On 3/14/06, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> > On the pain of oversimplification, Fitch's argument can be interpreted as
> > follows - the US unions suck because of their fragmented and
> > compartmentalized nature, which fails to take universal interests of the
> > working class, but instead it focuses on defending the interests of its
> > clients.
>From me:
> -this compartmentalization reflected the relatively decentralized
> -nature of US capitalism during the period in which the AFL and (to a
> -lesser extent) the CIO developed. In other "western industrial"
> -countries, on the other hand, capital was very centralized, so labor
> -organizations tended to be so, too.
Nathan Newman wrote:
> Huh? US capital is considered historically far more centralized; to this
> day, Italian and German manufacturers maintain a far stronger middle-size
> manufacturing sector compared to the more centralized sectors in the United
> States. What is true is that capital in Europe was more coordinated
> through employer associations and cross-holdings, but the concentration of
> capital controlled by the great trusts -- from US Steel and Standard Oil --
> in their heyday, when the AFL was formed and shaped, had no parallel in
> Europe.
Employer associations and cross-holdings are a method of centralization of capital. It's to these associations and cross-holdings that the W. European unions responded.
On the other hand, the AFL's development was shaped profoundly by the fact that it was _beaten_ by the US trusts. The USW was not the first steel union. The steel trusters beat the previous one, the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers (a organization preceded by the imaginatively-named "Sons of Vulcan" among others). As a result of the broader employers' anti-union offensive (which was preminiscent of the offensive of the last 30 years or so), US labor retreated into the AFL -- or advanced into the IWW, which was smashed. What is left today from that era is the decentralized, craft-oriented AFL (along with additions from later waves of unionization, i.e., the CIO in the 1930s and public-employee unions more recently). -- Jim Devine / "There can be no real individual freedom in the presence of economic insecurity." -- Chester Bowles