Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch with America [Hardcover]

Max Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1996

No institution in America has changed more in the past twenty-five years, observes Max Green, than the American labor movement. From its founding in 1884, supporters and detractors alike noted how distinctive -- how distinctively American -- the movement was. It rejected socialism and explicitly accepted the private enterprise system, seeking to improve the lives of workers not through political change but through collective bargaining.

In contrast to its socialist counterparts in Europe, the union movement here renounced not only political radicalism but cultural radicalism as well. In fact, the movement claimed to embody explicitly American values as much as -- if not more than -- any other institution in the country.

Such is no longer the case: by the early 1980s, the movement was advocating economic policies that were fundamentally inconsistent with competitive capitalism; had embraced the race- and gender-based policies of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements; and was bent on challenging the pursuit of U.S. interests abroad, particularly opposing strengthening free-market economies through free trade and other means.

Max Green, formerly a dedicated democratic socialist and a firm believer in the AFL-CIO, documents the descent into radicalism of the labor unions and concludes that as currently constituted and led, this movement no longer serves the public or the national interest. The labor movement, he predicts, has condemned itself to a life on the leftward fringe of American politics. Index.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It is hard to imagine a time when the union was as American an institution as apple pie. But between the 1930s and 1960s, Big Labor formed a status-quo triumvirate with Big Business and Big Government. Although the three sometimes clashed, they were seen as largely working together to advance the interests of ordinary Americans. But union membership has dwindled severely. Max Green shows how this drift has coincided with labor abandoning the political center for the political left, and how its traditional approval of capitalism has turned into an unhealthy skepticism of market forces that is increasingly out-of-touch with the modern world.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 215 pages
• Publisher: American Enterprise Institute Press (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0844739960
• ISBN-13: 978-0844739960
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,167,981 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Organized Labor and the New Left, December 30, 1999

By 

Patrick W. O'Hara "taparaho" (Salt Point, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch with America (Hardcover)

In this very reader-friendly work, Max Green describes the slow demise of the American Labor movement. His thesis rests on the fact that the emergence of the New Politics of the New Democrats in the late 60's early 70's brought the political aspect of organized labor away from the "bread and butter" issues of Gompers -- which rejected socialism -- to an increasinly liberal movement with declinig membership and influence.

He shows how this drift has coincided with labor abandoning the political center for the political left, and how its traditional approval of capitalism has turned into an unhealthy skepticism of market forces that is increasingly out-of-touch with the modern world. In short, the democratic nature of unionism was undermined by the New Lefts direction toward seeking special protections for minorities, rather than seeking gains for the whole. He further points out how the policies of the New Left actually hurt a core group of union members, middle class white America, and forced them to seek poltical representation outside of the traditional Labor-Democrat relationship. Thus was born, the Reagan-Democrat.

Green's work is well documented and worth reading, and has serious implications in contemporay society. Of greatest importantce is the need for middle America to gain representation -- a third party -- that would seek a more equal distribution of wealth. In short, raising the economic standard of living for all will likely adress the social issues of minorities as well.

4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Decline of Unions: We All May Be Better Off, October 15, 1998

By 

Michael E. Kreca "[e-mail]" (San Diego, Calif., USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch with America (Hardcover)

Max Green's fascinating exploration of the dwindling of organized labor in the United States has the slightly mournful tone of the former "true believer" but is refreshingly without the corrosive "sour grapes" approach that too often accompanies that tone.

In this heavily footnoted but very readable work, Green explains American labor unions had been organized, gained power and ruled during a time when the US economy was dominated by a handful of huge, powerful, vertically-integrated industrial enterprises which were members of seemingly invincible tariff-protected domestic monopolies or near-monopolies. Their workforces were composed largely of single-task semiskilled and unskilled manual workers. All rhetoric and behavior to the contrary, labor leaders for years in reality generally shared the economic and political outlooks of their presumed business "adversaries."

The 1970s and '80s, which saw foreign big and domestic small-business competition, the development of economical information and sophisticated production technologies, the rise of the well educated "knowledge worker," and government decontrol of key industries completely changed the socioeconomic landscape of this nation and the world. Business, although fitfully and often ineffectively, did successfully adapt to this new commercial landscape over time. Labor chose not to, instead acting more and more like backward-looking medieval guilds and gravitating to the radical left, embracing every fringe group that had little to do with business or even labor, and to government at all levels, the last real "monopoly" in the USA.

Green's work is flawed in the notable absence of any discussion of high-level corruption and organized crime infiltration that seriously damaged labor's effectiveness and tarnished its reputation over time. Also, greater discussion of the increasing dominance of small and medium sized businesses in the US economy and their strong immunity to organization efforts combined with the exposure of labor's legal immunity from prosecution for often heinous crimes against persons and property would have made for a more complete work.