At CNN last night, Frank Luntz the Republican pollster says, “The teachers and the service unions, they’re all in for Harris, of course, but the trades, the people who work with their hands, they’re up for grabs, they’re pretty evenly divided.” Well, duh.
The building trades have been the backbone of the AFL since its founding in the 1880s, and they’ve always been the most conservative element in the labor movement as such—in large part due to the fact that the crafts centered on construction (carpentry, brick-laying, plumbing, etc.) have never undergone the kind of managerial-technological revolutions that convulsed the production of most consumer goods, from shoes and clothing in the 19th century to automobiles in the 20th. The closest they have come to such convulsions are the periodic spurts of interest in pre-fabrication since the 1920s, and mechanical innovations in masonry (pouring concrete, in other words, which nonetheless requires real skill in finishing). They remain almost artisanal ways of making a living, which is to say almost anachronistic, so they nurture a rugged bourgeois individualism.
Timothy Noah at The New Republic [https://newrepublic.com/article/185519/labor-next-big-moment-here] meanwhile celebrates the new unionism—the UAW’s strikes and victories, the polls showing that 70% of Americans, even 40% of Republicans, approve of unions, the Biden administration’s embrace of a pro-labor NLRB, the surge of organizing in general and in particular the successful efforts at unionization in higher education—and, I would add, Harris’s direct appeals to working class voters (as on Labor Day in Detroit), not to mention Joe’s stint on the picket line . . . these trends suggest that the Democratic Party may well be piecing together some semblance of the fabled New Deal Coalition that underwrote the so-called Golden Age of American Capitalism (what Jonathan Levy calls “The Age of Control”), ca. 1936-1975.
These are offset, of course, by the Supreme Court’s relentless evisceration of the so-called administrative state, which includes agencies like the NLRB. But the trend line is promising.
I would add a caveat derived from my early days as an aspiring academic, when you could still call me an economic historian and not get ridiculed for it. The short version that follows can be examined more closely in the published results: “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late-19th American Development,” The American Historical Review 92 (1987): 69-95, and Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994), chaps 2-4.
The caveat goes like this. In the late-19th century, the labor movement was more successful than it has ever been, even though only 10% of the industrial labor force was unionized, mostly in the building and metal-working trades. The exceptions to that rule—where the bulk of the 10% worked—were the miners, the machinists, and the trades assembled under the rubric of the Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers, which controlled the process of production at their respective scenes of work. I know, this sounds unlikely at best, but it was true until the 1890s, when capitalists like Andrew Carnegie made concerted efforts to break the hold of the unions in the steel industry, and won, for example, at Homestead in 1892.
One way to measure the success of the labor movement—one way to argue that workers were winning the class struggle of the late-19th century—is to note that between 1881 and 1905, when the number of strikes, strikers, and establishments affected kept rising, labor won most of the conflicts, as these were recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics within the Department of Commerce. Note as well that these strikes were conducted, for the most part, as dimensions of disputes over working conditions, not just wages. Note also that the shares of national income shifted decisively toward labor, against capital, in this period, because real wages rose as labor productivity leveled off. You can look it up, in the citations provided above.
But how in the world did labor keep winning if only 10% of workers were unionized? The key here was cross-class solidarity, that is, the willingness of local, middle-class citizens to stand with their neighbors, the workers who went on strike in defense of their skills and their proven ability to manage the labor process at the point of production (to determine working hours, rates of pay, the division of labor, to hire unskilled help as needed, etc.).
That solidarity was a cultural artifact, a product of an ideology, or of a belief system, call it whatever you like. The point is that most Americans, even some of the robber barons themselves, took it for granted that capitalists lived off an unearned, unjustified income, money that was deducted from the sum of value created by working people, by “productive labor.” This was the vernacular rendition of the labor theory of value, “vernacular” in the sense of popular, demotic, and mostly unspoken, but nevertheless actionable. Well-educated economists, a novel occupational designation in the 19th century, struggled to counter the consequent charge of capitalist parasitism, knowing full well that in doing so they were coming up with a new kind of moral philosophy. John Bates Clark was the point man here. The leading capitalists pitched in, J. P. Morgan most flamboyantly. Their contribution to the related debates was what we would now call a bid for cultural hegemony—they endowed fairs, art museums, orchestras, operas, and the like, hoping, as Henry James realized in describing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to “seat education” of the masses in the marble halls they built.
The cross-class solidarity that fortified labor in its late-19th century struggle against capital is precisely what is needed today, and what is promised in the evidence of the new unionism which Noah cites—including, or rather especially, the polls that show 70% of the public in favor of unions. Successful collective bargaining alone won’t suffice, because that typically reduces to an interest group issue, and higher wages can, in the absence of competition or anti-trust challenges, be passed along to consumers by corporations whose CEOs require quarterly performance perfection to keep their jobs.
Shawn Fain of the UAW understands this cross-class imperative. To succeed on the scale that the labor movement did in the late-19th century, union leaders and supporters like us need to understand and act on it—not necessarily by joining a union or going on strike, but through ideological work, intellectual labor, showing that labor’s gains at the expense of capital are good for everybody (including the capitalists, who don’t know what to do with their profits except inflate whatever new bubble appears, thus making for constant economic crisis).
Like revolutions, class struggles have never been won by one social stratum. So coalition-building isn’t a concession to or a compromise with the ugly reality of politics as usual—if you want to think big, it’s just what is to be done.
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My angry thoughts on equal time for satire of earnestness on both Left and Right, prompted by David Mikics’s piece at Tablet on MAD magazine—it’s his introduction to the Library of America’s collection from the magazine’s archive—which tend toward the excoriation of the middle ground as staked out by Bill Maher or Damon Linker or P. J. O’Rourke or the Washington Post’s editorial board, will have to wait. Meanwhile, “objectivity” be damned!
For now, leave it at what I said in a Facebook comment on WaPo’s editorial comparing Harris and Trump as if he’s just another candidate, like all the others we’ve had to assess over the last 44 years, since another TV personality took over the news cycle. Treating these two candidates as if they represent commensurable alternatives is like saying. "Well, here are equal doses of fentanyl and aspirin for your pain, take your pick: you might end up dead, but either way the pain will subside."