--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> As I noted, foreign-born trade union leaders were
> "prominent", but they
> didn't dominate nor define the character of the US
> labour movement, as was
> initially suggested. The US unions arose out of the
> same domestic conditions
> and generally followed the same trajectory as labour
> movements in other
> countries at each historical juncture.
[WS:] That is news to me. The arguments that I heard (e.g. from Theda Skocpol or from Robert Fitch) are that US organized labor followed a different trajectory than European organized labor. The key difference was that while European labor quickly adopted a universalist approach (i.e. struggle for the benefit of the entire working class) and morophed into a politiacal party, US organized labor remained a "club good" for members only and never formed a political force on its own.
Skocpol attributes that difference to (i) different political exclusion patterns(those in US cut across class lines while those in Europe coincided with, class lines) and (ii) string tradition of patronage and machine politics that on the local level bound the interests of the workers to those of the bosses.
Fitch, if I interpret him correctly, attributes that to the dominance of Gomperism, amd more generally to the American value system, especially faith in capitalism and free market, shared by union leaders and bosses alike. I think this is consistent with the argument advanced by Hofstadter, who claims that Ameriocans share the same value system despite thier social political and economic differences.
As far as the role of immigratnts is concerned - it is two-fold. First is the one that you picked in your comment: overt import of fresh ideas brough by immigrants and spread in the host country. The second is much more subtle and less evident, but probably more powerful - it is the forms of social organization and social ties that immigrants bring from the old world and reproduce in the new world for generations to come. You seem to miss the second one.
My argument was centered mainly on the influence of social ties and solidarity networks that these immigrants reproduced in the US for generation. Those social solidarity ties made it easier for union organizing, even though the push for unionization might have come from native born activists. This can be compared to the level of oxygen needed for, say, sustained athletic performance. It is still the athlete who performs, but he needs suffcient level of oxygen to be able to perform. Oxygen is invisible and taken for granted, but without it - the athlete fails.
Ditto for social solidarity networks and unionism. My argument is that social solidarity networks were taken for granted in the earlier days of unionism, because they had always been there, brought in by European immigrants and reproduced in the new world. It is only when capitalism destroyed these networks through massive suburbanization and consumerism (both conscious efforts of USG to counteract "communist" influences), US labor unionism was deprived of its "social oxygen" and started to falter.
Wojtek
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