Introduction

The last thirty years of the twentieth century presented American workers and American unions with both wrenching change and an opportunity for renewal. Workers used to a generally rising standard of living in the post-New Deal era found their expectations shattered by forces of global economic transformation that undercut wages, working conditions, and job security, even as those forces reshaped the demographics of the American working class itself. Nor did union organizations escape the profound impact of the New World (Economic) Order. Arguably at the height of their economic and political power in American society in the early 1970s, within twenty years union leaders found their once powerful organizations confronted by fundamental challenges. By the late 1990s hope appeared that the worst had passed as American workers and unions found that a rapidly growing national economy produced a tight labor market that operated to their benefit. Despite signs of reinvigoration, however, critics of the labor movement argued that the maturing global economy would continue to be inhospitable to organized labor. Activists in the labor struggles at century's end of course disagreed.

Workers and Unions at the End of the Millenium

In 1996, the American working class--defined occupationally by power and authority exercised at work--consisted of approximately 83 million workers out of a labor force of 134 million, or 62 percent of the working population. During the years of 1968 to 2000, the majority of these people either experienced an erosion of their standard of living, or, if coming newly into the labor force during these years, found the material expectations of their parents' generation difficult to achieve. Real wage growth for American workers declined even as productivity surged. Using 1960 as an index of 100 for both real weekly earnings and real domestic product trends, productivity continued to increase steadily through 2000, while real weekly earnings peaked in 1972-1973, and steadily declined thereafter until 1996. Indeed, for American workers real hourly wages stagnated at best and for many actually declined. A production worker making $11.83 an hour in 1983, for example, found that by 1996 his wages had declined, in real terms, to $9.93, a 17% loss. Bouts of unemployment and underemployment during the recessions of the 1980s deepened income inequality. A snapshot of the years 1968, 1992, and 1997 showed that distribution of shares of income in American society, divided by quintiled economic groupings, became more unequal over this period. Only the top quintile of income groups--the richest 20 percent of income earners--gained in income shares. All other segments, especially the bottom sixty percent of income earners roughly congruent with the American working class, found that their shares of the national income declined.

Starting in 1995, however, a booming economy and tightened labor market produced the first real wage growth in many years. From 1995 to 1999, the median wage for all workers, across almost all race and ethnic groups, grew by 7.3 percent and was stronger for those at the bottom rung of the economy and the top, with fewer gains for workers in the middle, owing to increaes in the federal minimum wage and strong labor markets. Nevertheless, these positive changes did little to affect growing income inequality. According to economist Lawrence Mishel and his colleagues' annual analysis of the state of working America, by the latter half of the 1990s, residual income inequality had taken on a new shape, with "the bottom and middle growing closer, and the top pulling farther away from the rest." In addition to declining real wages and growing income inequality, compensation in the form of "fringe" benefits such as pensions and medical insurance eroded similarly. Thus, for example, in 1998 only 63% percent of workers had employer-provided health insurance, as compared with the 70 percent in 1979. Pension coverage too became less prevalent, with less than half the workforce having any workplace-related pension at all. Thus, despite the improvements of the late 1990s, even the most optimistic observers believed that workers would not soon recoup their wage and compensation losses.

Nor did the tide of recent improvements lift all boats. Women, minorities, and foreign-born workers continued to find advancement difficult. At century's end, immigrant workers, projected to be the most rapidly growing portion of the American population over the next fifty years, came to represent 34 percent of all workers in private households (i.e domestic servants), 21 percent of all workers in personal services, 19 percent of all workers in eating and drinking establishments, 13 percent of all workers in construction, and 81 percent of all farm workers. They also came to dominate in the garment, meatpacking, poultry processing, and building services industries, which once provided well-paid union jobs employment, but which now were ghettoes of low-wage, non-union jobs. For these most vulnerable workers, the American economy's improvement in the late 1990s did not mean much. Subject to threats of deportation, they often endured the worst kind of employer exploitation and working conditions, with non-payment of wages frequent and access to benefits such as health insurance rare. The result is a 21 percent poverty rate, compared to 2.5 percent rate among the native-born population.

Economic conditions associated with globalism lengthed the work week and drew increasing numbers of family members into the work force. In 1972, 50 percent of married couples with children had two or more wage earners contributing to family income. By 1992 this figures had risen to 75 percent as more and more women entered the labor market. The average family now worked eighty-three weeks per year, compared with sixty-eight in 1969. Paradoxically, the increase in work time did not mean there were more full-time jobs. The "contingent" worker, called a "permatemp" in the dismissive jargon of the Microsoft Corporation, was a part time or temporary employee who typically received low wages and could claim no medical insurance or other benefits. These men and women, many of whom longed for the security and advantages of permanent, full-time work, became increasingly numerous in the "post-industrial" economy of the late twentieth century. Employers actually boasted of massive layoffs, as they redesigned operations to limit commitments and the costs of benefits. By the mid-1990s, 22 million part-time and contingent workers labored in the American economy (about two-thirds of them women), 4 million of them involuntarily, earning approximately 62 cents of every dollar earned by a regular, full-time employee.

Thus, while in the 1980s and 1990s, the US economy generated large numbers of jobs, the jobs were largely in the growing service sector of the economy, and were qualitatively different from the family-sustaining jobs that predominated in the post-World War II era. They all too often paid less, provided poorer or nonexistent benefits, featured unsavory working conditions, and lacked many safety and health protections. And, as with the impact of declining real wages and benefits, women and minorities disproportionately experienced these conditions. Wage stagnation and rising living costs forced countless workers to moonlight. A cartoon in the popular press in the late 1990s captured the situation facing many beleaguered American workers-both of the traditional working class and of the new working class-at century's end: a haggard-looking man in an easy chair sits with a scowl on his face as he looks at his evening newspaper's headlines proclaiming the government's announcement of "Two Million Jobs Created in the Last Year." "Yeah," he growls ruefully, "I have three of them!"

Declining real wages and benefits, increases in hours worked, contingency, and growing income inequality had a sharp impact on the fortunes of the labor movement. In the early 1950s, union density--the percentage of the organizable labor force belonging to unions--had peaked at 35 percent and began a long, gradual erosion through the late 1970s. By 1983, only one-fifth of the non-agricultural labor force belonged to unions, and membership dipped even more sharply after that. By 1999, despite an uptick in the membership figures for the first time in many years, continued job losses in the mass production industrial base helped push union density down to 13.5 percent (about 16.3 million wokrers), even as organized labor experimented with new recruitment strategies in an effort to reverse this dismal trend.

The unions that took the brunt of the punishing losses were those that had earlier led organized labor. By 1995, for example, the proud United Autoworkers, which had once boasted 1.4 million members, had shrunk to 751,000 members. The United Steelworkers suffered even more dramatic losses, from a peak membership in 1973 over over one million to just over 400,000 in 1995. Old line AFL unions fared no better. Building trades unions, once the most stable and powerful in the old American Federation of Labor and in the AFL-CIO, suffered catastrophic losses through the 1980s, victims of changing construction technology and aggressive employer attack. Thus, the Carpenters saw its membership of over 700,000 shrink to 378,00 during the 1980s and 1990s. The International Association of Machinists, which once boasted over a million members, counted only 448,000 in 1995. In 1995, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies' Garment Workers, along with the declining textile workers' union, merged into the United Needle Trades, Industrial, and Textiles Employees (UNITE) to enhance their chance at survival in an industry particularly susceptible to international competition. The fabled United Mine Workers, barely clung to life as strip mining, environmental regulation, alternative fuel sources, and growing employer hostilty ravaged the traditional mining regions.

As membership figures plummeted, the older unions could fight only rear guard actions on the collective bargaining front. These proud organizations now they faced incessant employer demands for concessions as they fought rear guard actions to maintain wage and benefit standards. Employers slashed thousands of manufacturing jobs or moved work overseas or moved operations to low-wage countries or to the American South. Meanwhile, the wage and benefit levels of the expanding, mostly non-union service, financial, retail, and high tech sectors compared unfavorably with those that auto, steel, and other old economy workers had won in organized labor's glory days.

The public sector, along with a few service and retail industries not subject to geographical relocation, did help to brighten the picture. In the 1960s and 1970s, public sector or quasi-public sector unions such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) launched impressive organizing drives and built their organizations' political influence. The American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) mushroomed from 99,000 members in 1955 to 1.2 million in 1995. The National Education Association, representing teachers chiefly in suburban and rural areas, transformed itself from a placid employee association into an extremely effective bargaining agent, and over the course of the 1970s and 1980s grew into largest union in the country, with over two million members. The AFT also expanded, from 40,000 members in 1955 to 613,000 in 1995. By 1999, union density in the public sector had reached 37.5 percent (compared to a paltry 9.5 percent in private employment), surpassing the peak of overall union density for the American economy in the early 1950s. And in certain non-industrial areas-package delivery, retail grocery, and building maintenance, for example-the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the private sector wing of the Service Employees organized aggressively, enabling them to expand or at least stabilize membership totals.

A changing economic environment shaped both the power dynamics and the policy focus of the labor movement. Led for decades by the industrial and construction workers' unions, by the mid-1990s the AFL-CIO reflected increasingly the priorities of public employee and service workers' unions such as AFSCME and SEIU. In 1995, the ascension of SEIU president John Sweeney to the presidency of the AFL-CIO in the first contested presidential election in nearly a hundred years drove home this shift. Sweeney, elected as head of a slate of like-minded innovators, brought with him SEIU's culture of aggressive organizing, as well as a strong commitment to egalitarian economic and social policies. Representing low-wage service workers, SEIU and other service workers' unions insisted on the need to use government in the effort to redistribute income shares downward. At the same time, the newly potent public employee unions were now in a position to press the broad public interest legislative concerns that had always been their hallmark, and to do so with a high degree of political sophistication.

In addition to these historic changes, the composition of the American working class was undergoing a dramatic shift. Increasing unionization in the public and service sectors, in which disportionate numbers of black, Hispanic, and female workers toiled, significantly increased the proportion of minority and female union members. The burgeoning immigrant population, in which the numbers of women and people of color loomed large, rapidly found that unions could be vehicles for both acculturation and economic justice. In 1998, union members earned 32% more than their non-union counterparts, and the differential for female, black, and Hispanic union members was even greater. For example, African-American union workers earned a differential of 45 percent, women earned 39 percent, and Latinos 54 percent than their non-union counterparts. Not surprisingly, then, a labor movement that had for nearly a century been dominated by white males was becoming more diverse, with a larger propotion of African Americans now enrolled in unions than was the case among whites.

By 1998, it appeared that the new AFL-CIO leadership's exhortations to its affiliates to organize aggressively had halted labor's long-term decline. In that year, unions had added 103,000 members in the service industries, 49,000 in communications and public utilities, 8,000 in wholesale, and 213,000 in federal and local government, representing a total increase of 373,000 members in absolute terms, with California (2.3 million total membership), New York (2.0 million), and Illinois (1.0 million), leading the way. Net membership gain for that year, however, was only a modest 101,000, owing largely to job losses in manufacturing. Analysts calculated that to restore forward momentum in union density organized labor would have to organize nearly one million new members a year, a daunting task indeed.

Labor Politics: Decline and Rebirth

The political sphere served as a sensitive register of the challenges that the new economy and the new dispensation in labor relations posed. After its peak of policy influence in Johnson administration, the AFL-CIO, under President George Meany, found the Republican Nixon-Ford administrations of 1969 to 1977 far less accommodating. While there were some legislative and organizational victories in these years--most notably the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the expansion of unionism in the federal sector--the federation's strategy of top-officer political deal-making with elite political actors had seemingly run aground. During these years, American politics and political actors, including organized labor, faced a period of "crises of representation," in the words of political scientist Taylor Dark, wherein the political system opened wider to accommodate previously un-represented constituencies. For most of the post-New Deal period organized labor had been the bulwark of the liberal wing of the Democratic party. It had played a key role in defending and extending programs aimed at achieving for working (and middle) class Americans, union and non-union alike, fairer taxation, income stability, and social security, while at the same time promoting improvement of workplace conditions, both through collective bargaining and legislation. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, newly vocal civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and women's rights groups were demanding political recognition and thus challenging the AFL-CIO's putative leadership of liberal forces. Following the 1968 presidential election, sweeping reforms in the Democratic party's presidential nomination and platform-writing processes weakened Meany's and the AFL-CIO's clout. Meany's resulting disaffection was evidenced in 1972 when he and the labor federation refused to endorse Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, darling of these new elements and beneficiary of the changes in the party's rules.

Conflict raged within the House of Labor as well. In 1968, Walter Reuther led the UAW out of the AFL-CIO and sought to build a progressive coalition of dissident unions. Reuther and other critics of Meany sought alliance with anti-war, environmental, feminist, and other progressive groups, both within the revamped Democratic party and in broader arenas of social action. In the words of one union political leader, the federation's "leaders live in the dreams of the past, where they wheeled and dealed in politics" among the political elites. In a changing political world where increasingly conservative Republicans competed effectively with a Democratic party wracked by turbulent change, the chrages of left wing critics that under Meany the AFL-CIO's political operations were locked in a sterile anti-communist and undemocratic mindset resonated powerfully.

In 1976, these developments intensified as post-Watergate cynicism helped, Democratic former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, capture the party's nomination and defeat Republican Gerald Ford. Though Carter established ties with AFSCME, the UAW, and other key liberal unions, Meany and the AFL-CIO remained distant, supporting him in the November election with little enthusiasm. Running an anti-establishment campaign based on repudiation of traditional power brokers and party influentials, Carter exploited the changes that the Vietnam-Watergate era had wrought. During Carter's four years in office, the relationship between the AFL-CIO and the administration further deteriorated as disagreements over economic policy, foreign affairs, and other matters erupted.

Particularly notable was the failure in 1978 of the Democrat-controlled Congress to pass a package of modest labor law reforms. Although Carter did support these measures aimed at protecting the rights of workers to form unions seemingly guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, he proved unwilling to expend significant political capital to break a Senate filibuste. In economic policy also, Meany and other AFL-CIO chieftains quickly became disillusioned with the administration they had helped to elect. Struggling against rising inflation resulting in part from soaring oil prices, Carter and his aides advanced policies certain to embitter trade unionists. Wage-and-price guidelines would undermine collective bargaining. An obsession with balancing the federal budget jeopardized social programs that helped lower-income Americans. Deregulation of the airlines and the trucking industry threatened unions in these sectors that had prospered under decades of close federal scrutiny. Worst of all, however, was Carter's selection to head the Federal Reserve Board in June, 1979, of arch-conservative Paul Volcker, who immediately launched a program of monetary retrenchment that reined in economic growth, spurred unemployment, and brought approval from Wall Street and denunciation from AFL-CIO headquarters. By 1980, significant segments of the labor movement had abandoned Carter to support Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy as he sought to wrest the Democratic nomination from the incumbent Carter. In the end, Carter persevered, but the resultant divisiveness and the damage done in this particularly bitter nomination further boosted the chances of popular Republican nominee, former California governor (1967-75) Ronald W. Reagan.

Indeed, by the time of conservative icon Reagan's victory over Carter in 1980, the outlines of the precipitous decline of labor's political, and eventually organizational, fortunes were clear. It was with great irony that the first American labor leader elected president was Reagan, a former president of the Screen Actors Guild and once a liberal Democrat. For the next twelve years, Reagan and his one-term successor George Bush represented the apogee of modern conservatism's success in building a formidable threat to the primacy of the political heritage of the New Deal in American politics. Rejecting state economic intervention and enamored of "free" markets, Reaganism formed a coalition of the religious right and corporate America that rejected all institutions promoting counter-cultural values, positive government programs, interference with market forces beneficial to business enterprise. Some unions--especially those in the public sector--found themselves tainted with all three of these stigmas but even the more business-oriented unions in the private sector came under heavy fire, both from the GOP administrations and from employers confident of high-level support for anti-union actions.

Labor leaders attempted to fight back. Lane Kirkland, who in 1979 succeeded the elderly Meany as AFL-CIO president, was convinced that Reagan and his corporate supporters were determined to cripple organized labor. He resolved to rebuild labor's political power and to reverse recent Republican successes in the White House and in Congress. Kirkland's strategy focused on labor participation in the Democratic party's new system of candidate selection. AFL-CIO political operatives became newly active in party primaries and caucuses to ensure selection of committed pro-labor candidates. Kirkland and his aides held out the olive branch to unionists earlier antagonized by Meany's imperious ways. Under the low-keyed Kirkland, the AFL-CIO even promoted forms of direct action, sponsoring in 1981 a great Solidarity Day march in Washington to protest what laborites deemed the anti-worker agenda of Reaganism. By 1984 Kirkland had succeeded in unifying organized labor behind the reliably pro-union candidacy of former Vice-President Walter Mondale. Though Mondale went down to defeat, voting analyses showed that union members and voters in their households had decisively supported the Democrats, although non-union blue-collar voters continued their drift toward the GOP.

Democratic success in the 1986 Congressional elections, along with increased labor activism within the decision-making circles of the Democratic party, provided additional encouragement. While labor supporters were less unified in the fight for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, they rallied behind the eventual candidate, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Even his defeat at the hands of Reagan's vice-president, George Bush, provided some grounds for hope, as the votes of union members and their families helped the Democrats to retain control of Congress and to mount a vigorous challenge to the popular Reagan's hand-picked successor.

The 1990s brought further encouragement. Labor activists had at last begun to realize that organized labor could no longer dominate the liberal coalition. They had to reach out to and cooperate closely with allies in environmental, women's rights, civil rights, and single-issue movements. Labor's key role in the election of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 signaled this renewal of laborite political effectiveness, which remained in evidence throughout the decade.

Stressing a variety of liberal legislative programs as solutions for family and workplace issues of broader concern to the non-union working class-support for child care, comparable worth, plant closing legislation, portable health care benefits, increases in the minimum wage, protection against industrial pollution, and 1991 amendments to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example-labor activists learned to cooperate with other like-minded progressive groups, reinvigorating the liberal/labor coalition.

Indeed, organized labor once again formed the financial and organizational backbone of the Democratic party. The passage of the labor-backed Voting Rights Act of 1965 had the effect of liberalizing the southern wing of the Democratic party, while at the same time causing many traditional southern Democrats to defect to the GOP. These changes both weakened the party's overall electoral strength and diminished the importance of the historically conservative South in the party's agenda-setting and deliberative activities. At the same time, a new generation of labor activists, often veterans of the social movements of the 1960s, now advanced into key leadership positions. Led by politically savvy public sector unionists, these women and men were not content with the top-down labor politics of the Meany era. Instead, they linked the survival of a still-beleaguered labor movement to the fortunes of a reborn progressive political coalition.

Veteran labor activists did not expect the centrist, southern politician Clinton to embrace their complete progressive agenda. And in some respects the new administration proved almost as disappointing as had that of fellow southerner Carter in the 1970s. The administration's inept handling of health care reform-seemingly a sure legislative winner-eroded confidence in Clinton's political grasp. In place of aggressive promotion of labor law reform, Clinton appointed a special commission to study workplace issues, labor law changes, and employment policies. Although chaired by former secretary of labor John Dunlop, an academic friend of the labor movement, the commission issued an ambiguous report that soon became moot, once again frustrating labor's quest for stronger protection of union activities.

Even more disappointing was Clinton's ardent embrace of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This measure was designed ostensibly to remove trade barriers among the US, Mexico, and Canada in the interests of expanding markets and promoting economic development. Labor representatives certainly did not dissent from these goals but they did reject vehemently the specific provisions of the Agreement, which, they charged, offered little meaningful protection for workers' rights and which seemed to invite environmental degradation in the manufacturing plants springing up along the US-Mexican border. The vigor and energy that the Clinton administration expended in forcing NAFTA through in 1994, despite virtually universal condemnation by labor, environmental, and human rights groups, contrasted sharply with the administration's apparent lack of concern about protecting the right of workers on both sides of the border to organize without harassment.

Even so, however, from organized labor's perspective even a centrist Democrat such as Clinton offered a welcome contrast to twelve years of GOP governance. Clinton knew the importance of labor in both the electoral and legislative arenas and largely avoided the gratuitous antagonism of unionists that had plagued Carter. In 1993, he signed a Family Medical Leave Act, which Bush had vetoed. He issued executive orders to promote pro-union and pro-worker policies related to government contracting, and in a move urged by public employee unions he signed the repeal of the 1938 Hatch Act, which had prohibited partisan political activity by federal workers. He introduced legislation to curb the increasingly prevalent employers' tactic of recruiting so-called "replacement workers," men and women hired to supplant strikers in labor disputes. And even though the President did not press for reform in the nation's basic laws, his appointees to positions in the Department of Labor and especially to the National Labor Relations Board supported workers' rights and usually had close and positive associations with organized labor. Particularly notable was his selection as the new NLRB chairman a distinguished legal scholar, William Gould, who quickly set about attempting to restore that agency to its original function as a facilitator of worker representation.

But the 1990s also brought some sharp setbacks. The congressional elections of 1994 were a disaster for organized labor and other liberal forces. Republican House Minority leader Newt Gingrich of Georgia led a campaign promoting a conservative "Contract with America," which called for a rollback of federal programs, lower taxes, enhanced military expenditures, and a rebuke to the alleged "tax-and-spend" policies of an administration that Republicans characterized as irredeemably "liberal." Now for the first time since 1953, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. Although organized labor's political operations dutifully supported most Democratic house and senate candidates, the bitter fight over NAFTA and the administration's failures in regard to striker replacement, health care, and labor law reform sapped enthusiasm for a party that often seemed to have abandoned its working-class base. Non-voting among blue collar workers and union families generally reached record levels, paving the way for the GOP's stunning victory.

In a certain sense, though, the 1994 congressional elections had a "blowback" effect on the GOP. By putting control of Congress into the hands of conservative, vehemently anti-labor Republicans, this bitter election defeat served as the catalyst for the new labor politics in the latter half of the 1990s. Reform-minded elements in the AFL-CIO placed much of the blame for the election disaster on Kirkland. They charged that he was so preoccupied by anticommunist foreign policy concerns that he had neglected domestic affairs. Thus, the 1994 elections proved the last straw for laborites determined to press a renewed progressive agenda. By 1995, SEIU President John Sweeney and what came to be called the New Voices slate had put together a winning coalition. After forcing Kirkland to announce that he would not stand for relection, the reformers defeated Kirkland's heir apparent, Thomas Donahue, for the AFL-CIO presidency. Key to the New Voice movement was Sweeney's commitment to organizing the unorganized and to renewed political activism in the service of organizing and improving workers lives more broadly, as he had done successfully with the Service Employees. In both areas, Sweeney knew that labor's future lay in an increasing focus on women and minorities as the most receptive targets for both union organizing and a working-class political agenda of economic populism.

As the 1996 election cycle neared, the new AFL-CIO team girded for action. Despite disapproval of President Clinton's stand on NAFTA, a unified labor movement supported his re-election. Equally important, however, was an attempt to return the House to Democratic control by removing hard-right leaning freshmen congressmen in labor swing districts, elected as part of the "Gingrich Revolution." Central to the new political approach was an extension of labor operatives' involvement in the Democratic party started by Kirkland. Henceforth, the AFL-CIO would de-emphasize monetary contributions to individual candidates while promoting selection of reliably pro-labor candidates, including union members. The Sweeney regime also worked with member unions to develop intensive grass roots campaigns wherein union operatives listened to the concerns of their members and attempted to motivate workers to become actively involved in the political process.

To support these initiatives, the new leadership created a political training institute and assigned 135 staffers to political work for the 1996 election. Sweeney quickly appropriated $35 million for media, targeting of the most vulnerable of the Gingrichites. In the end, the New Voice's political impact was not enough to return the House to Democratic control, but labor did play an important role in defeating a dozen right-wing Republicans. As Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas reluctantly acknowledged, if 9,759 voters in ten key districts had switched, the House would have returned to Democratic control. "That's too close for comfort," he said. Declared liberal writer Harold Meyerson, the AFL-CIO was once again "an indispensable force" in the Democratic party.

In 1997, the AFL-CIO's political operatives flexed their newly toned muscles by defeating resoundingly the effort of President Clinton to expand the so called "free trade" program embodied in NAFTA. Union lobbyists helped to persuade 80 percent of House Democrats to oppose the president on this issue. And in another show of political clout, organized labor in populous California led a remarkable campaign to defeat a referendum initiative, Proposition 226, that would have crippled labor's political operations. Widely considered the opening round in a broader GOP-led attack on labor's political activities, Proposition 226 had gained over 70 percent support in polls taken months before the election. California unions, however, aided by the national AFL-CIO and working closely with feminists and ethnic and racial minorities, put on an impressive display of membership mobilization to defeat the measure decisively.

From 1998 through the presidential election of 2000 the AFL-CIO and organized labor expanded on these successful initiatives. By supporting only committed pro-labor candidates and concentrating on getting union members and their families out to vote, labor operatives had reinvented organized labor as a dynamic force in electoral politics. By the time of the primary season in 2000, both Vice-President Al Gore and Democratic former Senator Bill Bradley from New Jersey publicly sought organized labor's help without even a thought of running a Carter or Clinton-style "union silent" campaign. Though Gore ultimately lost after a bitter dispute over the electoral votes of Florida, the vice-president won a national popular vote plurality and his victories in Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and, many believed, Florida, owed much to hard work by union operatives, usually in close association with impressive efforts to mobilize heavily Demoratic African American voters.

But perhaps the most promising portent for the political future occurred at the grassroots. In addition to the federal agenda, labor activists continued to stress local coalition-building political issues such as city and county-based living wage campaigns, organized around the idea that anyone who works full-time deserves a "living," not merely a "minimum," wage. For many years, observed community organizer Madleine Janis-Aparicio, "the labor movement and progressive organizations focusing on poverty shared only a marginal relationship." Starting in the 1990s, labor and community organizations began asking themselves the question, "What would happen if the two supported each other through strategic alliances, and found ways to work with progressive lawmakers?" This resulted in a "new paradigm" of economic development and struggles to establish local living wage ordinances. These economically populist, politically unifying progressive grassroots initiatives quickly spread. Labor, community organizers, and religious supporters pressured local politicians to require governmental contractors or tax abatement benefactors to pay those working for them in the public arena wages pegged to local conditions in advance of the federal minimum wage, and even to provide health care benefits.

Central labor councils often led in these campaigns. Indeed, in 199? the AFL-CIO created a "Union Cities" program featuring these grass roots labor bodies. For years, central labor councils, which provided a meeting ground for members of often-diverse local unions in a given community, had languished. These councils, however, soon proved key elements in the new, grass roots approach to political action. The Sweeney administration set out a strategic plan to encourage local labor activists to revitalize these organs, especially with respect to political action. In many areas of the country--San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Los Angeles--central labor councils have built impressive local political power. Living wage campaigns, which one observer called awakening the "sleeping giant" of progressive political renewal, have often been the keys to these efforts. Even publicly sensitive private institutions such as Harvard University have proved vulnerable to labor's new focus on community action. Thus, in 2000 and 2001, actors Matt Damon, a former student, and Ben Affleck, whose father had been a janitor at Harvard, spoke before mass rallies, challenging the prestigious university, with its multi-billion dollar endowment, to pay living wages to its largely minority janitorial staff. In distant Gainesville, Florida, an informal coalition of students, unionists, and community activists helped low-wage service workers at the University of Florida to fight off imposition of near-universal night shift employment which would have created havoc with workers' family lives and jeopardized their health and safety. Up and down California, and in Los Angeles in particular, a Latino-labor alliance fostered by labor councils has profoundly changed the face of state and local politics. As writer Robert Kuttner proclaimed in 2001, "In this era of diminished expectations and hollow politics, the living wage campaigns are a heartening reminder that economic distress can rekindle grassroots political energy. In this case, the movement is an overdue reunion of unions and community activists."

More and more it appeared that women, minorities, and the burgeoning immigrant population (many of whom were women and racial minorities) were the key to labor's future growth. Demographers report that in the next fifty years the US will undergo vast population changes. They expect over eight hundred thousand immigrants, whose birth rates historically exceed those of established populations, to arrive each year. Analysts have projected that by 2050 immigration will have accounted for at least two-thirds of the country's population growth. By that year, fully half of all Americans will be "minorities," doubling the current proportion. Moreover, immigration will doubtless further the feminization of the US labor force, since all evidence points to the continued large-scale employment of immigrant women.

No wonder then that in February 2000 Sweeney's AFL-CIO took the historic step, though not without prodding by grassroots activists working with immigrants, of abandoning organized labor's traditional opposition to illegal immigration. The labor federation now called for a broad amnesty for illegals working in the United States. Union organizers and representatives working with immigrant populations realized how intimidating an employers' threat to report workers to the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) could be. Not only did it make them reluctant to join unions, but it also made them reluctant to fight all manner of employment abuses, including non-payment of wages. Increasingly, unions active in this area, such as UNITE in the garment industry, the Hotel and Restaurant workers, and the Service Employees, established immigrant Workers Centers to assist with employment law problems and educate about workplace rights. Center representatives also organized direct actions to fight injustices, even when the victims were not union members. In addition, unions established English as a Second Language programs and helped with immigration problems.

As a result of these initiatives, people in Hispanic and Asian communities have come to look about unions as friendly allies. As writer David Bacon has noted, "over the last decade immigrant workers have proven key to the labor movement's growth." As Hotel and Restaurant president John Wilhelm told the federation's 2000 convention, "those who came before us, who built this labor movement in the great depression, in strikes in rubber and steel and hotels, didn't say, 'Let me see your papers' to the workers in those industries. They said, 'Which side are you on?' And immigrant workers today have the right to ask of us the same question: Which side are we on?" The federation's new immigration stand clearly answered the question. Although the continuing presence of xenophobia and the often-fierce competition for jobs and public services continued to pose sharp problems for advocates of this new receptiveness, the aspirations and concerns of immigrant workers would clearly remain a central concern to a labor movement seeking to reclaim influence and legitimacy in American life.

American Unions: Heritage of Struggle

Through the end of the 1970s, union business ran pretty much along the lines that had developed by the 1950s after the passage of the union-restricting Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Through the post-war decades unions typically committed few resources to organizing. They focused rather collective bargaining, achieving enviable gains for their members and setting standards that non-union employers were often forced to meet. The conservative political resurgence of the 1980s and the reappearance of strident anti-union business militancy seemed to take union chieftains by surprise. By the 1990s labor leaders found that to survive at all into the twenty-first century they would have to return to the kind of grassroots organizing and collective bargaining struggles that had earlier built political and economic power, and not be content with simply protecting the status quo. As commentator Robert Kuttner wrote, "What almost killed the American labor movement was the idea that union leaders should behave like statesmen." In the labor struggles at century's end, it was clear that that idea of labor statesmanship had passed into history.

It did not take long after President Carter left office for the climate to change. In the summer of 1981, President Reagan's decision to fire 13,000 illegally striking air traffic controllers (whose union, PATCO, was, ironically, one of the few to have endorsed endorsed his candidacy) signaled the change. From the outset, Reagan appointed people to the NLRB of people who were hostile to collective bargaining. Picking up on these cues, following the 1982-1984 recession corporate executives everywhere, facing rising domestic and/or international competition, pressed unions for concessions at the bargaining table. Employers now invited strikes by hard-pressed unions and freely recruited strikebreakers, a tactic to which they had rarely resorted since the New Deal. They mounted vigorous campaigns to discourage workers from forming unions or to encourage them to decertify existing unions, often in flagrant violation of national labor laws. With the conservative-dominated NLRB looking on in approval, these tactics eroded union power, as in the formerly highly-organized autoparts industry. Some industries, such as residential construction, now became almost completely non-union. Into the 1990s, business seminars with titles such as "How to Remain or Become Union Free" proliferated. "The time is ripe," declared a leading anti-union consulting firm in 1987, "for employers to examine what the procedures are for deunionization. . .There is nothing to be ashamed of. No sacrilege. Nothing unethical" about union busting.

But workers and their unions also fought back. In the spring and summer of 1990, for example, when the Greyhound Bus Company replaced striking drivers, snipers fired at scab buses along Florida highways, and in California a picketing striker was crushed when a panicky nonunion driver lost control of his vehicle. In one showdown between the United Steelworkers and the RAC corporation in Ravenswood, West Virginia, the company evicted union members from its aluminum plant, erected steel fences, positioned armed guards, and hired replacements. The resulting two-year battle, which ended in a surprising union victory, often pitted worker against worker. Grateful for work in an area of acute unemployment, replacements sneered at picketing Steelworkers. "'Thanks for the job, Grandpa,' some of them . . . yell at us when they're drivin' by," one striker told a reporter. "But they know better than to stop their car, or try to eat at a restaurant in town. Cause we'll kick their young rumps from here back to Ohio."

UAW members in Peoria, Illinois, experienced similar problems. Faced with a strike of 13,000 workers in the spring of 1992, Caterpillar Tractor, which had bargained with the Autoworkers for more than forty years, now announced that it would hire replacement workers, a move unthinkable in earlier days. Replacement workers were plentiful; the phone company reported handling 30,000 calls an hour from hopeful workers around the country. The UAW called off the strike amid bitter recriminations from its Peoria membership. Labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan observed, "Cat was looking around and saying, 'There isn't a strong labor movement. . . , so why do we have to put up with one?"'

There were other episodes of sharp confrontation as well. In 1989 and 1990 the United Mine Workers revived their militant traditions to wage an epic battle against the Pittston (Virginia) Coal Company's efforts to rescind health care benefits and break union influence. New York telephone workers fought off telecommunications giant NYNEX's attempts to weaken the Communications Workers of America and to cut benefits. Some unions resorted to innovative techniques of struggle. The Mine Workers, for example, built Camp Solidarity to serve as strike headquarters, deployed camouflage-clad strikers as lookouts, and in September temporarily occupied a coal-preparation plant. Miners' wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, and lovers mobilized to support the strike, calling themselves the Daughters of Mother Jones and traveling along the East Coast to generate sympathy and to raise money. That same year, Eastern Airline machinists, flight attendants, baggage handlers, and pilots fought buccaneering airline tycoon Frank Lorenzo as he attempted to destroy labor organizations at the troubled carrier. At air terminals everywhere, travelers were given real dollar bills with the slogan "Don't Fly Eastern" stamped on them.

In the wake of the failed Caterpillar strike, UAW workers in Peoria launched a "work-to-rule" campaign that confronted management with the consequences of its attack on the union. Workers swamped the grievance procedure apparatus with all manner of complaints, used parking lots for regular rallies, and conducted mini-strikes to harass supervisors. Indeed, unions such as the Auto Workers began to develop systematic programs of "organizing the organized," attempting to rebuild lethargic shop-floor networks in an effort to reclaim the workplace power and solidarity they had once embodied. Such "an inside campaign," observes labor educator Steve Babson, "mobilizes the membership to withdraw their creativity and commitment, and thereby pressure management with the prospect of sharply declining productivity" unless it learns to treat workers with respect and to acknowledge the positive role of the union.

Labor conflict helped to plunge Greyhound and Eastern into bankruptcy, but a settlement with the bus company led to the rehiring of most strikers as well as NLRB-mandated back pay awards. So deep was worker hostility toward Lorenzo that unionists regarded the demise of Eastern Airlines as a victory despite the heavy loss of jobs. Even so, the tendency of employers to accept, and even to provoke, strikes, hire lower-wage replacements, and continue business in a "union-free" (and low-wage, low-benefit) manner grew. Between 1985 and 1989, businesses hired permanent replacement workers in nearly one of every five strikes. Courts imposed strict penalties on unionists for mass picketing or other displays of strength: in its relatively victorious encounter with Pittston, the UMW, for example, incurred fines totaling over $100 million in punishment for the short-term occupation of company property.

Not surprisingly, then, despite episodic displays of old-time militancy, strike incidence plummeted. Between 1978 and 1992, for example, the number of strikes involving more than a thousand workers dropped from 235 to 35. "We have nothing to bargain with now," said a Machinists' official. "Labor has an empty gun." Added reporter Alexander Cockburn, "In America, it's mostly legal to go on strike. It's simply illegal to win one."

Predating and pervading the problem of striker replacement was the generally unfavorable legal climate in which unions were operating. For years, unionists had been critical of the time-consuming and delay-rewarding procedures that had come to characterize union representation elections and unfair labor practices cases in NLRB proceedings. In the eighties, the number of unfair labor practices cases, filed by a union in behalf of workers claiming victimization because of their support for the union, skyrocketed. One scholar estimated that one worker in every twenty who voted for union representation lost his or her job. True, employers who broke the law by illegal dismissals faced fines and back-pay penalties, but the proceedings required to win an unfair labor practices case were dauntingly expensive and typically took up to three years for resolution. Moreover, successful litigants could make no claim for punitive or psychological damages and had to subtract any earnings they made in the interim from the final award. The contrast between the lightness of penalties faced by labor-law violating employers and the draconian punishments inflicted on erring unions, as in the UMW-Pittston cases, was powerful testimony to the courts' priorities.

Thus, when the relatively labor-friendly Clinton administration arrived in Washington in 1992 a new generation--and even many of the old generation--of labor leaders were spoiling for a collective bargaining fight that they could win. In most cases, this involved using so-called "corporate campaigns," which had been occasionally effective in the grim 1980s and even before. A corporate campaign featured innovative efforts to put pressure on employers, most importantly by reaching out to the community to gain allies. were now forced to rely Union leaders who could not adjust to this more militant, community-oriented style of organizing and bargaining, seemingly required to survive or grow in the new labor relations environment, fell by the wayside as a new generation stepped into their shoes.

The quintessential example of this approach was the "Jobs with Justice" labor-community workplace campaigns, along with its industry variant, "Justice for Janitors" initiatives. In Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities SEIU and other service worker unions launched aggressive programs that relied on mass mobilization, innovative public relations ploys, passive resistance, and other forms of direct action to promote organizing and achieve contracts for ill-paid janitorial and other service workers, most of them black or Latino. In the 1980s the private contractors who were responsible for operating and maintaining the large commercial buildings that housed major corporations, prestigious law firms, and other high-profile businesses had destroyed once-flourishing service workers unions. By employing vulnerable immigrant workers, who were--as it turned out, wrongly--assumed to be less militant than their previous African-American employees, these contractors could slash wages and benefits, increase work loads, raise their profit margins. Led by SEIU, the Justice for Janitors campaigns to organize and then win contracts did not rely on the traditional NLRB representation procedures, turning instead to community rallies, disruption of the business of tenants within the buildings, civil disobedience, street theater, stopping traffic, and other types of pressure placed directly on the owners and tenants of the buildings. It was the owners, after all, large real estate interests, who selected the cleaning employers and implicitly lent legitimacy to their union-busting and anti-worker practices. And it was the tenants, often among the wealthiest of corporations whose executive officers enjoyed lavish lifestyles, who in effect sanctioned the overwork and exploitation of immigrant workers.

Militant activism carried risks, just as it had in the 1930s. In 1990, the notorious Los Angeles Police Department, widely known for its racism and violence, attacked helpless Justice for Janitors, cracking skulls and arresting scores of peaceful protesters. This brutality backfired, however, and the Los Angeles campaign gathered momentum. Nationally, SEIU added 35,000 new union members and rebuilt centralized bargaining power in a number of major urban janitorial markets.

By the late 1990s the American public started to pay more attention to labor struggles. Many of the issues facing working American generally-stagnating wages, struggles to maintain family income, the work time crunch-started to play more visible roles in large-scale strikes. The UAW, for example, began to focus on issues related to income protection. In a maneuver known as "outsourcing," auto companies had been turning to cheaper, non-union firms to supply components for union-made vehicles. But the UAW insisted that the jobs of union workers thus displaced be guaranteed, delaring that absent this protection, union members would not handle outsourced components. Thus, in 1996, a major confrontation between General Motors and the UAW involving these issues resulted in a $1.5 billion loss of business to the company. Even non-union workers in the giant corporation's Saturn plant in Tennessee, fearful of outsourcing, expressed solidarity with the UAW. By 1999, the UAW had perfected the use of single strikes against key plants that played havoc with the auto companies "just in time" inventory systems, and won key concessions on job security, overwork, and downsizing.

It was the impressive United Parcel Service (UPS) strike of the summer and fall of 1997, however, that galvanized both organized labor and much of the public. Through a carefully planned contract campaign that emphasized membership rank-and-file involvement and community coalition building, reform Teamster President Ron Carey, a former UPS driver, took on the giant shipper at a time when the company had a war chest of over $1.5 billion. For more than a year prior to contract expiration, the Teamsters educated their members on the key bargaining issues of rolling back the excessive use of part-time workers and ensuring joint control over pension funds. The involuntary part-time worker issue hit home both with the UPS Teamster membership, many of whom worked the equivalent of full-time hours but at a lower wage, and with the American public at large. After all, even highly educated computer programmers, hardly traditional union adherents, had found themselves exploited in this way by Microsoft Corporation, which had created a whole class of employees--about one-third of its workforce, ironically self-termed "permatemps"--by using employment agencies. "The whole world's going to part-time," one rank-and-file Teamster told the press. "Used to be the American dream was to get a good job and own your own home with a white picket fence. Now it's hoping you win the lottery."

In what must have been a stunning surprise to the corporation, whose executives believed that union solidarity would crack and hat the public was indifferent, opinion polls revealed a two to one tally in favor of the strikers. Few workers crossed the picketlines, as over 185,000 workers held solid across the country. Reaching out to a public sympathetic to the men in the brown trucks who delivered their packages, strikers in one Florida community urged supporters to visit their picket lines and donate blood in mobile vans stationed there. President Clinton resisted calls to invoke anti-strike provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act and the AFL-CIO backed the strike with promises of massive loans to bolster the Teamsters' strike funds. Three weeks after the walkout began, UPS conceded on all the major issues.

The level of public support surprised even the Teamsters. One driver explained his amazement when after the strike he came back to work his route. "I left for my first stop. When I backed up to the dock at the federal building a group of employees taking their break nearby gave me a standing ovation." As labor journalist Kim Moody noted, what most "working-class people" saw in the UPS strike was "themselves or their families-part-timed, overworked, contracted out of work, insecure, and generally subordinated to some 'competitiveness' agenda . . . Workers fighting for decent paying full-time jobs are not seen as villains these days, but increasingly by working class people of all races and genders, as heroes . . . " Consquently, he wrote, public sentiment was decidedly favorable. "The brown collar workers fought the fight for blue and white collar workers across the economy and everyone knew it."

The Challenges of Globalism

The globalization of the American economy, which proceeded apace through the '80s and '90s, affected working people in myriad ways. The shift from manufacturing to service jobs eroded traditional bastions of union strength. The revolution in information technology and the increasing flight of both capital and jobs transformed workplaces and devastated many older industrial communities. Deregulation of trucking, the airlines, and other sectors weakened collective bargaining and degraded job secuirty, while growing attempts to privatize schools, prisons, and a wide range of former state and municipal services threatened public sector workers and their unions. The dismanting of social welfare programs, as evidenced in the 1996 federal Welfare Reform Act, was accomplished in the name of enhancing global competiveness.

Critics termed the architecture of globalism as it existed a "globalization from above," designed explicitly to serve the interests of the world's economic elites. As "capital" became increasingly internationalized after 1970, institutional structures of trade and finance such as the World Trade Organization (established in 1995), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank--advanced in importance as guardians of the new order. Two statistics illustrate the immense scale of the changes. By 1996 nearly 24 percent of the world's economic output entered the channels of international trade, compared to only 12 percent in 1973, a doubling in a short twenty-three years. And, developing countries' financial flows--the movement of money in and out of an economy--mushroomed from $44 billion in 1990 to $256 billion a scant seven years later. Coterminous with these changes came a "recommodification labor," wherein "workers have increasingly lost all rights except the right to sell their labor power," in the words of critics Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello. Workers experienced employer attacks on job security, social benefits, collective representation, "and anything else that defined workers as human beings and employers as partners in a social relationship, rather than simply as buyers and sellers of labor power."

The NAFTA agreement was both the symbol and substance of this new global order. Between 1994 and 2000 the U.S. experienced net export deficits with its two trading partners under the agreement, Mexico and Canada. That export deficit, according to an analysis by the economist Robert E. Scott, led to a loss of approximately 766,000 "actual and potential U.S. jobs," mostly to Mexico. The agreement, "also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened collective bargaining power and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits."

NAFTA's impact on U.S. union organizing and collective bargaining in manufacturing was particularly noteworthy. Labor resarcher Kate Bronfenbrenner concluded in two separate studies that U.S. employers in manufacturing commonly threatened to move operations, most often to Mexico, if employees unionized or pressed for new collective bargaining gains. "Overall, more than half of all employers made threats to close all or part of the plant during the organizing drive," with rates of 68 percent in mobile manufacturing industries, compared to 36 percent in industries like construction, retail, education, and health care. The threats had little to do with the financial condition of the company but they clearly undermined unions' changes in representation elections. Because a very small percentage of firms actually followed through on the threats to relocate, Bronfenbrenner concluded, they served as primarily another weapon in employers' anti-union arsenal.

The NAFTA treaty contained no stipulations of labor rights, relegating these matters to difficult-to-enforce side letters appended to the treaty. Absent meaningful guarantees of the right to organize, unionists in both the United States and Mexico quickly came to experience the kind of economic development envisioned by uncontrolled international capital. For many years, the "official" Mexican labor movement had been strongly allied with the ruling political party, misleadingly named the Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI), which had dominated the Mexican government since the 1920s. In the wake of NAFTA, the "official" Mexican unions followed governmental priorities, avoiding any hint of confrontation even with openly exploitative employers. Meanwhile, rank-and-file workers, seething with resentment, turned to unofficial workers' organizations, which challenged both the employer and the official cooperative union. But under NAFTA, companies that were establishing and expanding operations in Mexico used recognition of the "official" labor organizations to undercut or discredit these genuine expressions of workers' sentiment.

In the treaty's labor accord side letter the three nations pledged themselves to the "highest labor standards," and all three had extensive labor codes ostensibly protecting rights to organize and bargain. But enforcement on both sides of the border was weak or non-existent. As labor activist David Bacon noted, since January 1995 over twenty side agreement complaints had been filed citing failure to protect the right to organize and strike, as pledged in the side letter. "All of the cases have met a similar fate. Hearings were held. Workers testified, sometimes at considerable risk." And the U.S. government office responsible for the hearings "concluded in almost every case that serious violations of the law have occurred. And then--nothing." Trade sanctions for failure to comply with the side letter were non-existent, as was any other meaningful proscription.

Increasingly, it appeared that American unions would have to work with rank-and-file movements among their Mexican colleagues to expand cross-border organizing and to promote solidarity. Soon, organizers and legal specialists from U.S. unions such as the UAW, the United Electrical Workers, the Teamsters, and UNITE, among others, were in Mexico, helping to foster, independent labor unions among Mexican workers. John Sweeney's historic trip to Mexico in January 1998, during which he snubbed the officially approved labor body in favor of meetings with unofficial rank-and-file representatives, symbolized this new approach. Organized labor did not oppose expanded international trade but early experience under NAFTA drove home two points: trade agreements must contain strong workers' rights guarantees; and American unionists had to make common cause with activists in other countries.

NAFTA and organized labor's response to it were not the only evidences of a new interntional economic environment. The World Trade Organization, a condominum of private and govenmental representatives formed to promote expanded world trade under conditions favorable to leading financial intrests, also attracted labor's attention and hostility. Thus, in late 1999 the AFL-CIO, led by the Steelworkers and the Teamsters, played a prominent role in the "Battle of Seattle," the raucuous demonstrations and police clashes surrounding the Ministerial Convention of WTO in the West Coast City. Young anarachists, environmentalists, farmers, along with labor activists, took to the streets to urge the acknowledgement of the concerns of common citizens into the new world order. These protests were so effective that the WTO functionaries left town without concluding their business. Indeed, the vociferousness of the street demonstrations, the clashes with police, and the prominent role played by normally cautious representatives of organized labor surprised nearly everyone.

As John Sweeney shortly afterword told a meeting of global ecnomic elites in Switzerland, they should ask themselves what globalization was for. The point of global free trade, he insisted, was "human development. The fundamental question," he continued, "is whether globalization is helping to lift the poor from poverty; whether it is empowering many, not just the few; whether its blessings are shared widely; whether it works for working people." If globalization continued to breed financial crisis and wisening inequality, it would fall of its own weight. "This global economy will either be reformed or face every greater resistance," which, he warned, would "make Seattle look tame." Of paramount importance, he instructed the corporate and government leadeers, was the incorporation of meaningful labor standards, such as those endorsed by the United Nations through its International Labor Organization (ILO). Failure of new globalized economic arrangements to endorse an end to child labor, to guarantee freedom of association, to prohibit gender and racial discrimination, and to acknowledge labor's right to organize and bargain would discredit the new world economic order and sow the seeds of endless confrontation. Labor strategists, of course, knew that progressive standards by themselves, even if effectively enforced through trade sanctions, would not be enough. Organizing across national boundaries and cultivating trans-border soldiarity was also critical. Thus, for example, in 1997 demonstrations by unions overseas helped buttress the Teamsters in the UPS strike, at a time when the company was trying to establish an international shipping presence. In in Mexico, the UE has led in initiating cross-border solidarity activity in Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere. Encouraged by the AFL-CIO's recently established "Solidarity Centers," unions in the U.S. have also stepped up their participation in the International Trade Secretariats. These bodies, housed mostly in Switzerland, consist of representatives of unions in various trades and sectors from around the world and provide coordination and assistance in labor struggles around the world.

And such gestures of international labor cooperation had begun to pay dividens. For example, the AFL-CIO's new American Center for International Solidarity has made labor rights and labor organizing a centerpiece of its international strategy in Cambodia, where a trade agreement in 1999 required respect for ILO-inspired labor rights and standards in that country in exchange for favorable access to U.S. markets. UNITE soon followed up by sending U.S. labor organizers into the country to educate Cambodia Buddhists on their right to organize and bargain. And early in 2001 Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda raised a fist of solidarity with the Hotel and Restaurant workers convention in Los Angeles when he declared support for the AFL-CIO's amnesty for Mexican nationals in the U.S. These gestures of international solidarity, however, remain more hopeful than definitive, and the future of effective trans-national labor solidarity remains uncertain. Expanding the definition of workers' rights to embrace workers in other countries, however, would seem to be imperative for a U.S. labor movement being whipsawed by the effects of globalism.

The Arc of Justice

The victory of Republican free-trader George W. Bush in the hotly contested, and incredibly close election of 2000 filled most labor activists with dismay. The the new president lost no time in snubbing the AFL-CIO by nominating an archconservative as Secretary of Labor and rescinding new OSHA workplace standards for workplace stress (ergonomics) promulgated in the waning of the Clinton administration. In addition, the Republicans initially retained control of both houses of Congress. Clearly, dealing with the new President and his victorious party on a wide range of issues, never an easy task, promised to be far more problematic than in the Clinton years.

As troubling as the news on the political front were the union membership figures for year 2000. To be sure, the renewed emphasis on organizing did produce 350,000 new union members, but the labor movement suffered a net loss of 200,000 owing to continued erosion of manufacturing jobs. Union density now stood at 13.5 percent, down from 13.9 percent the year before. Predictably, at a meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council Sweeney stepped up his exhortations to devote more resources to organizing, and he expressed his frustration that the labor movement was not meeting his goal of organizing three-quarters to one million new members per year. Indeed, reports circulated that the aroused labor chief had painted a grim picture indeed of labor's prospects. "If we don't begin to turn this around quickly and almost immediately," he was understood to have warned, "the drift in the other direction is going to make it virtually impossible to continue to exist as a viable institution and to have any impact on the issues we care about." As another federation functionary observed, a bit less apocalyptically, "The American labor movement in terms of political operations and political juice has showed its stuff. . . . The issue is, is there a way for the labor movement to duplicate that the of success in organizing?"

But, given continued conservative control of the government at the federal level, could the new grassroots labor politics and new focus on organizing realistically promise a brighter future for organized labor? Where would the labor movement of the twenty-first century find its adherents? Who would take a place alongside the immigrant Germans and the Irish, the Jews and the Poles, the Italians and the Eastern Europeans, the African Americans and the other men and women who had built the diverse unions that made up the American labor movement over the past five generations? Through a tumultuous century, these Americans had sought to advance the cause of economic justice and to bring ordinary people into the decision-making arenas of civic life. They had done much to bring about a better life for all. Who were their descendants? Who would now carry the torch?

As the new century dawned, glimpses of labor's future might be seen in California, the nation's largest state. Los Angeles, where, declares one liberal writer, a political earthquake. Remarkably, over the past decade the state that gave the country conservative political icons Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan has now become the most economically progressive state in the nation, reliably and increasingly Democratic. Particularly in the megopolis of Los Angeles, once a rock-ribbed open shop bastion, an alliance of the rapidly-growing Latino working class and an energetic and revived grassroots labor movement, declares one close observer, has produced a veritable political earthquake.

As the nation's second largest conurbation, with eighty-eight municipalities and the greatest number of manufacturing workers in the country, Los Angeles, along with other immigrant-rich regions of California, may well have become the new century's equivalent of the fabled Lower East Side of New York City and Detroit's blue collar neighborhoods, from which the great industrial unions of an earlier day had risen. Mass immigration from Mexico and Central America, legal and illegal, has created a vast, impoverished Latino working class. With poor wages and egregious working conditions common, intensive union organizing in both the public and private sectors has advanced rapidly, with the most notable victory being the organization in 1999 of seventy thousand public sector home health care workers by the Service Employees, the largest union victory since the glory days of the CIO. At the same time, Southern California has undergone a profound political transformation. A dynamic central labor council, led by Miguel Contreras, has led in both dynamic organizing drives and innovative political mobilizations. It has successfully supported both labor-oriented Latino candidates and worker-frienldy non-Hispanics. Within the council, the immigrant-dominated Service Employees and the Hotel and Restaurant Workers locals are the two most active and visible, but many other affiliates are deeply engaged, as the local labor movement builds a class-based coaltion reflective of diverse trades and ethnicities.

The area's living wage campaign has vividly reflected the synergy that has come from this dynamic labororganizing and political mobilization. In the Los Angeles area, the living wage campaign has strong municipal ordinances requiring the payment of living wages by local government contractors. Moreover, it has had a spill-over effect in promoting union recognition in the private sector, since successful living wage campaigns have grafted respect for organizing rights to ensure that contractors and other employers benefitting from tax abatements or needing zoning approvals, respect the rights of their employees to organize. With locally-elected, pro-union politicians on board, for example, the Gigante supermarket chain found that it could not get local zoning approvals unless it permitted its employees an uncontested vote on union representation. In collective bargaining as well, workers in Southern California have made impressive strides. In 2000, following a series of Latino-led strikes throughout the 1990s, an LA Justice for Janitors strike won a 26 percent wage increase over three years from some of the nation's largest property holders and, as in the UPS strike, won spontaneous applause from citizens in unlikely places such as Beverly Hills. And in 2001, Contreras and the labor council, in fact, came extremely close to electing their ally, California House Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, a former labor organizer, as mayor of the nation's second largest city, having to be content with the election of a more traditional pro-labor Democrat. Similar political/labor organizing and coalition-building has led to union organizing and bargaining victories throughout Southern California, and into the Silicon Valley and Bay areas as well.

Moreover, the overwhelming manner in which the labor-Latino alliance has supported progressive, mostly Democratic candidates and issues has resulted in a complete policy turnaround in local and state government. As liberal writer Harold Myerson observed, the "Latinoization [of the state] has also transformed California's fiscal politics." The state that led the tax rebellion movement in the late 1970s and fed the national conservative political resurgence in 1998 passed "a massive $9.2-billion school bond measure and a $2-billion initiative for parks and open-space preservation" and reduced the power of anti-tax voters to veto local government bond measures. The Latino working class does not need convincing on the issues of the importance of living wages, health insurance, and the right to organize, or the value of public services. "With the uptick in Latino voting . . . the gap between the voting public and the people who need public services began to narrow. . . .," Myerson observes. Labor activists everywhere sought to learn from California developments, which have, in Myerson's words, created "a model of social equity, of worker and public power, at a time of capital supremacy."

Thus, at Labor Day 2001 the U.S. labor movement stood once again at a crossroads, decimated at its former core of strength, effervescently bubbling at the periphery of a transformed economy and demographically changing workforce, searching for the direction and soul of its future. In many ways, it was the worst of times and the best of times. Still, the history of the labor movement has been rich in achievement and in victories won against the odds. Believing as they instinctively did that the cause of labor remained the cause of human progress, American unionists could find strength in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. "The arc of the universe bends slow," he said amid the struggles of the civil rights movement, "but it bends towards justice."

There is an extensive bibliography covering Twentieth-Century U.S. labor history at www.jhup/something something. Readers are urged to access this site for a frequently updated discussion of the literature. The reading suggestions below are intended to highlight book-length works either useful to the authors and/or reflective of recent historical literature and are intended

as a guide to important, readily accessible works. It is not intended to be comprehensive and

those seeking detailed bibliographical commentary are directed to the website, above.

Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001)

David Brody, In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (1993)

David Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth-Century Struggle (1980)

Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (1999)

Clete Daniel, Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism . . . (2001)

Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (1994)

Melvyn Dubofsky and Foster Rhea Dulles: Labor in America: A History (1999)

Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: Labor Leader (1977)

Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, eds., Labor Leaders in America (1987)

Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (1991)

Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (1991)

Joseph Goulden, Meany (1972)

James Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (1980)

Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (1997)

Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-1954 (1997)

William Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (1982)

Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998)

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985)

Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women . . . (1982)

Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther. . . (1995)

Craig Phelan, William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader (1989)

Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor. . . 1923-1960 (1983)

Christopher Tomlins, The State of the Unions (1985)

Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (1995)

Robert H. Zieger, ed., Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South (1991)

Graham Adams, Jr., Age of Industrial Violence, 1910-1915: The Activities and Findings of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (1966)

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