> These workers in the new service industries are more dispersed, atomized, and transient than the industrial workers who used to be concentrated in factories and neighbourhoods, and are consequently more difficult to organize in unions as well as politically. There was also once a powerful international socialist movement which could inspire young workers and intellectuals and provide them with the opportunity for sustained political action and political education. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China and the corresponding withering away of the socialist ideal, that is another condition which is no longer present. Finally, as you note above, the winning of the right to vote has led the masses into an electoral system dominated by the rich and powerful where the act of voting is now the primary means of political expression, and is rarely replaced or supported by more effective forms of mass action in the streets and workplaces.
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> Today's lower level of political consciousness of urban workers and their allies in the universities, professions, and elsewhere is a product of the changed economic and political environment described above. My argument has been that the liberal bourgeois politicians in the US and Europe are a reflection rather than the cause of the diminished consciousness and combativity of the working class. It is not as though left-wing activists in the unions and have not tried to raise the consciousness of the masses, but today's workers have been notably unresponsive to their appeals and, except for that part of the working class which supports the right, have remained stubbornly loyal to their liberal and social democratic trade union and political party leaders in any confrontation with the left. If it were simply a clash of conflicting ideas, we would have seen more left-wing insurgencies and campaigns succeed and effect lasting changes inside the unions and political parties and !
> in the community.
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Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture (Working Class in American History) Lawrence Richards
Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture confronts one of the most vexing questions with which labor activists and labor academics struggle: why is there so much opposition to organized labor in the United States? Scholars often point to powerful obstacles from employers or governmental policies, but Lawrence Richards offers a more complete picture of the causes for union decline in the postwar period by examining the attitudes of the workers themselves. Large numbers of American workers in the 1970s and 1980s told pollsters that they would vote against a union if an election were held at their place of employment, and Richards provides a provocative explanation for this hostility: a pervasive strain of antiunionism in American culture that has made many workers distrustful of organized labor.
Weighing the arguments of previous historians and sociologists, Richards posits that this underlying antiunion culture in America has been remarkably consistent over the course of half a century. Assessing organizing efforts among blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar workers, Richards examines the tactics and countertactics of company and union representatives who sought to either exploit or neutralize workers' popular negative stereotypes of organized labor's insidious control over workers' autonomy. The book considers a number of case studies of organizing drives throughout recent history, from the failed attempt by District 65 to organize clerical workers at New York University in 1970, to a similarly fruitless drive by the Textile Workers Union in 1980 at a textile factory in Charlottesville, Virginia. In both of these particular cases and in many more, antiunion culture has operated to hinder unions' efforts to organize the unorganized. By examining the manifestations and motivations of antiunion culture in the United States, Richards helps explain why so many American workers seem to vote against their own self-interest and declare themselves "Union Free and Proud."