the United States, but to the list of such publications and cross-union centers has been added Trade Union News in Britain, Solidariteit in the Netherlands, Trade Union Forum in Sweden, Labour Notes in New Zealand, and Labour in Taiwan, alongside the Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE) networks in Germany, Brazil, and North America, among others.43 Such publications set out to make coherent what rank-and-file union activists do less visibly day in and day out as they operate on the terrain of their members’ basic interests and need for class organization.
Projects like those listed above, by publishing reports of struggles and issues across the class, providing support contacts in other sectors for those in dispute, and bringing activists across employment together in schools and conferences, begin to demonstrate to rank-and-file trade unionists the class meaning of their everyday activity, without the need for principles and programs dictated from above. Such initiatives cannot be sufficient to complete the transition to a “class for itself” consciousness by the activists involved; but they are a necessary beginning for such a process.
The issue of membership control over even workplace union leaderships is another central focus of these cross-movement organizations, as indicated in the interactions between US Labor Notes and union rank-and-file caucuses like TDU.44 The constant flux identified above between the bureaucratization of unions as organizations and the subversion of this by the concerns and demands of the membership has been consciously confronted by rank-and-file union activists in such formations with the deliberate adoption of strategies structured to pull in the opposite direction—toward the creation of organic links between the workplace-based concerns of the membership and the policies and actions of their representatives. In a few cases, like the rank-and-file based involvement of TDU in the demands and organization of the UPS strike, the threads come together with a powerful result.
We have seen that, with or without the support of socialists, workers will continue to organize on the basis of their own necessary, if sporadic, conflict with the system to create “ramparts” of resistance and, whatever their apparently conservative consciousness, intermittently enter into outright confrontation with employers and the state. Socialists have never been required to generate class struggle and organization; where they may be useful is in pointing out its class meaning and potential. Existing efforts to adopt this approach remain slight in comparison to the yawning gaps in consciousness and organization they confront, yet they present a crucial perspective on, and example of, cross-movement currents of opposition and resistance rooted in the labor movement that can begin to build toward a class response to the deepening social crisis.
This essay was originally published in Socialist Register 1998 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
3
Contextualizing Organized Labor in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the United States
Kim Moody
The relative well-being of the working class depends to a large extent on its state of organization and combativeness. But the ability of unions to improve living and working conditions also depends strongly on the economic, political, and social context in which struggles occur. In discussing the “general law of capitalist accumulation” in Capital, Marx argued that “the conditions which are the most favorable to the workers” are those of “reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e., accumulation.”1 This is more or less what happened in the United States during the long expansion that followed World War II and lasted until the early 1970s. Shaikh, for example, argues that this expansion was based on growing productivity, which allowed for an increase in the rate of surplus value of 24 percent from 1948 to 1976. This, in turn, allowed for a substantial increase in real wages for most of this period, despite a falling rate of profit.2 In this period, the US working class, including both the productive workers who produced this increasing surplus value and the unproductive sections of the class, achieved a growing share of national income at the expense of capital. From 1959 to 1979 the “labor” share of US GDP rose from 68.3 percent to 73.9 percent. Eventually, by the mid-1970s, the declining rate of profit brought the great postwar expansion to an end.3 When expansion returned it would be on the basis of a continued fall in real wages and productivity growth through the intensification of work.
Expansion Returns
A new upward trend in both profit rates and growth began in 1982. McNally argues that this was the result, among other things, of a generalized attack on organized workers that produced wage compression and a rising rate of exploitation, along with a restructuring of capital worldwide and imbalances in the global economy. In addition, there was significant destruction of capital in Europe and North America with the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs.4 In the United States alone, some six billion dollars of real private manufacturing assets were destroyed between 1980 and 1983, while business failures soared from 7,600 in 1979 to 31,300 in 1983. Between 1979 and 1983, some two and a half million manufacturing production jobs were lost.5 In this same period the rate of surplus value jumped by over 9 percent.6 It was this substantial devalorization, and along with it a sharp rise in the rate of surplus value, that produced a renewed period of capitalist expansion in the 1980s.7
This period of expansion and accumulation, however, was very different from that of the postwar years. There was, as Shaikh shows, a continuing rise in productivity following 1982, but this time real wages lagged far behind allowing for a rapid rise in the rate of exploitation.8 Far from rising as a proportion of US GDP, labor income, broadly defined, fell from 73.9 percent in 1979 to 70.4 percent in 2006.9 Whereas profit rates had fallen during the postwar boom, from 1982 until about 1997, by most measures they rose.10 While there were a number of factors that explain this return to growth, it seems clear that it was in large part due to capital’s ability to accelerate the rate of exploitation quickly and continuously, as productivity outstripped wages. Shaikh and Tonak show that the rate of surplus rose by 20 percent from 1979 through 1989. Whereas the average annual rate of surplus value had increased by a modest 0.6 percent from 1948 to 1980, from 1980 to 1989 it increased by 1.8 percent a year. Mohun calculated that this ratio increased by 40 percent from 1979 through 2000 as the value of labor power in the United States plunged.11 Far from providing “the conditions . . . most favorable to workers,” the expansion that began in 1982 was built on the relative and, in the case of the United States, the absolute decline of working-class living and working standards. Capital’s expansion was now predicated more than ever on the decline of labor’s fortunes.
The Collapse of Union Resistance in the United States
From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, much of the industrial world experienced a major labor upheaval. America witnessed its largest labor upsurge since the 1930s, mainly in response to capital’s attack on organized labor, which began in the late 1950s with what Mike Davis calls “the management offensive of 1958–63.” Spurred by falling profit rates, this was specifically an attack on work standards and shop-floor organization in the major, highly unionized industries, notably automobiles, steel, and electrical goods.12 By the mid-1960s, rank-and-file resistance to this management offensive surfaced with a wave of wildcat strikes. Strike levels often surpassed those of the huge 1945–46 strike wave, peaking at just over six thousand strikes in 1974.13 It was an era of worker self-activity in which unofficial strikes, contract rejections, and rank-and-file rebellions within major unions all challenged both the routine of American business unionism and the bureaucratic rule that supported it. Alongside the social movements of the era, and often inspired by and overlapping them, this worker upsurge thwarted the efforts of capital to recoup its falling profits rates for several years. The labor upsurge would continue for a decade and a half.14
The movement’s momentum, however, was broken first of all by two recessions, 1973–75 and 1980–82, in which the eight largest US unions, major sites of the rebellion, lost 2.2 million members.15 Also key to the loss of momentum was the dialectic of constant struggle between rank-and-file activists and leaders in most of these major unions, who, in business-union fashion,
