Knocking on Labor’s Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

The dominant narrative of labor and union organizing in the United States during the 1970s is a story of defeat. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, organized labor was at its peak. Some three-fourths of manufacturing plants in the United States operated under union contracts. Union-negotiated wages and benefits significantly improved the standards of living for millions under collective bargaining agreements and millions more in non-union workplaces where management sought (for varying reasons) to keep up with those union standards. By the 1970s, this narrative tells us, the labor movement was in free fall: bureaucratization and business unionism shifted unions’ focus away from organizing; workers had become more individualistic and less open to collective action; and unions stood squarely outside the rights revolutions that reshaped the country. As a result, union density declined and organized labor further retrenched in the following decades as technological change, globalization, the ascendancy of...