A Labor-Management Accord? DID A Lr~~~~~.~~NA~~~~~~ ACCORD^' re- solve the labor question in the prosperous years after the end of World War Il? Many historians, policy makers, and labor partisans have argued that such a beneficent social compact governed indus- trial relations far nearly a third of a century, from 1947 until some- time in the late 1970s. Writing early in the 1980s economists Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf were among the first scholars to retrospectively identify such a "tacit agreement between corporate capitalists and the organized labor movement." A. H. Raskin, the veteran labor reporter for the New York Times, simul- taneously recorded the end of the post-World War 11 era: a "live- and-let-live relationship rather than endless confrontations." Then in the 1990s AFL-CIO president John Sw?eney called for the restora- tion of the "unwritten social compacr" between capital and labor. Sweeney, the son of a struggling New York bus driver, declared him- self a "product of the social compact that lifted America out of the Great Depression and lifted working Americms into the middle class. . . . For employers back then, decent wages and benefits and high standards of corporate responsibility were seen as good buslness and good for business." Robert Reich, President Clinton's first secre- tary of labor, spent much of his tenure jawboning corporations to live up to their side of this presumptive accord.' But the very idea of such a harmonious accord is a suspect rein- terpretation of the postwar industrial era. Phrases like "social com- pact," "social contract," and "labor-capital accord" were first deployed A LABOR-MANAGEMENT ACCORD? - 99 in the early 1980s by liberals and laborites anxious to condemn wage cuts, denounce corporate union busting, and define what they seemed to be losing in Reagan's America. The terminology of social peace and cooperation used to describe industrial life in the pre-Reagan era was actually absent from the langgage of either labor or management during the 1950s and 1960s. During the first two decades after World War 11 few unionists could have been found to declare their relationship with corporate America particularly agreeable or stable. Most would have thought the very idea of a "social compact" between themselves and thcir corporate adversaries a clever piece of management propaganda. In 1948, when C. Wright Mills published The New Men of Power, he found that 55 percent of labor leaders in the AFL and 69 percent of those in the CIO "feel that the threat of fascism in America is serious or is likely to become so in the near future." And in 1951 when Fortune maga- zine declared contemporaq union workers "middle-class member(s1 of a middle-class society," most trade-union officials scoffed at the claim.' The 1940s and 1950s were years of historically high strike levels and of corporate-sponsored ideological warfare. Real wages doubled in the twenty years after 1947, but strikes were also ten times more prevalent thl in the years aftcr 1980 Moreover, if a cenain indus- trial relations stability did come to characterize labor relations in core industries like auto and steel, it hardly characterized those growing sectors of the economy where wages were low, output labor intensive, and management militantly anti-union. And even in industries that were the very model of bigtime collective bargaining, shop-floor conflict proved endemic and widespread. As Jack Mebgar reminds us in his moving account of steel unionism in the I~~OS, the largest strike in American history took place in 1959 over issues nor unlike those that motivated the Homestead combatants of ~Rgz.' Indeed, if such an accord could be said to exist during these years, it was lcss a mutdally satisfactory concordat than a dictate imposed upon an all-too-reluctant labor movement in an era of its political retreat and internal division. At best it was a limited and unstable tNCe, largely confined to a well-defincd set of regions and industries. It was a product of defeat, not victory..' From: Nelson Lichenstein, State of the Union (Princeton: Princeton Press, 2002)100 - CHAPTER 3 Politicized Bargaining That defeat has a name, a legal construct, an institutional expression: it is "collective bargaining." Such a judgment will surely surprise many who have come to see, or been taught, that such periodic bar- gains-between the management of a single firm and its unionized workers-were the core function of organized labor in the post- Wagner Act era. In its heyday, collective bargaining seemed a meta- phor for pluralist democracy itself. What better mechanism could al- low for the periodic recalibration of the economic and social share that each sector, class, and interest demanded in a complex, indus- trial society? But in the crucial fifteen years that stretched from 1933 to 1948, collective bargaining of this sort hardly described the system whereby labor and capital struggled for influence, income, and power. Instead, a highly politicized system of interclass conflict and accommodation put not just wages and working conditions in play across the nego- tiating table, but the fate of the New Deal impulse itself. Elections, legislative battles, strikes, organizing campaigns, and labor negotia- tions were seamlessly interwoven. Against the wishes of almost all private employers, the state played a decisive role in the outcome of the bargaining that took place be- tween the parties in every crisis that put the relationship between workers and capitalists in the headlines during the years that fol- lowed.6 As Sidney Hillman, the founder of the ClO's Political Action Committee (C10-PAC) put it in 1943, American workers "can no longer work out even their most immediate day to day problems through negotiations with their employers and the terms of their col- lective agreements. Their wages, hours, and working conditions have become increasingly dependent upon policies adopted by Congress and the National Administration."' American unions certainly had the power and capacity to conduct such politicked bargaining. By 1945 the trade unions stood near their twentieth-century apogee. About 30 percent of all American workers were