Beaten Down, Worked Up

Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. xv, 387 pp., notes and index. $27.95.

Review by Melvyn Dubofsky, Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology Emeritus at Binghamton University, SUNY.

Since retiring as the New York Times labor beat reporter, Steven Greenhouse has continued to enlighten general readers about the lives of American workers and the organizations that have defended them. His previous book, The Big Squeeze, described the plight of workers made insecure and economically hard-pressed by the national and global forces that created a second Gilded Age. With skillful prose portraits of individual workers he delineated how work had grown ever more precarious, less rewarding, and oppressive. In Beaten Down, Greenhouse builds on those themes but also uses history and contemporary events to explore how working people can fight back.

In four parts and twenty-one chapters, Greenhouse again explores why workers’ lives have grown precarious, the tactics and strategies that workers have used in the past and present to achieve security, and the methods that hold the most promise for creating a more secure and egalitarian future. Part One has only three chapters, the first of which describes how workers lost the voice that they had won at work in the quarter of a century after World War II when unions represented nearly one-third of all nonagricultural workers and set wage patterns and working conditions in mass-production industries. Chapter 2 describes a contemporary US in which barely ten percent of workers belong to unions (less than seven percent in the private sector) and most workers struggle to make ends meet. Chapter 3 offers a dramatic counterpoint, highlighting how the rise of the culinary workers’ union in Las Vegas changed the lives of its members. Through a warm biographical portrait of a Latina hotel worker, who rose to become a union leader, Greenhouse shows how the Las Vegas local of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Union representing the dominant sector of the city’s work force, created stable work environments, decent wages and annual incomes, excellent health care, and the prospect for a comfortable retirement for its members. Las Vegas proved the exception to American reality in the early twenty-first century.

Part Two, the five chapters of which provide the historical core of the book, explain how labor built its power during the years of the “Great Contraction” in inequality from roughly 1947 to 1973. Rather than sketch the full story of union growth, Greenhouse focuses on several dramatic set pieces. One chapter treats the 1909-10 “uprising of the Twenty Thousand” in New York City, a rebellion by aggrieved young immigrant female garment workers. Through the story of Clara Lemlich, a feisty young woman of Russian Jewish origin who later became a communist and lifelong advocate of political protest, Greenhouse shows how immigrant women built one of the largest locals in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. The next chapter portrays a more dramatic event, the 1911 Triangle Fire in which more than 140 Jewish and Italian immigrant shirtwaist makers, nearly all young women, many teenagers, lost their lives. Here Greenhouse uses the life of Frances Perkins to explain how the tragedy led to immediate improvements in working conditions in New York State and subsequently to the labor reforms of the New Deal. In the third chapter readers learn how the conjunction of the Great Depression and the New Deal precipitated a worker uprising in the automobile industry that culminated in the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike, the surrender of General Motors, then the world’s largest industrial corporation, to the United Automobile Workers of America, the spearhead for the growth of CIO unions in mass production industries. The final chapter uses the life of Walter Reuther, president of the UAW from 1946 until his untimely death in 1970, to examine the triumph of unionism in its post-World War II heyday. Here readers discover how negotiations between Reuther and automobile company executives, especially those at General Motors, produced multi-year union-management contracts that provided job security, rising wages, health insurance, and paid holidays, in other words a private welfare state. Union gains created industry-wide standards often also adopted by nonunion firms in order to keep unions out. The last chapter treats the 1968 Memphis Sanitation workers strike, best known for its slogan “I am a Man,” and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. who had gone to Memphis to support the strikers.

The final two sections form the heart of the book. The six chapters in Part Three describe the steady decline of labor power from the 1970s to the present. It opens with the story of the 1981 Air Traffic Controllers’ strike told through the memories of several key participants. Though the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization was a small, insignificant part of organized labor and a maverick one at that, the only union to endorse Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, its defeat in 1981 heralded hard times for all unions. Not only did President Reagan declare the strike illegal but he used his full power to break it and deem strikers ineligible for federal reemployment. As Greenhouse suggests, employers in the private sector, taking their cue from Reagan, grew more resistant to labor, often precipitating strikes in order to break unions. As corporations fought unions, labor leaders failed to respond effectively. Greenhouse is far from generous to labor’s leaders, convicting them of self-inflicted wounds to their movement. Too many union leaders refused to spend money on organizing and others engaged in corrupt practices. The result, between 1981 and 2010, unionism collapsed in the private sector. Not content with weakening unions there, big money interests and Republican politicians challenged union power among public employees. In the year 2000 nearly 35 percent of all public employees belonged to a union. Beginning in Wisconsin with the election of Scott Walker as governor in 2010, the Republicans who had gained unitary control of state government attacked public employee unions. Republican policies denied unionized teachers the right to bargain over any issue other than salary (salary increases were limited to rises in the cost of living); instituted onerous rules concerning union representation elections; and made the payment of union dues a voluntary and individual decision (a right-to-work law for public employees). Walker placed similar restrictions on other public employee unions except for police and firefighters whose unions had endorsed the governor’s candidacy. The result, public employee union membership declined by about forty percent and union treasuries were decimated, a blow to a state Democratic party that depended on union financial support for its campaigns. From Wisconsin the anti-public employee campaign spread to other midwestern states under Republican control: Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri. The Supreme Court delivered its own blow to public employee unionism in 2018 in a five to four ruling declaring agency fees for public employees a violation of their First Amendment rights (hence creating “right-to-work” law for all public employees). As Greenhouse concludes, such attacks on union power achieved their goal, rendering “big labor” a minnow in electoral politics.

In the final and longest section of the book Greenhouse explains how workers have tried to rebuild labor power. He discusses how employees in the “gig economy,” most notably “Mechanical Turks” and ride-share drivers (think Uber and Lyft), all of whom are defined as independent contractors and work in isolation from each other, have used technology and social media to build community and seek collective power. Next he dissects the campaign by the Service Employees Union that organized fast-food workers to engage in strikes and mass protests to demand a $15 an hour minimum wage. Though the campaign failed to build stable unions, it caused employers to grant wage increases and, more importantly, led states and cities to adopt higher minimum wage laws. Greenhouse then explains how previously exploited agricultural workers  (mostly the most marginal immigrants) who picked tomatoes in Florida pressured their primary purchasers, such corporate giants as Burger King, McDonalds, and Chipotle, among others, to pay more, enabling growers to increase wages for the pickers. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) became one of the most successful agricultural workers’ unions in the country. Greenhouse analyzes the great exception to the failure of most local movements to create durable unions in the case of a rising and empowered union movement in Los Angeles. There, largely second-generation Latino-American workers, who served as movement leaders, and new immigrants built service sector unions that bargained successfully with employers and used their voting power to elect a municipal government open to the influence of labor. Greenhouse then explores how teachers in the antilabor states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arizona struck in violation of state law and without union sanction but with the support of students, parents, and others in their communities to wrest substantial salary gains from state governments plus additional state financial support for education. Here Greenhouse stresses the vital importance of union-community coalitions, a type of social reform unionism, in developing labor power. Finally, Greenhouse reminds readers of the barriers that workers still face as they try to rebuild labor power. Today workers find their electoral influence diluted by the influence of money in political campaigns, their power at work weakened by the rights granted to employers in contemporary labor law, and their existence threatened by judicial rulings that empower corporate control. Greenhouse calls upon unions to spend more money and energy on organizing, to provide an alternative organizational voice for workers unlikely or unable to build stable unions (which the AFL-CIO has already done with its “Working America” that claims three million members), and to use workers’ collective voice to create a society that benefits all citizens, union and nonunion alike. There is nothing crazy about such a dream he reminds readers. “The whole idea that raising wages is a left ideal is nutty,” an Angelena labor leader remarked. “You can’t make an economy work if people don’t have money to spend.” (p. 283) Nor can you create a decent society absent labor power.