U.S. Labor and the Neoliberal Turn

Abstract

U.S. Labor and the Neoliberal Turn Ruth Milkman (bio) Timothy J. Minchin. Labor under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiv + 414 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $39.95. Lane Windham. Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide, 2017. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xiv + 295 pp. Figures, table, appendix, notes, bibliography and index. $32.95. Despite the downward spiral of union membership and power during the period they explore, these two fine studies of late twentieth century U.S. labor history both are surprisingly optimistic. Minchin provides a straightforward institutional history of the AFL-CIO starting in 1979, the last year of George Meany's 24-year reign at the organization's helm, up to just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His main sources are the Federation's archives, where he studied many documents not previously exploited by scholars, and sixty original interviews with AFL-CIO leaders and staffers. Perhaps because of his extensive reliance on this material, Minchin's narrative largely reflects the viewpoint of the D.C. labor establishment and at times uncritically reproduces the official "glass half full" perspective that its spokespersons often promote. Windham was an AFL-CIO staffer herself for a decade prior to embarking on an academic career (indeed she was one of Minchin's interviewees), but her approach is quite different, focusing primarily on rank-and-file workers. She carefully reconstructs four union organizing drives that took place in the 1970s, none of which have been previously documented in any detail. All four involved categories of workers who had been influenced by the social movements of the 1960s: women, young workers, and African Americans. Windham's optimism is rooted in her finding that workers were eager to unionize when they had the opportunity to do so, despite rapidly increasing employer resistance. Although Minchin and Windham focus on distinctly different levels of labor movement activity and slightly different time periods, both inquiries shed new light on the ways in which the neoliberal turn affected American [End Page 125] unions. They both argue that although the neoliberal juggernaut of deregulation, globalization and market fundamentalism took off in the 1970s, most U.S. unions did not feel its effects until after the 1980 presidential election. "While some of the roots of the AFL-CIO's problems in the Kirkland-Sweeney era did lie in the 1970s … the climate really changed after 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president," Minchin declares (p. 10). Windham concurs, citing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) data to support her argument that in the 1970s, "Workers kept voting in union elections at generally the same pace as during the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of American labor," adding that "the precipitous drop off in organizing efforts did not happen until the early 1980s." (pp. 3–4) U.S. government data support this periodization as well: the private-sector unionization rate declined from 24.2 percent in 1973 to 20.1 percent in 1980, but went into free fall during the 1980s, plummeting to 11.9 percent by 1990. (The decline continued thereafter, reaching 6.5 percent in 2017.) To be sure, union membership erosion began much earlier, soon after the 1955 merger of the AFL and CIO, when 35 percent of workers were union members (almost all in the private sector). As Minchin emphasizes, the AFL-CIO's political influence lasted longer and had greater potency than these membership data might lead one to expect. In part, this is a reflection of the the continuing strength of organized labor in the public sector. There the unionization rate was 35.9 percent in 1980 and dipped only slightly in the decades that followed, to 34.4 percent in 2017. Neither Minchin nor Windham pays much attention to public-sector unions, however. And their ability to bolster AFL-CIO political efforts may be greatly diminished as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision, which upended previous case law to prohibit public-sector unions from collecting "agency...