions, but how does that explain the longer-run response of unions to changed circumstances? The argument would be that the potential membership was reduced, but that misses the point that workers’ rights of association span the economy and federal labor law only excludes agriculture and jobs not in interstate commerce By itself change in industrial structure cannot account for collective bargaining or union decline For example, collective bargaining has declined in construction even though this is not a declining sector (25) Moreover, in the United States collective bargaining is virtually coterminous with unionization, but this is a relationship that does not hold in many other countries where legislation has extended collective bargaining without union membership (26) Given the comparative differences in the relationship between unionization and collective bargaining, there is an unexplained political dimension to the implications of industrial structure for collective bargaining Another factor is public opinion, which is said to change in a "conservative" anti-union, and thus in the United States an anti-collective bargaining, direction Debates about the evidence as well as about what precisely links public opinion and unionism have settled on little beyond the fact that there is no clear pattern Opinions of union members about their unions and attitudes of non-union workers about unions are significantly more positive than the unionization rate would suggest (27) It would be useful to have opinion data which tracks attitudes toward unions by "liberals", Democratic political leaders at the national and state levels, professionals, newspaper editors and other influential non-labor forces, but I have not seen this reported In any event, the point is that opinions are formed, not primordial 10 Another factor is employer hostility to collective bargaining, either in the formative years of the industrial economy and/or increasing since the 1970's Employers have been hostile to organized employees in every country, however, without similar outcomes It is hard to imagine a more vicious reaction historically than the suppression of the Paris Commune from which, nonetheless, the French labor movement recovered very nicely Sweden, the land of virtual wall-to-wall unionism today, was once governed by anti-labor groups Even vaunted Volvo came to collective bargaining under pressure (28) Japanese labor-management relations are still sometimes taken as an instance of cooperation, but most have learned about the great conflicts in the 1950's and the institutionalized patterns of conflict as well as cooperation (29) The historical documentation is convincing that American employers were determined to resist union encroachment on their terrain Some have argued that American business leaders were more hostile to state-sponsored solutions to labor-management conflict of the kind that German employers were willing to accept (for example) because of the legacy of a weak state and business autonomy (30) This argument concedes too much to a conception of the corporate economy that only emerged at the turn of the 20th century but, whatever the antecedents, the argument continues, American corporate employers internalized labor markets and adopted an autarkic strategy toward markets and politics (31) Many American employers made a strategic accommodation to unions and the state in the 1930's and 1940's, but this accommodation came undone later, in the 1970's, and major employers formed new interest associations to fight union power The crux of this explanation of employer action is the calculation of labor costs; in recent decades growing international competition has made industry even more sensitive than normal (32) Even if we accept these claims about strategic and cost-sensitive employers, that is only one part of the story because industrial relations is not a free market but a set of institutions that govern organizations and economic exchanges The calculation of costs (and benefits) depends on a prior distribution of rights of action and claims on resources The question should be how did the proponents of New Deal industrial pluralism expect to sustain employer participation? How did they expect to win over the employers from strategic accommodation to political commitment? One of the most important books on the transformation of American industrial relations, by Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz and Robert McKersie, points out that the 10 57 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 101 Unger, Social Theory, 151-3f 10 Although Bourdieu privileges subordinates as agents of change, in theory the dominant group may also act As I suggest in the discussion of the 1960’s, policy elites and employers acted to change the terms of labor-management relations 11 John Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems (Carbondale, Illinois: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1957), 13 12 For example, Kathryn Marie Dudley, The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, Lost Lives in Postindustrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) Steve Babson, editor, Lean Work: Empowerment and Exploitation in the Global Auto Industry (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995) Ruth Milkman, Farewell to the Factory: Auto Workers in the Late Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 13 There are exceptions in comparative studies, including the path-breaking study by Michael J Piore and Charles F Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984) and the authors collected by Kirsten S Wever and Lowell Turner, editors, The Comparative Political Economy of Industrial Relations (Madison: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1995) and Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John D Stephens, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 14 Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) Michael Wachter, "Labor Law Reform", Industrial Relations 34 (3) July 1995: 382-401 A short review of leading comparative variations on this theme is found in Miriam A Golden, Michael Wallerstien and Peter Lange, “Postwar Trade Union Organization and Industrial Relations in Twelve Countries”, in Kitschelt, Continuity and Change, 194-230 at 195-7 Also see the contributions in Robert Keohane and Helen V Milner, editors, Internationalization and Domestic Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) by Milner and Keohane, “Internationalization and Domestic Politics” (3-24) and by Geoffrey Garrett and Peter Lange, “Internationalization, Institutions, and Political Change” (48-78) 57 58 15 Moe, “Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory” Cf Kathleen Thelen, “Varieties of Labor Politics in Developed Democracies”, in Peter Hall and David Soskice, editors, Varieties of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71-103 16 Richard Edwards, Rights At Work: Employment Relations in the Post-Union Era (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution/20th Century Fund, 1993) Katherine Van Wezel Stone, “The Legacy of Industrial Pluralism: The Tension Between Individual Employment Rights and the New Deal Collective Bargaining System”, University of Chicago Law Review 59 (1992): 575 An instance of how federal preemption operates is a dispute at Texaco Texaco conceded that it had discriminated against its black employees in promotions, but when the company entered the remedy phase it argued that relief and compensation were due only to non-union employees because the preemption doctrine requires unionized workers to follow federal rules to seek a resolution through arbitration rather than a civil court proceeding Neela Banerjee, “25 Blacks at Texaco Sue”, The New York Times (November 28, 2000) 17 See Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) Cf Douglass C North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 18 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Great U-Turn (New York: Basic Books, 1988) Daniel Luria, Metro Futures (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) 19 E E Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (Hinsdale: Dryden Press, 1975), 66 20 DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited” 21 Kim Moody, An Injury to All (London: Verso, 1988) Cf Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War At Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Glenn Perusek, “Classical Political Sociology and Union Behavior”, in Perusek and Kent Worcester, editors, Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995), 57-76 The pre-reform Teamsters are a favorite target of critics of the labor movement and this case did approximate the cash-and-carry image of maximizing union leadership, but the leaders also were gangsters On the other hand, this fact did not stop the Nixon and Reagan administrations from seeking their support 58 59 22 Lance Compa, Unfair Advantage: Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States Under International Human Rights Standards (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2000) 23 Theodore Lowi, “Preface”, in Lawrence Dodd and Calvin Jillson, editors, The Dynamics of American Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), ix-xvii 24 Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz and Robert McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1986) Lloyd Ulman,"Who Wanted Collective Bargaining in the First Place?", Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association (1986): 1-13 Jane Jenson and Rianne Mahon, editors, The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993) Miriam Golden and Jonas Pontusson, editors, Bargaining for Change: Union Politics in North America and Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) Richard Locke, Thomas Kochan and Michael Piore, editors, Employment Relations in a Changing World Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) Edwards, Rights at Work 25 For a detailed examination of the industry structure thesis, see Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) Steven G Allen, "Developments in Collective Bargaining in Construction in the 1980's and 1990's", in Paula Voos, editor, Contemporary Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector (Madison: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1994), 411-45 26 Gary N Chaison and Joseph B Rose, "The Macrodeterminants of Union Growth and Decline", in George Strauss, Daniel G Gallagher, and Jack Fiorito, editors, The State of the Unions (Madison: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1991), 3-46 27 Gary N Chaison, and Joseph B Rose, "Continental Divide: The Direction and Fate of North American Unions", in David Lewin, David Lipsky, and Donna Sockwell, editors, Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1990), 169-205 Richard B Freeman and Joel Rogers, "Who Speaks for Us? Employee Representation in a Nonunion Labor Market", in Bruce E Kaufman and Morris M Kleiner, editors, Employee Representation: Alternatives and Future Directions (Madison: Industrial Relations 59 60 Research Association, 1993), 13-79 Richard B Freeman and Joel Rogers, What Workers Want (Ithaca: Cornell University Press/Russell Sage Foundation, 1999) 28 Peter Swenson, Fair Shares: Unions, Pay, and Politics in Sweden and West Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) Pehr Gyllenhammer, People At Work (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1977) 29 Robert E Cole, Work, Mobility and Participation: A Comparative Study of American and Japanese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) Ronal Dore, Taking Japan Seriously (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 30 Dubofsky, State and Labor David Vogel, "Why Businessmen Distrust Their State: The Political Consciousness of American Corporate Executives", British Journal of Political Science (1978): 45-78 31 Piore and Sabel, Industrial Divide, 49-54f 32 Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986) Sar Levitan and Martha Cooper, Business Lobbies: The Public Good and the Bottom Line (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America (New York: Basic Books, 1989) 33 Kochan, Katz and McKersie, Transformation, 25 34 Compa, Unfair Advantage, 71-5f 35 George Strauss, "Is the New Deal System Collapsing? With What Might It Be Replaced?", in Industrial Relations 34 (3) July 1995: 329-49 36 Paul C Weiler, Governing the Workplace: The Future of Labor and Employment Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 118 37 William Gould, Agenda for Reform (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993) 38 Stone, “The Legacy of Industrial Pluralism” 39 Wachter, “Labor Law Reform” 40 These are documented in Presidential Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, Fact Finding Report (May 1994) 60 61 41 Schattschneider, Semi-Sovereign, 84 Burnham, “Party Systems and the Political Process”: “American party development has largely been derivative from major changes in the structure of the socio-economic system” (303) 42 Michael Goldfield, “Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation”, American Political Science Review 83 (December 1989): 1257-82 Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “Explaining New Deal Labor Policy”, American Political Science Review 84 (1990): 1297-1315 43 Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor Peoples’ Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Random House, 1977) 44 Peter B Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, editors, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol, editors, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 45 Stephen Amberg, The Union Inspiration in American Politics: The Autoworkers and the Making of a Liberal Industrial Order (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994) Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 46 Kerr et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969) Philip Selznick, Law, Society and Industrial Justice (New York: Sage, 1969) 47 Colin Gordon, New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics in America, 1920-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Christopher L Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 48 E.g Ferguson, Golden Rule Richard Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development, 18801980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) Cf Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, editors, Worlds of Possibility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 61 62 49 Gary Herrigel, “Identity and Institutions: The Social Construction of Trade Unions in NineteenthCentury Germany and the United States”, Studies in American Political Development 7,2 (Fall 1993): 37194 50 Steve Fraser, "Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal: Shop-Floor Insurgents, Political Elites, and Industrial Democracy in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers", in Michael H Frisch and Daniel J Walkowitz, editors, Working-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 212-55 51 Gordon, New Deals Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland and the Tragedy of American Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999) 52 Stephen Herzenberg, John A Alic and Howard Wial, New Rules for a New Economy: Employment and Opportunity in Postindustrial America (Ithaca: 20th Century Fund/ILR Press, 1998) 53 Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Evans et al., Bringing the State Weir et al., Politics of Social Policy Ira Katznelson and Bruce Pietrykowski, “Rebuilding the American State: Evidence from the 1940s”, Studies in American Political Development 5/2 (Fall 1991): 301-39 54 Berk, Alternative Tracks, 8-11 55 Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal", Political Science Quarterly 97 (Summer 1982): 255-78 56 Joel Rogers, “Divide and Conquer: Further Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws”, Wisconsin Law Review (1990): David G Branchflower and Richard B Freeman, "Unionism in the United States and Other Advanced OECD Countries", Industrial Relations 31(1) Winter 1992: 56-79 Stephen Amberg, "The Contrasting Consequences of Institutions and Politics: Labor and Industrial Relations in the United States and Germany", in Political Power and Social Theory 10 (1996): 195-227 Richard Oestreicher, “The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth Century America”, in Kevin Boyle, editor, Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 19-50 57 Amberg, Union Inspiration in American Politics, 29-30 Richard Valelly, "Cooperation for What? The Democratic-Labor Alliance in the Reagan-Bush Era", in Jane Jenson and Rianne Mahon, editors, The 62 63 Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 115-36 Wolfgang Streeck and Philippe C Schmitter, editors, Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985) David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 58 Gary Herrigel, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) J Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer, editors, Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 59 Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 66 60 Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 215, 223-7 61 Charles Sabel, "Constitutional Ordering in Historical Context", in Fritz W Scharpf, editor, Games in Hierarchies and Networks (Boulder: Westview, 1993), 65-123 Selznick, Law, Society, 252f J Rogers Hollingsworth, “The Institutional Embeddedness of American Capitalism”, in Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck, editors, Political Economy of Modern Capitalism (London: Sage, 1997), 133-47 62 Orren, Belated Feudalism, 225 63 David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 210 64 Lowi, End of Liberalism 65 Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, 313-15, 389 66 Alan Fox, Beyond Contract (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 249f 67 Ruth O’Brien, Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 68 Milton Derber, The American Idea of Industrial Democracy, 1865-1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970) Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991) Nelson Lichtenstein, “Great Expectations: The Promise of Industrial Jurisprudence and 63 64 Its Demise, 1930-1960”, in Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, editors, Ambiguous Legacy: Industrial Democracy in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113-41 69 Tomlins, State and the Unions Dubofsky, State and Labor 70 Tomlins, State and the Unions, 79 David E Feller, "A General Theory of the Collective Bargaining Agreement", California Law Review 61 (1973): 663 71 Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) 72 Joseph A McCartin, Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 73 Fraser, Labor Will Rule O’Brien, Workers’ Paradox 74 Tomlins, State and the Unions, 80-82 McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 24-9 75 Peter H Irons, The New Deal Lawyers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Foundations (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1991), 155 76 Bruce Kaufman, "Why the Wagner Act? Reestablishing Contact with its Original Purpose", in David Lewin, Bruce Kaufman, and Donna Sockell, editors, Advances in Industrial Relations (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1996): 15-68 77 Selznick, Law, Society, 138-40f David Brody, “Workplace Contractualism in Comparative Perspective”, in Nelson Lichtenstein and Howell John Harris, editors, Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 176-205 Dubofsky, State and Labor, 214 78 Selznick, Law, Society, 139 79 William M Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Charles Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) Cf Riva Siegel, “Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-Enforcing State Action”, Stanford Law Review 49 (May 1997): 1111 64 65 80 Katherine Van Wezel Stone, "The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law", Yale Law Journal 90 (1981): 1509 81 Irons, New Deal Lawyers, 295 82 Selznick, Law, Society, 152 Plotke notes that “several forms of order were possible” at the time of the Wagner Act debates He does not focus on industrial relations to link on-going practice to discourse about orders, but he says the Progressive Liberal “position” toward organized labor was characterized by a shifting perception of unions as allies or objects of paternalist guidance Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 99-100, 121, 144-45, 170 83 Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt, The New American Workplace (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1994) James B Atleson, Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983) Cf Richard Freeman, editor, Working Under Different Rules (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994) 84 Amberg, Union Inspiration, 98-102, 116f 85 Tomlins, State and Unions, 198f James Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board, 1937-1947 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981) 151-225 86 Kochan, Katz and McKersie, Transformation, 25 87 Edwards, Rights at Work, 51 Selznick, Law, Society, 140 88 Morris Llewellyn Cooke and Philip Murray, Organized Labor and Production: New Steps in Industrial Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1941; 1946) Steve Jefferys, Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home 89 Selznick, Law, Society, 13-14 90 Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of America Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 300 91 Lichtenstein, Labor’s War Fraser, Labor Will Rule 65 66 92 Howell John Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) James A Gross, Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S Labor Relations Policy, 1947-1994 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995) 93 Harry Millis and Emily Clark Brown, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950) 94 Robert Dahl, “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States”, in Robert Horowitz, editor, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 230-52 Ackerman, We The People 95 Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order Richard Ostreicher, “The Rules of the Game: Class Politics in Twentieth Century America”, in Kevin Boyle, editor, Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 19-50 On the historical structuring of work and electoral politics, see Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 55 96 Selznick, Law, Society, 249 97 Strauss, “Is the New Deal Collapsing?” Amberg, Union Inspiration, 168-69 Cf Bruce Kaufman, The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1993) 98 Amberg, Union Inspiration 99 Bok and Dunlop, Labor and the American Community, 247 Also, compare John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism, and idem., The New Industrial State (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967): in the former, published in 1956, unions are a useful countervailing power to corporations and in the latter their “function” in the economy is redundant because of the macroeconomic policy capacity of the state 100 William J Crotty, Political Reform and the American Experiment (New York: Crowell, 1977), 252 101 Piore and Sabel, Industrial Divide Moe, “Interests, Institutions, and Positive Theory” Unger, Social Theory, 131-32, 152f 102 DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited” Stone, “The Post-War Paradigm” 66 67 103 Brody, Workers in Industrial America, 194, 206-07, 228-29f Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 104 William Serrin, The Company and the Union: The "Civilized Relationship" of the General Motors Corporation and the United Automobile Workers (New York: Knopf, 1973) Dubofsky, State and Labor Stephen Amberg, “The CIO Political Strategy in Historical Perspective” in Kevin Boyle, editor, Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 159-94 105 Moe, “Interests, Institutions and Positive Theory” 106 Amberg, Union Inspiration, 151-52f, 252-56 107 Bok and Dunlop, Labor and the American Community Jack Stieber, editor, Employment Problems of Automation and Advanced Technology (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 108 Amberg, Union Inspiration, 228-73 Craufurd Goodwin, Exhortation and Controls: The Search for a Wage-Price Policy, 1945-1971 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975) 109 Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 110 Moe identifies the labor movement’s demands for ideologically pro-labor appointees to the NLRB in the 1970’s as the cause of the disruption of labor-management relations cooperation that led to the emergence of ideologically recalcitrant political forces in the Reagan coalition (Moe, “Interests, Institutions and Positive Theory”.) This is a misidentification of the dynamics of play in the field Although Moe is correct in his analysis of the appointments process, the Board was a constituent institution of on-going labormanagement relationships and it was a field in relationship to other fields What this paper suggests is that in the 1960’s, international economic policy dislodged industrial relations as the central focus of Democratic governance and, substantively, the new economic policy had the effect of demoting the historical goals of the labor movement and shifting authority over restructuring to managers As noted below, this redistribution of authority, which changed the balance of labor-management competition, was redoubled by the specific ways that the civil rights field developed 67 68 111 Piore and Sabel, Industrial Divide Abernathy, William J., Kim B Clark and Alan M Kantrow, Industrial Renaissance (New York: Basic Books, 1983) Harley Shaiken, Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984) Bryn Jones, “Controlling Production on the Shop Floor: The Role of State Administration and Regulation in the British and American Aerospace Industries”, in Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin, Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press 1985), 219-55 Amberg, Union Inspiration, 171-206 Lawrence Mishel and Paula Voos, editors, Unions and Economic Competitiveness (Armonk NY: M E Sharpe, 1992) 112 Kochan, Katz and McKersie, Transformation of American Industrial Relations, 173, 178f Mike Parker, "Industrial Relations Myth and Shop-Floor Reality: The Team Concept in the Auto Industry", in Lichtenstein and Harris, Ambiguous Legacy, 249-74 Presidential Commission on Worker-Management Relations, Fact Finding Report William C Green, and Ernest J Yanarella, editors, North American Auto Unions in Crisis: Lean Production as Contested Terrain (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996) Babson, Lean Work Appelbaum and Batt, New American Workplace Marc Weinstein and Thomas Kochan, “The Limits of Diffusion: Recent Developments in Industrial Relations and Human Resource Practices”, in Locke, Kochan and Piore, Employment Relations, 1-32 113 Atleson, Values and Assumptions Weiler, Governing the Workplace 114 Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) Cf Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics (New York: Norton, 1997) 115 William Gould, Black Workers in White Unions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) Bok and Dunlop, Labor and the American Community, 131 Elaine Gale Wrong, The Negro in the Apparel Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press/Wharton School, 1974) 116 Stephen Amberg, “Labor Market Segmentation in the Construction Industry and the Origins of Affirmative Action in Massachusetts” (Unpublished paper, MIT Political Science Department, 1981) Gould, Black Workers 68 69 117 Stein, Running Steel 118 Levitan and Cooper, Business Lobbies Gary M Fink, “Labor Law Revision and the End of the Postwar Accord” in Kevin Boyle, editor, Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 239-57 119 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), 151-62 120 Amberg, Union Inspiration, 256 Stephen Amberg, “Governing Labor in Modernizing Texas”, Social Science History (forthcoming) 121 Crotty, Political Reform, 77 Dark, Unions and the Democrats, 80f Amberg, Union Inspiration, 26670 122 Charles Noble, Liberalism at Work: The Rise and Fall of OSHA (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) Edwards, Rights at Work 123 Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 124 “Merely to maintain their present share of the workforce, unions need to add about 500,000 new members each year To add a point of density, they need to organize close to million….As long as management opposition remains as determined as it is today and national labor law does not change dramatically…unions have little or no chance of gaining substantial new membership by conventional means.” Richard B Freeman and Joel Rogers, “Open Source Unionism”, in WorkingUSA vol 5, no (Spring 2002): 8-40 125 Edwards, Rights at Work Alan B Krueger, “The Evolution of Unjust-Dismissal Legislation in the United States”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 44, (July 1991): 644-60 Jack Steiber and Richard N Block, “Comment on Alan B Krueger, ‘The Evolution of Unjust-Dismissal Legislation in the United States’”, Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45, (July 1992): 792-96 126 James Dertouzos N and Lynn A Karoly, "Employment Effects of Worker Protection: Evidence from the United States", in Christoph F Buechtemann, editor, Employment Security and Labor Market Behavior: Interdisciplinary Approaches and International Evidence (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1993): 215-27 69 70 127 Christoph Scherrer, "Surprising Resilience: The Steelworkers' Struggle to Hang On to the Fordist Bargain", in Glenn Perusek and Kent Worcester, editors, Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s-1990s (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995): 140-68 Garth L Mangum, and R Scott McNabb, The Rise, Fall, and Replacement of Industrywide Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry (Armonk: M E Sharpe, 1997) 128 E.g Freeman, Working Under Different Rules Amberg, “The Contrasting Consequences of Institutions and Politics” Herzenberg, Alic and Wial, New Rules for a New Economy 129 “Production” has a creative connotation beyond the Marxist tradition See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) Joas, Creativity of Action, 85-105f 130 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa, volume (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25 131 Orren and Skowronek, “Regimes and Regime Building” 132 Kochan, Katz and McKersie, Transformation Dubofsky, State and Labor, xvi 133 Eileen L McDonagh, “Race, Class, and Gender in the Progressive Era: Restructuring State and Society”, in Sidney M Milkis and Jerome M Mileur, editors, Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 145-91 at 183 134 ibid., 176 135 See Perusek and Worcester, Trade Union Politics 136 Cf Huntington, The Promise of Disharmony 137 Unger, Social Theory, 156 138 Noble, Liberalism at Work Cf Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 117-61 139 This adopts the sequence formulation of Orren and Skowronek, “Regimes and Regime Building” 140 Bourdieu and Wacquant, An Invitation, 101f 141 Southern elites’ opposition to labor rights had wide repercussions E.g the Truman administration calculated the U.S Senate would reject a treaty affirming human rights Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made 70 71 New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001), 71-2 Labor standards were a sticking point in the negotiations for the failed International Trade Organization William Brown, The United States and the Restoration of World Trade (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1950) 142 Charles E Lindblom, Inquiry and Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 143 Margaret Weir, "Wages and Jobs: What Is the Public Role", in idem., editor, The Social Divide: Political Parties and the Future of Activist Government (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998), 268-311 Cathie Jo Martin, Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Gottschalk, Shadow Welfare State, shows how the industrial relations structure shaped the play on the field in the conflicts over health insurance reform 144 Amberg, “Governing Labor in Modernizing Texas” 145 Adapted from Kitschelt et al Continuity and Change, table 7.1 146 Barry T Hirsch and David McPherson, Union Membership and Earnings Data Book (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1997) Herzenberg, Alic and Wial, New Rules 147 Hirsch and McPherson, Union Membership Bureau of National Affairs, Individual Employment Rights Manual, volume 9A (1997) Lawrence Mishel, “The Wage Penalty of Right-to-Work Laws” (Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2001) www.ACORN.org 71