The right and labor in america politics, ideology, and imagination

The Right and Labor in America POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas J Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture The Right and Labor in America Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The right and labor in America : politics, ideology, and imagination / edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer.—1st ed p cm.— (Politics and culture in modern America) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978-0-8122-4414-4 (hardcover : alk paper) Labor unions—United States—History—20th century Labor unions—United States—History—21st century Labor disputes—United States—History—20th century Labor disputes—United States—History—21st century Labor policy —United States—History—20th century Labor policy—United States—History—21st century Conservatism—United States—History—20th century Conservatism—United States—History—21st century I Lichtenstein, Nelson II Shermer, Elizabeth Tandy III Series: Politics and culture in modern America HD6508.R525 2012 331.880973—dc23 2011049649 Contents Preface Introduction Entangled Histories: American Conservatism and the U.S Labor Movement in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer I The Conservative Search for Social Harmony Chapter Unions, Modernity, and the Decline of American Economic Nationalism Andrew Wender Cohen Chapter The American Legion and Striking Workers During the Interwar Period Christopher Nehls Chapter Democracy or Seduction? The Demonization of Scientific Management and the Deification of Human Relations Chris Nyland and Kyle Bruce II Region, Race, and Resistance to Organized Labor Chapter Capital Flight, “States’ Rights,” and the Anti-Labor Offensive After World War II Tami J Friedman Chapter Orval Faubus and the Rise of Anti-Labor Populism in Northwestern Arkansas Michael Pierce Chapter “Is Freedom of the Individual Un-American?” Right-to-Work Campaigns and AntiUnion Conservatism, 1943–1958 Elizabeth Tandy Shermer III Appropriating the Language of Civil Rights Chapter Singing “The Right-to-Work Blues”: The Politics of Race in the Campaign for “Voluntary Unionism” in Postwar California Reuel Schiller Chapter Whose Rights? Litigating the Right to Work, 1940–1980 Sophia Z Lee Chapter “Such Power Spells Tyranny”: Business Opposition to Administrative Governance and the Transformation of Fair Employment Policy in Illinois, 1945–1964 Alexander Gourse IV The Specter of Union Power and Corruption Chapter 10 Pattern for Partnership: Putting Labor Racketeering on the Nation’s Agenda in the Late 1950s David Witwer Chapter 11 “Compulsory Unionism”: Sylvester Petro and the Career of an Anti-Union Idea, 1957–1987 Joseph A McCartin and Jean-Christian Vinel Chapter 12 Wal-Mart, John Tate, and Their Anti-Union America Nelson Lichtenstein Chapter 13 “All Deals Are Off”: The Dunlop Commission and Employer Opposition to Labor Law Reform John Logan Chapter 14 Is Democracy in the Cards? A Democratic Defense of the Employee Free Choice Act Susan Orr Notes List of Contributors Index Acknowledgments Preface In the years since the publication of this book, two seemingly contradictory phenomena have framed the way many Americans think about working people and the institutions that once represented their interests Today, virtually all politicians and pundits, even those decidedly on the right, think income inequality a serious and pressing problem in the United States Even as economists declared the country in recovery from the Great Recession, family incomes remained stagnant in the face of rising productivity That alarmed Mortimer Zuckerman, the influential and opinionated conservative who runs a media empire in New York He editorialized that American workers are finding that the “mismatch between reward and effort makes a mockery of the American dream.” Republican Jeb Bush agreed “If you’re born poor today, you’re more likely to stay poor,” Bush told conservatives at a 2015 meeting of National Review staffers and supporters “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners,” announced his presidential campaign web site, “they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”2 As a consequence, the movement to boost the minimum wage, even to $15 an hour, has gained remarkable traction, if not in the Republican-controlled Congress, then certainly outside Capitol Hill Many big cities on the West Coast, in the upper Midwest, and along the Northeastern corridor have all passed ordinances that roll out incremental minimum-wage increases Some laws will raise hourly pay by more than 30 percent within just a few years A handful of cities and states have even sought to intervene within the workplace itself by mandating sick leave for employees and prohibiting managers from scheduling work in an unpredictable fashion Some big firms, including Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Whole Foods, and Costco, have followed along CEOs have publicly pledged at least modest pay raises and more predicable hours of work Indeed, in a New York Times opinion piece, “Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal with Income Inequality,” former advertising executive Peter Georgescu spoke for at least a slice of the percent when he posed the choice before them: raise wages now, or face either “major social unrest” or the kind of high taxes advocated by the French economist Thomas Piketty, author of the bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century.3 Of course, neither minimum wage campaigns nor corporate hand-wringing have opened the door to a revival of trade unionism in the United States Depression-era policymakers once emphasized that collective bargaining was the lever by which working-class wages might be pushed higher But even after 2008, when for a brief moment there was much talk of a new New Deal, the very idea of trade unionism came under unrelenting attack, often along the same well-trod avenues outlined in our book For example, hostility to private sector trade unionism remains deeply embedded within the American South’s political culture This anti-unionism dominated headlines in recent years, when “Yankee” trade unionists sought to organize two large industrial facilities, one in South Carolina and the other in Tennessee In both instances conservative politicians spearheaded the anti-union charge, even more so than the companies themselves That hostility surprised the United Automobile Workers Until the end of 2013, organizers were confident that they could persuade most workers at Volkswagen’s new assembly plant in Chattanooga to vote for the union in an NLRB supervised election Top VW management, in Germany and in the United States, wanted a union in their Tennessee factory because they expected to put in place a “works council,” similar to those established in every VW factory in the world, save those in China and Russia VW managers thought participatory councils enhanced shop productivity They also knew that IG Metal, the powerful German union, held ten seats on the VW board and strongly advocated for such shop-floor representation.4 So, unlike many other European firms with manufacturing operations in the American South, VW did not oppose the UAW organizing effort Instead, a phalanx of conservative political strategists and politicians declared war on organizers For example, Grover Norquist’s anti-union Americans for Tax Reform bankrolled a faction of plant employees, who demonized the UAW’s Detroit roots Even more important, Republican politicians like Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam and U.S Senator Bob Corker, the former mayor of Chattanooga, in effect blackmailed VW workers by threatening to cancel or withhold state tax abatements and other incentives designed to help VW expand the plant.5 Their intense opposition arose out of a GOP fear that a unionized “transplant” would soon transform the political and economic landscape Corker thought that if VW workers were able to unionize, “Then it’s BMW, then it’s Mercedes, then it’s Nissan.”6 Amidst all this fear-mongering, the UAW lost the closely contested 2014 NLRB election However, the potential for unionism at the VW Chattanooga facility has not been entirely vanquished Deploying an industrial relations structure that in some ways resembles pre–Wagner Act procedures, VW management has agreed to periodically meet and confer with any organized group of workers, including the UAW as well as the anti-union “union” initially pushed forward by right-wing elements within and outside the plant.7 In South Carolina, the Republican establishment also took a leading role in preventing organization of a production unit that was part of an otherwise thoroughly unionized private company When Boeing built a large assembly plant in Charlestown, the Seattle-based aerospace company sought to escape the labor militancy historically associated with the Pacific Northwest The International Association of Machinists charged that Boeing violated the labor law when the company sought to penalize strikes and aggressive bargaining in Seattle by shifting so much production and employment opportunities—estimated at about 3,000 jobs—to a right-to-work state In this fight Boeing had an important and effective ally: South Carolina governor Nikki Haley Bloomberg Businessweek called her “Boeing’s strongest weapon in its fight with IAM.” She appointed a veteran anti-union lawyer as head of the state’s Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation to help her “fight the unions.” She also appeared in Boeing radio ads encouraging workers to reject the IAM and also devoted part of her 2015 State of the State address to the issue “We have a reputation internationally for being a state that doesn’t want unions, because we don’t need unions,” she told the legislature In April of that year the IAM admitted defeat when it withdrew a petition for an NLRB-supervised election at the Dreamliner plant “It’s hard to tell the difference between Boeing and Nikki Haley,” said an IAM official “The implication that people are left with is that if you support collective bargaining rights in South Carolina, you are somehow opposing the official position of South Carolina.”8 Both Tennessee and South Carolina are “right-to-work” states It was the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which permitted states to ban collective bargaining contracts that require union membership and payment of dues as a condition of employment For decades, right-to-work states were largely confined to the South, the Great Plains, and the Mountain West As one might expect, these restrictions weakened unions by providing plenty of opportunity for “free riders” to take advantage of union-bargained wages and benefits without paying their fair share In the aftermath of the Republican statehouse victories in the 2010 elections, right-to-work laws have spread throughout the Midwest Some combination of genuine anti-union sentiment and clever GOP gerrymandering has tilted state legislative bodies well to the right on this issue Both Indiana and Michigan passed right–to-work statutes in 2012, while in Wisconsin, governor Scott Walker, who four years earlier had waged a tumultuous battle that succeeded in slashing collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers, signed a bill that made his state the twenty-fifth to adopt the right-to-work policy In early 2016 West Virginia followed suit with a new right-to-work law of its own Meanwhile, in Ohio and Missouri right-to-work statutes targeting private sector unions came close to passage: in Ohio a right-to-work law was enacted by the legislature and signed by the governor but then overturned in a popular referendum; and in Missouri, only a gubernatorial veto prevented enactment of the anti-labor statute In Illinois and Kentucky, conservatives sought to bypass such state-level divisiveness by encouraging cities and counties to adopt right-to-work ordinances.9 Such local initiatives were likely to encounter resistance in the federal courts, but whatever the judicial temperament, right-to-work controversies seem destined to roil for years in a region that once constituted America’s blue-collar heartland As this book makes clear, such anti-union assaults have taken many forms over the past century and more Depending on ideological fashion, economic circumstance, and political opportunity, conservative opposition to trade unionism has changed its colors and taken different forms In the mid-twentieth century, politicians and pundits, no matter how hostile to organizing, never openly denounced the working man and woman They instead trained their fire on the organizers behind “monopoly unionism,” which led to an inflationary spiral and a flood of low-wage imports But a decade ago, when the Employee Free Choice Act was being debated, the right attacked private sector unionists for their presumptively thuggish and autocratic character Later, at the depths of the recession that began in 2008, conservatives targeted public employees and their unions for the wages, pensions, and other benefits that cash-strapped cities and states were thought no longer capable of affording Critics often declared workers selfish and conflated such denunciations with an assumption that government unionism was inherently corrupt, because the supposed political power of unions like the Service Employees International Union meant that in negotiations the government was bargaining with itself.10 Conservatives continued to hone their methods of crippling unionism Right-to-work laws were a tried and true method of depriving locals of dues income by invoking the all-American principle of self-determination Union income increasingly came under attack from an evolving libertarian logic that posits a conflict between the free speech rights of individual workers and the traditions of solidarity and democratic decision-making that have traditionally legitimized the existence of both public and private sector trade unionism The Supreme Court’s 2014 Harris v Quinn decision, for example, ruled that home health care aides did not have to pay any fees to the unions representing them These men and women were but “partial public employees” whose “fair share” dues payments constituted a violation of their free speech rights insofar as the union lobbied, negotiated, and mobilized the public on behalf of issues with which the plaintiffs disagreed Many in the labor movement feared this ruling’s broader ramifications Harris v Quinn itself was unlikely to have a major impact on public sector trade unionism But Justice Samuel Alito Jr led ... race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture The Right and Labor in America Politics, Ideology, and Imagination Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Copyright... www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data The right and labor in America : politics, ideology, and imagination /... undervaluing their imports and thus cheating the government out of millions in revenue Butler charged wealthy smugglers with undermining the Union and promoting the misery of the laboring classes living