The Rise and Fall of Labor Unions in the U.S
The Queensland Council of Unions has organized small-scale protest rallies to pressure the government into halting the sale. 4,000 people marched through Brisbane, as smaller actions in regional centers, such as Townsville, Mackay, Rockhamption, Cairns and Gladstone took place. Union officials of Brisbane had a petition signed by 14,000 people calling for Bligh to nix the plan. Her government, however, has no intention of stopping the sale. Unions have worked to suppress industrial action. The disconnect between union and worker interests has probably been steepened by the lack of participation in the unions by workers. s union density declined, unions have been forced to cut back on their staff and resources, causing a more centralized mode of governance within the institutions. (Cook)
The de-unionization of ustralia has significantly altered the nation's superstructure. From wage differentials to worker consciousness, ustralia has moved, in this sense, away from the liberal democracies of Europe.…...
It is this defection by white trade unionists from the Democrats, not the alleged sudden organization of the corporate community, which explains the right turn in the United States on labor and many other issues. A fractured liberal-labor alliance was defeated by an enlarged corporate-conservative alliance that was revitalized by the resentments of white Democrats and independents over the demands by the civil rights movement, feminists, environmentalists, and soon thereafter, the gay-lesbian movement. I know it sounds strange coming from a class-dominance theorist, but the problem was not that the corporate community somehow got its act together and asserted itself. This corporate-assertiveness theory is the great conceit of the liberal conventional wisdom of the twenty-first century, which comes close to explaining away the defections from the liberal-labor alliance that were the main cause of its demise, or at the least, the start of its decline and fall (Hacker and Pierson 2010; Phillips-Fein 2009).
This renewed emphasis on defeating unions occurred just as Richard M. Nixon prepared to assume the presidency, thanks to a narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey in the popular vote by a 43.4 to 42.7% margin, which lead to a 301 to 191 victory in the Electoral College. Nixon's triumph was in part made possible by the defection of white Democrats to the third-party candidacy of Alabama's segregationist governor, George Wallace, who won five Southern states and 13.5% of the nationwide popular vote, thereby showing that his success in Democratic primaries in 1964 was no temporary aberration. His strong support in 1968 in two highly populated Midwestern industrial states, Ohio (where he had 11.8% of the vote) and Illinois (where he had 8.5%), may have contributed to Nixon's narrow victory in them. All that said, Nixon's victory probably owed even more to the white Democrats who cast their votes for him instead of Humphrey. Whether they turned to Wallace or Nixon, the white vote for the Democratic ticket plunged by nineteen percentage points between 1964 and 1968 in many industrialized Northern cities. As a case in point, "Half of the voters in UAW areas [i.e., city neighborhoods or suburban communities] had cast their ballots for conservative candidates, a profound change for a union whose members had been among the Democrats' most loyal supporters" (Boyle 1995, p. 256).
Scholarship essays focus on the rise of unions
Spencer develops various specific disastrous ramifications of the wholesale substitution of the principle of compulsory cooperation - the statist principle - for the individualist principle of voluntary cooperation. His theme is that “there is in society … that beautiful self-adjusting principle which will keep all its elements in equilibrium… . The attempt to regulate all the actions of a community by legislation will entail little else but misery and compulsion.”
Although union membership in the private sector declined during the 1960s, that fact was cold comfort for the corporate community. It was far more concerned that the most powerful of the private-sector unions, such as those in construction, steel, and autos, could still use slowdowns, work stoppages, and strikes to win wage increases, cost-of-living clauses, and better benefits in a context of tight labor markets and domestic turmoil, which would raise costs for the largest corporations. As a consequence, reducing union power became the primary concern for both moderates and ultraconservatives in the corporate community by 1968, whether the immediate issue was inflation, wage rates, profit margins, or foreign trade.
To make matters worse, longstanding tensions became worse between Walter Reuther, the president of the UAW and the de facto leader of the liberal unions, and the president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, a former plumber with a classic craft-union mentality and little interest in helping African American workers, if any. What made the old tensions worse were Meany's support for the Vietnam War and foot-dragging on integration. Reuther withheld UAW dues to the AFL-CIO to express his displeasure with Meany's leadership, which led Meany to suspend the UAW from the AFL-CIO. Reuther then formed a new Alliance for Labor Action that drew "the most unlikely of partners," the Teamsters, noted for corruption and political conservatism. The failure of the Alliance for Labor Action reflected the UAW's isolation, and that of the liberal unions in general, from the rest of the labor movement at that point (Boyle 1995, pp. 246-247).
Secondly, the growing divisions between liberals and labor over how to react to the civil rights movement's demands for integration of neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces made the union movement vulnerable to a renewed corporate attack. As the disruption generated by activists in the black community (and then the anti-war movement) continued to escalate after 1965, it soon became apparent that the liberal trade unions could not organize a large voting coalition in favor of the government programs they favored. Even in the case of the most progressive industrial union, the UAW, its leaders' hopes for an enlarged welfare state on the basis of a black-white worker's coalition in both the North and the South, with the segregationist Southern Democrats finally displaced, were "little more than ashes" by 1968. The UAW simply did not have the ability "to maintain a cross-class, biracial coalition committed to continued reform." Instead, it lost the support of its major allies and the confidence of many of its white members: "For very different reasons, African-Americans, white workers, liberals, and the New Left all came to see the UAW, as they saw the Johnson Administration, as a prop for the status quo," historian Kevin Boyle concludes in a concise summary of his study of the UAW between 1945 and 1968. Far from any notion that labor had sold out or betrayed its promise, its story was one "of struggles fought -- and lost" (Boyle 1998, pp. 230-231 for the information and quotations in this paragraph).
An Essay on the Essential Role of Labor Unions
In terms of impact, the hearings were completely obscured by anti-war demonstrations, the scramble for the Democratic presidential nomination after Johnson announced he would not run again, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Although the Republicans gained five seats in the Senate in 1968, including the one held by Morse in Oregon, and five in the House as well, the labor committees in both houses still had too many non-Southern Democrats to make significant changes in labor laws possible. The overall campaign therefore ended in failure, but it once again revealed just how coordinated 100 or more corporations were for lobbying Congress and connecting with opinion-shaping organizations. It also showed their determination to prevail one way or another on this issue, and prepared them to work closely with future presidents on labor issues. They were to get their chance very soon due to divisions in the liberal-labor alliance and the election of Republican Richard M. Nixon to the presidency in 1968. Historical institutionalists and other contemporary scholars sometimes write with near-nostalgia about how liberal Nixon really was, but they don't take labor issues into consideration in making that claim. They are also wrong to take the growth in spending on welfare and Social Security as evidence of Nixon's liberalism, since the moderates in the corporate community were all for it, but that mistake is a separate story from the one being told here (Domhoff 2013).
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Many LLRG witnesses were especially critical of the Fibreboard decision, calling it "codetermination," which a labor lawyer from Olin-Mathieson attacked as "an alien doctrine, fundamentally contrary to the structure of U.S. industry because it involved the worker in the management of the enterprise," a "socialist" idea imported from Europe. Their concern was to return to "traditional collective bargaining," which meant discussions limited to wages, hours, and working conditions. Problems arose, however, in early August when a liberal Senator from Oregon, Wayne Morse, who was first elected as a Republican in 1945 and then became a Democrat in 1955, revealed the full story behind the hearings in the . Two days before the 1968 elections, the ran an in-depth report in which spokespersons for both the Chamber of Commerce and Hill and Knowlton acknowledged that a coordinated campaign had taken place (Gross 1995, pp. 211-212, for the information and quotations in this paragraph).