Showdown at Nissan: the 1989 campaign to organize Nissan in Smyrna,Tennessee, and the rise of the transplant sector

In July 1989, workers at Nissan’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, voted 1622 to 711 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). At the time, many reporters saw the well-publicized Nissan vote – dubbed a ‘showdown’ by the New York Times – as a defining moment in modern labor history. The election deserves further exploration, especially as it played a key role in establishing the non-union ‘transplant’ sector. UAW leaders blamed the Smyrna loss on Nissan’s anti-union tactics, while the company claimed that workers did not need a union because they were already well paid (although this was largely due to the UAW’s presence). This article is the first to provide a detailed analysis that draws on the union’s records of the campaign, as well as many other sources. While the factors cited publicly were important, the article demonstrates that there were additional reasons for the union’s defeat, including internal divisions, unanticipated staffing problems, and the logistical challenge of organizing such a big – and new – facility. Although Nissan workers had many grievances, the company also fostered loyalty by not laying off workers, and by expanding the plant. Finally, it secured a high level of community support, and drew off the conservative political climate of the era.     

Look at Detroit: The United Auto Workers and the Battle to Organize Volkswagen in Chattanooga

ABSTRACT

On February 14, 2014, workers at Volkswagen’s new plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted 712 to 626 against being represented by the United Automobile Workers of America (UAW). The result capped one of the most high-profile organizing campaigns of recent years, with most media accounts anticipating a UAW victory, especially as VW had declared that it would not oppose the union. The VW election is also now attracting scholarly interest, with accounts stressing the role of external opposition – especially from conservative politicians and lobby groups – along with the UAW’s over-reliance on partnerships with German actors. Providing a detailed analysis of the campaign, this article recognizes the importance of these factors, but also argues that an important role was played by the UAW’s strong association with the domestic automakers, and especially with Detroit, their historic base. Citing the fact that foreign automakers had expanded since the 1980s while the domestics had contracted, opponents effectively linked the UAW with economic decline. These arguments swayed many workers. Placing the VW story within the broader struggle of the UAW to organize a foreign-owned auto plant, the article also stresses structural obstacles, especially the location of Greenfield plants in areas of low union density.     

A successful union in an era of decline: interrogating the growth of the Service Employees International Union, 1980-1995

ABSTRACT

Between 1980 and 1995, while John Sweeney was president, the membership of the Service Employees International Union rose from around 600,000 to over 1.1 million. It continued to increase after 1995, making the SEIU the largest and fastest-growing union in the country. This growth was remarkable because it occurred at a terrible time for unions, one where the overwhelming emphasis – in both the media and academic scholarship – was on labor’s decline. While scholars have noted the SEIU’s growth, there has been little sustained analysis of how it was achieved. Existing accounts also posit growth largely as a reflection of the union’s organizing prowess. Drawing on the SEIU’s papers and interviews, this article argues that the union’s growth under Sweeney did reflect its commitment to organizing. At the same time, the article makes a fresh contribution by showing that the SEIU also grew because of lesser-known factors, including the affiliation of independent unions and legislative advances in public sector rights. The SEIU also benefited from operating in a growing sector of the economy, where low-paid workers needed unions. These conclusions are developed through analysis of “flagship” drives at Beverly Nursing homes, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the high-profile “Justice for Janitors” campaign.     

A pivotal role? The AFL–CIO and the 2008 presidential election

This article explores the role that organized labor played in the landmark presidential election of 2008. In particular, it explores the work of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), which ran its biggest ever election campaign in 2008, spending upwards of $250 million. While there is a vibrant emerging literature on the election, particularly from political scientists and former reporters, labor’s role in the story has been largely overlooked. Drawing on new parts of the AFL–CIO’s papers, as well as interviews with key staffers and federation leaders, this article highlights the important – and overlooked – role that labor played in putting Barack Obama into the White House. Especially important were its extensive efforts to educate – and pressure – white members, many of whom had backed other candidates during the Democratic primaries, to support Obama. Indeed, the Washington Post asserted that union members played a ‘pivotal role’ in Obama’s victory, especially in terms of delivering the white vote. It was a conclusion largely supported by exit polls, which showed that white union members were much more likely to support Obama than whites who were not in unions. The article highlights that despite the decline in union density – by this time only about 12% of American workers belonged to unions, compared to 35% in the 1950s – the labor movement retained considerable political influence, chiefly because of reforms carried out by AFL–CIO President John J. Sweeney. While Obama was unable to fulfill many of the expectations generated by his campaign, the story of labor and the 2008 election is an important one in its own right, showing that contemporary labor could still be a powerful and constructive force.     

Toilets and resistance in Italian factories in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

In the literature on industrial conflict, the Italy of the 1950s is often described as marked by worker acquiescence and an absence of conflict, ensured by high unemployment and the severe repression of union activism. My research challenges this. While formal, organized collective action subsided, workers continued to show their defiance and opposition to factory authorities by means of diverse acts of individual resistance that have escaped scholarly study. Drawing on anthropological theory, particularly Scott’s notion of ‘weapons of the weak’ – the strategies used by subordinate classes when facing heavy repression or lack of resources – this article undertakes an innovative analysis of the use of insults, irreverent behaviour, rumours and mockery of foremen and bosses to undermine the authority and legitimacy of factory hierarchies. It casts new light on the protest cultures and practices of Italian workers in the 1950s and improves our understanding of post-1945 industrial conflict.     

The Women's Charter: American Communists and the Equal Rights Amendment debate

The American Communist Party (CPUSA) opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), arguing that it failed to ameliorate class and racial inequality. In 1936 the CPUSA participated in the Women's Charter campaign, an alternative to the ERA crafted to protect labor legislation. This article argues that the Charter campaign and the CPUSA's opposition to the ERA demonstrate class-based visions of equality that amalgamated race and gender into the class struggle and highlights disagreements among women's rights activists about how to define women's equality. These disagreements prevented a unified single-issue women's movement after 1920.     

Indispensable Outcasts: Harvest Laborers in the Wheat Belt of the Middle West, 1890–1925

This article assesses the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) during the presidency of John J. Sweeney, which lasted from 1995 until 2009. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including press accounts and the AFL-CIO's own papers, it provides one of the first scholarly assessments of the entire Sweeney presidency. Sweeney won office in the first contested election in the AFL-CIO's history, and he came into power promising to revitalize the Federation, which is the largest labor federation in the Western world. Under Sweeney, the AFL-CIO invested an unprecedented amount of resources into both organizing and political mobilization, two key areas. In the early years of his presidency, Sweeney oversaw some important gains, particularly in the organizing arena, but the 2000 presidential election proved to be a turning point. After 2000, Sweeney's reforms were undermined primarily by external factors, particularly mounting corporate opposition, deindustrialization, and a hostile political climate, although internal resistance and division also played a role. As a result, a major campaign to secure labor law reform fell short, and union density continued to decline, yet the rate of decline was slower than it had been in the 1980s and early 1990s. Overall, although the results of Sweeney’s efforts were mixed, the important role that the AFL-CIO played in electing Barack Obama partly justified Sweeney’s emphasis on political mobilization.     

Bound to Please: a history of the Victorian corset

This paper addresses feminist materialism as political practice through a case study of IWW-Earth First! Local 1, the late Judi Bari's organization of a radical ecology/timber workers' union in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California. Rejecting the Earth First! mythology of timber workers as ‘enemies’ of nature, Bari sought to unite workers and environmentalists in pursuit of sustainable forestry practices against the devastating approaches favoured by multinational logging corporations. In so doing, she brought a working-class feminist perspective to the radical ecology of Earth First! Bari's work provided a significant instance of community organizing in opposition to the masculinist, exclusionary practices and misanthropic posturing of Earth First!'s self-proclaimed ‘eco-warriors’ and ‘rednecks for nature’. What is perhaps most interesting about the development of Local 1 is the articulation of feminist, environmentalist and labour discourses through a series of political actions.     

Navigating class power and inequalities: new deal liberals and the Los Angeles regional labor board, 1933-1934

ABSTRACT

This article examines how local state officials operated the Los Angeles Regional Labor Board, 1933-1934, a regional branch of the National Labor Board. Amid a surge in workers mobilizing strikes and organizing unions, which faced fierce business opposition in LA, one of the period’s most anti-union cities, local state officials discarded initial solutions to industrial conflict – solutions based on state paternalism and involved parties’ voluntary compliance – and proposed more robust state interventionist tools. Such efforts were to enhance state authority and power and forge greater class equality by accepting worker rights and limiting business prerogatives, while the officials also obsessively encouraged the economic ‘wheels be kept turning and the pulse quickened.’ Drawing on regional-based archives, we trace local officials navigating and shaping social relations, and investigate the unpredictable, everyday workings of local responses to national-level policy-making. Earlier scholarship on the period highlights the role of leaders, like FDR or Senator Wagner, or business elites crafting seemingly pro-working-class policy, alongside the accounts of structural political economy. We emphasize local state agencies tasked with policy implementation becoming sites of contention for class actors and state officials, reflecting more general patterns but also initiating institutional procedures with enduring implications for US capital-labor relations.

Abbreviations: LA: Los Angeles; NLB: National Labor Board; RLB: Regional Labor Board; NLRB: National Labor Relations Board; AFL: American Federation of Labor; LACC: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce; M&M: Merchant and Manufacturers Association; NRA: National Recovery Administration     

An ethnography of global labour migration

An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs – dirty, dangerous and degrading – in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers' violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask – who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal.     

Organizing teachers in Pennsylvania, 1935–1941

ABSTRACT

By eliminating mandatory agency fees, the US Supreme Court’s Janus decision has created an opportunity for the American teachers’ unions to renew their commitment to organizing teachers. This article returns us to the pre-agency fee era, when on-the-ground organizational work was essential for building teachers’ unions. Drawing from archival documents, it shows how dedicated activists from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh reached out to Pennsylvania’s classroom teachers to draw them into the AFT during the later Depression years. It details the changes in their organizational strategy, the challenges organizers faced in the field, their successes and failures, and the work accomplished by a paid AFT organizer – Vivian Dahl – in 1938. Above all, it documents both the dividends of face-to-face interactions between organizers and prospective unionists and the difficulties of such work in an ideologically polarized political environment, among a group of workers dominated by the hierarchical ethos of professionalism.     

The UAW and the struggle to organize aircraft, 1937–1942

This article examines the United Automobile Workers’ Union (UAW) efforts to organize the aircraft industry, 1937–1942. It argues that the North American Aviation Strike in Inglewood, California in 1941 played a pivotal role in determining the union's fate in the industry. Following the controversial strike national UAW leaders seized control over the Aviation Organizing Campaign, placing the drive clearly in the hands of the union's auto interests. The move removed local leaders, and alienated a workforce that long cast a suspicious eye on the UAW. Ultimately, as events at Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo, New York show, the decision greatly hindered the UAW efforts in aircraft and opened the door to fierce competition from the International Association of Machinists.     

Childbearers as rights-bearers: feminist discourse on the rights of aboriginal and non-aboriginal mothers in Australia, 1920–50

Abstract

In the post-suffrage era in Australia, feminists invoked maternalist arguments in support of the idea that mothers were political subjects with rights and they extended their campaigns to press for recognition of the rights of Aboriginal women. This article examines the claim made by post-suffrage feminists that ‘the common status of motherhood’ entailed a range of social, economic and civil rights. They argued in Royal Commissions, election campaigns, and the press that all mothers, working class and middle class, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, who wished to retain the custody of their children should have the legal right and economic ability to do so. In New South Wales the campaign culminated in the staging of a play called Whose Child? This article explores some of the tensions between Women's claims as mothers and as independent citizens and the difficulties encountered when feminists attempted to have mothers' rights defined as human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.     

Organized labor in the political process: A case study of the right‐to‐work campaign in Ohio

The 40-year anniversary of the Equal Pay Act in 2010 brought a new notoriety to what was once an obscure dispute – the Ford sewing machinists’ strike of 1968. Even a film, Made In Dagenham, has now been released in Britain and the US and, as described below, a number of letters and articles have appeared celebrating what is universally described as ‘a strike for equal pay’. Yet the sewing machinists’ placards at their union conference proclaiming ‘Equal Rights’ are probably the nearest the workers themselves got to a demand for equal pay. That demand was instead developed by the male trade unionists who came to control the dispute. The one woman in the case who enthusiastically embraced the concept of equal pay – Minister of Labor Barbara Castle – did so only in order to get the women back to work. Classifying the 1968 strike as ‘a strike for equal pay’ conceals its real importance as a protest against injustice and exploitation.     

The factory and the welfare state: redundancy,benefits and workers’ organization at Alfa Romeo Arese, 1963-1986

ABSTRACT

The article tracks the relationship between the Italian welfare state and the social relations of production at a Fordist factory, showing how social policy influenced the pattern of workers’ contention on the industrial shop floor. Welfare state analysis has concentrated on the institutional aspect of social policy but neglected the role that state benefits played in industrial organization and workplace relations. The article ‘nests’ the analysis of social policy in a micro-history of the factory, using the case study of Arese – a plant owned by the carmaker Alfa Romeo – Milan, Italy. Tracking the history of Arese, the article shows how the Italian system of short-time work subsidies, the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), served to quell industrial unrest and target unions’ organizational resources. From the late 1960s, the CIG was used by managers to suspend workers during strikes and acted as a deterrent against their mobilization. As redundancies increased during the 1980s, workers were put on short-time for prolonged periods and prevented from entering the factory. This degraded their professional identity and eroded their political ties with the workplace, curtailing the basis of unions’ organizational strength within the factory.     

‘A whisper in the assembly of nations’ United States' participation in the International Movement for Women's Rights from the League of Nations to the United Nations

This work examines North American feminist activities in the international arena from the end of the First World War to the early days of the United Nations. Led by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party of the United States, feminists attempted to obtain greater equality for women by having nations agree to an Equal Rights Treaty and an equal Nationality Treaty. But they ran into opposition from more moderate social reform women's organizations. Believing protective legislation for women in industry to be more important than legal equality, and antagonistic to the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States' Constitution, reformers objected to the international feminists on ideological grounds. They also disapproved of the radicals' militant tactics and active publicity seeking, thereby extending the quarrel to the realm of personality differences. Thus the divisiveness caused by the ERA in the United States disrupted the international women's movement as well. Working through Pan American Congresses and the League of Nations, and continuing into the United Nations, feminists devoted more than a quarter of a century to fighting for equal rights world-wide. While their actual achievements were not notable, in the end their equalitarian ideas proved to have more enduring value than reform theories.     

Understanding the silent majority in authoritarian populism: what can we learn from popular support for Putin in rural Russia?

ABSTRACT

This study distinguishes and challenges three main assumptions/shortcomings regarding the silent majority – the majority of the ‘ordinary’, ‘simple’, ‘little’ people, who are the main supporters of authoritarian populism. The silent majority is commonly portrayed as (1) consisting of ‘irrational’, ‘politically short-sighted’ people, who vote against their self-interests; (2) it is analysed as a homogeneous group, without attempting to distinguish different motives and interests among its members; (3) existing studies often overlook the political economy and structures of domination that gave rise to authoritarian populism. I address these shortcomings while analysing the political behaviour of rural Russians, who are the major supporters of Vladimir Putin. I reveal that the agrarian property regime and power relations in the countryside largely define the political posture of different rural groups. Less secure socio-economic strata respond more strongly to economic incentives, while better-off villagers tend to support the regime's ideological appeals. Furthermore, Putin's traditionalist authoritarian leadership style appeals to the archetypal base of the rural society – namely, its peasant roots – and, therefore, finds stronger support among the farming population. Finally, this study reveals that collective interests prevail over individual interests in the voting behaviour of rural dwellers, who support the existing regime despite the economic hardship it imposes upon them.     

British women's anti-suffragism and the forward policy, 1908-14

This article reinstates prominent female leaders within the organised opposition to women's suffrage in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. More specifically, it focuses upon the evolution of a positive, constructive anti-suffragism, labelled the Forward Policy by Mary Ward and other women campaigners who were active in the period leading up to the First World War. These women participated in contemporary citizenship debates through their writings, through their commitment to social action, and through their sometimes problematic relationship with male antisuffragism. The article concludes that women's anti-suffragism deserves closer study in its own right, and through its supporters’ own records, as well in relation to suffragism and the wider women's movement.     

New directions in the political history of women: A case study of the National Woman's Party's campaign for the equal rights amendment, 1920–1927

This paper examines the National Woman's Party campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1920s as an important chapter in the history of organized feminism in America. The analysis focuses on the NWP's two major objectives: to create gender equality and female autonomy and to redefine the agenda of American politics to include women's special interests. Drawing on the work of women's historians and feminist anthropologists, this paper also suggests several new perspectives for studying the political history of women. The relationship between the public and domestic spheres in general, and the relationship between women's politics and women's culture in particular, are discussed as central components for any new theoretical perspectives on women's political history.