Choice Reviews Online · 1989 · 262 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesHistorySociologyIndustrial RelationsLabor HistoryLabor RelationsLabor OrganizingLabor-management RelationsTrade Union HistoryTrade UnionismUnion OrganizationWorkers' MovementsAfl-cio HistoryBusiness UnionismCold War HistoryCollective Bargaining HistoryLabor Movement AlliancesLabor Movement HistoryService Sector WorkplacesUnion Ideology
American labor has endured wage cuts, plant closures, broken strikes, and the AFL‑CIO’s refusal to ally with new social forces, leading to the surrender of many postwar gains. The book aims to demonstrate how the AFL‑CIO’s business‑unionism ideology disarmed unions amid a domestic right turn and the shift to globalized production. Moody uses case studies of auto, steel, meatpacking, trucking, and service‑sector struggles, along with rank‑and‑file perspectives, to trace grassroots anti‑concession movements, obstacles to organizing the unorganized, and the potential of a Rainbow Coalition and labor internationalism. The study finds that the AFL‑CIO’s business‑unionism ideology effectively disarmed unions amid a domestic right turn and the shift to globalized production.
Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO's conservative ideology of 'business unionism' effectively disarmed unions in face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favour of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its postwar gains. With extraordinary attention to the viewpoints of rank-and-file workers, Moody chronicles the major, but largely unreported, efforts of labor's grassroots to find its way out of the crisis. In case-studies of auto, steel, meatpacking and trucking, he traces the rise of 'anti-concession' movements and in other case-studies describes the formidable obstacles to the 'organization of the unorganized' in the service sector. A detailed analysis of the Rainbow Coalition's potential to unite labor with other progressive groups follows together with a pathbreaking consideration of the possibilities of a new 'labor internationalism'.