State of the Union: A Century of American Labor weaves the stories of the union-busting practices of corporations; the growing political opposition of anti-union zealots; the conservative, incompetent, and corrupt union leadership; the racism and sexism within many local labor organizations; the abandonment of the labor movement by left intellectuals; and the more recent manifestations of capital flight into a tragic epic which explains the losses in union membership and erosion of working-class political influence during the twentieth century. Nelson Lichtenstein's depressing story deserves much praise. It offers a sophisticated synthesis and confronts its readers with a provocative thesis.

Lichtenstein argues that over “the last forty years a transformation in law, custom, and ideology has made a once radical demand for racial and gender equality into an elemental code of conduct.” He finds the upswing in federal legislation that attacks sexism and racism a positive development, but points out that the unintended consequence of these measures has been to push “the rights of workers, as workers, and especially as workers acting in an autonomous, collective fashion,” into “the shadows” (p. 3). He identifies this transition as a shift in political culture from a labor (collective) pluralism to an individual-rights consciousness.

The beginnings of this change occurred between the 1940s and 1960s. New laws and labor leaders' insistence on fighting for gains at the firm level transformed collective bargaining from representing part of labor's political and economic agenda to being the only mechanism workers had to contest the practices of their employers. In this same period, union leaders purged their locals of radicals (who had been their most dynamic organizers), they failed to organize African-American workers in the South, and they had blocked most women from entry into skilled trades. This was not all. Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, Barry Goldwater started to have success with his right-to-work campaign, and the McClellan Committee made Jimmy Hoffa's foibles public. Before the working class could attend to all of these wounds, deindustrialization and globalization further exacerbated the collapse of their movement.

Lichtenstein argues that we continue to live with the consequences of labor's collapse. For example, he pointed out that in the 1990s when the country experienced a 3 percent per year growth rate, most median incomes continued to decline. By 2000 “real household income for young families (breadwinners under age thirty) stood at one-third less than their counterparts in 1973, even though their total working hours were longer and the educational level of the head of household higher than a generation before” (pp. 13–14). Although rights consciousness, State of the Union argues, can provide workers protections against sexual harassment and racial discrimination, it cannot produce the class-based actions necessary to alter wage rates and the larger social structure.

The implications of Lichtenstein's work are well worth noting. The protections granted to workers by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, fail to challenge current corporate practices because they only protect individuals in a limited set of instances. If an individual challenged his or her employer over the right to set wage and hour rates, or in some cases, such as Wal-Mart, over organizing a union, he or she would likely be fired. Lichtenstein is right to place much of the blame for this current state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of labor leaders. They somehow forgot unions are supposed to be agents of social democracy not simply intermediaries between workers and their bosses.

In hopes of not sending the prolabor reader away too depressed, Lichtenstein concludes with some suggestions for rebuilding the labor movement. They include a new and improved craft unionism, which would eliminate the racism and sexism of the past, and a new political militancy. These points of advocacy were the least creative and weakest part of an otherwise brilliant work.