Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Lane Windham

The power of unions in workers' lives and in the American political system has declined dramatically since the 1970s. In recent years, many have argued that the crisis took root when unions stopped reaching out to workers and workers turned away from unions. But here Lane Windham tells a different story. Highlighting the integral, often-overlooked contributions of women, people of color, young workers, and southerners, Windham reveals how in the 1970s workers combined old working-class tools--like unions and labor law--with legislative gains from the civil and women's rights movements to help shore up their prospects. Through close-up studies of workers' campaigns in shipbuilding, textiles, retail, and service, Windham overturns widely held myths about labor's decline, showing instead how employers united to manipulate weak labor law and quash a new wave of worker organizing.

Recounting how employees attempted to unionize against overwhelming odds, Knocking on Labor's Door dramatically refashions the narrative of working-class struggle during a crucial decade and shakes up current debates about labor's future. Windham's story inspires both hope and indignation, and will become a must-read in labor, civil rights, and women's history.

Genres: Labor, History, Nonfiction, American History, Economics, Politics

310 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Lane Windham is a post-doctoral scholar with Penn State University’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights. She completed a PhD in U.S. History at the University of Maryland in the spring of 2015. Her dissertation focuses on U.S. private-sector union organizing in the 1970s and is titled “Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing and the Origins of the New Economic Divide (1968-1985).”

Before returning to graduate school, Windham spent seventeen years in the union movement. She served as media outreach director and specialist for the national AFL-CIO from 1998 to 2009. There, she led a dynamic staff who planned and implemented the AFL-CIO’s media strategy. From 1993 to 1998 she worked as a union organizer and Southern regional communications director with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) and UNITE.

Windham has published two articles in the journal LABOR: “Signing Up in the Shipyard: Organizing Newport News and Reinterpreting the 1970s” and “‘A Sense of Possibility and a Belief in Collective Power’: A Labor Strategy Talk with Karen Nussbaum.” She has also published pieces on work, race and labor in the Baltimore Sun, The American Prospect, The Hill’s Congress Blog and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Windham has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships including the 2015 Richard T. Farrell Award for Best Dissertation, the Robert H. Zieger Prize for Best Essay through the Southern Labor Studies Association, and the University of Maryland Graduate School’s Flagship Fellowship. She has served on the conference planning committees of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) and the Labor and Research Action Network (LRAN).

Reviews

[Nick Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great examination of what labor’s decline in the 70’s and 80’s was like for workers struggling to form unions.

As the working class in the 70's was increasingly politicized and progressive, and thousands of women and people of color attempted to expand the victories of the civil rights and women’s movements into the workplace - big business and political conservatives teamed up to beat their efforts back, and succeeded in crushing the labor movement.

The book focuses mainly on various individual union and labor organization local fights, in order to demonstrate what union organizing looked like under these changing conditions. This zoomed-in look gives us a very clear view at how difficult it was to organize a union under the increasingly gutted labor law and right-wing backlash, but it doesn't give a clear view of why it was happening or what alternatives could have been.

My biggest criticism is that the author seemed to present the economic conditions - the financialization of the economy and globalization - as if they were predetermined. Blame is put on the union leadership for its inability to adapt to the new economic conditions, but not as much focus was put on its failure to attempt to intervene to actually change the economic conditions. This was completely in their power to do in the 70's since they still wielded such enormous power over the main American industries.

Still, it was really educational to learn about how much potential there was for labor growth in this time period. If labor leadership had charted a different course in the late 60's / early 70's and built on the advances of the civil rights movement and women right's movements, we could be in a very different place today!

[Becca R · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book on the labor movement 60s-80s. Makes the important case for how the civil rights and feminist movements created and opportunity to expand the labor movement in powerful ways. And, how the rise and expansion of the right used numerous tactics to deeply challenge and hurt the labor mvmt.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Windham connects labor's heyday of winning in the 1940s-50s to the destruction of labor's power in the 1980s by showing the 1970s were a decade of women and people of color pushing to be included in the promises of the New Deal by mass participation in labor. Windham argued that the 1970s was a huge upsurge in labor across the board, but corporate power got really good at winning NLRB elections through threats, manipulation of rules, and outright breaking of the law. Thus, though there were many more elections than in 1947, unions went from winning 80% to less than half in the 1970s. Struggles in shipyards, retail, manufacturing, and clerical industries saw the most amount of labor organizing. By employing "union avoidance" or union busting lawfirms, Windham argues that worker power was largely crushed, leading to the counteroffensives of the 1980s. She also makes a key argument that labor started laying the grounds for organizing outside the NLRB, such as pressure campaigns and community-labor relationships such as Justice for Janitors, Working America, or Jobs With Justice as the NLRB became more and more broken.

A key text for labor historians and labor activists.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Windham has written an important revisionist, corrective account of 1970s labor history that eschews the prevailing narrative of stagnation and decline by a self-satisfied bureaucracy in favor of an understanding, based on an innovative archive that mixes NLRB records with more in depth accounts of individual struggles, of the 1970s as a decade when organizing exploded into new sectors and the working class transformed itself.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clearly written qualitative analysis of the decline of unions in the 1970s in the US, with several interesting case studies of unionization and attempts at unionization in that period. The author proposes that contrary to the narrative that fewer working class Americans pursued unions and that problems internal to unions were the primary drivers of this decline, Americans were pursuing unionization at steady numbers but dramatic changes in employer response to unions (increases in law breaking by employers, the hiring of lawyers and consultants to help facilitate union busting, etc) changed the ability for workers to succeed in unionization attempts. Weak federal protections of unions were successfully and increasingly exploited by employers, whose incentives were shifting as economic turmoil and globalization undermined their profits during this decade of change. Definitely would recommend this book to anyone interested in a well executed snapshot of this period in American labor history.

[Highjump · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adds some much needed context and complexity around the often-heard lament that unions 'stopped organizing in the 70s and 80s'

[Ethan Harner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Windham provides an important corrective to the dominant narrative surrounding labor organizing amidst neoliberal ascendence. Importantly, she provides special attention to the intersectional nature of organizing in the 70s and 80s, as civil rights and feminist movements bled into issues of workers rights and economic organizing.