76 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
THE CRITICS
A CRITICAT LARGE
STATE OF THE UNIONS
What happened to America’s labor movement?
BY CALEB CRAIN
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
D
o you have rights at work? Frank-
lin Delano Roosevelt thought you
did. In 1936, while trying to haul Amer-
ica’s economy out of the bog that the
free market had driven it into, Roosevelt
argued that workers needed to have a
say, declaring it unjust that
a small group had concentrated into their
own hands an almost complete control over
other people’s property, other people’s money,
other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For
too many of us throughout the land, life was
no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could
no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
For Roosevelt, a system in which bosses
could unilaterally decide “the hours
men and women worked, the wages
they received, the conditions of their
labor” amounted to “dictatorship.” He
hoped that the New Deal would bring
workers and managers together in a
new form of workplace governance.
New Dealers drew on an idea known
as industrial democracy, developed, in
the late nineteenth century, by English
socialist thinkers who saw workplace
rights as analogous to civil rights such
as due process and the freedoms of
speech and assembly. Senator Robert
Wagner, who wrote the National Labor
Relations Act of 1935—also known as
the Wagner Act—made the point ex-
plicitly: “Democracy in industry means
fair participation by those who work in
the decisions vitally affecting their lives
and livelihood.” In their efforts to civ-
ilize the workplace, however, Roosevelt
and his allies didn’t set up a new insti-
tution for workers to speak through.
They relied on an existing one: the
union.
Whenever the rate of unionization in
America has risen in the past hundred
years, the top one per cent’s portion of
the national income has tended to shrink.
After Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act
and other pro-union legislation, a gen-
eration of workers shared deeply in the
nation’s prosperity. Real wages doubled
in the two decades following the Sec-
ond World War, and, by 1959, Vice-Pres-
ident Richard Nixon was able to boast
to Nikita Khrushchev that “the United
States comes closest to the ideal of pros-
perity for all in a classless society.”
America’s unions and workers haven’t
been faring quite as well lately. Where la-
bor is concerned, recent decades strongly
resemble the run-up to the Great De-
pression. Both periods were marked by
extreme concentrations of personal wealth
and corporate power. In both, the value
created by workers decoupled from the
pay they received: during the nineteen-
twenties, productivity grew forty-three
per cent while wages stagnated; between
1973 and 2016, productivity grew six times
faster than compensation. And unions
were in decline: between 1920 and 1930,
the proportion of union members in the
labor force dropped from 12.2 per cent
to 7.5 per cent, and, between 1954 and
2018, it fell from thirty-five per cent to
10.5 per cent. In “Beaten Down, Worked
Up” (Knopf ), a compact, pointed new
account of unions in America, Steven
Greenhouse, a longtime labor reporter
for the Times, writes that “the share of
national income going to business profits
has climbed to its highest level since
World War II, while workers’ share of
income (employee compensation, includ-
ing benefits) has slid to its lowest level
since the 1940s.”
“Beaten Down” updates Greenhouse’s
book “The Big Squeeze” (2008), in which
he portrayed a “broad decline in the sta-
tus and treatment of American work-
ers,” with such details as fingers chopped
off in a yogurt-container factory, stock-
ers locked inside a Sam’s Club overnight,
and a Walmart cashier who “menstru-
ated on herself,” as a colleague put it,
after being denied bathroom breaks. (The
colleague was disciplined for buying the
woman sanitary napkins and a washcloth
on company time.) “Beaten Down” adds
new outrages to the list, including the
shuttering of the Web sites Gothamist
and DNAinfo by their owner after staff
writers unionized, but Greenhouse’s em-
phasis this time is on remedy rather than
indictment. A General Motors employee
recalls the union legacy she inherited
from her great-grandfather, who partic-
ipated in a strike at the company in 1936
and 1937 that helped launch the golden
age of American labor. “Nobody realizes
that all that we have is because of what
was done before,” she says. The book is
a kind of primer for the woman’s peers,
explaining how “the eight-hour work-
day, employer-backed health coverage,
paid vacations, paid sick days, safe work-
places” arose—and what the prospects
are for keeping them.
O
ne of the earliest heroes in Green-
house’s book is a Ukrainian im-
migrant named Clara Lemlich, a dress-
maker and a union organizer, who, in
1909, hopped onstage during a rally at
Cooper Union to call, in Yiddish, for a
strike against New York’s garment indus-
try. Carried out mostly by women, the
strike became known as the Uprising of
