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

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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.

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.