If I Had a Hammer

Nothing so astonishes us--the professional middle class--as a visible working class. To the media (both news and entertainment), to most urban and suburban professionals, workers are like wallpaper: always around us, seldom noticed. When they do emerge from the background, we are amazed: Where did they come from? Were they there all along?

On a June day in 1998, 40,000 construction workers, protesting the hiring of a nonunion firm to erect a new government building, blocked Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The media’s reaction, Queens College professor Joshua B. Freeman tells us in “Working Class New York,” his groundbreaking history of post-World War II New York, was to cover the story as if the city had been occupied by some exotic new species. An editor at New York magazine called the workers “an invading army”; the Daily News marveled at the politically incomprehensible spectacle of hard-hats battling the cops; the New York Post, in its inimitable high-minded fashion, described the demo as “hunk heaven,” a runway, 20 blocks long, of virile proles modeling the latest in work shirts.

A similar astonishment greeted Los Angeles’ janitors when they took to the streets for their epochal strike in the spring of last year. Normally among the most ubiquitous and least-noticed of workers, suddenly the janitors became the noisiest and most obtrusive, parading down boulevards, holding up traffic for half-hour intervals, chanting slogans, banging drums. The strike was a four-week Dickensian morality play pitting L.A.’s poorest residents against some of its richest. As many middle-class Angelenos came to understand the battle, the most astonishing sight of all was their response: Blocked in traffic, emerging from their cars, shaking their fists and shouting, not in anger but in support. But always, their first reaction was a shock of recognition: “These must be the janitors. The bit players have become protagonists. The white noise is speaking to us.”

It has been almost four decades since Michael Harrington forced Americans to acknowledge the existence of poverty in our midst in his classic work, “The Other America.” We were the first nation in history, he argued, to have an “invisible poor.” Since then, we have always had with us a visible poor; poverty is a state and a problem that the government and society recognize as real. Since then, it’s the working class that has disappeared as a construct, though clearly not as a reality. All America, we are told, is divided into three parts: rich, middle class and poor. In one poll after another, about 90% of Americans identify themselves as middle class because they almost invariably are given just those three categories from which to choose. When presented with a fourth option, however, that 90% splits in two: 45% call themselves middle class and 45% working class.

But that fourth option is seldom presented in polling or anywhere else. Except for cop shows, the working class has vanished from prime-time TV; the outer-borough New York of Ralph Kramden and Archie Bunker has given way to the Manhattan of “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” Television newscasts generally ignore labor stories even more than they ignore other real news, while the number of labor-beat reporters on major newspapers continues its decades-long decline. In America, the working class is out of mind--so out of mind that it’s out of sight.

Just in the last year, however, unions have finally begun to receive their due in our understanding of modern American history. For the last several decades, the consensus among historians of all ideologies was that unions entered the American chronicle during the ‘30s, grew ossified, bureaucratic and (some of them) corrupt in the ‘50s and dwindled to insignificance by the ‘80s. Acts 1 and 3 of this saga don’t need any rectification, but the historians’ treatment of Act 2, it is increasingly clear, has been so wrongheaded that it has missed the central point of unions’ contribution to American history.

That contribution, quite simply, was the creation after World War II of the first genuine mass prosperity in the history of humankind. The one period of union strength in American history, roughly the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, overlaps precisely with the only period in United States history when wealth was widely shared, when working-class incomes rose as steeply as middle-class incomes. The real weekly wages of nonsupervisory workers increased by 62% from 1947 to 1972; since ‘72, they have not again been nearly so high. Moreover, the period when American workers made their greatest gains was 1945 to 1960, a time when workers first won pension plans and health insurance (and, some of them, cost-of-living increases) from their employers, regular increases in the minimum wage and unemployment compensation from the government, and moved into the first mass-produced decent housing the world had known. This was, not coincidentally, also the time when unions represented roughly one-third of all nonagricultural workers; they have not been nearly so large or powerful since.

To understand how unions wrought this distributive revolution in postwar America requires us to revisit and re-envision the key decade in that revolution--the 1950s. To speak of the ‘50s and revolution in the same breath, of course, is to run counter not just to the official version of American history but to virtually every version of American history. To the right, the ‘50s were a time of business preeminence (“What’s good for General Motors,” said the head of General Motors in 1955, “is good for the USA”), social tranquillity, patriarchal authority, stay-at-home moms and sound family values we’d do well to emulate today. To the left, it was a time of purging of the communist left from liberal institutions (unions particularly), of McCarthyism, mass conformity, Cold War hysteria and stultifying dullness--the bad decade against which adolescents and young adults justly rebelled in the ‘60s. To the center, left and right alike, the ‘50s were America’s “Ozzie and Harriet” interval--after the tumultuous ‘30s and ‘40s, a nap time for America.

So it comes as a shock to learn, in Jack Metzgar’s “Striking Steel,” that there were more strikes during the “good gray” ’50s than there were during the “sit-in” ’30s, the “in-the-streets” ’60s or, indeed, any other decade in American history. “Striking Steel” is a brilliant combination of labor history, family memoir and historical meditation that takes as its starting point Metzgar’s puzzlement that what should be viewed as a mega-event in labor history--the 1959 steel strike, the largest work stoppage in U.S. history, which saw more than 500,000 workers stay off the job for 116 days--has fallen into a historical black hole. Despite its scope and importance, the ’59 strike figures nowhere in any labor history or history of the decade. Indeed, Metzgar has surveyed every major history of the postwar United States--18 of them--and finds only one that offers more than a passing note about the decade’s strikes. When labor appears at all in these accounts, it is to be chastised as corrupt or (when the historian is progressive) conservative. When the historians turn to the creation of mass prosperity, surely the decade’s single most important social fact, they leave unions out of the equation. Mass prosperity, well, just kinda happened.

Part of the problem is that unions were so large, powerful and socially legitimate in the ‘50s--in a 1958 Gallup Poll, 76% of Americans approved of them--that their strikes and bargaining victories did not require the desperate, and more dramatic, measures that invested the strikes of the ‘30s and the civil rights campaigns of the ‘60s with such an obvious theatrical and moral grandeur. Drama demands visible conflict, and the ’59 strike had little of that. Though the United Steelworkers didn’t even have a strike fund in 1959, virtually none of its half-million striking members crossed the picket line, nor did management even consider recruiting strikebreakers. Clustered in Pittsburgh or Chicago’s southern suburbs, in mill towns like Bethlehem or Johnstown, Pa. (where Metzgar grew up), the steelworkers dominated their communities, or effectively were their communities. Many shopkeepers extended them credit and, through their union, they had amassed enough political clout and community bona fides that the local civic establishments supported them, too.

The United Steelworkers struck the industry in 1946, ‘49, ‘52, ’56 and ‘59, and, though the first of these strikes saw some real clashes, thereafter these were somewhat routinized affairs. The ’59 strike took so long to settle because management had planned to outlast the strikers and force the union to relinquish its coequal power over changing work rules. In the end, the workers outlasted the companies and returned to work victorious. Thereafter, until the industry crumbled in the early ‘80s, the workers’ power was such that management no longer sought to provoke them, and they were able to win further advances without having to strike at all.

The cumulative effect of these postwar steel strikes, and the contemporaneous strikes and bargaining victories of the United Auto Workers and other unions, was a massive redistribution of wealth and power in America and, at the time, press accounts of these battles dominated the news. Today, writes Metzgar, “[a]ccording to the standard conception of American history, none of this happened, or could have happened.... The organized working class and its unions get ‘disappeared’ from postwar American history because they don’t fit. To recognize and remember a working class with distinct interests would require the professional middle-class to recognize our values and interests as related to our class rather than as the social norm to which everyone should aspire.”

To remember what the working class did in the 1950s, moreover, would require labor historians--almost all of them literal or spiritual children of the ‘60s left--to validate, at least in part, the decade against which they defined themselves. In Metzgar’s case, rethinking the ‘50s also involves coming to terms with his late father, a Steelworkers Union grievance official at the Johnstown plant who was also a domineering pain in the ass to virtually all who encountered him. “Striking Steel” is, in this sense, an unusually cleareyed entry in the “Greatest Generation” genre, but it is much more than an act of filial piety. It is a signally important contribution to American economic history and a companion volume to such contemplations of memory and history as Norman M. Klein’s “The History of Forgetting.” Above all, it is an important addition to the small but growing collection of books that challenge our prevailing views of the ‘50s: Alan Ehrenhalt’s “The Lost City,” a study of Chicago in the early years of Richard Daley the First; Maurice Isserman’s “If I Had a Hammer,” a consideration of the ‘50s left; and Freeman’s magisterial work on postwar New York.

From the mid-1940s through the mid-1970s, New York’s unions exercised more power on their home turf than those of any other city, but it was a different kind of power than the kind that Metzgar outlines. Giant industrial unions like the United Steelworkers or the Auto Workers were able to wrest a kind of privatized welfare state from their equally giant employers. There were no such giant employers in New York, save the city itself; New York’s largest union for the two decades following the war was the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, whose 200,000 in-city members were spread across many hundreds of firms.

What the unions were able to do was to use their own resources and their considerable political clout to create a hybrid but genuine social democracy in one city. Levittown, for instance, was only one part--the private-sector suburban part--of postwar New York’s housing boom. Unions themselves erected tens of thousands of new housing units throughout the city during those years and pressured the city to erect tens of thousands of its own. Freeman figures that fully 21% of the 785,000 housing units built in New York between 1946 and 1970 were in either union or public projects. During the ‘50s, the city’s unions established their own health-care centers--precursors to nonprofit HMOs--that enabled a million New Yorkers access to probably the first preventive medicine they had ever known. In 1962, midway through the 12-year mayoralty of the largely forgotten Robert Wagner, the city, at the prodding of its unions, even enacted America’s first and only municipal minimum wage, though the courts soon struck it down. Replete with communists, ex-communists, socialists and social democrats, New York labor envisioned and realized a social unionism much more far-reaching than that of any other U.S. city or state.

In time, however, social democracy in one city met the same fate as socialism in one country. Many businesses relocated to cheaper climes (compelling the Ladies’ Garment Workers to accept low-ball contracts in New York in an ultimately futile attempt to reduce the job flight), while the city’s banks forced a massive rollback in municipal services during the fiscal crisis of the mid-’70s. As it did in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, the middle began to fall out of the economy of New York in the ‘70s. The vast number of immigrants who’ve gone to the city in the last two decades encounter an economy with a badly shrunken manufacturing base, forcing many of them into low-wage service sector jobs and some into the city’s nouvelle sweatshop sector. With union power greatly weakened, the low end of New York manufacturing bears some grim resemblances to the sweatshop economy of 100 years ago.

Between the corporate welfare states that industrial unions forced their employers to create and the municipal welfare state that New York unionists were able to erect, a third model of union-made prosperity also sprang up in postwar America. Confronting a sector with literally thousands of local and regional employers, inflicting upon their members a union with little or no internal democracy, the postwar Teamsters, under Dave Beck and the elder Jimmy Hoffa, built themselves into not only the nation’s largest union but also one that delivered good wages and benefits. They did this, according to Barnard College historian Thaddeus Russell in his new Hoffa biography, “Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class,” chiefly because, by the very nature of trucking, they had far more jurisdictional conflicts with other unions than any of their counterparts and therefore had to deliver the goods to their members lest they defect.

But “Out of the Jungle” is an oddly maddening book. Focusing chiefly on Hoffa’s two-decade career in Detroit before he assumed the Teamster presidency in the late ‘50s, it recounts with a studied academic detachment his various organizing techniques--from his brilliant use of worker boycotts (the drivers wouldn’t truck nonunion goods, the warehousemen wouldn’t unload nonunion trucks) to his consistent employment of violence (bombing recalcitrant employers, beating up members threatening to defect). The book’s villain, amazingly, is Hoffa’s fellow Detroiter and postwar America’s greatest union leader, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther. By pursuing a vision of industrial democracy, which occasionally entailed a cessation of inter-union competition, Russell argues, Reuther left the trucking field to Hoffa and his ilk, giving them a free hand to create an undemocratic and at times unresponsive union.

This breathtakingly perverse thesis is actually contradicted by several crucial points in Russell’s own narrative. First, one key to the Teamsters’ successes in Detroit was that the UAW, far from competing with them, actually had a de facto nonaggression pact with Hoffa. Second, after the expulsion of the Teamsters from the AFL-CIO in 1957, it was Reuther who wanted the federation to raid its members; he was thwarted in this design by the AFL-CIO’s old-line president, George Meany, who was nobody’s idea of an industrial democrat. Third, the Teamsters wouldn’t have required so much external prodding to craft decent contracts if Beck, Hoffa and the gang had created a union with some accountability to its membership. (This is not to say that inter-union competition can’t be a spur to organizing. The ongoing rival organizing campaigns of the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Assn. are yielding a large number of good, first-time union contracts in California hospitals.)

The other peculiarity in “Out of the Jungle” is the absence of Hoffa from much of the book. Focusing on the inter-union competition and on the presumably nefarious doings of Reuther & Co., it fails to tell with any clarity the story of Hoffa’s rise within the union and conveys hardly anything about this most vivid of trade union personalities. Jimmy Hoffa may be the most famous disappeared person in American history, and damned if he hasn’t disappeared again, this time in the middle of his own biography.

The past that Metzgar and Freeman (brilliantly) and Russell (shakily) relate to us isn’t distant, but it sure seems like a foreign country. The moderately prosperous and clearly visible working class of postwar America--and in order to become and stay prosperous, a working class must be visible, organized, large, assertive--has vanished over the last quarter-century. Union membership, once at 35% of the national work force, now is an anemic 13%. Working-class incomes, in decline since the ‘70s, ticked up slightly in the last couple of years, largely because of the effect of a full-employment economy on the lowest-paid workers, but with unemployment upward bound, those incomes will likely resume their descent.

In the last few years, a handful of major unions have endeavored to turn these trends around. Under brilliant leadership, both the Service Employees International Union and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union have had major successes organizing and winning good contracts for a range of workers, many of them immigrants in low-wage sectors. In Los Angeles, last year’s striking janitors--members of a statewide local in the Service Employees Union--won themselves a 26% raise over three years; and L.A.’s hotel and restaurant union locals were the generative force behind both L.A.’s and Santa Monica’s groundbreaking living wage ordinances. All these efforts have been greatly aided by the political clout of the L.A. County Federation of Labor, which, since Miguel Contreras took the helm in 1996, has been the single most dynamic and effective force in local elections (though it took a bath in this year’s L.A. City Council and mayoral races).

At first glance, L.A.’s union movement today may seem a match for postwar New York’s. L.A.’s new-model labor movement is probably the nation’s foremost advocate for immigrant rights in much the same way, for example, that New York unions took the lead in backing the civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s (and immigrant rights in earlier decades). The fundamental difference between the two cities’ movements is one less of vision than of numbers: New York’s unionization rate in the decades after World War II was a good deal more than twice that of L.A.’s today. Los Angeles may be home to the nation’s largest manufacturing sector but, with the departure of aerospace and auto plants, that sector is almost entirely nonunion. Without larger numbers, it’s hard to craft truly expansive union social programs, even such desperately needed ones as the creation of union-backed affordable housing developments.

Indeed, without a larger union movement, it’s hard to envision a viable Los Angeles. A 1996 study for the state Assembly Select Committee on the California Middle Class found that 66% of L.A. County residents lived in households with annual incomes of less than $40,000 (40% in households with less than $20,000), while just 26% of the households had middle-class ($40,000 to $100,000) annual incomes. The last few years of low unemployment have doubtless produced more heartening figures, but not much more heartening. New data from last year’s census show California ranking next to last among the states in its percentage of middle-income residents. Another new census report says that 18 of the nation’s 25 cities with the greatest residential crowding per housing unit are in California, almost all of them working-class suburbs of L.A. The three most overcrowded areas in the U.S. are East Los Angeles, El Monte and Santa Ana, where, it’s reasonable to conclude, two and three immigrant families live in units built for just one, or 10 and 12 immigrant workers are camped out in a single apartment.

That’s a far cry from postwar L.A., the nation’s leader in homeownership, where union workers gobbled up new housing tracts as soon as they were built. Rebuilding a Los Angeles, and a United States, where working-class living standards approximate that postwar level is an absolute impossibility so long as workers remain unorganized and invisible. We need a lot more janitors taking to a lot more streets.