“The Class Idea” (And How to Get It)
Many progressives in the United States are prone to making gloomy jokes about moving North whenever conservative forces grip our national institutions. After all: Canadians have unions! They have health care! They don’t pretend that everyone’s middle class!
Why, people wonder, are the politics and labor movements of the two countries so different?
In his new book, Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, sociology professor Barry Eidlin grapples with this question. His explanation not only illuminates the history but suggests some ideas about a course correction for the U.S. labor movement.
Canada, by contrast, strengthened its labor laws. The Canadian labor party—the New Democratic Party—is frequently in power in certain provinces, acting like a left pressure bloc on Canada’s not-quite two party system.
Eidlin locates the source of this reversal of fortune, in part, in how much harder the Canadian unions had to fight to establish themselves. In contrast, an American labor law regime was handed to union organizers by the New Deal. The fight in Canada took a decade longer for the government to recognize a protected right to engage in union activity, and it solidified a class consciousness among Canadian workers that in the United States is a bit more, well, flippy-floppy.
And this raises the perennial question: How can we get the American working class to recognize its own existence and fight like hell for what it deserves?
The United States and Canada are remarkably similar countries in terms of labor politics. We were colonized by the same European nations—England and France—which shaped our political cultures. And U.S. unions colonized Canadian workplaces by chartering locals north of the border. (The “I” in most unions’ acronyms stands not for “Industrial” but for “International,” which basically means, “Oh, and we have some members in Canada.”) For that reason, Canada’s labor law regime was modeled on the U.S. emphasis on government-certified bargaining units with firm-level contract bargaining, exclusive representation, and the union shop.
The passage of key pro-union legislation, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, preceded and in some ways made possible U.S. labor’s great upsurge in organizing and strike activity, Eidlin argues. Union rights were in effect “granted” by the Roosevelt Administration, which was rewarded, in turn, with the entrance of unions into the Democratic Party coalition as a special interest.
The Canadian government responded to increasing worker militancy during the Great Depression with equal parts repression and indifference. By way of example, Vancouver dockworkers went on strike in 1935 for union recognition. The struggle faced armed resistance from employers and the police, briefly spreading to a general strike punctuated by a bloody street fight—the Battle of Ballantyne Pier. In the United States, the West Coast longshoremen who had gone on strike the year prior, won union recognition through federal pressure and a nascent system of New Deal tripartite arbitration. The Vancouver dockworkers’ fight dragged on another decade until the Canadian government created more labor-friendly laws.
As a result, Canadian workers were far more likely to see themselves as a working class with distinctly different interests than the bosses, government, and two major parties. They made common cause with farmers in a third party—the forerunner of today’s New Democratic Party—that continued to gain votes and threaten the power of the established party. Crucially, they continued to strike during World War II for their rights and in protest of rising inflation.
That electoral threat, combined with the impact of the strikes on wartime production, finally compelled Canada’s government to enact a labor law that protected workers’ rights in 1944.
American unions’ post-war rise in militancy, by contrast, was greeted with legislative repression. The Taft-Hartley Act—which outlawed many forms of strikes and legalized anti-union “right to work” legislation—codified the legal status of unions as a mere special interest, one to be “balanced” against management.
Eidlin explores the key tests of strength faced by unions in the postwar years, and how that shaped the divergence in fortunes. Both countries faced a Red Scare, but unions in the U.S. contended with a 1960s New Left not centered on questions of class.
Canada’s labor movement, in contrast, made room for New Left politics within its New Democratic Party. They were able to tap into the hard-fought recognition of class interests to convince the government to strengthen labor laws as a way to mediate industrial disputes.
Eidlin, I think, underestimates the explanation given by many previous scholars for the lack of an American labor party: that property-based restrictions on voting were abolished before American workers had a chance to fully conceive of themselves as a separate class. The American labor movement entered the Great Depression already an atomized collection of special interests to be courted by the two major parties.
Regardless, a more urgent question for American activists is how to to wake the working-class giant. I suggest two trends—legal reform and political realignment—that contain promise.
One idea for creating a new labor relations system is an old idea that’s gaining traction: wage boards. These are public, tripartite industrial standards boards that can raise wages and working standards across entire industries. They were a cornerstone of the early New Deal framework, and still exist in some states, waiting for a demand to be revived.
The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, FDR’s first legislative effort to woo unions into the Democratic fold, is perhaps best remembered for its Section 7 guarantee of workers’ rights to organize unions. Though lacking an enforcement mechanism, the guarantee did inspire workers to sign up for unions in droves and helped get labor’s great uprising going.
The act also created tripartite industrial boards, like the National Longshore Board that arbitrated end of the 1934 strike. These consisted of a representative each from companies, unions, and “the public” for each major industry—with the power to establish minimum wages, work rules and union recognition. Strong unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and United Mine Workers were able to press the boards to raise wages and spread union standards across non-union firms in their industries. In non-union industries where workers didn’t rise up in paralyzing strikes, the boards gave little thought to working conditions.
The National Labor Relations Act was meant to be an enforcement mechanism for the National Industrial Recovery Act’s “right to organize.” The 1935 act outlawed pervasive union-busting techniques like retaliation and surveillance of union activity of employees. It threatened the power of the state to restrain “unfair labor practices,” and it demanded that employers bargain in good faith when workers declared themselves to be a union.
But the National Industrial Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by an arch-conservative Supreme Court that detested the idea of any kind of federal intervention in the private market. Roosevelt signed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act into law a few weeks after the court struck down the earlier law. His expectation had been that the two laws would exist side by side. The NLRA-created National Labor Relations Board would protect workers’ rights to organize and strike, while the NIRA-created industrial wage boards (and their state-level counterparts) would arbitrate union demands and impose the terms on employers.
University of Michigan law professor Kate Andrias proposes that wage boards, still on the books in states like California and New Jersey, could be used to pioneer a new form of social bargaining in the here and now. This is not pie in the sky. New York’s wage board system was dusted off by Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the Fight for $15 movement.
American unionists might hear “tripartite” as “two votes to one against the workers.” But what do you call a group of decision-makers who could vote to give you and your peers a wage increase or fairer scheduling practices or the right to several weeks of paid family leave but resists doing so? I call that a boss – a big one that we can run campaigns against.
Let’s imagine a hospitality industry labor board. The board could enact a whole range of changes, from raising the minimum wage to abolishing the practice of tipping. It could ban “clopens,” the practice of assigning an employee to work the first shift of the day after she just finished the last shift of the night before. It could take on issues of harassment in the workplace, like granting cocktail waitresses the right to refuse to wear “uniforms” that are too sexually exploitative.
The workers’ representative on the board could force a vote on any issue. Once that vote is scheduled, every union and workers center with an organizing stake in the industry would agitate for a yes vote. Join us. Sign this petition. Wear this button. Pay your dues. The unions could anticipate which major employers would have the most influence on the other two board members, and target them for disruption with actions like slowdowns, consumer boycotts, and rolling strikes.
Unlike in our current system, where workers are siloed in their bargaining relationships with individual employers, unions could take on entire industries as a class.
Our political system is in the midst of a rare political realignment, suggesting that a class-based party of the people is possible, even in America. As the Republican Party degenerates into authoritarianism and white nationalism, it becomes unelectable in many large city and big urban states. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, remains a big blob of incoherence, grappling with an energized left flank while trying to absorb “former” Republicans who would drag it to the right.
The solution may be regional. We are seeing the ideological fight, appropriately, in primaries, as witnessed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upsetwin over Congressman Joseph Crowley, and Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to Andrew Cuomo’s reelection.
But states like New York have essentially a one-party system—there is no threat of a Republican eking out a win in a three-way race. This makes a formation like the Working Families Party a viable second party.
With affiliates in more than a dozen states, the Working Families Party tends to act as a left pressure group in Democratic primaries, but doesn’t shy away from challenging corporate Democrats in general elections. It represents our best chance at an independent labor party in the United States and, like Canada’s New Democratic Party, could work on a regional basis.
More crucially, if the GOP continues its death rattle of naked racism and authoritarian hero-worship, while billionaire vampires like Howard Schutz and Michael Bloomberg abandon its corpse to suck what life remains from the Democratic Party, the rest of us are going to need a party to continue to fight for the survival and uplift of the 99 percent.
That is not to say permanent union opposition to both boss and state is a long-term winning strategy. Eidlin’s book—along with two centuries of union organizing in practice—make clear that workers need state power to restrict the worst impulses of corporations. But a degree of explicitly declared political autonomy within the current Democratic coalition, combined with a labor relations framework that treats workers as a distinct and protected class interest, could revive the class idea in the United States.
[This article originally appeared in The Progressive.]