An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism

The Haymarket Series

by Kim Moody

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 the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor 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 post-war 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.”

Genres: Labor, History, The United States Of America, Politics

376 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1988

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a sobering experience re-reading this book 23 years after it was published (and 22 years after I first read it). It remains a trenchant critique of business and enterprise unionism, and a compelling case for community organising (and what we used to call class-struggle unionism). Moody is a fine journalist formerly with the excellent Labor Notes (see http://labornotes.org/) and not scared to take a stand in support of two of the most inspiring and divisive disputes of the 1980s – the Watsonville Canning Strike that propelled a Chicana-led workers struggle to international profile and broke the corrupt power of the local Teamsters union as well as securing significant victories, and the Hormel P-9 meatworkers dispute that was defeated by the company and the union in concert (but no cahoots).

The major gap in the book is the disproportionately low attention to working women’s struggles – although to be fair there was not a lot to go on in the period through the 1960s-1980s, and the greater attention to issues central to African-American workers is probably fair.

Part of me is depressed that we seem to have learnt nothing and UK unions remain stuck in business unionism models as do those in the US – but recalling the disputes of the 1980s, the tragic decline of unions as agents of working class power, and revisiting Moody’s call for action now along the lines of Watsonville and Hormel helps replace that glumness with a vision of a world that could be better.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly excellent. Moody does a great job laying if the field of macroeconomic trends in the US from the post war boom to the Reagan Era and the way labor responded to them. While I have some critiques of his evaluation of Left politics in the US (he's coming at it from a Trotskyist perspective which I think tends to minimize both the early successes of the communist movement and aspects of the global class war commonly called the Cold War), they are a very minor aspect of an overall fantastic evaluation of the field of labor struggle in the US from 1940-1988.

Moody not only attacks business unionism from a theoretical level for its stifling bureaucracy and class collaborationism, but also lays out case after case after case of major struggles that were lost due to these structural failures.

While it is a bit depressing to read today and see how little has changed in the halls of power in the major unions, and how many of the trends of decline and dependency on a ruling class party like the Dems are still the same today, it does make his analysis all the more relevant.

A must read for organizers in the US.

[David Selsby · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a dense read; unfortunately, after awhile “An Injury to All” also became a tedious read.
It’s long. It’s detailed. I’m not studying labor history. I’m not involved in organized labor. I imagine for a reader who wants to know the nitty-gritty of different union organizations and the actions they undertook and the resistance they encountered all the way through the 60s, 70s, and 80s this book is a trove of valuable information. As a non-expert, I started to zone out about half way through. For the general reader--even one deeply interested in American history and labor history--this might not be a generative read.

The biggest (only?) takeaway for me was learning about the emergence of business unionism in the late 40s and early 50s and how that orientation altered the dynamic between labor and management, so that labor was no longer instinctually antagonistic toward management, but rather worked with (to varying degrees) management to make sure the wealth of a company or corporation was distributed equitably. The discrete factors of American political economy in the mid-twentieth century allowed for this detente between labor and management. It was during this time, from the mid-forties to the mid-seventies, that income increases were pegged to growth rate. Since the mid-seventies, the U.S. has seen a separation between growth rate and income growth. There are many factors for this, which Moody ably details, but the bottom line for union militancy and union effectiveness is unions had been largely defanged by the mid-seventies as a result of the business unionism orientation. Unions didn’t have the strength or the militancy to fight back at the dawn of the neoliberal era.

Presumably many people love books like this, where the details of what transpired in the unions, with management, with political economy, are laid out and the reader himself formulates a narrative about who was fiercely committed, who or what organization compromised too much, etc. I’m not saying I need my books overly polemical or slanted towards this or that conclusion, but there is something dry about this text and the reason for that dryness is hard to pin down. Is it the seemingly endless number of details about labor actions, where it’s hard to differentiate the significance of this one or that one? Perhaps it is just Moody’s writing style--methodical and direct--that made my eyes glaze over after awhile. I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’d recommend this book. It was quite informative for awhile. Then it became tough sledding to finish.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although obviously a bit dated now, very good history of the postwar union years up until the mid 80's. Very dense and at times academic in delivery. Admittedly I glazed over during some paragraphs full of statistics, and selectively read different areas of the last 1/3rd, but wholly worthwhile.