> On May 5, 2016, at 9:20 PM, Eugene Coyle <e.coyle at me.com> wrote:
> The Taft-Hartley Act, passed over President Truman’s veto in 1947 really crippled union power and set the stage for crushing unions in the Red Scare of the McCarthy era which followed. The FBI (and CIA, according to Les Leopold) really went after unions. All decline after Taft-Hartley…The post-WWII automation was already eating jobs and of course still is… “job-killing automation at home” had been going on full blast since the 1890s, gathering speed in the early 20th century and didn’t need the collapse of the USSR and transformation in China to be promoted… In the early 20th century most work wasn’t full-time and not secure. The 1920s and 1930s weren’t either.
Thanks for your detailed reply, Gene. I’ve isolated the comments which suggest that there wasn’t an abrupt qualitative change in the relationship of forces between the classes from the 80’s for the reasons which I had identified.
While I agree that attacks on unions, automation, and precarious work are integral to capitalism and are present at all stages of development, these did not always or even mostly have the effect of altering the balance of power to the severe detriment of workers. From the last quarter of the 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th, the core capitalist economies were generally expanding, aided by imperialism, and accompanied by labour shortages which contributed to working class confidence, militancy, and the growth of trade unions. In the 80’s, this all changed. The advent of computers and technological advances in intercontinental transportation, notably containerization, coupled with the opening up to foreign investment of the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, and the former colonies on the periphery shifted production and supply chains abroad, with resulting labour surpluses and a sharp decline in working class combativity and union growth in the capitalist core.
You can see this decline demonstrated most graphically in the number of work stoppages in the US involving 1000 or more workers. You stated that Taft-Hartley “really crippled union power and set the stage for crushing unions in the Red Scare of the McCarthy era which followed”. While Taft-Hartley hampered the unions and facilitated the purging of their militants, it hardly delivered a crushing blow. The number of major strikes annually was in triple digits without interruption throughout the period from 1947, when Taft-Hartley was passed, to 1981, the opening of the “neoliberal” era, when the incidence of major strikes suddenly fell off a cliff. The number of strikes in 1952, at the height of the Red Scare, reached a peak at 470. Even as late as 1974, there were over 400. Compare that to the paltry 11 work stoppages recorded last year and during the three preceding decades. See: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet <http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet>.
The same is true of union density. In 1960, 30.9% of the US working class was unionized, down to 10.7% last year. See: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=UN_DEN# <https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=UN_DEN#>. Nor does this take into account either that it was the more powerful industrial unions which suffered the sharpest declines, only partially offset by union rights granted to government workers whose unions were not formed in the same cauldron of class struggle.
Micheal Yates also posted two useful articles on the subject yesterday which cited the fall in both hourly and weekly wages and labour’s share of national income to below their level in the 1970’s. The MR piece by Foster and Jonna nicely summarized the external factors which contributed to the epochal break in class relations:
"In the immediate post-Second World War years, the capitalist world economy, centered in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan, experienced a period of rapid economic expansion based on: (1) undisputed U.S. hegemony; (2) a second wave of automobilization in the United States; (3) the rebuilding of the war-torn economies in Europe and Japan (and automobilization there); (4) the massive growth of the sales effort based in Madison Avenue; and (5) two regional wars in Asia, along with the general militarization trend associated with the Cold War. Higher employment, particularly in the Korean and Vietnam War years, coupled with domestic repression in the United States, and a welfare state (especially in Europe where it was necessary to counter the challenge represented by the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), created an era of relative peace between monopoly capital and conservative business unions. Multinational corporations emerged in this period as major actors on the world stage. Workers at the center of the system benefitted indirectly from the world imperialist system.
"The U.S. economy peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the various external factors that had propped it up gradually waned. It subsequently entered a severe crisis (corresponding with the end of the Vietnam War), leading to a secular slowdown in economic growth that was eventually to turn into full-fledged stagnation. By the late 1970s, capital had initiated the process of global economic restructuring, cutbacks in welfare state spending, attacks on trade unions, and other measures, commencing the heightened class war that was to become known as neoliberalism.”
http://monthlyreview.org/2016/04/01/marxs-theory-of-working-class-precariousness/ <http://monthlyreview.org/2016/04/01/marxs-theory-of-working-class-precariousness/>