The Politics of US Labour: Paralysis and Possibilities

Abstract

After nearly thirty years of political and economic retreat, the US labour movement is facing what is possibly its most serious crisis since the early 1930s. Historically, the US labour officialdom has practiced what we have called ‘bureaucratic business unionism’. Conceiving themselves as business people engaged in the sale of their members’ labour-power, the leadership of the US unions have relied upon the National Labour Relations Board, and the resulting alliance with the pro-capitalist Democratic Party, to insure the regulation of labour-management relations since the late 1930s. The framework of industry-based pattern bargaining over wages, hours and working conditions (and the reliance on the bureaucratic grievance procedure to enforce written contracts) collapsed in the late 1970s. In the face of an aggressive capitalist offensive, the US labour bureaucracy has engaged in continuous concessions bargaining, reintroducing competition over wages and conditions among workers in the same industry, while seeking greater ‘cooperation’ with management and abandoning contract enforcement through routine grievance handling.

Since the onset of the global recession in 2008, the US labour movement has faced even greater challenges. Sectors of the US capitalist class and their Republican political representatives are going beyond the bipartisan calls for ‘sacrifice’ – more concessions in collective bargaining and the acceptance of neoliberal state policies. Today, the very institutional basis of the US trade union movement – state regulated union recognition and collective bargaining – are under attack across the United States.