In Solidarity by Kim Moody

Author:Kim Moody
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor, Politics
ISBN: 978-1-60846-458-6
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2014-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Opening Gambit: Change the Rules

With the end of World War II the government restraints on capital’s behavior were removed. The unions that had forced recognition in the 1930s and early 1940s, whose position had been protected by the priorities of war production, however, were still there. Indeed, their presence was asserted in the massive national strike wave of 1945 and 1946 that opened collective bargaining on a scale never before seen.24 Additionally, in 1946 general strikes occurred in five American cities as managers fought to restrain union power locally.25 In addition, recession and falling profit rates in 1948 and 1949 called for action to undermine the power of these still-militant unions.26 Although the postwar boom lay ahead, it was by no means a given in the mid- to late 1940s. The intensity of class conflict and the specter of economic uncertainty sent business off in two directions in the immediate postwar period in the hopes of weakening existing unions and avoiding them where possible.

First, to take on the unions and reduce their ability to grow, American capital moved in 1946 to change the NLRA, which they held responsible for union growth. With the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1946, business had the means to do so. The outcome was the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which severely limited union actions and gave employers new “rights.”27 Despite this setback for labor, union win rates in NLRB elections continued to be high, remaining above 70 percent for several years while union membership grew by two million members from 1945 to 1950.28

A second, more effective way of avoiding unions and, indeed, leaving them behind in many cases was simply to relocate production, and this capital did on a large scale beginning at the end of the war. Some companies simply moved out of heavily unionized cities. General Motors, for example, built twenty-five new plants in the suburbs outside of Detroit from 1947 to 1958, soon to be followed by fifty-five other Detroit-based firms.29 Other corporations, such as General Electric, “decentralized” production across the country away from the unionized Northeast.30 But the major strategy was to move to the low-wage, mostly nonunion South. From 1947 to 1963 value added in manufacturing grew by 94 percent for the nation as a whole, but 163 percent for the South.31 This was union avoidance on a grand scale, one that was very difficult for unions to resist. Nevertheless, union membership continued to grow into the 1950s from 14.3 million in 1945 to 17.5 million in 1956.32 Employer attention would now turn toward stopping union growth in the arena meant to encourage it: the NLRB election.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.