Labor Day parades end

I don't remember a time when, on the first Monday in September, you could look down on Fifth Avenue from a high building and not see the sidewalks lined with crowds from 96th Street down into the 40s and marchers and bands coming up the avenue and the mayor, whoever he might be, leading the parade.

Last Monday, I thought they must have switched it to the West Side. Next morning, however, the paper told me that for the first time since the Labor Day parade was instituted in 1882, it had been abandoned. There was no parade. Many other cities too skipped it and in one Midwestern town only 400 people showed up to march and they marched home.

This is a remarkable sign of the times. It was in the spring of 1882 that a New York carpenter, one Peter McGuire, proposed to his local union that the first Monday in September should be designated as an annual Labor Day. The suggestion was adopted and there was a parade joined by other craft unions. Within seven years, 31 states followed New York's example and in June of 1894, President Cleveland signed a national bill.

By that time, organised labour was being accepted as a fact of life but only by employers of mechanics, carpenters, builders, who had begun to amalgamate their locals in state craft unions. The national craft union, the American Federation of Labor, was created just a hundred years ago, but not until the depths of the Great Depression in the mid 1930s was there a national, industrial union, eventually called the Congress of Industrial Organisations, the CIO.

In those dire days, with over a quarter of the work force unemployed, the unions fought company unions, boycotted corporations that hired goon squads and fought the Communists who tried to bore from within – that was the phrase – and take them over. When the Second War came, it would not have been possible to make the guns and planes and tanks and all the other weapons without the solid cooperation of the AF of L-CIO.

The CIO, the industrial union, had become so powerful that in 1955 the craft union, the AF of L, merged with the CIO but only in the sense that Jonah merged with the whale.

When the war was over, just on 30 per cent of all American workers in every sort of job were unionised. I find that most people are surprised that the figure, even then, was so low – one American in three, but that was the peak. Today, union labour accounts for only 19 per cent of the American workforce – four working working Americans in five do not belong to a union. What happened?

Well we're so close to the time and the slow changes in the story of organised labour that it's tempting to leave it to history, if so often history were not, as a German cynic put it 'something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there'. I have tapped down the years many of the men who were there, more recently, old labour men and young entrepreneurs. They tend to agree on only one thing. The unpredicted prosperity of the post war years which had 70 million jobs to offer instead of the hunger and vast unemployment that liberals and the new Progressive party had prophesied. And many states, recoiling from the grip that organised labour had on industry during the war, started to pass so-called 'right-to-work' laws, giving workers even in basic industries the right not to join a union.

Now in the fighting days, industrial workers especially flocked to the CIO and the Automobile Workers Union because their strength had helped the New Deal administrations of Franklin Roosevelt to pass a national labour relations act that guaranteed for the first time the right to organise, to bargain collectively, that prohibited specified unfair practices, for bad company unions and, eventually, set a minimum wage. This was a revolutionary change in the 1930s.

When the war was over and America was enjoying what we didn't know at the time was to be its glorious twilight as a creditor nation, when orders were pouring in from abroad for everything, even for the staples of life whose production had been devastated in the bombing of Europe, employers who had once fought union labour at the factory gates now readily accepted the New Deal guarantees to labour.

In the general euphoria, we didn't recognise then that labour would lose its last big, crucial fight, its routine practice of demanding compulsory union membership when many states passed those right-to-work laws which, as I said, legalised the right not to join a union.

So, in a way, the very victories that union labour had won in the Thirties and Forties led to its undoing, when even old company towns respected the new laws and often, if their need was pressing, offered higher wages than the minimum.

Well, that's enough guessing over the long haul. The really conspicuous decline in organised labour has come in the past six years, certainly since Ronald Reagan went into the White House. He dared, in his campaigning throughout the industrial Midwest in 1980, to promise workers all the rights they had secured and more if they had the nerve to go Republican and desert their unions' old and dependable alliance with the Democratic party. And they did.

For the first time, there was a disastrous split in the party loyalty of automobile workers, steel workers, the men in the basic industries whose fathers and grandfathers votes could be automatically delivered to the Democratic party. And in 1984, Reagan was re-elected with the support of 49 per cent of union members, an impossibility for a Republican 20, 10 years ago.

A reason that many people give for organised labour's decline is the success of President Reagan's rather breathtaking act at the time, 1981, of setting a deadline for the air traffic controllers to go back to work and telling them that if they didn't, they would be fired. Everyone knew that the largest civilian aviation system in the world, 6,000 daily flights, couldn't possibly function without its traffic controllers. The controllers' union knew and defied the president's threat.

When the deadline fell, the president announced that all the men not back at work were sacked for good and all. They couldn't believe it. Two-thirds of the entire air traffic controllers of the United States, over 11,300, lost their jobs. New controllers were hired and trained in a hurry and five years later the system still works with astonishing efficiency in spite of the efforts of former controllers to attribute every other airplane accident to a controller's error – a contention not proved.

Other industries, other employers, grew bold after that step. Recently a national meat-packing company refused to meet the increased wage demands of its many thousands of workers and the company held out throughout a year of the strike, and the union lost. Not only lost what it wanted, but lost old gains. The workers were back and new workers found they were to be paid less than old workers in the same jobs.

Undoubtedly, one new element that has given the employer the stamina to resist new contracts, new wage and pension demands, is the conglomerate. When a bus company is a bus company and nothing else, it's likely very soon to be concerned about the blow to its revenues when its workers are on strike. But, several years ago, when the workers of a national bus company went on strike, the workers' antagonist was not the bus company. It was a conglomerate that owned the bus company but still counted its profits from its food and soap companies. It held on and broke the strike.

United Airlines was another famous strike and the pilots might have got much of what they wanted if United Airlines was an independent company running nothing but an airline. However, United was part of a conglomerate with two national chains of hotels which went on making profits while the pilots were out picketing the airline.

I have a friend who spent over 30 years as a labour arbitrator and he says that the president's firing of the air traffic controllers was not an historic turn in the attitude to organised labour. It was, he said, just one incident, if certainly the most dramatic, in a long train of ailments or surrenders on the part of organised labour. He believes that the unions' decline is due, more than anything, to the enormous increase in the numbers of people engaged in service jobs – clerking, secretarial, state and city, federal government bureaucracies, hotel help, telephone workers, so on. And where these people are organised, he says, they are what he calls 'passive' union labour with few collective resources, no strike funds and little inclination towards militant action.

Well, maybe he's right but as for the air traffic controllers' strike, I have to say I think it's an example of history's being not what happened but what people are convinced happened. In other words, if enough American employers were heartened by the president's action and enough employees were scared by it, then there'll be a lot of employers, especially if they are big conglomerates, who will think twice about giving in to a union's demands and a lot of employees who will think twice about going on strike.

I find that wherever I talk to people who are not experts in labour relations, whose job lies outside the basic industries – which is to say the vast majority of us – they all bring up the air traffic controllers' strike as a brave or frightening precedent. Brave or frightening according to party affiliation.

And when only one worker in five throughout the whole country belongs to a union, there is a general indifference to the problems of union labour, a glaring lack of that vocal public indignation which, in the Depression backed the miners and the automobile workers and the A F of L and the, then separate, CIO – the absence of a resounding public opinion that was mobilised by President Roosevelt to defeat the sweatshops and the strike breakers and the company unions and the arbitrary wages and the confident tycoons who now seem to be reborn.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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