What, No Labor Day Post?

I was going to publish a Labor Day post but my heart just wasn’t in it. Rather than post the whole long thing I’ll just put in the key bullet points.

What happened to organized labor? I think that a number of things happened: success, competition, professional labor organization, a narrowing of goals. In essence the industrial labor movement succeeded in its goals: conditions and practices improved, wages rose. For a generation or more it was possible for members of industrial trade unions to live prosperous lives and reasonably graceful retirements. The unions’ successes were matched by improvements in conditions, practices, in wages in non-unionized companies and industries.

However, that took place in a hothouse environment. When competition arrived variously in the form of workers overseas or newly immigrating workers, it couldn’t persist. It’s remarkable to me that the wage and price controls imposed by the Nixon Administration aren’t mentioned more when discussing this process.

A transition has also occurred in union organization. Just look at the difference between Jimmy Hoffa and his son, James P. Hoffa. Jimmy Hoffa came up through the school of hard knocks. He began as a working man and union organizing was an outgrowth of what he encountered. His son is a lawyer. When he speaks about “the workers”, it doesn’t have the ring of authenticity it did when Jimmy Hoffa did.

Finally, I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t here as much about the international labor movement from American labor leaders as we used to. A sense of proportion would put a lot more emphasis on securing rights for Chinese workers than I’m hearing these days.

1 comment… add one
  • My Dad was an international VP for the Transit Union, working his way up from bus driver. He left that after 20 years and went to work for USAID as a labor advisor in USAID in Turkey and Vietnam. USAID only works where countries allow them in and Congress chooses to fund the programs. At the moment, neither of those conditions prevail.

    AFL-CIO does have its own international program, but to tell the truth, I haven’t follow it for better than 40 years.

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