US labor in trouble and transition, Kim Moody, London: Verso 2007
Why is US labor in decline and how can the situation be turned around? Kim Moody, a prominent Marxist participant and commentator in the US labour movement over the past three decades has produced a coherent answer to these questions, with implications of the revival of trade unionism everywhere.
The book explains why US labour went into decline, what the current state of play is in the unions and points to potential signs of revival.
Why US labour went into decline
The absolute membership of US trade unions peaked in 1980 at 20 million members. Union density however peaked a lot earlier; in 1953 unions accounted for nearly a third (32.5%) of non-agricultural workers.
By 2005 US unions organised just 12.5% of the workforce, with 16.5 million members. In that year the labour movement split down the middle, when the Change to Win coalition broke away from the AFL-CIO trade union centre, taking some six million members with it.
Moody’s explanation starts from the worsening economic situation from the 1970s and after the election of Ronald Reagan, the harsher political climate, which made labour’s ability to fight more difficult. The economic situation is described as the “Great Transformation” – a fall in the rate of profit led to intensified competition, the acceleration of global economic integration, outsourcing, new technologies, lean reorganisation – what Moody rightly describes following Marx as the concentration and centralisation of capital.
The consequences were the shrinking of the manufacturing workforce by 4 million workers, the brutal intensification of work, the reorganisation of America’s industrial geography – principally the migration of many industries to the South, longer and more irregular working hours and greater control by the capitalist class over the labour process.
All these factors worked to ratchet up the rate of exploitation, leading to the transfer of wealth and income from the working class to capital. The change is epitomised by the stagnation of real wages: in 2006 real wage levels were 13% below the 1972 level, giving most US workers a standard of living little different from the 1960s.
The period also saw a recomposition of industrial demography, with the US labour force becoming more diverse ethnically and by gender. In particular the growth of Latino workers from 4 to 13% of the workforce marked a significant shift.
But Moody does not simply attribute the decline of American unionism to objective circumstances. For one thing the objective situation was not all bad. The number of auto jobs actually grew from 575,000 in 1980 to 770,000 by 2000, with foreign and US car makers shifting to or starting production in the southern states. Yet over this period the UAW auto workers union lost thousands of members.
More importantly, the book highlights the failures to fightback in 1980-81 and again in 1989, when most union leadership gave up on any kind of militancy, surrendered workplace organisation to the employers and backtracked into partnership strategies when the bosses were conducting a one-sided class war. Unions took refuge in mergers with no industrial logic that merely increased the income and assets of the bureaucracy and diminishing rank and file democracy. At the same time unions made more and more concessions to employers – such as signing longer and more austere contracts. Unions became hollowed out, lacking the basic democratic structures to involve members in fighting back. At the same time US labour remained tied politically to the Democrats, just as business lobbyists tightened their grip on the Democrat machine.
What is the current state of play is in the unions
Moody characterises this approach as “bureaucratic business unionism”, the direct ancestor of the “pure and simple” trade unionism that has soiled US labour since its inception. Such an approach has no ultimate ends, just immediate objects, is concerned with day to day matters and overseen by “practical men”. Unions like these are run like businesses and infused with business culture, believing in a community of interest with capital, committed to economic growth while creating a “private welfare state” around members.
Not all unions went this way. The services union SEIU under John Sweeney turned to organising – notably with the Justice for Janitors campaign, which recruited 35,000 cleaners in LA and elsewhere. It turned aggressively towards increasing its membership, adding to its full time staff and hiring radical college activists.
In the decade after 1996, when Sweeney left to head the AFL-CIO, the SEIU under Andy Stern doubled its membership to 1.8 million members, mostly through new organising (though 350,000 were added through mergers). Stern continued the centralisation of SEIU, its corporate organising norms and its creation of mega-locals, branches stretching over huge geographical areas grouping workers in unrelated areas.
Moody therefore explains the SEIU-led breakaway Change to Win coalition from Sweeney’s AFL-CIO as essentially a split between rival versions of what he calls “bureaucratic corporate unionism”.
This is epitomised by the continued semi-institutional alliance with the Democrats. In 1996 unions spent $25 million on electoral adverts. In 2000 they spent $40 million overall – less on adverts ($10 million) but more on paying activists to do face to face and other work in marginal seats. SEIU for example gave one Democrat $800,000 in 2004 in return for granting health care workers bargaining rights.
Potential signs of revival
Moody is able to critique both bureaucratic business unionism and the new corporate unionism so thoroughly because he has a well worked out alternative conception, what he calls “social movement unionism”. This conception, worked out through the Labor Notes journal since 1979, is based on workplace power, membership mobilisation, union democracy, independence from the employer and alliances with other workers organisations.
Moody acknowledges the influences of South African and Brazilian unions in pioneering social movement unionism. He also highlights the role played in the US by other journals and activists, such as the Union Democracy Review edited by the old Shachtmanite Herman Benson and other activists like Mike Parker. He is characteristically modest about his own contribution in developing the perspective within US conditions in the heat of successive battles.
The key has been to base himself on the actual rank and file struggles and movements within the existing unions. The book highlights examples, such the UAW caucus in Delphi, the United Action teachers’ caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the Committee for Real Change in the AFSCME and the Longshore Workers’ Coalition.
Moody also points to the kind of mobilisations and organising that could help turn the tide. He highlights the May 2006 “Day without Immigrants” marches, which drew 5-6 million workers – a quarter of the foreign-born population, as well as the 137 Workers’ Centres that have sprung up to defend workers and their communities.
But the book goes even further. It argues strongly for unions to turn strategically to industries such as auto and meatpacking, which means organising in the southern US where density is less than 6%. The idea is to fight for democratic, internationalist unions in key industries, avoiding token campaigns such as around Wal-Mart, coupled with the renewed drive for political independence through the Labor Party, including standing candidates.
In short, it is a plan for the renewal of the labour movement in the US, based on ideas with wide application. Socialists and militants in the unions in Britain would benefit from a similar honest assessment combined with grounded answers for how to rebuild.
