[lbo-talk] LBO's Union Experts, I Call Upon Ye!

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Thu Apr 17 14:07:14 PDT 2008


Wojtek writes:


> --- 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.

[...]


> 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.
=================================== I think Skocpol and Fitch mostly have in mind the different POLITICAL trajectory of the two movements which would be consistent with my comment that "it was in the political arena that 'American exceptionalism' was most apparent. European influence was strongest in the small American socialist movement, which rose alongside but was not identical to the much larger trade union movement, and which never took root in the US."

The "domestic conditions" - the economic ones = which resulted in trade unions were, however, much the same in American factories and mills as in European ones, as were the demands presented to the employers for redress (shorter hours, union recognition, safer workplaces...) and the forms of struggle (strikes, slowdowns, sabotage...) they used to coerce agreement. The American labour movement grew out of its own soil, and I'd dispute that the culture of social solidarity which found expression in both the IWW and CIO were essentially European imports, as you suggest.

Union militancy in the US was contained and eventually suffocated by economic growth and improvements in working conditions and living standards, notably the widespread acquisition of homes and other personal assets - what you describe as "massive suburbanization and consumerism" - all of which which moved the political centre of gravity in the US unions to the right. But the same process has unfolded belatedly in the other OECD countries, which lagged the US in economic growth and where the socialist left had a much more considerable presence in the unions.



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