Labor’s End

Writing in the New Republic , Richard Yeselson examines ” the long, slow death spiral of America’s labor movement ,” especially in the wake of the unions’ Wisconsin failure. Fifty years ago, Yeselson writes:

People, for better or worse, knew what unions  did  and understood them to be an almost ordinary part of the workings of democratic capitalism.

Most important, they knew, for better or worse, that unions had  power . Sixty years ago, the UAW or the Mineworkers or the Steelworkers, not only deeply affected crucial sectors of an industrial economy, they also demanded respect from broader society—demands made manifest in the “political strikes” they organized, whether legally or not, to protest the issues of the day. Millions supported these strikes, millions despised them—but nobody could ignore them. The charismatic leaders of these unions, men like Walter Reuther and John L. Lewis, were household names to most Americans. Jimmy Hoffa was thought by many to be a “thug”, but his union, the Teamsters, could stop interstate commercial transportation in the country.

Credit to Yeselson for not simply pinning the blame on some cabal of wealthy Republicans, or shouting at the American people for their supposed sloth in the face of political shifts (though he does delve into the long-term impact of laws like the Taft-Hartley Act). As he largely admits, the conditions and challenges which gave rise to organized labor are simply different today from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and the cultural climate has changed, too. To a large extent, the success of the labor movement was premised on the existence of a manufacturing-centric economy. The conflict that develops between “owners” and laborers reached its dramatic height (or was most readily apparent) at the peak of industrialization.

But what of a post-industrial economy? When tertiary sectors (finance, service, entertainment, etc.) and abstractions become the basis of a country’s wealth, that conflict recedes—or, at least, it gets obfuscated and diluted and outsourced. The segue into this further stage, perhaps almost as much as the historical failures of collectivism, serves to discredit the appeal of socialism. (Marxists, of course, might simply respond that the situation we find ourselves in today represents the migration of capitalism beyond the nation-state and into a terminal, global stage, after which its failures will finally become apparent and inescapable, and the engine powering first-world false consciousness will finally run out of gas.) But for the rest of us today, the increasing irrelevance of the labor problem (whether a real or illusory triumph) is a factor that must be reckoned with alongside growing political limitations on labor. In other words, the blame doesn’t fall exclusively (or even primarily) at the feet of some well-funded super PAC.

For Catholics who came of age in the heyday of labor (and there were many serious Catholics who committed themselves to this movement), this decline must be especially baffling and painful. Indeed, decades of papal encyclicals, which sought to chart a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, led to many noble efforts to formulate a suitable response, from Christian democratic parties to activist work on behalf of religiously-flavored guilds and trade unions. The image of the “Christian worker” was cemented in popular memory, whether through the daily activities of parish societies or Hollywood films like On the Waterfront . But given that unions today (especially public employee unions) really do seem to be more of a drag than a benefit, or at least holdouts from a bygone era, what would today’s Dorothy Day advise? What ought the Catholic response to a situation like Wisconsin’s be? It’s not fully clear: Indeed, many of Governor Walker’s supporters and many of his organizer-opponents are committed Catholics having what essentially amounts to a prudential (if quite loud) disagreement. Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent comments on “subsidiarily” provoked widely divergent responses among brother bishops.

It’s probably fair to say that any attempt at formulating a coherent Christian response to economics would today draw less from Rerum Novarum and more from its “update,”  Centesimus Annus , with its post-Cold War critiques of consumerism and apprehension of laissez-faire triumphalism, conveyed in a manner that acknowledges the failures of socialism in practice while stressing the ineradicable role of the state in these questions. Still, contra partisans and occupiers, lasting and responsible solutions are not immediately at hand, and the ground for prudential judgment on economic questions today seems to be wider than ever. Economic questions remain urgent, but the moral imperative behind certain solutions is now a little less imperative.