Factores intervinientes en la reacción celosa

There is a strong pressure within labor to maintain solidarity because this is the source of much of labor’s economic and political power. Individuals organize when they share a collective interest that they cannot adequately advance on their own (Olson 1968). A similar logic can apply to organizing across unions: we should see cooperation when labor unions share a collective interest that cannot be advanced independently. Indeed, we see organized labor cooperate when individual unions are organizationally intertwined, they share goals and tactics, and incentives exist—like the potential for a legislative or strike victory—to encourage them to

work together. Many factors can intervene, however, to make the collective interests unions share less prominent and their differences more visible, making it harder for individual unions to recognize and pursue inter-union cohesion.

A central assumption in this chapter and project more broadly is that a unified, organizationally cohesive labor movement is crucial to the labor movement’s political

effectiveness. Practically, this translates into a unified AFL-CIO because it is the best positioned organization today to represent the entire labor movement. Efforts to create alternative labor federations, most recently the Change to Win federation formed in 2005, have been at best marginally successful. Today, Change to Win is a separate federation mostly in name only as both labor federations have recognized the need to work together if they hope to be politically effective. For all its weaknesses, the AFL-CIO is the central organization of the labor movement with an organizational structure spanning the country, a diverse membership of unions, and the history and name recognition to lead the labor movement. Despite these resources, however, the AFL-CIO has not been as politically influential as we might expect—the union defections to Change to Win were the result of legitimate frustration with the AFL-CIO. Thus, given that practically speaking the AFL-CIO is the most promising organization for the union movement, why has it faltered in its efforts to unify and lead the labor movement? Part of the answer lays in the different development trajectories of public and private sector unions.

This chapter draws on interviews with labor leaders,30 historical documents, and

secondary source accounts to explore the relationship between public and private sector unions in the 1970s. There is a tendency among labor historians to see the public and private sector union movements as wholly separate entities in the 1970s, describing the public sector unions as

30_{This chapter and the next two utilize information gained from field research and interviews conducted}

in the leadup to and aftermath of the 2012 presidential election. For further details on these interviews, please see Appendix A.

“exceptions,” without asking why the two sectors were so different and distinct in the first place (Lichtenstein 2002, 181). This chapter begins with the premise that a labor movement divided by sector is neither natural nor inevitable, and instead seeks to understand why the public and private sector union movements were such distinct entities in the 1970s.

Labor historians also tend to blame the intractable leadership of the AFL-CIO for failing to support and join the New Left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s—perhaps labor’s last, best chance to stave off their plummeting membership losses and power. A typical account, in asking why labor “missed the boat” of the civil rights, student, feminist, environmental, gay and other social movements, explains that:

To a large extent, it was the conservativism bred by business unionism in which many labor leaders presided over increasingly narrow member-oriented organizations that had lost a broader vision and passion for social justice. This combined with ideologically intense cold war anticommunism made many labor leaders (led by George Meany and the AFL-CIO) suspicious and at times quite hostile to new political stirrings on the left, whether it was civil rights, antiwar protests, or the women’s movement…Most labor leaders…gave their primary loyalty to the status quo (Turner and Hurd 2001, 14-15). Thus, Turner and Hurd conclude that revitalization was “blocked by defensive, threatened leaders” who were able to “cordon off their organization from the radical currents of change ” (Turner and Hurd 2001, 17). While labor leaders certainly made poor decisions in this period by eschewing these other movements, it is important to recognize that labor leaders and their

decisions occur within a broader context. Institutions and outside political forces can make certain decisions and behaviors, like whether to accept or turn away from potential allies, more or less likely.

Timing and sequencing affected many of the factors that shaped union leaders’ decisions about the New Left movements. Private sector and public sector unions’ distinct organizational identities were in part products of when they each developed: private sector unions became

entrenched powers when the Cold War mindset was dominant, whereas public sector unions rose to power and adopted the tactics of their contemporaries including the Civil Rights Movement. Further, the labor movements’ decision about how to treat the up-and-coming public sector unions was shaped the era: rather than the prosperous 1950s when the debate was over how to share the wealth, the 1970s were marked by economic crises and discussion of tightened budgets and austerity measures. Thus, divided labor law and the delayed development of organized labor helped foster a context that discourages cooperation between public and private sector unions.

As a result, when trying to understand the failure of organize labor to join forces with the New Left social movements, we cannot simply look to the decisions of the leaders of the AFL- CIO and its affiliate unions. Turner and Hurd (2001) note that at the very time that organized labor was eschewing the new social movements, “the main exception to the predominant pattern of the 1960s and 1970s lay in the public sector” (17). Many public sector unions were part and parcel of the New Left social movements and, rather than seeing public sector unions as the main exception, this chapter instead asks why they were not the vanguard of change for the labor movement, ushering organized labor into New Left politics. The answer lies not simply with the decisions of a few leaders, but rather with the delayed growth of public sector unions, which amplified the conflicts between public and private sector unions, ultimately making private sector unions less likely to embrace their public sector brethren and the New Left social movements.

As detailed in Chapter Two, the exclusion of public sector employees from the Wagner Act and the absence of their own public sector collective bargaining law/s delayed public sector union growth at the very time that private sector union density skyrocketed in the 1930s and 1940s. It wasn’t until the 1960s that public sector employees were able to generate the needed

pressure for pro-public sector collective bargaining laws to pass resulting in a period of explosive public sector union growth in the 1960s and 1970s. Public sector union density more than tripled over the span of these twenty years. In contrast, private sector union density declined by more than a third over this same period (Visser 2012).

In the 1970s, rather than cooperation, inter-union relations were conflictual with the differences between public and private sector unions in stark relief. This was not simply the result of the nature of these two different types of unions, but rather was amplified by divided labor law in the United States and what Joseph Slater has termed labor’s “unsynchronized development” (2004, 202). In particular, divided labor law delayed the growth of public sector unionism. As a result, public sector unions grew and gained power, not in tandem with private sector unions after the Wagner Act, but instead in the 1960s and 1970s when private sector unions had already reached their height of power and this sewed discord within the movement. Even more troubling for labor solidarity, the decade of the 1970s was a period of cultural, economic, and political crisis, which amplified conflict between these two domains.

Labor’s unsynchronized development is a vivid illustration of the consequential role of timing and sequencing. The analysis in this chapter echoes Jacob Hacker’s (1998) study of health insurance in Britain, Canada and the United States. He finds that “the timing and sequence of policy developments shaped what was possible” (96). In Hacker’s case, critical timing elements, like whether national health insurance is enacted before large portions of people have private health insurance and whether national health insurance comes before or after the dramatic rise in health care costs, shaped whether these countries successfully adopted national health care. Hacker is concerned with how the sequence of developments makes the possibility of a specific policy, national health care, more or less feasible, but the logic can apply more

broadly to organizational development. In particular, Hacker is identifying how the ordering of events can make certain paths more or less likely, which can be exported to analyzing the likelihood of organized labor working more or less cooperatively.

Cohesion within the labor movement is shaped by when public and private sector unions developed, at separate times or in tandem, and the external conditions during this development, either a period of economic growth/contraction and political support/backlash. Inter-union cooperation is promoted when sectors develop in tandem, fostering organizational identities and connections as they grow together. Conflict is created when one sector develops late, having to fight their way into an entrenched movement. Further, cooperation is promoted when the external environment creates a sense of abundant resources and optimism, whereas economic contraction or political backlash can amplify conflict by pitting unions against each other. Thus, the strongest, most unified labor movement is likely when the timing and sequencing align public and private sector unions: both sectors gain their collective bargaining rights together and grow in tandem during a period of economic growth and political support. When these variables do not align, conflict within the labor movement is much more likely. Moreover, when these variables are out of alignment, the potential for a strong, unified labor movement with both sectors peaking in power and influence together is also lost. As a consequence, labor punches below its weight because it missed the crucial moment when the punch it threw would have been the strongest possible.

Comparing public and private sector union development temporally illustrates vividly how labor’s two sectors fortunes were out of alignment—growth and decline happened simultaneously. Moreover, this growth and decline occurred under the specter of cultural, economic and political upheaval. Taken together, the incongruent development of public and

private sector unions in the face of a decade of turmoil heightened the public/private conflict in the 1970s and weakened organized labor’s effectiveness in American politics.