Hope for Labor at the End of History

Abstract

Hope for Labor at the End of History Steve Fraser (bio) and Joshua Freeman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo from “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-In with the Labor Movement.” From left to right: Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Steve Fraser, Eric Foner, Ira Katznelson, Manning Marable, Betty Friedan, George Rupp, Patricia J. Williams, Joshua Freeman, and John Sweeney. (Courtesy of Columbia University Archives) [End Page 110] It was “the end of history”: America in the 1990s. Francis Fukuyama published a book with that title in 1992. Things would continue to happen, according to the philosopher, but the underlying story line had come to a finish with the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. As the decade wore on, Fukuyama’s prophecy seemed practically clairvoyant. At the turn of the millennium, Bob Dylan captured the zeitgeist: “I used to care, but things have changed.” Yet how could that be? Talk of a second Gilded Age of gross disparities in income and wealth was already commonplace. Homelessness, declining wages, a reemergence of sweatshop labor, an explosion of a contingent and deeply insecure labor force, a population of the working poor numbering in the tens of millions, industrial ghost towns, the surgical removal of a whole occupational species of middle managers—on and on went the litany of what the “market republic” had accomplished. CEO pay had grown to 500 times that of the average worker. This was the high noon of bipartisan neoliberalism in the United States. Bill Clinton was the new president, and by the time he had finished taking his inaugural oath he had jettisoned the faintly populist aroma of his campaign. After failing to extend healthcare to millions of uninsured, Clinton responded to a Republican triumph in the 1994 midterm elections with punitive workfare reform, ending, as he said, “welfare as we know it.” Talk of labor-law reform was silenced. Republicans and Democrats found common ground when it came to shrinking the welfare state, and the Democrats took the lead in accelerating mass incarceration through a crime bill in 1994. A systematic deregulation of Wall Street would come later during Clinton’s watch. All of this was good for business. A galaxy of business-oriented foundations, think tanks, magazines, policy ateliers, television and radio commentators, newspaper editorialists, and megachurches applauded the new wisdom, formed its programs, lobbied for its interests, lent it intellectual ballast, and rationalized its social unconsciousness. [End Page 111] Nothing resembling a social opposition of any muscle was in sight. Organized labor was nearly comatose. It had once represented a third of the labor force; now that was down to a sixth, and only 10 percent in the private sector. When strikes happened, which was less and less frequently, they usually ended in failure or, at best, preserved the status quo. The last great social movements to disturb the equanimity of American life—the civil rights movement especially, but also the antiwar and feminist insurrections—had taken place decades earlier and were receding rapidly from view. Trace amounts of that unruly era were detectable here and there. But, for all practical purposes, the labor movement was dead, the Black liberation movement was dead, the anti-imperial movement was dead, the feminist movement was dead. News from Nowhere Then, on a crisp October evening in 1996, something totally unexpected happened. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 people showed up at Columbia University to attend an event called “The Fight for America’s Future: A Teach-In with the Labor Movement.” People came from up and down the East Coast. Busloads of students arrived from area colleges. Professors mixed with transit workers and schoolteachers. The young, the old, and the middle-aged rubbed shoulders. There were about 1,500 more attendees than the organizers of the event anticipated. The rotunda of Low Library, where the opening plenary of the two-day teach-in was to convene, was packed; fire marshals ordered it closed to further entrants. Improvising, organizers set up loudspeakers outside, and two auditoriums were commandeered, one with an audio feed and the other with a closed-circuit television, to accommodate at least some of the overflow. Inside...