Labor Power and Social Equality: Union Politics in a Changing Economy

Abstract

Despite American labor's societal significance, union politics does not command the scholarly attention it once did, in large part because most of the postwar literature has concluded that American trade unions behave much like other pressure groups. Comparativists have little difficulty demonstrating that U.S. unions lack the class orientation of their European counterparts. In the workplace U.S. unions have largely ignored production control and corporate participation in exchange for high wages and job security. Similarly, American unions have never mounted a serious effort to organize a political movement aimed at challenging management's right to control capital. At the same time, political behaviorists cite union electoral and lobbying activities to argue persuasively that organized labor pursues narrowly defined political goals, the principal purpose of which is to extract rank and file benefits from government, benefits otherwise unattainable through collective bargaining. Also consistent with group theory is the fact that though the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) remains aligned with the Democratic Party, rank and file unionists break frequently with both the federation and the party in presidential elections. Despite these well known tendencies, American labor cannot be characterized as a mere trade union movement. Since the early 1960s organized labor has behaved much like a social movement: pressing for a higher standard of living and better working conditions for less fortunate segments of our society such as blacks and the urban poor. Moreover, recent studies by J. David Greenstone, Harry Hol-