Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy Labor Day. Hope you're enjoying the holiday weekend. If you are off from work and if you are working, to keep all those vacationers well served, this first major section of the show today is for you. How? Well, now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of 100 Things. We are up to thing number 17. For this Labor Day, it's 100 years of unionization and de-unionization. We have a great guest for this. It's Georgetown University professor Joseph McCartin, an expert on US labor, social and political history.

McCartain scholarship focuses on the intersection of labor organization, politics, and public policy. He is the current president, president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association, a member of the board of the Catholic Labor Network, a founding member of the board of the Interreligious Network for Worker Solidarity, and more. He is co-author of the book Labor in America A History, which must be a hit because it is now in its 9th edition. As a cheat sheet just for transparency, many of my questions will be drawn from an article he wrote last year that condenses a lot of the history in the textbook.

The article is called US Labor and the Struggle for Democracy. Professor McCartain, thanks so much for doing this with us. Happy Labor Day and welcome to WNYC.

Joseph McCartin: Happy Labor Day to you, Brian, and thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: The frame is 100 years of 100 things, but let's do some prehistory first. You've written that the first us unions coincided almost precisely with the founding of the republic. I read that, and I thought, really, we mythologize those days as an agrarian era, agricultural, pre-industrial era. What kind of unions would there have been in 1776?

Joseph McCartin: Well, unions were already coming into being among workers like shoemakers, then called cordwainers, among carpenters, among the other skilled tradespeople who tended to be concentrated in the small towns and cities of the emerging republic at that time. Skilled workers mostly, who did things like barrel making, carpentry, shoemaking, people involved in the production of shipping, ships carpenters, and other such workers. They were among the first to form unions in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Part of the concept there, which you argue throughout your work, is that unionization and democratization are historically linked. Can you lay that out for us conceptually a little bit?

Joseph McCartin: Well, I think that's right, Brian. I would say that you could think of the US union movement over time, from its inception, around the time of the inception of the republic down to the present day, as being in a dialectical relationship with the democracy of the nation. Politically, what workers were fighting for, really, from those earliest days when they began to organize the first, what would become unions, was a say over the conditions of their work and being able to have some self-determination over those conditions. The demand for a greater say at work really was in sync with what was happening politically in the country. As in the beginning, we're just talking about white men who were allowed access to the ballot, and at first, it was just propertied white men, but as white men began to demand access to the ballot who didn't have property, they were often part of the union movement of their time. From the beginning, as people struggled to widen political democracy, that often resonated with the efforts of working people to widen a democratic voice in the workplace.

I think over the long span of our history, there's been that interaction where gains in political democracy have triggered gains in worker voice, where gains in worker voice have, in many cases, forwarded political democracy, but it's also worked the other way as well. I think since the 1970s or so, we've seen the labor movement diminishing in its power. Workers' ability to have a democratic voice in the workplace was eroded during that time, and that coincided with an erosion of political democracy, which-

Brian Lehrer: Hold that thought.

Joseph McCartin: -has happened with a lot of things.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, hold that thought, because we will get to the 1970s and the arc from there to today, but staying on some prehistory, if we can call it that, this series, again, is officially a centennial series. It starts the timeline in the 1920s, but you referenced the 1820s as the advent of central labor councils. What and where were those in 1820s America?

Joseph McCartin: The first one formed in Philadelphia. This was the first time that those initial unions, things like carpenters’ unions, shoemakers’ unions, and others, started to come together across trades to affiliate with each other. What were first called, as you said, city central. City central unions that brought together multiple groups of working people who came to realize, and it was in the 1820s when this realization really began to set in, that the lot of a carpenter was linked to the lot of a bricklayer, was linked to how well shoemakers were doing, and that they needed to support each other in their struggles.

That was an innovation that began in the United States, I think, in that period, in a really profound way, those early city central unions gave birth to the first effort in the 1830s to try to build a national labor union. All of that came crashing down with a depression that broke out in the late 1930s that led to economic turmoil. A lot of those early organizations collapsed, but workers in the 1820s, for the first time, began to realize across craft lines that they needed to support each other.

Brian Lehrer: You acknowledged in your first answer that US labor unions, for most of their history, and certainly in the early days, were not linked with democratization enough to take up the abolitionist cause or the women's suffragist cause, or you also write about them not opposing Chinese exclusion when that was a thing. We have much more modern examples, too, of their white male exclusivity. What began to change that, and when I?

Joseph McCartin: That change was gradual, and it began, I think, even in the early 19th century in that period. I'm talking about when women, again, we're talking here first about white women in textile mills in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, began to form their own organizations. At first, they weren't fully received into the labor movement of their time, but as women began to organize in those kinds of settings, there was a growing realization among union people that women also needed to organize. Now, in the pre-civil war years, the labor movement that emerged, of course, in a setting in which slavery existed in the United States.

The union movement was distorted by that reality because it was basically a white person's movement in the pre-civil war years. By the end of the civil war, with the end of slavery, and as we moved into the reconstruction period, there were the first efforts to try to make the union movement a biracial movement and to make it a movement that included women as well as men. By the 1880s, an organization had emerged called the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. Most people just referred to them as the Knights of Labor. They aspired to organize women as well as men, African Americans as well as whites, into one organization, skilled and unskilled workers as well into that early organization.

They were still affected by the racism which was deeply ingrained in the America of the mid-19th century. That was expressed mostly in their support at that time for the exclusion of Chinese immigrants from the US. The knights of labor, as inclusive as they were, in some ways, did believe that the entry of the Chinese would undermine the conditions of workers in the United States. They played a role in lobbying for and helping to achieve Chinese exclusion, which happened in the 1880s and was continued into the 20th century. The story of the us labor movement is a story of America in a way, and the way this country, over many decades had to struggle toward the ideal of becoming a multiracial democracy.

It didn't begin that way, and the labor movement didn't begin that way, but over time, the labor movement became an engine for change. Sometimes it was halting, sometimes it was backward-looking, as in the case of the Chinese exclusion. Overall, the movement emerged and evolved till the early 20th century. It started to produce a much more inclusive approach. Again, it would take a long time and over the course of much of the 20th century before it fully became a more inclusive entity.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we are in our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of 100 things. Thing number 17 today, and for this Labor Day, it's 100 years of unionization and de unionization with Georgetown University Professor Joseph McCartain, who also is co-author of the book Labor in America A History. Moving closer to the actual start of our centennial period, meaning closer to the 1920s, you have President Woodrow Wilson taking the US into World War I under the slogan of making the world safe for democracy.

Usually, when we hear about that history, it's in the context of international relations. That slogan was aimed at Europe, but you're right that it helped unions build strength at home. How so?

Joseph McCartin: Oh, absolutely. Well, the war happened at a crucial moment in the evolution of the union movement. For the first time, the union movement was beginning to produce organizations that were just dramatically more inclusive. The leading one in that period was the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, sometimes called the Wobblies. They rejected Chinese exclusion, they rejected segregation. They included the Chinese, African Americans, and women in their organization. They were a rival of the dominant labor group of that time, the American Federation of Labor, which was predominantly composed of skilled white workers unions, but which itself started to become more inclusive.

The United Mine Workers, for example, was part of the AFL, and the mine workers included African American as well as white workers in one organization. The union movement was becoming more inclusive, the country was becoming more industrial. Urbanization was accelerating, and immigration was reaching its height just before the war broke out. The war setting created a kind of cauldron where a lot of those things came together. When Wilson led the country into war under the banner of this will be the war to make the world safer, democracy. Workers at that time demanded that if we're fighting in Europe for democracy, what about democracy in our workplaces?

In the first six months of US participation in World War I, US entered in April 1917. There were more strikes than had occurred in any previous such period in American history as workers took advantage of the fact that the economy was gearing up for war. There was a labor shortage. Workers were demanding employers recognize their rights. This massive strike wave arose. Wilson had to deal with that in a couple of different ways. One way was not so good. He authorized, or at least looked the other way when repression happened that ultimately undercut the industrial workers of the world, the IWW.

He at the same time, set up a national war labor board in an effort to placate workers. What that board, which was composed of employers and union representatives did was it set some basic rules where workers under the authority of this board would have, for the first time, the government trying to enforce their right to choose representatives who could negotiate with their employers. That was something the government had to do, basically to keep workers loyal to the war effort so that they were able to say to workers, yes, we're fighting this war in Europe to expand democracy, but we're also interested in ensuring your democratic rights in your own workplaces here at home.

Brian Lehrer: You have union gains being rolled back after World War I, but then the resonance between union building and democracy seriously expanding in the 1930s and '40s. We'll get to the '30s, the Roosevelt era. We're going to play a clip in a few minutes of New York Senator Robert F. Wagner from that period, who gave us maybe the landmark piece of pro-union legislation of all time. We'll get to that, but take the first part of that first, what happened after World War I? Where were we around the official starting point of our centennial timeline, 1924?

Joseph McCartin: Right. What happened is the war ends at the end of 1918. Business was horrified. Business leaders at what had happened in the brief period of US participation in the war were only in the war for about 18 months. During that period, unionization soared. The government was protecting workers’ rights to organize in that brief period. After the war, business absolutely demanded a rollback of the War Labor Board. It was terminated in 1919.

Business people also stirred up a red scare after the war to try to link all labor agitation in the US to the recent revolution that had broken out in Russia, that had produced the Soviet Union, that happened in 1917 and to try to link strikes and labor disturbances in the US to a worldwide communist plot. Those things helped to undermine labor as the 1920s began. By 1924, we're talking about a union movement that had been set back on its heels, and its longtime leader, Samuel Gompers, who was the founder of the American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and led it all through the period we just talked about. He dies at the end of 1924.

We're talking about a union movement that in the mid-'20s was back on its heels. It was dealing with a resurgent anti-unionism among leading employers like Ford, like General Electric, like US Steel, and absolute adamant opposition to the idea that business had any obligation to negotiate collectively with their workers. In the mid-'20s, that was where labor stood. The '20s was a period of relative prosperity for many workers, but what characterized that prosperity was that the rich got richer a lot faster than anyone else, and that had the effect of laying the basis for what would happen in the early '30s.

The Great Depression, the crash of '29, and what followed, I think grew out of the inequalities that were becoming more rampant in the 1920s.

Brian Lehrer: On to the 1930s now, did the Great Depression spur unionization? One might think that in a depression when jobs were scarce, that workers would have declining power to negotiate anything, but was that not the case?

Joseph McCartin: It's a great way of framing the question, Brian, because previous to the 1930s, all major depressions before that had basically wiped-out labor organizations. The 1930s was the biggest depression the US had gone through yet that didn't happen. In its first years, though it certainly seemed like it would happen. The crash of '29 initiates it. By 1932, the union movement was really in trouble. The leading union expert, I would say, of academics at that time, a guy named George Barnett, actually gave an address in 1932 in which he predicted that by the end of the 1930s, the labor movement would no longer exist in the United States. It was on its last legs.

The turnaround that happened subsequent to that was shocking to many people, including a lot of the experts. A lot of the turnaround came from the political outcome of the 1932 election. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to office and the inauguration of the New Deal set the basis for a transformative moment for workers. Workers had been initially in the United States-- I talked to my students about this. I give them figures like in some cities, like Detroit, unemployment was up over 50%. Yet the first reaction of American workers to depression was not to flood into the streets in protest, but in fact to be discouraged and to, in some ways, maybe even think that their own personal loss of a job was a personal failing.

Roosevelt's election and his promise that government was going to take action to turn the economy around had a profound psychological effect, because, in effect, he was saying, it's not your fault that you don't have a job. The economy is broken, and we need to fix it. As he took steps to turn that around, that energized workers. One of the first things he did in the first 100 days in 1933 is push through something called the National Industrial Recovery Act that included a very important provision that was based on what had happened in World War I.

It took that idea, and during the war, the government said you had a right to collectively bargain with your employer. It actually, for the first time, put it in law in what was called Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act. When the government publicized the existence of this right for the first time engraved in law, that you could form a union. In fact, the government felt the formation of the union might actually benefit the economy, because if workers were able to organize and improve their wages, that would give them more spending power and that could propel us forward instead of the downward spiral.

When Section 7A appeared, there was suddenly, in textile factories and auto factories and steel mills around the country, a surge of workers who wanted to form unions. None of that could have been expected a few years earlier, but it had a dramatic and transformative effect on labor, and it really opened the door for Senator Robert Wagner. One thing I'll say about Section 7A and this early effort that the New Deal made to ensure workers' right to organize is that all that came crashing down with a Supreme Court decision in May of 1935 that declared the NIRA to be an unconstitutional law. It was called the Schechter decision.

One thing I think we can talk about before we're done, hopefully, Brian, is that over the course of US history, courts have generally never been defenders of workers’ rights in the United States. I think we've seen that very much to be the case in recent years.

Brian Lehrer: We will definitely get to what you've written about the Roberts court in that respect, but let's take a break right now, and when we continue, we will get to that 90-year-old archive clip of the senator from New York, or one of the two senators from New York at the time, Robert F. Wagner, and what may be, you'll tell me the most landmark piece of union legislation, pro-union legislation in American history known as the Wagner Act. As we continue with this Labor Day edition of our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of a hundred things. It's thing number 17, a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization. Stay with us.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It's the Labor Day edition of our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of a hundred things. It's thing number 17, a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization with Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartain. A milestone for unionization came in 1935 when Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act. Here is New York Senator Robert F. Wagner speaking about the law that he introduced at that time.

Senator Robert F. Wagner: The National Labor Relations Bill I introduced is not new in principle. It is based upon the long-cherished American belief that every worker should be a free man, in fact, as well as in name, should be free to belong to any kind of union that he likes. My bill guarantees this economic freedom in the clearest terms.

Brian Lehrer: Professor, can you talk about the Wagner Act as some kind of turning point?

Joseph McCartin: Oh, it was a huge turning point, Brian, and the situation was after the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA, that took down with it Section 7A, and that meant that there was no labor law. It was at that point that Robert Wagner stepped forward and said, I've got one. He'd been actually working on this law for some time because the Section 7A had lots of flaws in it that he wanted to correct, and so that's the act that he introduced, the National Labor Relations Act. One of the things that it improved upon over what happened during World War I, or Section 7A, was that it banned company unions.

That is when employers were faced with the fact that workers were trying to form a union, what they often did is they sponsored their own union. They picked who would run it. They decided what it could negotiate over. Wagner said that's no kind of real freedom as you hear him talking about there. Workers need to be free to be fully represented by their own organizations, by organizations not dominated by their employers. That's what the act provided for. It created a board to oversee it and enforce it, the National Labor Relations Board. Roosevelt signs it into law on July 5th, 1935. It's hard to overstate how important that law was. It was hugely important. Among all of the things the New Deal did, I would rank it near the very top, if not the most important thing. The New Deal, of course, created the Social Security Act, but it also passed this important labor law. The important thing about the Wagner Act, I think, and what made it distinctive, among other things the New Deal did, is it really altered the power balance in the country because it provided a legal protection for workers to form their own organizations, to provide a countervailing force in the country to the power of big business. It forced a reckoning in the way our politics worked.

It gave workers a voice in politics that they had never previously had. It gave them power in the workplace to negotiate over the terms and conditions of their work. It gave them what, at the time, workers often referred to as industrial democracy, which was a compliment to and a necessary complement to political democracy. The Wagner Act is hugely, hugely important. Among the things it did is it produces a revival within the labor movement that ultimately ends up splitting the movement. There were some in the AFL who were committed to the craft union model that went back to the 19th century. There were others in the AFL unions, especially John Lewis, who led the mine workers union, who believed that that craft model was not appropriate for the modern industrial factory, for the auto plant, for the steel mill.

What we needed were what Lewis and others called industrial unions. Lewis, once the act is passed, Lewis says, okay, AFL brethren, it's time to really grow into organized workers. It means we need a new model, because these workers in these settings, like steel mills, they shouldn't be in 15 different unions. Let there be one single steel worker union. The AFL couldn't come to an internal agreement over that step. Quite frankly, some of the leaders of the craft unions were more concerned about whether their own influence would be diluted by the emergence of rival industrial unions.

They opposed us. Lewis said, the hell [unintelligible 00:29:56] He and others like Sidney Hillman, leader of the garment workers at that time, David Dubinski of the International Lady Garment Workers, as well as Hillman, who led the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, they stormed out of the AFL. They decided to form their own group to organize industrial workers. They called it, first, the committee, an industrial organization, and it evolved into, within a couple of years, something called the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

They launched new unions like the United Automobile Workers, the United Steel Workers, the United Electrical Workers, and within the space of five to six years, they really transformed industrial America. They got big companies like General Motors to sign contracts. Famously at GM, they did that by sitting in and occupying the plants in Flint, Michigan, beginning in late 1936 and early 1937, occupying GM's plants and refusing to leave until the company recognized their right to negotiate.

Brian Lehrer: The Congress of Industrial Organization's initial CIO, you were talking about the American Federation of Labor, AFL, as an older group. That's what gave us the AFL CIO as we refer to it today.

Joseph McCartin: That's right. That's right. It would take 20 years for those groups to come back together again. They reunited finally in 1955 to form the AFL CIO, but sadly, for much of the early period, after the split first emerged, they spent a lot of time fighting each other, and that probably limited some of the gains that unions were able to make in the late '30s and through the '40s, but finally they made peace with each other. In the meantime, both organizations grew quite a bit. Once the CIO was launched, the AFL got busy and decided they saw these unions forming, that they better start to organize more effectively, and they did, and so the movement grew.

Brian Lehrer: Continuing through our timeline. You have the 1950s as a high point for American union power, at least for those who the movement represented. Why the 1950s?

Joseph McCartin: That's right. Well, a couple of reasons. One is that the percentage of US workers in unions reached its high point then. By 1953, about 35% of all non-farm employees in the United States were members of a union. Union influence expanded beyond that 35% because what union workers were able to win from their employers, many non-union employers really gave to their own workers as an incentive to say, hey, you don't need to be unionized yourself. Unions began to transform the employment structure in the United States. They became more powerful. Collective bargaining helped to set the trend for workers in that period.

One thing that's also true about the 1950s, I think probably a lot of your listeners operate under the presumption that the '50 were a decade of consensus, and I like Ike and the emergence of a middle-class consumer society. All of that was true to some extent. The '50s were also the decade in US history when workers were most willing and able to stage effective strikes to improve their situation. They did that repeatedly all through the '50s. Collective bargaining was backed up by worker-collective action. We hear a lot of talk these days about how unions built the middle class. Well, that's how they built it. They built it by expressing solidarity, by when they needed to, going on strike.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, listeners, we are in our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of a hundred things. We're up to number 17. For this Labor Day, it's 100 years of unionization and de-unionization with Georgetown University Professor Joseph McCartain, an expert on us labor history and co-author of the book Labor in America, A History as we move through the last hundred years. Really, if you've been with us from the beginning, we've been talking about unionization and de-unionization from the very beginning of the United States.

We're up to the 1960s. In the '60s, you document a divergence between private sector labor unions which clung to their segregated ways, and the AFL CIO shamefully did not support Martin Luther King's march on Washington in 1963, but the American Federation of Teachers did. Public sector unions generally became more intertwined with broader democratization than the private sector ones. Why, and to what extent was there that split?

Joseph McCartin: Great question. It's a complicated story, and I'll see if I can summarize it. What I would say is coming out of World War II, the AFL still retained its craft orientation. A lot of those unions still were segregated. The CIO, I should say, rejected segregation and was very much a proponent of equal employment opportunity. When the AFL and CIO came together, there were divisions within that organization over how much and to what extent to support an emerging civil rights movement. A. Philip Randolph had been a leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest union of African Americans.

By the way, it was Randolph who was the honorary chair of the March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech. Randolph had fought for years within the AFL and later the AFL CIO to get the unions to fight racism and to admit African Americans to their ranks. He was still waging that fight as the '60s began. It was the industrial unions and the public employee unions that were the most receptive to that point of view. It was in the '60s that we began to see the growth of public-sector unionism. Actually, it was Robert Wagner's son, Senator Wagner's son, Mayor Robert Wagner Jr, who in 1957, as mayor of New York City, began to collectively bargain with city employees for the first time. By the 1960s, we started to see teachers, public workers of other kinds, sanitation workers, for example, organizing unions. They famously went on strike in Memphis in 1968. The public sector movement was beginning to grow in the '60s. That became a leading edge for the fight to make the union movement more inclusive and to commit it more to civil rights activism.

You're absolutely right that the AFL CIO did not endorse the March on Washington in 1963. Most of its leaders feared that the march would produce some kind of violence. They were completely wrong, of course, about that, but some leading unionists within the AFL absolutely supported the march. Walter Reuther, the head of the United Automobile Workers, for example, was one of those. The union movement started to experience what the country was experiencing as the civil rights struggle emerged. The old question, which side are you on? Will you be on the side of civil rights or not?

The union movement ultimately began to move into an embrace of the civil rights cause. The FL CIO actually played a key role in lobbying for the passage of the Civil Rights Act in '64 and the Voting Rights Act in '65. It was a little late to the party, but when it came, it came with force.

Brian Lehrer: Then, as you write in the last third of the 20th century, union density plunged, and our touchstone for the '70s will be 1971 when you refer to something called the Powell memo, written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, which helped to spark a counter-revolution, you say. What was the Powell memo and what kind of counter-revolution did it spark?

Joseph McCartin: Well, Lewis Powell was then writing that memo for the American Chamber of Commerce. He was a conservative legal mind based in Virginia very much. Somebody was defending that old order that was starting to change in the '60s, and he was seeing something develop that scared him, a union movement that was now embracing civil rights, the emerging feminist movement, the great transformations that we associate with the '60s. He was also alarmed by the consumer movement, people like Ralph Nader.

He wrote a memo basically to the conservative forces of the country. We need to prepare for a long struggle to push back against this emerging coalescence of movements. From that point, I think you can date the beginning of the long fight that we've witnessed over the course of the last half-century in which the right-wing pushed back to try to really roll back the New Deal.

Brian Lehrer: One more break, and then we'll bring it up to the present as we continue with this Labor Day edition of our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of 100 things. It's thing number 17, a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization with Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartain. When we come back, we're going to play one more archival clip that goes back to 1981. Some of you may be able to guess what that is, and then we'll bring it up to the present. Stay with us.

Brian Lehrer, on WNYC, it's the Labor Day edition of our WNYC centennial series, 100 years of 100 things. It's thing number 17, a hundred years of unionization and de-unionization with Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartain, who also has written a textbook about the history of labor in the United States, which is now in its 9th printing. Another landmark moment as we continue to move through the decades came in 1981, when there was a strike by unionized air traffic controllers, which President Ronald Reagan responded to by firing all of them who walked out, and he literally broke the union.

Here is President Reagan announcing his response on day one of that strike, August 3rd, 1981.

President Ronald Reagan: Let me make one thing plain. I respect the right of workers in the private sector to strike. Indeed, as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union. I guess I'm maybe the first one to ever hold this office who is a lifetime member of an AFL CIO union, but we cannot compare labor-management relations in the private sector with government. Government cannot close down the assembly line. It has to provide, without interruption, the protective services which are government's reason for being. It was in recognition of this that the Congress passed a law forbidding strikes by government employees against the public safety.

Brian Lehrer: Reagan in '81. Professor McCartain, that strike was illegal coming in a core safety-related government service, correct?

Joseph McCartin: Absolutely, it was illegal. Reagan was within his legal rights to respond in that way. His response, I would say, was one of the most profoundly important other turning points of labor history, I think almost at the level of the Wagner Act and its implications. I've written a book about it called Collision Course, and I'm glad you played that part of the clip where Reagan referred to the fact that he was once a union leader, once president of the Screen Actors Guild, and in a way that situated him rather well to play the role that he played then because he could claim to not be anti-union per se, but to break this particular strike, which the workers did not have a right to engage in, but which had not been the first time public workers had done something like that.

In 1970, postal workers went on strike across the country in an illegal wildcat strike not approved by their unions, but that had big impact at that time. Nobody was fired over that. What Reagan did was much more militant than Nixon's response in 1970. Reagan's response came on the heels of some big changes that had been happening over the course of the '70s. The right-wing was gathering strength around the ideas of Lewis Powell and others. Reagan himself was emerging as a vehicle for the right wing's hopes. The economy was changing in ways that made unions more vulnerable.

Deindustrialization had begun in much of the industrial belt around the Great Lakes. Steel mills were closing, auto plants were downsizing, and the union movement strength in the industrial core of the country was diminishing. At the same time, business was really ready to roll back the gains that labor had made. When Reagan had the opportunity to confront the air traffic controllers in 1981, opponents of labor really saw that as a great opportunity for them.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me follow up on that and follow up on what he said in the clip, because we heard Reagan there make a clear distinction between public sector and private sector unions and reinforce, at least in his language, the private sector ones right to strike. You wrote that Reagan's response to the air traffic controllers helped corporate employers become less inhibited about strike breaking, even where striking was legal. How did it spill over?

Joseph McCartin: That's right. What happened is Reagan fired those air traffic controllers. He banned them for life from that work. Bill Clinton would later bring some of them back, but when he did that, there was no public outrage about it, that the labor movement itself was not even united over what its response to this should be. Business people looked at that and they said, see, Reagan has been tough. He broke the unions and the union in this case, and he hasn't paid any price for it. It's time for us to follow suit.

You started to see employers in the years after 1981 respond to legal strikes by private sector employees, just as militantly, so that copper miners went on strike in Arizona in 1983 against the Phelps Dodge company. Phelps Dodge induced that strike by cutting their wages and forcing them into this confrontation. Then when the workers walked out, Phelps Dodge said, well, we're going to hire replacements now. They brought in replacement workers and basically destroyed that union. The same thing happened in Minnesota to meatpackers at Hormel in 1986.

It happened to multiple workers and airlines during these years. Private sector employers in this case were recognizing that a moment of opportunity had emerged. It was possible to break strikes if you just were tough on unions and hired replacement workers. They did that to the point that union workers in the US became frightened about the prospect of even thinking of going on strike, thinking that it would lead to the destruction of their unions. You started to see a dramatic falloff and the willingness of workers to go on strike over the course of the '80s and into the 21st century.

It was hugely important because the percentage of union workers was declining, yes, but even more significant was the fact that even union workers felt like they didn't have the power and leverage they once had. Once that feeling set in, inequality could surge. Employers could take more and more of profits for themselves without worrying that this would induce labor unrest.

Brian Lehrer: Further to that coming into the 21st century. Now, you focus, and I know you want to talk about this on the Supreme Court, and you write that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts far outstrips any court of the last century in its tendency to side with owners over workers. Can you give a couple of brief, top examples of that?

Joseph McCartin: Sure. Well, its recent decision in the case of the Starbucks company is one. That goes right to the heart of what the New Deal did and what the Wagner Act did and what the National Labor Relations Board did. Recently, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Starbucks workers that the National Labor Relations Board had exceeded its authority by seeking and gaining a preliminary injunction that forced Starbucks to stop firing its baristas who were expressing interest in unionizing.

This decision ultimately has resulted in an effort to curb the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to preempt employers from doing bad things and to force cases into the court system, rather than allowing the labor board to do what it had been designed by Wagner to do, is intervene and protect workers rights where needed. The court also recently ruled in a case in which it has opened the door to unions being penalized for any economic damages that employers suffer as a result of a strike. This court has been the most anti-union court, the most anti-worker rights court I think, that we've seen, certainly since the 1920s.

Brian Lehrer: Yet you write that today and we hear about it in the news. We've been talking about it on the show. There are many signs indicating the labor movement is stirring to life. We hear about Starbucks and Amazon and UPS and the vote to join a union by Volkswagen workers in Tennessee, rare for the south. Why now against all those headwinds of Supreme Court power, corporate campaign finance power, and a lot of conservative state governments building on the history that you were describing from the '70s and the '80s?Joseph McCartin: Great question. I think a lot of things have come together in the last several years that have set the groundwork for the recent interest in unions that we now find. I teach young people, and I would say that that interest is especially pronounced among people who are under 30. Polls show that, too. Union favorability is higher now than it's been at any time since the mid-'60s. Why is that? I think a number of things. I think one is that the pandemic has had a big impact on the psychology of workers in our time.

I think in a way that recalls in some ways what happened during the Great Depression. The pandemic experience affected workers across the board. One of the things that it dramatized for lots of workers was the persistence and in fact, even exacerbation of inequalities. I would take Amazon as an example. The company set record profits during the pandemic as people increasingly relied on Amazon to buy things so that they could stay home. Amazon workers felt like those profits came out of their sweat and blood and that they were not protected by the company adequately during the pandemic, that they certainly didn't enjoy in the fruits of its profitability.

You started to see the emergence of union interest at a company like Amazon. Now, they've been fighting that tooth and nail in the years since, and that's going to be a long fight ahead there, but it's not just Amazon. The same thing happened at Starbucks. That unionization effort has resulted in more than 300 stores choosing a union in the past couple of years. Starbucks is actually negotiating now with Starbucks Workers United on seeing whether they can arrive at some agreement for how to handle the issues that are at issue there.

I think the pandemic played a big role. I think inflation has played a large role as well. Workers are saying our wages aren't keeping up with the rising cost of housing, and that's helping to fuel this.

Brian Lehrer: Two things before you go and we run out of time. One, you teach at a Jesuit university, Georgetown, and I see you're a member of the board of the Catholic Labor Network and a founding board member of the Interreligious Network for Worker Solidarity. Where does religion come into anything that we've talked about? Are different US religions or denominations different on these issues? Like if we think of white Christian nationalist evangelicals, if we want to call it that, who have a lot of clout these days as generally conservative, does it generalize to their view of unions or labor rights?

Joseph McCartin: Oh, what a wonderful question. That's a rich and complicated history. I would say that from the very beginning in the formation of unions in the United States, that workers often brought their religious point of views into their organizing. Many cases were inspired by those point of views to engage in organizing. The catholic tradition going back to the 1890s, and a papal encyclical called rerum novarum had long defended the rights of workers to unionize and bargain collectively. Catholicism isn't alone in that.

In the Jewish tradition, in many of the protestant churches, and among Muslims as well, there are teachings about justice in the workplace that have been inspiring to workers seeking to organize. That's been an ever-present factor. I think a sad thing that has occurred in that period since the 1970s that parallels some of the other things we've talked about, is that religion has to a great extent, been co-opted by conservative forces and by, in some cases, anti-union forces. I would say, frankly, that's true among many Catholics. There's a large catholic presence on the current Supreme Court, including Justice Roberts himself.

They don't seem to take catholic social teaching very seriously when it comes to issues like the right of workers to truly have the ability to organize and to bargain collectively. There's not much indication that that kind of thinking has impacted those jurists, in my view. I do think that in the course of social movement struggles in the US, religion has played important roles in the past. I expect that it will play an important role in the future as well and in a diverse way.

Brian Lehrer: Last question in our last ten minutes. We've been through a lot. We've talked about the past hundred years, really the past 250 years for this Labor Day edition of 100 years, of 100 things. Thing number 17, 100 years of unionization and de-unionization. Is it an impossibly dumb question to ask based on our history and your understanding of it, where the pendulum might be 100 years from now? Because we like to look forward as well as back in this series, or maybe a little less stupid? What you see is the prime inflection points in the next coming decades, be it AI or whatever, as tension points.

Joseph McCartin: I think we're at an inflection point right now, Brian. I think what is happening this year, what is going to happen in the next few years, is going to help determine how things look 100 years from now. I would say that AI and other technological changes, really all turn vast changes in the relationship of people to their work. It's hard to know what the future holds in that regard. One thing I think we can say from history is that American workers have often found, and have consistently found that whatever changes come, they are best met together, best met collectively, meant by coming together with other workers who are also affected by those changes and by seeking a democratic voice in how those changes are negotiated.

Brian Lehrer: A good place to end. Listeners, coming up Wednesday, thing number 18 as we stay on the theme of workers on this Labor Day week, 100 years of employment and unemployment. That's coming up on Wednesday. For today we thank labor historian from Georgetown University, Joseph McCartin. Thank you so much.

Joseph McCartin: Thank you, Brian.

 

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