benefits. But it was also incredibly disruptive and convinced many politicians that labor had somehow become “too powerful.”
The Taft-Hartley Act that the Republican Congress passed in 1947 was a series of amendments to the NLRA that aimed to blunt the power of unions and give bosses more legal tools to fight them. Its “right to work” section devolved the issue to the states, thereby killing the legal challenges that unions were pursuing.
Union leaders threatened hellfire and damnation for any politician that voted for Taft-Hartley. They increased their political fundraising and campaigning, and they made legislative repeal their number one priority. This was not a particularly effective strategy (so says this writer who has the benefit of seventy years of hindsight).
First, the obvious: Congress never repealed Taft-Hartley or meaningfully reformed labor law. This was despite tremendous efforts by unions to elect Democrats over the decades. There were substantial Democratic majorities in 1949, 1965, and 1977 and repealing Taft-Hartley was simply not prioritized by Presidents Truman, Johnson, and Carter.
The phrase “right to work” is a cynical manipulation by right-wingers, but it does have some support. Compelling workers to join a union or face termination is not the most popular thing in the world. As we have seen, union-shop clauses are compensation for the workplace governance functions that unions are legally compelled to provide. They could be seen as a tax. But unions are not just a neutral workplace government, a labor-management committee, or a works council. They are political organizations, with social views, and they work toward civil rights, openly allied with a political party.
This system is a bit of a muddle, but exclusive representation, the duty of fair representation, and the union shop are all essential components of what made it work. “Right to work” attacks put unions and their allies in the untenable position of having to defend the system solely based on its least popular component. This is not unlike forcing defenders of the Affordable Care Act to justify it solely because of the individual mandate. Both systems fall apart without forcing individuals to pay their fair share, but the individual mandate is the most divisive component of the system.
By focusing solely on legislative lobbying, unions engaged the issue as a special interest. For the remainder of the twentieth century, labor, where labor was strong, was able to prevent passage of state “right to work” bills. Where it was weak—the South and Southwest—states fell like dominoes.
Without the ability to negotiate union shops, unions have largely avoided new organizing in “right to work” states. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this left labor regionally isolated and encouraged capital flight and union avoidance.
THREE
The Routine of Collective Bargaining
Management has no divine rights. —WALTER REUTHER, 1948
A HUGE PART OF THE SYSTEM in which we are trapped is the routine of collective bargaining.23 In contracts that last anywhere from three to seven years, unions trade preservation of wages, pensions, and health insurance for significant concessions on workplace protest and the boss’s ability to run his business as he damn well pleases. The result is cutbacks in pay and benefits for which unions bear most of the blame, a decline in our power, and the perception by workers, inside and outside the labor movement, that unions can’t be the change agents that workers want them to be.
Much of this is reinforced by our lousy labor law regime. But this is not an area where we are helplessly shackled to an out-of-date model. No, we’re still following Grandma’s pot roast recipe even though our kitchen looks nothing like hers.
The Treaty of Detroit
Unions bargain like it’s still 1950. That’s the year the United Autoworkers settled a landmark collective bargaining agreement with General Motors that set the postwar pattern for labor relations. It’s often called the “Treaty of Detroit.”24 The agreement covered an unprecedented five-year period. It guaranteed there would be no work stoppages during that time. It gave wide latitude to management’s rights to direct its business, setting product prices, for example. It guaranteed workers’ wages that would keep pace with the cost of living and rise with productivity. It included a private welfare system of employer-paid pensions, health insurance, and other fringe benefits. This probably sounds awesome to a modern reader. But it involved significant trade-offs that have only worsened with time, and it was not the goal with which the union started.
The union began the postwar period with an audacious demand: a 30 percent wage increase accompanied by no rise in the price of cars.25 This demand was put forth by Walter Reuther, then a vice president of the union, a few weeks after the Japanese surrender that ended the Second World War. At the time, people were understandably worried that the country would return to an economic depression once wartime spending on production was phased out. Reuther was convinced that the key to staying out of a Depression was to put more money in workers’ pockets so that their rising living standards would drive the demand for consumer goods and keep the factories humming.
This was a demand for income redistribution. It’s the demand that earned Reuther the sobriquet “the most dangerous man in Detroit.” He was so christened by George Romney (father of Mitt), who headed the auto industry association, because “no one is more skillful in bringing about the revolution without seeming to disturb the existing forms of society.”26
Workers who had long experienced price increases in food, shelter, and consumer goods that eroded whatever wage gains they were able to win rallied to the cause. The strike, which began on November 21, 1945, was the first time that the UAW completely shut down production at all of GM’s facilities. Workers at Ford and Chrysler stayed on the job, so that GM would lose business to its competitors and be more likely to settle what the union hoped would be a pattern for the other car companies.
But the UAW was not the only union on strike. The bitter winter of 1945–46 saw a strike wave that put two million workers on picket lines. All the strikes were motivated by the same kind of worker demands for a bigger slice of the pie.
When the Steelworkers signed a deal with U.S. Steel that gave its members an 18½ cents an hour raise, with a corresponding rise in the price of steel, a pattern was set. Most strikes came to an end within a few weeks of the steel settlement, with similar raises. The GM strike lasted 133 days, the longest of all the strikes that winter. For their efforts, the GM workers got a penny more an hour than the Steelworkers, but GM still raised the price of its cars.27
That was a one-year contract. Most collective bargaining agreements were one-year deals back then, and they were fairly bare bones. They were basically an agreement over what that year’s wage rates would be, with a dispute resolution process spelled out for the period of a truce in which the union promised not to strike.
For every year that followed, the UAW would single out one of the Big 3 auto companies for strike preparation and wage and benefit demands that aimed for significant, permanent improvements in workers’ standard of living. In 1949, Chrysler bore the brunt of a 104-day strike after refusing to match Ford’s fully paid pension. Out of this annual turmoil came the Treaty of Detroit. General Motors wanted five years of labor peace, and the UAW made them pay for it with pensions and health insurance.
Unions had begun to negotiate fringe benefits during the Second World War. After the War Labor Board froze wages to combat inflation, it exempted fringe benefits from the restrictions. This “Little Steel Formula” gave unions wiggle room to make some material gains for their restive members.28
