Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979.

Timothy J. Minchin, Labor Under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2017)

FOLLOWING A 2016 US presidential election that saw the Democratic candidate's union household vote share advantage over the Republican shrink to eight percentage points--the smallest gap in three decades--AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka initiated a restructuring of the labour federation that included dozens of staff layoffs and the elimination of several programs in an effort to address current and anticipated revenue shortfalls. This comes at a time when labour density in the United States has dropped to 10.7 per cent, the lowest level since the 1930s. In Labor Under Fire, the prolific labour historian Timothy Minchin has taken on the daunting task of telling the AFL-CIO'S story from 1979--when union density was 23.4 per cent--to the present, delineating an era of seemingly unremittingly grim tidings and a one-step-forwards, two-steps-back trajectory of decline. If Irving Bernstein hadn't already used the title for a work about the 1920s, Minchin could have called his book The Lean Years.

While the theme of decline unavoidably colours Minchin's fine history, he strives to complicate the prevailing image of a largely hapless association leading a doomed movement. Indeed, Minchin frames his narrative of the AFL-CIO under the presidencies of Lane Kirkland, John Sweeney, and (briefly) Trumka as a revision of the hostile portrayal of the federation by leading labour historians. During the long tenure of the AFL-CIO'S larger-than-life founding president, George Meany, critics heaped charges of racism, sexism, and long-term strategic myopia against the organization that scholars have largely echoed. Minchin's most important and subtle analytical achievement is to show how the federation gradually but determinedly shed all of those Meany-era characteristics in the difficult decades following his retirement. Beginning with Lane Kirkland's under-appreciated presidency, Minchin shows, the AFL-CIO slowly transformed into a thoroughly progressive force, "firmly on the left side of the Democratic Party and the political spectrum" (249) and still punching above its weight in political impact, at the same time that organized labour's presence in society diminished relentlessly, year after year.

The source base for Minchin's crisply written and organized account, spanning ten chronological chapters and a brief epilogue on Trumka's presidency, consists of 60 oral history interviews plus archival material drawn from unprocessed and never-before-used AFL-CIO papers, collections in several presidential libraries, and a slew of personal papers. Perhaps to a fault, this is a narrative told resolutely from the vantage point of the AFL-CIO'S leadership. We get only sporadic glimpses at events from the perspectives of other actors--usually presidential administrations--seeking strategically to engage or respond to the federation. The narrative focus on AFL-CIO presidents and US presidents serves an implicit analytical purpose, emphasizing both the importance of national-level public policy for labour's fate and the degree to which the federation, lacking much authority over the activities of its union affiliates, has found its comparative advantage in political lobbying and electoral work.

The first chapter offers a sweeping overview of the Meany era that impressively synthesizes decades of labour and political history while also drawing on original archival research. Minchin identifies "roots of decline" in the midcentury heyday of union power, particularly in the AFL-CIO leadership's reluctance to forge ties to progressive social movements as well as its indifference to the task of organizing new members. The decentralization of the federation's structure, which limited it ability to compel affiliate members to invest in organizing, encouraged such indifference and would greatly hinder the federation's ability to grow its membership once its strategic priorities did shift in later years.

The core of the book consists of six chapters on Lane Kirkland's presidency, spanning his ascension as Meany's groomed successor in 1979 to his ignominious and undesired retirement in the face of an internal challenge in 1995. Kirkland had the bad luck of leading the federation just as an unprecedentedly hostile presidential administration took power. Minchin recounts the largely losing battles of the 1980s waged by labour against the Reagan administration's regressive fiscal policies, its zealously promanagement National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) appointments, and (starting with Reagan's replacement of striking air traffic controllers in 1981) its normsetting messages to corporate America declaring open season on labour. Indeed, the importance of norms and expectations in shaping the political economy is a recurring theme in Minchin's account. Nascent corporate investments in antiunion consultants and legal strategies in the 1970s gained the critical political imprimatur of a governing regime in the following decade. At the same time, growing (and rational) skepticism among workers about the reliability of the NL-RB'S commitment to enforcing existing protections for organizing, collective bargaining, and labour actions tempered their willingness to undertake the risks of either forming unions in the first place or flexing existing unions' muscle in conflicts with management.

Minchin's portrayal of the cerebral and introverted Kirkland is highly sympathetic. He argues that, on each of the major topics emphasized by the AFL-CIO'S internal and external critics--its resistance to female and racial minority inclusion in leadership, its deprioritization of organizing, and its lack of outreach to other progressive movements and organizations--Kirkland moved the federation haltingly but definitively in the direction sought by those critics. The clearest example lies in Kirkland's success in pushing the AFL-CIO "more firmly into a coalition model of relations with its progressive allies," (107) essentially validating the approach long advocated by leaders of labour's progressive wing. During Kirkland's tenure, what had been a dissident voice concentrated in service and public-sector unions came to dominate the federation's political outlook at the same time that such unions came to predominate within its membership.

The incremental quality of Kirkland's efforts to diversify the AFL-CIO'S leadership and shift priorities to organizing, however, helped to spark growing internal frustration among a dissident faction led by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which only grew in the bitter aftermath of the Clinton Administration's successful push to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Republican congressional takeover of 1994. Minchin conveys both the internal angst as well as the great excitement and popular engagement that occasioned SEIU president John Sweeney's unprecedented leadership challenge against Kirkland's successor Tom Donahue in 1995. His two chapters on the Sweeney era play out like a grim replay of the arc of Kirkland's tenure. Further efforts at shifting resource investment toward organizing ran up against the resistance of many affiliates and the limits of national authority over a decentralized federation, while broader economic and political shifts walloped the labour movement. This in turn sparked yet another internal reform movement a decade after the first, again led by Sweeney's own SEIU, though this time the result was not a change of leadership but outright schism. Minchin's account of Andy Stern's 2005 decision to lead the breakaway "Change to Win" coalition out of the AFL-CIO paints a grim portrait of misguided infighting and destructive strategic folly.

Impressively researched and ably rendered, Labor Under Fire is not without shortcomings. Most importantly, particularly given its focus on the federation's involvement in national politics, it would have benefited from much more engagement with core analytical arguments about the labour movement's changing interaction with the party system offered by historically-minded political scientists like Taylor Dark and Daniel Schlozman. Minchin shies away from major, overarching analytical claims, usually opting instead to catalogue wins and losses year by year in a reflection of the perspective of the labour leaders who supply the bulk of his source material. This means that, after a brief discussion in the introduction, the book also pays insufficient attention to the comparative international context for American labour's travails. Finally, Minchin has a tendency to make causal claims about the contribution of labour's (undeniably extensive) electoral efforts to the outcomes of various elections without much in the way of rigorous evidence. Nevertheless, Labor Under Fire should set the standard for national histories of the labour movement in the contemporary era.

SAM ROSENFELD

Colgate University

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Author:	Rosenfeld, Sam
Publication:	Labour/Le Travail
Date:	Mar 22, 2018
Words:	1331
Previous Article:	The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I.
Next Article:	History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History.
Topics:	Books Book reviews