The last book I read this year was Irving Bernstein’s “The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933.” It’s hard not to see the shock of recognition in that period of anti-worker bludgeoning, union weakness, inaction, and indifference. This year, the barrage against the working class was ramped up in this country beyond any other year of my life, if you just tally up the sheer number of jobs lost, of wages lost, of life lost. But from organized labor there was no equal and opposite reaction. There was, indeed, organic “class struggle” here and there -- spontaneous walk-outs and sick-outs, some successful at short-term demands. There were even more demonstrations and “protests” and someone new calling for a general strike every two weeks for about six months. There was the largest and most inspiring mass protest movement of my lifetime, in the reborn Black Lives Matter movement, and indeed some glimmers of union support, in July’s “Strike for Black Lives,” in union bus drivers refusing to aid and abet police terror, in workers connecting the dots between authoritarian violence in the streets and authoritarian domination at the workplace. But just a handful of organized and institutional worker responses to the economic crisis that has now become the air we breathe. In 2020, there were just seven organized work stoppages that exceeded 1,000 workers, as tallied by the BLS. A couple more if you count some less-than-official actions and demonstrations. That compares to 25 in 2019, which was the highest since 2001. The year 2020 is now tied for second fewest large union work stoppages of all time, with only 2009 having fewer, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started counting in 1947. Irving Bernstein notes that the late 20s dearth of strikes -- and their tendency to be defensive strikes, and failed strikes, at that -- “produc[ed] a calm seldom if ever matched in American industrial history.” We’ve certainly matched it, and then some.
It’s as though we’ve been stuck in the 1920s for 40 years, and if we’re lucky, 2020 may have been our 1929. Our unionism, as Bernstein put it, is undeniably at low tide. One can chalk it up to a low level of “class consciousness” or organic fightback among everyday workers, but without organization the fits and starts of resistance and revulsion will fail to consolidate their temporary gains, and will hit the limits of emergency relief. This year we saw our Bonus Armies trounced, our CPUSA demos wither, our Wagner Acts die in committee.
And for the most part we heard just the smallest peeps from the labor movement. True, there were exceptions -- UNITE HERE’s raging against the dying of the light, single-handedly knocking Trump out of office, making cross-labor noises early on about a broad relief program. But there were the same old divisions, the most cynical of building trades unions still playing supply-side economics with their own pensions, the absolute silence of the AFL or others beyond tweeting #HEROESAct as various clocks ran out on their own members and the rest of the working class, the lone voice of AFA’s Sara Nelson calling for a deal before a lame duck limbo left people out in the cold. For those of us that still look for them, there are signs of hope -- the Painters leading a PRO Act pressure campaign; the toeholds a de-Trumpified NLRB might yield; what new leadership could mean for the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO, and the UAW.
We’ll see what 2021 holds for the organized labor movement, such as it is, in this country. And my personal little hope is that I can write more here and share what I think is interesting, promising, dismaying, for those of us who think that underneath the torpor and the crust, there’s something still flickering and worth stoking in the union movement.
Happy new year.