> You have a valid point that Fitch does not talk about the role of
> the state, but I think you exaggerate that role a bit.
<snip>
> Stated differently, the US unions had a similar chance to establish
> itself as a national political force under the FDR administration
> as the Europen unions did after WW2 - yet the US unions blew it,
> and European unions did not.
>
> And to be honest to Fitch, he did say that the US union leadership
> systematically rejected any cooperation with the government, opting
> instead for collective bargaining as the means of achieving its
> powers. The argument is burried in his corruption stories, but it
> is still there.
One of the sources that Robert Fitch cites for his contrast of American and European labor laws is Derek C. Bok. What's in the bibliography is Labor and the American Community that Bok coauthored with John T. Dunlop, but in "Acknowledgements" Fitch credits Dan Lazare for bringing to his attention Bok's Harvard Law Review article on comparative labor law, so I looked up the latter:
Derek C. Bok, "Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws," Harvard Law Review 84.6 (April 1971), pp. 1394-1463 Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0017-811X%28197104%2984% 3A6%3C1394%3AROTDCO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N
It's a really good article.
I disagree with Nathan that the US ruling class were more violent toward US workers than the European ruling class were toward European workers. But what is true is that US workers were (probably at least till the end of the 1970s) as militant as European workers and that strikes in the US tended to last longer than in Europe: "Since the early 1880s, when reliable statistics were first compiled, American workers have struck with a frequency roughly equal to that of their peers in Europe. Strikes in the United States, however, have tended to last longer than elsewhere, with a mean duration between 1881 and 1974 of twenty days. Accordingly, the total number of workdays lost in strikes proportionate to the size of the work force has been higher in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world" (Joshua B. Freeman, "Labor: II. Strikes," The Reader's Companion to American History, <http://college.hmco.com/history/ readerscomp/rcah/html/rc_051202_iistrikes.htm>).
What Bok's article, as well as other comparative studies of industrial relations, suggests is that the dominant US unions' seemingly pragmatic decision in the crucial period of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to eschew any variety of left-wing politics, to focus economistically on wages, hours, and other work conditions in the narrow sense, and to seek to achieve almost all its goals (except immigration policy) through craft- or plant-based bargaining made the problem of employer resistance a lasting one. Why?
1. In a context of decentralized bargaining in the US, individual employers who recognize unions and grant union demands stand at competitive disadvantage with those who don't. So, each union organizing for recognition and contract almost always becomes a life- or-death struggle. In contrast, in Europe, where labor movements grew large, strong, and centralized, employers, too, developed their centralized employers' associations, so bargaining happens between centralized organizations that set standards over whole industries. That minimizes employers' fear of being put at competitive disadvantage, so individual employer resistance diminishes. And if employers still resist collectively, the structure of bargaining ensures that workers' resistance will also be collective (spread throughout an industry or even society at large), not by an individual union local.
2. Since few things are left to legislation and almost everything needs to be bargained over between an individual union and an individual employer in the US, each contract becomes rigid, minute, complex, and voluminous. No two contracts are exactly alike. This problem, too, leads to more determined employer resistance. It also means that unions in the US need more money and more full-time officials and staff than in Europe simply to administer contracts, which is a source of corruption.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>