America's labor unions have made history by creating the minimum wage, job safety protections, paid vacations, and employer-provided pensions and health insurance.
But now the labor movement is in danger of becoming history. It represents only 16 percent of the entire U.S. work force and less than 10 percent of workers in private industry. While the nation's labor federation, the AFL-CIO, now has activist and imaginative leaders, unions still have an uphill fight to restore their membership strength, bargaining power, political clout, and public esteem.
Even the 67-year-old National Labor Relations Act, which promoted the growth of modern unions, may have encouraged them to take a wrong turn to "workplace parochialism." By creating cumbersome procedures for unions to demonstrate majority support at individual job sites and guaranteeing their right to represent employees at these locations, federal law can discourage unions from reaching out to other workers in their industries and communities.
These are among the conclusions of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $29.95) by Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of an acclaimed biography of the late United Auto Workers president, Walter Reuther.
Lichtenstein has written an insightful analysis of how unions declined from more than a third of the work force in the years immediately after World War II. He offers an explanation of how, for much of the ensuing half century, unions became more of a bureaucracy and less of a movement, losing the support of the liberal-to-radical intellectuals that had been their strongest allies.
For all the significance of its subject matter, State of the Union has yet to be reviewed in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, or until now, The Baltimore Sun. Leading newspapers and magazines might be expected to review a magisterial history of a major institution by one of the leading authorities in the field. So why has State of the Union gone almost unnoticed? In part, the book's disappointing reception vindicates one of its major theses: unions have suffered from their failure to attract the interest of a wider audience of liberal intellectuals.
But, much more importantly, Lichtenstein's study mirrors a major failing that he attributes to the unions themselves: the "parochialism" that concentrates on their own inner workings, core functions, and closest allies, rather than the broader concerns of working Americans, most of whom are not union members but still need better treatment on their jobs.
Of course, it can be churlish to criticize authors for their choice of subject and focus. But Lichtenstein has not written the sort of book that might interest an audience concerned with the "state of the union" but not necessarily the state of the unions. He has not placed the rise, decline and continued need for unions in the larger context of how the nation's economy, its workplaces, and its work force have changed in recent years.
Such a study would focus first on workers, then on unions. It would explain, as Lichtenstein does, how the unions that emerged during the 1930s and '40s answered the needs of working people and the entire nation during that era. It might take more pride than State of the Union in the unions' role in creating mass prosperity during the 1950s and '60s, when large companies offered secure jobs with rising wages and stable benefits.
But such a book would take a wider view than Lichtenstein of how workers suffered while the American economy was transformed in the 1970s and '80s. Yes, companies did engage in a new wave of union-busting, as Lichtenstein emphasizes, and workers, union and nonunion alike, saw their living standards decline.
But other factors were also at work, including international competition, new technologies and the deregulation of major industries.
Eventually a new economy emerged, where customized goods and services are replacing standardized mass production, and information technologies are transforming manufacturing as well as communications and the service sector. The book Lichtenstein didn't write would explain how new ways of working create new problems and require new public policies and new forms of worker organization. Yet he hardly mentions the fastest growing sectors of the economy, except for the government, health care and building service workers whom unions are organizing successfully.
Instead of thoroughly examining labor history in the making, Lichtenstein offers labor union history and labor intellectual history.
Particularly as the narrative shifts from the heroic period of the Great Depression when the major industrial unions emerged, Lichtenstein downplays workplace developments in favor of ideological debates within the unions and among the intellectuals who shifted from supporting unions to criticizing and eventually ignoring them.
In his conclusions, Lichtenstein offers two worthwhile recommendations for how unions can move beyond representing a declining number of members in a diminishing number of industries. To help low-wage workers, unions can promote regional efforts to improve wages, such as Baltimore's law requiring companies that do business with the city government to pay a "living wage." To reach out to professional and technical workers, unions should also revive the tradition of organizing along occupational lines, creating modern-day guilds that would provide training, set standards for credentials and competence, and serve as a source of portable health coverage and pension benefits for workers who keep moving from job to job and company to company.
But, after hundreds of pages about fascinating but forgotten debates among labor intellectuals, these forward-looking recommendations seem without a context in today's workplace realities.
Still, State of the Union is far and away the best book to be written recently praising or damning the labor movement. Another recent offering, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short Illustrated History of Labor in the United States by Priscilla Murolo, A.B. Chitty and Joe Sacco (New Press, 364 pages, $27.50), presents a readable and comprehensive history of the unions but offers few explanations for their decline other than the hostility of most employers and the complacency of some labor leaders.
Recent labor-bashers are just as simplistic. In Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch with America (American Enterprise Institute Press, 215 pages, $24.95), Max Green attributes the unions' decline to what he considers the extreme liberalism of their leaders.
More ambitiously, in Beyond Unions and Collective Bargaining (M.E. Sharpe, 240 pages, $26.95), economists Leo Troy and Daniel B. Mitchell maintain that most workers prefer the system of "individual representation" that they contend prevails in nonunion companies. But their rosy view of working without a union seems to be entirely derived from articles in academic journals, statements by business leaders, and selective interpretations of polling results.
Both sides of the debate, especially union advocates like Lichtenstein, would do well to return to the very practical discussions that produced the National Labor Relations Act almost 70 years ago. Back then, as Lichtenstein writes, unions were presented as the solution to America's problem: Most people didn't make enough money to afford the necessities of life and get the economy moving again.
Today's union advocates would do well to present the problems the nation needs to solve - such as the need for a new source of training and benefits in a churning economy - before explaining that the answer is reviving the labor movement. Then they'd write books that would encourage Americans to take a new look at unions - and encourage unions to look out the window, instead of looking in the mirror.
David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994. He is a former staffer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties, and a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.