Apocalypse Then, and Now

Two historians trace our economic mess and growing inequality to that dismal decade—the 1970s

These movements could have grown more rapidly had labor-law reform passed in the late 1970s, which would have made it easier to win union organizing drives, collective bargaining rights, and actual contracts. Cowie argues that the AFL-CIO hoped reform would shore up labor’s Southern flank. Stein notes that Carter and the New Democrats didn’t grasp that it would help the party build up a Southern political base. Reform’s failure meant a lost chance to organize the new working class in the service sector more extensively. Three decades later, even though Barack Obama’s election owed much to this new, broadly defined working class, he and his advisers still don’t get it. They continue to believe that there’s not enough of a constituency to put up a real fight for the Employee Free Choice Act, instead of recognizing that if they pass it and open the way to new unionization, they would build the mobilized constituency for a broader political and economic agenda.

So why did the Democrats become so unresponsive to labor, workers, and industrial production? Did labor lose its economic and political power because the white, working-class male became so devalued culturally? Cowie can offer his declension narrative rooted in pop culture representations because he downplays the sectors where the union movement was growing. But it doesn’t enable him to deal fully with the politics. For expanding unions like SEIU, AFSCME, and AFT, collective bargaining was linked to public budgets. How much could they get the Democrats to keep listening to them as public budgets became more constrained for both political and economic reasons during the 1970s and 1980s?

Here we have to come back to Stein’s structural story. First, Democratic politicians put themselves at the mercy of the bond market and bet that they could restrain the social welfare budget and labor demands. By the late 1970s, Democrats ended up pitting their key constituent groups–middle-class homeowners and public workers–against each other. Second, Democrats’ unwillingness to use interventionist microeconomic policy to make private-sector industrial capacity stronger meant the further erosion of a strong, long-term tax base–thus leading to greater borrowing from the financial markets, and finally driving cities and counties to gamble on new high-risk derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps. As strong as service-sector and public-sector bargaining became over the last quarter of the twentieth century, its Achilles’ heel was always the strained public budget. And after all the havoc of the last two years, it’s still vulnerable to the bankers’ attacks.

The question that remains is what would actually tip the balance of power again in labor’s favor. To answer this question, both Stein’s structural approach and Cowie’s cultural one are essential. Workers have been legally disempowered in myriad ways and structurally blocked from acting collectively. Yet rethinking the meaning of work and democracy in the workplace is hard to do when there’s so little of it in the culture around us. As Cowie eloquently writes, workers’ prospects have been profoundly affected by “the shrinking outlets” and “diminished civic space” where issues of labor and collective action can be discussed. Reimagining economic security and national prosperity won’t come just through labor spokesmen at the top. We need new ways of seeing individual experience in political and social terms, and promoting action where those connections are most tangible.

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