Labor-law reform is stalled in Congress. The Employee Free Choice Act, which would make union organizing easier and impose stiffer penalties on recalcitrant employers, has hit a wall of opposition: from business, from Republicans, and from Democrats representing states and districts where labor’s voice is weak.
Nothing new here. For more than half a century, Congress has rejected every effort to reform the nation’s basic labor law, even as union membership shrinks and labor’s bargaining leverage grows ever more anemic.
What’s interesting and revealing about this fight, however, is not the outcome, but the choice of rhetorical weapons chosen by the opponents of organized labor to make their case. Those say a lot about the ideological vulnerability of the unions and about how scholars understand the origins and persistence of that weakness, even in an era of economic distress and social inequality. The Center for Union Facts, a well-financed anti-union public-relations operation, denounces union officials for “greed, corruption, and mismanagement of union dues.” In one of the center’s videos, the words “Intimidation,” “Pressure,” “Harassment,” and “Deception” flash across the screen as an ominous voice-over decries union-organizing tactics. Meanwhile the conservative Heritage Foundation argues that the thousands of charges involving “threats, violence, and coercion” filed by employers against unions before the National Labor Relations Board are symptomatic of the very nature of American trade unionism.
The truth or falsity of such charges is far less important than their resonance. The anti-union consultants and PR companies have put their finger on a powerful and persuasive set of tropes, prejudices, and lore. Indeed, their recognition that many Americans conflate unionism with racketeering and corruption should come as no surprise to labor historians, such as myself, who find that in every college class there is always a sizable group of undergraduates—not always anti-union or conservative by any means—who want to write their term papers on Teamster thuggery or other forms of union malfeasance. In the popular imagination, Jimmy Hoffa remains the 20th century’s most well-known labor leader, eclipsing the radicals and visionaries about whom so many of us have written so much.
At a deeper level, though, historians have long been flummoxed by all of that. Scores of books have been written examining the way in which anti-Communism has been deployed against the union movement and its liberal allies. And notable scholarly efforts have been put forward to contextualize the charge, often made by management-oriented conservatives, that trade unions retard the growth of productivity, add fuel to inflationary pressures, and stifle innovation. Likewise, the sexism and racism present within the union movement have been the subject of much penetrating analysis, and hardly from a posture that defends the leadership of organized labor.
But when it comes to corruption, the topic has all too often been swept under the rug. That is not so much because labor historians are apologists for union officialdom. Rather, the theme seems hard to square with the reigning historiography that puts the New Deal and the prosperous post-World War II decades at the apogee of the valiant rise, and sorry decline, of the trade-union movement.
I became aware of that difficulty when Lawrence Richards, my graduate student of a few years past, was working on a project that would eventually see the light as Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2008). After much research, Larry had concluded that anti-union rhetoric hardly varied from one decade to the other. Phrases describing union leaders as “dictators” “tyrants,” “despots,” and “autocrats” were as prevalent in the years before World War I as in the affluent 1960s. The “union boss” was a newspaper and newsreel standard throughout the 20th century. Similarly, in the movies, the story line hardly varied, from the 1938 Racket Busters to On the Waterfront, in 1954, as well as in the 1970s, when Blue Collar and F.I.S.T. exemplified a fleeting Hollywood love affair with the alienated and angry working stiff who was disdained and misled even by his own union officials. Throughout, producers and screenwriters, even those of a liberal political orientation, made unionism synonymous with self-serving and cynical leaders who betrayed their guileless rank and file.
But surely, I said to Larry, the story can’t be quite so monochromatic. The New Deal, World War II, the rise of postwar prosperity, the recessions of the 1970s: All must have had a salutary impact on how the popular media, in general, and labor’s conservative opponents, in particular, characterized the men and women who lead American trade unions. Not much, replied Larry, who had pored over countless articles and editorials gracing the pages of Reader’s Digest, The Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and other conservative, widely read publications.
He turned out to be right, which is why his book is so revealing, and for labor advocates, rather depressing. Regardless of unionism’s strength, politics, or workplace locale, its opponents have deployed a remarkably consistent critique, notwithstanding episodic alarms over Communism in the early cold-war years or trade-union race-mixing below the Mason-Dixon line during the years of civil-rights turmoil.
A new generation of historians has begun to grapple with this longstanding but powerful indictment, to understand the origins of the racketeering charge in American law and political culture. They are beginning to explain the way accusations of corruption, bossism, and union bureaucracy are deployed by American conservatives to discredit the unions, both those that are tarnished by such malfeasance and those that are squeaky clean.
In a neglected book, Andrew Wender Cohen explains the origins of that ideological animosity. In The Racketeer’s Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Cohen writes that if we want to understand the motives behind modern trade unionism, the New Deal law that once sustained it, and why both generated such hostility, then historians would be well advised to shift their historical gaze from the great steel mills and packinghouses of the American heartland and turn attention to the bustling streets, construction sites, saloons, and laundries that constituted the service economy of the early 20th century. There was a lawless realm of petty entrepreneurship, police corruption, political payoffs, and gangland violence. Amid all that social and political chaos, craft unions like those of the teamsters, the carpenters, and the service trades sought to regulate the labor market for their particular occupational niches. To do so, they constructed a private system of governance in which picket lines, payoffs, and a measure of coercion, both physical and financial, were essential parts of the trade-union modus operandi. Theirs was a Hobbesian world far removed from the Progressive-era municipal-reform ideal or its latter-day good-government heirs.
It was also highly visible. Inside the great factories and mills of industrial America, day-to-day conflict was largely hidden from the urban middle class, but on the streets of Chicago, the craft-union effort to construct a system of occupational governance put disorderly class conflict front and center: As they passed a construction site, shipped goods across town, ordered a beer, or voted for their local alderman, Chicago urbanites were intimately aware of union power and employer pushback. It was in response to that urban conflict that a generation of Progressives in the early 20th century invented much of the modern language of antiunionism. The Wilsonian journalist Ray Stannard Baker coined the term “right to work” to attack the “closed shop” whereby unions on the railroads and in the construction trades sought to sequester valuable jobs for their members. And in far-off Phoenix, as Elizabeth Shermer points out in her just completed dissertation, “Creating the Sunbelt: The Political and Economic Transformation of Phoenix, Arizona,” enterprising municipal reformers like Barry Goldwater became antiunion partisans in the 1930s and 1940s not because they saw Communist infiltration or sit-down-strike militancy in their city, but because unions like those representing bartenders and truck drivers seemed to have too much power both at their favorite watering holes and in city hall.
Indeed, the word “racketeering” was actually invented in the 1920s by Gordon L. Hostettera, head of the Employers Association of Greater Chicago, who was equally alarmed at Al Capone’s gangland mayhem and trade unions’ efforts to control the service trades. Since the mid-19th century, the word “racket” had suggested an illicit form of business, often combined with a measure of political extortion. But now Chicago businessmen and their good-government allies began using the gerund “racketeering” to defame and criminalize the tradition of craft governance—to equate union power with the work of Chicago’s criminal gangs. Just as Capone sought to corner the market for illegal liquor on the city’s South Side, so too, presumably, did the unions seek to corner the market for labor in a city and nation in which laissez-faire was upheld as the only legitimate modality for the sale of that particular commodity. Then and now, unions that set prices and wages in trades like dry cleaning, janitorial services, barbering, bartending, construction, and trucking were ipso facto “rackets.”
The New Deal briefly legitimized many of those union stratagems. The effort to take wages and prices out of competition and to put the state behind union organizing—both hallmarks of New Deal industrial statecraft—did amount to something close to a “racketeer’s progress,” at least in the eyes of conservative opponents. But the Wagner Act of 1935 and the unions it helped spawn never achieved the kind of cultural and political hegemony that would shield organized labor from ferocious attack, even when union power seemed at its apogee. That is the point of Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor (University of Illinois Press, 2009), David Scott Witwer’s engaging study of how the columnist Westbrook Pegler transmuted an exposé of Depression-era union corruption into a wholesale indictment of the union idea itself.
There really were crooks, thugs, and extortionists at work within the craft unions of that era, none less savory than George Scalise, of the Building Service Employees International Union, and William Bioff, of the International Alliance of Theater and Stage Employees. Both were hustlers who parlayed their gangland connections into control of a set of marginal unions. Their story was one of entrepreneurial mobility, not unlike that exemplified by Don Corleone in The Godfather.
Pegler, who wrote for the conservative Scripps-Howard chain, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for his exposé of Scalise, Bioff, and assorted other lowlifes. His columns drew on the tradition of the Progressive muckrakers but also increasingly prefigured the role that postwar talk radio would play in crystallizing a populist discourse rooted firmly in the political and cultural right. Pegler’s reportage established the journalistic template that later would re-emerge in the postwar decades in the films, journalism, and government investigations that permanently tarnished labor’s public reputation. Industrial unions that represented steelworkers and autoworkers might be bureaucratic and stolid, but they were rarely led by men and women who for personal gain colluded with their managerial adversaries. But no matter, the Peglerization of all labor reportage generated an imaginative world in which labor bosses routinely betrayed their members and ran roughshod over the public interest. The employers—whose near-universal collusion with corrupt union leaders was almost always neglected—were made into helpless bystanders, subject to self-interested pressure and criminal threats from arrogant labor barons. This demonization of union leadership enabled antiunion conservatives to pose as protectors of the working American even as they pushed for new restrictions on organized labor, especially its capacity to organize new members, deploy the strike weapon, and raise funds for political work.
As a consequence of all that mid-20th-century scandal and investigation, the unions are now highly regulated institutions, far more so than almost any other voluntary institution in American society. Meanwhile, the trade-union movement is but a fraction of its previous size—representing today but 12 percent of all working Americans, down from 35 percent half a century ago—while actual instances of criminality are almost certainly a good deal fewer, if only because unionism as a “business” is no longer the growth industry out of which ambitious members of the working class, many of them immigrants, can make careers. A commitment to labor and its left-wing heritage is left to what the union cynics call the “missionary” crowd: radical organizers, antipoverty crusaders, minority-rights advocates, and those who still see the union movement as a lever by which to reform the entire society.
But all that has not stopped those who still tag the unions as a fount of corruption, payoffs, and barely veiled coercion. And there are good reasons for the persistence of such a discourse.
Today we live in a world not unlike that of early-20th-century Chicago. Most jobs are in the service trades, not heavy industry; unemployment and turnover remain chronic; and employment security is increasingly rare. The fragmented and incomplete character of the American welfare state means that many unions have built up large pension funds, which in turn serve as a tempting kitty for otherwise scrupulous officials. At the same time, employers resist organization by hiring antiunion consultants, outsourcing their labor force, and manipulating the bankruptcy statutes to void union contracts. And existing labor law remains a virtual dead letter, especially that which governs union organizing and collective bargaining. When it comes to regulating the labor market and maintaining routine labor relations, we have returned to the jungle once decried by Upton Sinclair.
That is the kind of environment in which effective union leadership requires an opportunistic, politically savvy set of maneuvers, inventive pressure tactics on management, and the occasional recourse to civil disobedience. Since employers never allow unions to solicit members on their property, organizers have to contact workers at home, which their employer opponents interpret as coercive and intimidating. Likewise, few unions today rely on cumbersome and delay-prone NLRB elections to organize new workers. Instead they seek a “card check” procedure, in which the employer agrees to recognize a union when more than half of all workers sign up.
But to get to such a system, the union has to convince an employer, either through contract concessions or a strike threat, that its offer really is “too good to refuse.” Thus, when the Service Employees International Union sought to organize home-health-care workers in Illinois, it made a handsome contribution to the election campaign of the now-disgraced governor, Rod Blagojevich, which critics would soon denounce as a payoff. Indeed, aggressively antiunion politicians in the South and West have often decried the collective, coercive economic pressure generated by the traditional strike as a form of racketeering. And in South Carolina just a few years back, the state attorney general charged the radical, black leadership of a longshoremen’s local with “felony riot” after unionists clashed with the police on a dockside picket line.
So it’s likely that a discourse of labor racketeering and union criminality is here to stay even as the nation passes through a devastating recession, which has discredited the Wall Street wizards and the bonus-rich corporate executives who have long served as a symbolically charged foil for labor and its partisans. Absent a radical convulsion in politics or society, cultural tropes and attitudes shift their composition only in the most incremental fashion. Add to that inertia the embedded structures of American law and politics, which privilege an unfettered market in labor and the goods that are the fruit of that labor, and it is hardly a surprise that trade unionism remains a suspect institution no matter its size, leverage, or leadership.
This is a century-long counternarrative that historians of labor, business, and politics must probe with energy and insight. A new scholarly generation has begun a long-neglected reconstruction of the history of American conservatism in the years since the Great Depression. This is vital work, even—and especially—for those who might regret the shift of American political culture to the right. But this new history will not be complete unless those same scholars come to understand why conservatives have so long exhibited such a culturally resonant animus against one of their most high-profile institutional adversaries, and why even the most fastidious and progressive unionists have found it so difficult to offer a persuasive rejoinder.