The American labor union movement came to maturity in the years after World War II, bringing with it material success and stability, but also compromising many of the ideals of its youth.
In some ways the war years were good for unions. Membership rose by over 4 million to include a total of 14,322,000 Americans, over 35 percent of the nation’s nonagricultural workforce. Feeling that the war had been even kinder to factory owners, unions flexed their muscles substantially at its conclusion. Almost 13 million workers went on strike at some point in the 18 months after the war’s end. The situation appeared so grave to President Harry S. Truman that he ordered government seizure of several facilities affected by strikes and contemplated drafting striking railway workers into the military.
Fear of these strikes provided support for the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, over Truman’s veto, in 1947. Where the New Deal had put the federal government on the side of helping organize labor, Taft-Hartley erected governmental obstacles to union activity. Sympathy strikes were banned and states were allowed to prohibit the practice of closed shops, where an employee had to join a union before getting a job. Most damaging of all, the president was given power to delay strikes for an 80 day “cooling off’ period.
After these initial postwar confrontations, the union movement settled into the mainstream of American society. Control of unions fell to moderate elements, as radicals were driven out in purges facilitated by the strong wave of anticommunism sweeping the country. Strikes declined and union leaders became almost indistinguishable from the managers with whom they negotiated. National union officials retained control over locals by setting rules, insuring that power flowed from the top down. Unions evolved into greater bureaucracies and became more centralized. The 1955 merger of the two largest unions, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), provides the best example of this. “Tuxedo Unionism,” as it was termed by disgruntled steelworkers, meant more cooperation between unions and management and less input from the union rank and file.
Even worse for the perception of unions by their members and the public, corruption among top union officials increasingly came to light in the late 1950s. Teamsters Union president David Beck went to prison for stealing union funds. The ensuing congressional investigation of the Teamsters uncovered connections to organized crime, which led to the union’s expulsion from the AFL-CIO. Hollywood helped spread the perception of corrupt unions in the film On the Waterfront, which depicted an ex-prizefighter’s struggle against union corruption along the New York waterfront. Congress tried to address union corruption with the Landrum-Griffin Act, which gave the federal government power to oversee internal union affairs to assure democracy for rank-and-file members. It also made it a federal crime to misuse union funds. The Teamsters had difficulty adjusting to this government oversight as Beck’s successor, Jimmy Hoffa, also ended up in prison, thanks to aggressive prosecution by Attorney General Robert F Kennedy.
While some union members expressed outrage at their leadership’s corruption and distance from the rank and file, most did not chiefly because union members could see tangible improvements in their standard of living and working conditions. Wages increased and benefit packages offering health care and paid vacations became more commonplace, even in industries that did not have significant levels of unionization. With fewer bread-and-butter issues to contest and less power within unions, active rank-and-file participation in unions declined.
Although membership rose most years, the percentage of the American labor force involved with unions declined steadily through the 1950s and 1960s. This drop resulted not only from the apathy or contentment of industrial workers but also from important changes that occurred in the ECONOMY. Manufacturing jobs were increasingly locating in the southern sunbelt states, which were historically hostile to union activity. Moreover, structural changes in the economy were diminishing the share of the labor force involved in sectors such as manufacturing and mining where union activity was heavily concentrated.
Established unions were initially slow to respond to these changes, but by the 1960s they had begun to come around. In 1965, the AFL-CIO recognized the United Farm Workers, organized by Cesar Chavez. At the other end of the occupational spectrum, white collar unions such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees were getting started by the late 1960s, although most private-sector white-collar employees rejected unionization.
As the union movement looked to the 1970s, it faced several challenges. Not only did it need to counter increasing public perception that it was corrupt and unresponsive it also needed to reinvigorate its rank and file. Most important, it needed to find ways to make its existence relevant to workers in a rapidly changing American economy that no longer rested on manufacturing.
Further reading: Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions, 1920-1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
—Dave Price
World History
