On 2011-01-13, at 10:56 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
> Julio Huato:
>>> Opinions on this piece?
>>>
>>> http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2011/01/17/110117ta_talk_surowiecki
>>>
>
> Louis Proyect wrote:
>> I'm surprised that it appeared in the wretched New Yorker.
>
> my god, this article is straightforward journalism. And it seems accurate.
Unfortunately, it isn't that accurate, except with respect to what everyone already knows: that a majority of Americans are hostile to unions. But Surowiecki, like many liberals and radicals, including myself until recently, gilds the lily with respect to public support for unions under the New Deal. While it remains true that a majority of Americans, unlike today, supported the right to organize unions and to strike, a central tenet of Surowiecki's piece - that "the general public applauded labor’s new power, even in the face of union tactics that many Americans frowned on, like sit-down strikes" is very misleading.
In a fascinating and what I regard as a groundbreaking paper published last August, “Public Opinion, Organized Labor, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1936–1945”, two UCal Berkeley political scientists, Eric Schickler and Devin Caughey - examined more than 400 polls by Gallup and others, including more than 200 questions relating to trade unionism, and found that most Americans in that period not only "frowned" on the "illegal" sit-down strikes, but supported state intervention to end them, were more sympathetic to employer demands for what we today call "right to work" laws than the closed or union shop, and favoured stripping the new CIO unions of their wartime strike rights and drafting strikers into the army.
Surowiecki undoubtedly drew on the paper for his article. If so, he should have known that the "more than seventy per cent of those surveyed in a 1937 Gallup poll", on which he rests his claim about mass support for "labor's power" under the New Deal, was a result recorded a year earlier, in July 1936 - BEFORE the sit-down strikes in the auto plants in the cold winter of 1936-37. This is a rather egregious error. Prior to the strikes, a stunning 76% responded affirmatively to the question, "are you in favor of labour unions?" But, as Schickler and Caughey report, in the 1937 Gallup poll, AFTER the strikes and the strike wave which it unleashed in other heavy industries, "half of the respondents reported that their views had changed; of these, 70% claimed to be more negative towards unions than they had been six months earlier." During the sitdowns, polls showed a majority of Americans, particularly in the Southern states, favoring the use of force to end them. A minority of unionized workers, the unemployed, and the unskilled - those who had a real material stake in the outcome - were notably opposed.
Schickler and Caughey also observe correctly that the closed shop was (and remains) "a major concern for unions since the open shop would undermine their ability to gain and maintain a substantial membership base across industries. But here too poll results indicated that even during the New Deal "a healthy majority of the public opposed both the closed and union shop and instead favored the open shop". They continue: "Public concern about union power and tactics continued throughout the war years. For example, across a range of polls from 1941 to 1945, more than 70% of respondents supported banning strikes in war industries. In April 1944, 68% supported drafting strikers, with just 22% opposed and 10% undecided. These data suggest "that the 'no strike' pledge made by union leaders following Pearl Harbor, while criticized by some observers for taming shop-floor activism (Glaberman, 1980; Lichtenstein, 1987), may well have been a necessary concession to a hostile public and Congress".
The paper is accessible at: http://web.me.com/devin.caughey/Site/Research_files/SchicklerCaugheyLaborOpinion.pdf
I would encourage everyone to read it in full, not only for its detailed exhumation of public attitudes to trade unionism, but also to the New Deal in general. This passage in particular caught my eye:
"Taken as a whole, our results suggest two ways in which the contours of public opinion posed obstacles to a social democratic agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. First, the survey evidence suggests that at an abstract level, there was widespread skepticism towards further bold domestic policy innovations in both the South and non-South after 1937. Second, organized labor—arguably the key constituency for further liberal innovation—was itself on the defensive with respect to the public and the Congress. The erosion in support for unions was especially sharp in the South, where the CIO threatened the region’s system of racial apartheid as well as Southern elites’ strategy of low-wage industrialization. But labor policy also divided Northern Democrats, thus providing Republicans with a potent campaign issue and paving the way for conservative successes in reining in the labor movement.
"At the same time, the survey data also underscore why Republicans’ electoral success would ultimately depend upon their accepting substantial elements of the New Deal state. Although support for rolling back labor unions was widespread, so too was support for many key pillars of the nascent welfare state. From the start, Social Security enjoyed broad popularity, as did many other New Deal economic programs. This simultaneous support for individual New Deal programs and for paring back the New Deal state seems to be a manifestation of the well-known regularity that specific governmental programs tend to be more popular than is government in the abstract (e.g., Free & Cantril, 1968; Stimson, 2004)."
Sound familiar? Apart from the sharp decline in public support for trade unionism, which of course is not insignificant, nothing much else has changed; most Americans who have no first-hand knowledge or experience of unions uncritically endorse, as in most other cases, the propaganda and policies of the bourgeois state: in this case, that unions be allowed to exist so long as they accept to remain shackled and largely ineffectual. Most Americans also continue to stubbornly support the welfare state reforms introduced by the New Deal while attacking big government in the abstract, checking the efforts of both Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Democrats, to roll these back.