> European unions may be weakening today - the situation in Germany's
> looking pretty bad - but what a difference in the old days! Could you ever
> imagine a European union leader denouncing national health insurance as
> "emasculating," as Gompers did? US unions have historically been far more
> concerned with narrow bread & butter issues than their European
> counterparts.
===================================
This is true. The European labour movements were strongly Marxist, led by
the parties of the Comintern and their successors after WW I. By contrast,
the US labour movement, except for the brief interlude of the CIO, was led
by liberals and, at best, social democrats, who also reflected the
consciousness of their own rank and file. There's lots of literature, of
course, on why there was no lasting socialist movement in America. I don't
think you really have to look that far; America's constantly expanding
economy, built on the continent's great wealth, produced a more powerful
capitalist class able to provide more consistent upward mobility to
successive generations of immigrants, as well as shelter from the two wars
which ravaged Europe and served to raise the political consciousness of its
working class. Immigration, as well as race, also served to divide the US
working class to a greater degree than was the case with the more homogenous
working classes in the European states. There has been a convergence in the
outlook of Western labour movements, of course, as a result of the long
period of postwar peace and relative prosperity which the European working
class has experienced.