“Judases”

Chapter 3 examines the reasons that caused workers to leave or reject unions. Scholars normally associate union decline with workers disillusion with unionism. This chapter, however, argues that workers’ faith in unionism did not waver as much as their faith in union leaders did. As Gilded Age unions like the United Mine Workers implemented a more centralized hierarchy, local union autonomy waned. As a result, workers doubted whether union leaders made decisions with the workers’ interests in mind, and they left the union when it seemed their leaders went astray. Rather than abandoning unionism altogether, however, many of these individuals formed local unions that rivaled the national unions, indicating that workers had more problems with union leadership than they did with unionism itself.

Labor Rights in the Era of Union Decline

The conclusion revisits the main findings of the book and considers how important weaknesses unions exhibited in the 1950s matter now in an era marked by union decline and conservative ascendance. The 1950s conflicts over labor rights were more than an interesting side story. Labor never completely conquered the Midwest, where most union members resided during these years. Many of the vulnerabilities unions exhibited then—weak or nonexistent ties to groups outside of the labor movement, ambivalent political allies, inadequate responses to employer mobilization—were magnified in the coming decades, beginning with the economic downturns in the 1970s and continuing to the present day. Contemporary fights over labor rights bear many of the same features of the 1950s conflicts. While state labor movements generally developed more sophisticated political operations over time, enduring labor–community coalitions have proven elusive and are needed now more than ever.

The Capital–Labor Accord in Action

This chapter provides a sketch of labor relations during the 1950s, noting where the imagery of a capital–labor accord is useful and where it falls short. The chapter shows how using the 1950s as a benchmark when explaining union decline tends to obscure key vulnerabilities that labor has long exhibited, well before the fallout in manufacturing and the rise of economic globalization. Gains workers accrued through collective bargaining were exceptional in many ways, though union strength was still confined to a relatively narrow geographic and industrial space. Even here, in the industrial Midwest, there were intense struggles over the legitimacy of unions. This came to a head at the end of the decade when employers made a concerted push for right-to-work.

Financialization and union decline in Canada: The influence on sectors and core industries

This article explores the long-run relationship between financialization and union density in Canada’s non-financial sector. Drawing on critical political economy literatures, we argue that the shareholder business model, the growing use of financial assets and leading global industries have led to a restructuring of labour markets and unionized workforces. Evidence from panel data analysis suggests that the negative relationship between financialization and union density holds when controlling for economic context and sectoral characteristics. We conclude that the sectoral impacts of financialization on union density – especially in highly financialized sectors such as manufacturing, extractive resources, transport and warehousing – are critical to understanding union decline and recent changes to employment relations.

Australian Union Transformation and the Challenge for Labour Historians

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it confronts misconceptions that explain union decline in Australia; misconceptions that are entrenched in labour history and industrial relations scholarship. We are told that decline “commenced in the early 1980s,” when in fact it began in 1948; that union decline primarily results from attacks by conservative governments “bent on their destruction,” when the rate of decline has often been steepest under Labor governments; that unions invariably redress the plight of society’s poorest, when union agreements negotiated in retail and hospitality routinely leave workers in a worse position than those employed under relevant awards. The article’s second purpose is to trace the sociological consequence of union decline. While unions claim to speak for society’s battlers, more than 40 per cent of unionists today are managers and professionals. In terms of wage cohorts, the propensity to join increases with wealth. Although unions retain representation rights for society’s battlers, and publicly advocate their cause, the fact remains: society’s poorest members are no longer found in much number in union ranks. In part, at least, the unwillingness of labour historians to confront harsh realities stems from an understandable desire to defend labour’s cause, rather than serve primarily as dispassionate academic observers.