Lane Windham tells a compelling and, in many ways, fresh story of union organizing in the 1970s. While the arc of the story is not entirely new, its shape—a higher peak and steeper slope—offers a different perspective on what some historians have regarded as “the last days of the working class” (Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class [2010]). Windham sees not decline or extinction in the 1970s but working-class rebirth in a surge of organizing led primarily by African American workers and women. The record is mixed. But what sets this study apart is both the originality of its general argument and the fine-grained local studies that complicate the broader story she seeks to tell.
The organizing campaigns in the 1970s, often led by workers new to industrial wage work, were energized by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that pushed the boundaries of employment for women and minority workers as they claimed access to the income, job security, and respect that an older working class dominated by white men had helped build, in what is commonly called the New Deal framework. The Wagner Act (1935) guaranteed the right to organize, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), in a robust, post-Depression industrial economy fueled by wartime and postwar consumer demand. As new workers “knocked on labor's door” they claimed space in that New Deal order, which by the 1970s was already in crisis. But, for them, expanding opportunity for a time belied the wider collapse to which their efforts ultimately fell victim. By the early 1980s, labor's status was increasingly precarious in the face of globalization, stiffening employers’ resistance to providing privately negotiated social welfare, and a rightward shift in American politics that eroded what limited possibilities state intervention held for protecting workers’ rights and income. The steep slope of labor's decline in the 1980s also came from concerted efforts by employers and their political allies to “close labor's door” through increasingly sophisticated anti-union campaigns. The opposition of employers and their state allies came as a deep shock to the newly energized labor movement. Although some beachheads of union representation were won, the tide was turning sharply. Erosion came quickly in the 1980s. In addition to the steep decline in private-sector union density, fewer workers even chose to bring their claims for union representation to the NLRB. As Windham notes, workers voting in NLRB elections fell from half a million per year in the 1970s to a mere seventy-four thousand in 2016 (pp. 37, 184).
The heart of this volume lies in case studies of organizing efforts in four quite distinct industries: shipbuilding, textile manufacturing, retail, and clerical. What the cases have in common is the leadership of African Americans, women, and, to a lesser extent, immigrant workers. Their rights consciousness fed the impetus to extend those rights claims to the workplace. At least for a time, the inherited New Deal framework seemed capable of supporting those workplace claims. Workers in the Newport News, Virginia, shipyards fought a protracted battle in the late 1970s against an entrenched company union and their employers in the courts and on the picket line to eventually win a contract that wove together labor rights and civil rights. But as Windham notes, workers in a naval shipyard, subject to federal government supervision, enjoyed a degree of insulation from global market forces that workers in many industries did not. A second case in point is the organizing effort, also led by African American workers, at the Cannon Mills textile complex in Kannapolis, North Carolina. In repeated campaigns between 1974 and 1985, workers saw their efforts to create a measure of collective security thwarted by owners’ use of global competition and threatened plant closings to sow division in their ranks. Despite labor-management cooperation to promote protective legislation for American-made goods, the company deployed a full arsenal of anti-union weapons in the NLRB-run elections. The shift to retail-dominated supply chains ultimately led to the closing of the plant in 2003, just three years after the members of UNITE HERE finally won their first election and negotiated contract. Labor's door to American textile jobs had largely been slammed shut.
The final two cases in this study highlight more successful campaigns that in different ways suggested pathways out of the crisis confronting private-sector unionism in the 1970s and 1980s. At the prestigious Woodward & Lothrop department store in Washington, D.C., a decidedly youthful and increasingly African American workforce conducted a vigorous organizing campaign to displace a moribund company union. With the company choosing a “dignified” and less aggressive anti-union campaign, “Woodies” workers won dramatic improvements in health insurance, job security, and wages. They swam against a swelling anti-union tide in a retail sector increasingly dominated by big box stores like Walmart. Despite a cultural divide from their parent UFCW union, Woodies workers demonstrated, as Windham notes, “the kind of future that might have met the newly forged working class in the 1970s if it had not faced such powerful employer resistance” (p. 150).
The promise of that future was met to some degree by the novel organizing approach undertaken not by a union per se but by “9to5,” a feminist association of office workers, first in Boston and then nationwide. Bypassing an increasingly moribund NLRB, women office workers developed novel methods to combat workplace discrimination and pressure companies to improve the conditions of work for women. They brought lawsuits, set up picket lines, and lobbied for a workers’ “bill of rights” with state legislatures. Although they eventually formed a parallel, more conventional union, SEIU 925, and bargained over wages and other benefits, the emphasis on community mobilization tactics continued to prove its effectiveness. 9to5 became a precursor of other “alt-labor” strategies, such as workers’ centers and associations of janitors, home health care workers, and car wash workers, among others.
For all of the richness of this book, it does not give sufficient attention to the surge in public-sector organizing in the 1970s, despite the fact that union densities in the public sector continued to grow, even as private-sector unions fell into sharp decline. If the early 1980s was a “perfect storm” for private-sector unions, public workers would face their own challenge after 2011 in the fiercely anti-union legislation in Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, and elsewhere designed to cut the legs out from under trade unions in the public sector. While appropriately emphasizing the enormous destructive influence of increasingly sophisticated corporate anti-unionism and the collapse of statist protections for working people, Windham also highlights the resilient capacity of workers to build new centers of power in associations like 9to5 and in wider community mobilization through workers’ centers, lobbying, and direct-action tactics. Windham might well have quoted David Montgomery's insight into the resiliency of workers’ organizing historically: “Their movement has grown only sporadically and through fierce struggles, been interrupted time and again just when it seemed to reach flood tide, overwhelmed its foes only to see them revive in new and more formidable shapes, and been forced to reassess what it thought it had already accomplished and begin again” (The Fall of the House of Labor [1987]). She has, importantly, reminded us of the undercurrent of working-class self-activity in the 1970s led by African American and women workers and the lessons it holds for beleaguered workers today.
