Declension and Construction Themes in the Study of Labor Politics in the United States

Extract

The precipitous decline in collective bargaining between employees and employers during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century in the United States should tell us something useful about American political development. The decline of collective bargaining is about more than waning union influence or competitive conditions in the labor market because collective bargaining was the primary expression of the regime established by the New Deal Democratic Party electoral coalition. For a generation, labor-management bargaining epitomized empowered liberal democracy which, acting through the legislative branch, established a new legal regime of industrial order. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA) shaped a pluralist industrial order by creating new rules that curbed the authority of managers and compelled business firms to participate with unions in a process of rational bargaining based on the assumption of competing employee and employer interests.I do not mean to suggest that the place of collective bargaining was uncontested. Scholars, however, launched major efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to understand how “industrial relations” fit into the emerging conception of pluralism. This was an important effort because union-management relations were central to the New Deal Democracy. For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1956); Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, Politics, Economics and Welfare: Planning and Politico-Economic Systems Resolved into Basic Social Processes (New York: Harper and Row, 1953); Clark Kerr, Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Others Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Vintage, 1969). By the mid-1960s, industrial relations was a rare topic for political science investigation; aside from Greenstone, political science conceived “labor” and “work” to be “private interests” and not a matter of political significance. Yet collective bargaining is no longer the focal point for industrial relations, and industrial relations no longer occupies the center of governing attention. The various reasons for this trend have attracted significant scholarly attention; however, the issue is confounded by arguments that union decline is a wrongly conceived topic to investigate.