that “the most significant contemporary attempts to legitimate the contemporary social order all invoke the lean production model” (emphasis in original).50 In other words, not only is the cluster of new techniques associated with lean production more successful in terms of productivity measures, but it also plays an ideological role in legitimating the competitive arguments put forth by management. It thus seems clear that working under lean conditions, driven by new management tactics, and, given the reality of plant closures, fearful of job loss, US workers in manufacturing not only involuntarily initiated the expansion that began in 1982 after the collapse of union activity but sustained it through the 1980s under a regime of work intensification and a continuing fall in real wages.
There was, to be sure, some resistance to all of this. High-profile strikes in the 1980s at Hormel in Minnesota, Watsonville Canning, International Paper, and the shipyards at Jay, Maine; the successful mobilization strategy at NYNEX in the Northeast in 1989; and the massive civil disobedience in the UMWA strike against Pittston, also in 1989, all signaled that the labor movement was not quite dead yet.51 In some unions, notably the New Directions Movement in the UAW and the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), rank-and-file reform movements fought consistently against the increasingly cooperative attitudes of the leadership toward new management methods.52
Nevertheless, the level of resistance and even of conventional strikes in the 1980s remained low. Aside from the exhaustion of the upsurge discussed above and the obvious fear of job loss that prevailed in many restructuring or shrinking industries after the 1980–82 recession, two other economic factors allowed for a low level of resistance from the ranks. The first was the relatively low level of inflation that followed the recession. The Consumer Price Index would fall from a high of 13.3 percent for 1979 to 3.8 percent in 1982 and then to 1.1 percent in 1986, rising again to 4.6 percent at the end of the decade.53 While this was high enough to wipe out real gains in wages, it was far below the rising levels of the 1970s. Second, compensating for the loss of real buying power was what Shaikh calls “the extraordinary fall in the interest rate,” which, among other things, allowed working-class families to continue consuming through the accumulation of household debt.54 This relative lack of grassroots resistance also allowed most union leaders to accommodate to labor- management cooperation and subsequent implementation of lean production norms. In the face of continually falling union density in all but a few industries, the survival “strategy” of the leaders of most large unions in this period and beyond was based on three practices: bargaining concessions not only on wages but on benefits and working conditions as well; various forms of labor-management cooperation or “partnership” usually associated with lean production methods; and union mergers to bolster falling membership figures.55 The first two represented accommodation to capital’s new management strategies and practices, while the latter tended to reduce the urgency of new organizing for many unions.
Nevertheless, new organizing became a major issue in the 1990s as several unions turned seriously to new organizing techniques. As a result, significant leadership changes would take place in the AFL-CIO, as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president John Sweeney beat old-guard standard-bearer Lane Kirkland and TDU-backed Ron Carey became president of the Teamsters, leading to one of the most important anti-lean strikes of that decade at UPS in 1997. Grassroots militancy in the face of drastic lean methods would explode once again on the prairies of the Midwest, this time at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois.56 Yet the basic practices of labor-management cooperation adopted by most business union leaders in the 1980s would continue into the 1990s.
With resistance low, productivity gains would increase somewhat, in some recovery years very rapidly, real wages would continue to fall until a brief reprieve in the late 1990s, and increases in the exploitation of labor would remain a central factor in the expansion of the 1990s, as Mohun’s figures on the rate of surplus value cited earlier indicate. In that decade and later, financial and overseas profits would play a growing role in holding up profits as the epicenter of capitalist investment moved from West to East, above all to China, until the drop in the mass of profits that began in late 2006.57
To summarize the analysis, the collapse of union resistance beginning in 1979, intensified by the recession that followed, sparked the recovery that began in 1982. Accelerated industrial restructuring undid “pattern” bargaining, labor’s first line of defense since the end of World War II, undermining resistance and contributing to the continued fall in real wages. The introduction of “lean production” methods enabled significant productivity increases, first in manufacturing in the 1980s and then more generally in the 1990s. The combination of these trends produced a fall in the value of labor power, contributing to the sustainability of the expansion over this whole period.
US Labor in the Early Twenty-First Century
Despite the recession of 2000–01, in the early years of the new century, US capital would continue to be favored by a continued fall in the value of labor power. In the first several years of the new century, real wages remained essentially stagnant, while productivity rose by more than 20 percent from 2000 through 2008. The gap between the two grew, indicating a further fall in the value of labor power.58 Union membership, however, after rising slightly in the late 1990s, began to slip again with the recession of 2000–01, falling from 16.3 million in 2000 to 15.4 million in 2006, with all of the loss in the private sector.59 First year increases in union negotiated agreements averaged 3.5 percent from 2001 through 2007, generally staying slightly ahead of inflation and clearly somewhat better than the average worker.60 But with union density down to about 8 percent in the private sector, these agreements had less and less influence on working-class incomes overall. While there was, as always, some resistance in the years before the Great Recession, the level of strike activity continued to plummet in the new century, falling by more than half from 392 in 2000 to 119 in 2009, a record low.61 The most important developments in organized labor in the first few years of the twenty-first century up to the “Great Recession” of 2008, however, were the changing nature of the unions, the increasing centrality of the SEIU, the split in the AFL-CIO, and the virtual “civil war” that exploded in 2009 between several important unions.
The first thing to note is that the unions that faced capital in the twenty-first century were very different from those of the late 1970s. For one thing, the industrial distribution of union members had changed significantly. Unions in traditional strongholds such as steel, auto, transportation, and apparel all lost members as employment dropped or shifted south, or held their own through mergers or absorptions of smaller unions. Union density in manufacturing had fallen from 32.3 percent in 1980 to 14.8 percent in 2000 and would fall further to a little over 11 percent in 2007, while density in a small number of service industries grew, most notably in hospitals, where it grew from 13.8 percent in 2000 to 15.3 percent in 2007, twice the level for the private sector as a whole.62
The industrial shift meant that union members had changed in terms of occupations and demographics as well. In 1978, 65 percent of union members were in manual occupations in manufacturing, mining, construction, transport, and telecommunications. By 2008 fewer than half were in those industries. There were by then as many workers in health and education services as in manufacturing. Women now comprised 48 percent of union members, whereas in 1978 they were less than a quarter. In 2008, while the proportion of African American members remained the same as in 1983 at about 12 percent, the percentage of Latinos had doubled from just under 6 percent to just over 12 percent. Between 2000 and 2010 half a million Latinos had joined unions.63 This reflected the growth and increased importance of immigrant workers in the US labor force and in the unions. If the decline of unionism in manual occupations symbolized labor’s weakening position in the economy, the industrial and demographic shifts brought some new strengths.
The first of these was the rising importance of immigrant workers in the United States referred to above. In 2000, the AFL-CIO abandoned its past restrictionist policy on immigration and came out in favor of amnesty.64 Recognizing the centrality of immigrant workers in its industries, the Hotel Employees Restaurant Employees (HERE) took the lead in organizing the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom
