THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019 79
remain outside the jurisdiction of the
National Labor Relations Board.)
Despite these exclusions—and de-
spite racist “hate strikes” in the early twen-
tieth century by white union members
who objected to black co-workers—black
workers joined unions in large numbers
after the Second World War. By the nine-
teen-seventies, they were more likely
than any other demographic to be in a
union. The Great Migration from the
rural South to the urban North had
landed many of them in the sorts of low-
wage, high-skill, large-firm jobs that were
quickest to unionize. But, as the sociol-
ogist Jake Rosenfeld has shown, in his
book “What Unions No Longer Do”
(2014), they joined in even greater num-
bers than those factors would predict.
The quest for workers’ rights ran in par-
allel with the quest for civil rights. The
night before Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s
assassination, he spoke in support of a
sanitation-worker strike: “What does it
profit a man to be able to eat at an in-
tegrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn
enough money to buy a hamburger and
a cup of coffee?” A black employee’s wage
today is, on average, 16.4 per cent higher
if she is in a union, but the wage gap be-
tween black workers and white workers
remains large and persistent. Rosenfeld
suspects that the black community was
welcomed in too late to receive the full
benefit of unions’ heyday.
Public approval of unions began to
fade at the end of the nineteen-fifties.
Robert F. Kennedy confronted the Team-
sters president Jimmy Hoffa during a
Senate investigation that exposed cor-
ruption, fraud, tax evasion, extortion, beat-
ings, and murder. To hip leftists of the
sixties, unions looked stodgily bureau-
cratic. In 1962, the activist Tom Hayden
accused labor of “losing much of the ide-
alism that once made it a driving move-
ment”; at a panel discussion in 1967, Bill
Clinton, then an undergraduate, asked
George Meany, the head of the A.F.L.-
C.I.O., whether collective bargaining was
“merely another institution against which
man must assert himself.”
Meany supported the Vietnam War,
and at the 1968 Democratic National
Convention he dismissed protesters who
had been beaten by police as “a dirty-
necked and dirty-mouthed group of
kooks.” Meany, a former plumber from
the Bronx, preferred looking after his
own to chasing visions of workplace de-
mocracy. “Why should we worry about
organizing people who do not appear
to want to be organized?” he said, in
1972, shrugging off the evangelical spirit.
It was Meany who coined the phrase
“silent majority” to refer to working-class
whites without a college education who
felt alienated by anti-establishment dis-
ruption and progressive moralizing—
and who would be crucial to Nixon’s
political victories.
Though a number of these wounds
look self-inflicted, Rosenfeld suggests
that macroeconomic forces may have
made union decline inevitable. In the
past four decades, unionization rates have
slipped across the developed world. In
the nineteen-seventies, America’s man-
ufacturers for the first time faced serious
foreign competition, which stripped profit
margins and put unionized companies
at a disadvantage just when high unem-
ployment was depriving workers of bar-
gaining leverage. Federal deregulation in
transportation and telecommunications
whittled away profits that unions were
hoping to share in. Manufacturing jobs
were being replaced by service jobs, which
were harder to unionize. And automa-
tion was steadily grinding jobs away. Thestory goes that a Ford executive once
asked, as he showed off new robots to a
union leader, “How are you going to col-
lect union dues from these guys?” (“How
are you going to get them to buy Fords?”
the union leader replied.)
Some companies started to factor the
cost of breaking the Wagner Act into
their budgets. Under the law, any worker
fired for supporting a union must be re-
instated with back pay, but the company
can deduct income he earns elsewhere
in the meantime and owes no additional
fine. (In some cases, the only penalty is
having to admit wrongdoing on a bul-
letin board.) A 2009 survey found that
union supporters were illegally fired at
thirty-four per cent of companies where
the management opposed a union.
Greenhouse interviews a nursing-home
employee in Florida who was awarded
less than two thousand dollars at the end
of a five-and-a-half-year investigation
of his unfair firing.
In the 1980 Presidential election, a
union of air-traffic controllers bucked
tradition and endorsed the Republican
candidate, Ronald Reagan. The control-
lers, who worked for the federal govern-
ment, were aggrieved about their sala-
ries, whose value had been eroded by“Wait—did you wash your hands?”