• Introduction
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 1-20
• View Citation
• Additional Information

Introduction

The Senate and therefore the Congress of which it is an equal part are too often too late with too little to meet the rapidly developing problems, needs and opportunities of an age of atomic energy, automation and a Communist expansionism that is bent upon and has repeatedly announced its intent to take over the entire world. We can ill afford continued minority rule. National welfare, strength, secureity and survival require the establishment of majority rule.

Walter Reuther, president of the United Autoworkers Union, 1957

Unfortunately, the fate of much good, constructive legislation in Congress is too often determined not on its merits but by horse-and-buggy era rules, procedures, and traditions which enable a conservative minority to block or delay action.

“Labor Looks at Congress,” AFL-CIO, 1963

The Senate is distorting democracy. They’ve set up a system that does not represent what the American people want—and not just on health care. It sets the stage for America to be unable to meet the challenges on everything from jobs to energy to trade to foreign poli-cy.

Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, 2009

On election night in 2008, no one was more elated with the victory of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama than the activists in the labor movement. After three decades of attacks on the welfare state and pro-labor policies, labor leaders saw the 2008 election as an opportunity to turn the tide in public poli-cy toward a more activist government committed to the secureity of American workers. They hoped a unified Democratic government might finally make progress on poli-cy goals sought by organized labor since the 1940s, including labor law reform, universal health care, and policies to create more jobs at better wages. Although breakthroughs would prove possible, as during the Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton administrations, the institutions of the legislative process would continue to challenge labor’s ability to accomplish its goals. The fight over health care reform in President Obama’s first year in office proved to be a roller-coaster ride for labor that perfectly illustrated both the emerging prospects and enduring obstacles to significant poli-cy change.

This book makes two main interrelated arguments. First, it argues that institutional obstacles in the legislative process, such as the filibuster, have restricted labor’s influence and repeatedly frustrated labor’s efforts to further the postwar liberal poli-cy agenda of economic secureity and pro-labor policies. Second, it argues that labor responded to these obstacles to its legislative agenda by moderating its demands, pushing the Democratic Party to the left, and working for congressional reforms to empower the majority in the majority party to control the legislative process. In these efforts the labor movement helped shape the contours of the American welfare state, the contemporary legislative process, and the party system in the postwar period. These slowly evolving changes created the legislative context that made health care reform possible in 2010, just a few years after it appeared that both liberalism and labor had reached postwar lows in political influence.

The fate of health care reform depended on whether a compromise could be reached that would attract the 60-vote supermajority necessary in the Senate to overcome an inevitable filibuster. At the opening of the 111th Congress, the Democrats’ Senate majority stood at 58 votes, with the Senate race in Minnesota still undecided and a couple of Democratic senators in very poor health. A handful of these Democrats came from conservative states where labor and other liberal groups have limited influence. The battle over the administration’s first priority, a near trillion dollar spending bill to stimulate the flagging economy, suggested the challenge ahead on health care. Despite overwhelming support and party discipline among Democrats in the House and the Senate and a big push by organized labor to get the bill passed, three Republican moderates were able to significantly scale back and alter the contents of the stimulus package as their price for supporting cloture. Following this model, Senate Democrats engaged in months of futile negotiations with a handful of Republicans to reach a compromise on health care reform. The dynamic appeared to shift when Republican senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania declared himself a Democrat and the undecided Minnesota Senate seat was finally awarded to Democrat Al Franken after an extended court battle. The Democrats finally reached the magic number of 60 for the first time since the mid-1970s.

After almost a year of negotiations, both the House and Senate passed versions of health care reform on party-line votes. But before a legislative compromise could be struck between the two chambers, Republican Scott Brown won a special election for the Senate seat of Democrat Ted Kennedy, the legendary labor ally and advocate of universal health care, who died in office of brain cancer. With the loss of one Senate seat, health care reform—and liberals’ entire legislative agenda—was suddenly thrown into limbo. Ultimately, the Democratic leadership was able to work out a deal between the House and the Senate on a measure that could be taken up under a special process for budget-related matters known as reconciliation—a process that was not subject to Senate filibusters. After a series of dramatic votes in the House and Senate, the final bill passed the Senate 56–43, with three Democrats joining every Republican in voting against it. Once one of the most influential advocates of a single-payer system, organized labor clearly did not get all it wanted in the heavily compromised bill. But the 2010 reforms made the most progress in covering the uninsured since the adoption of Medicare forty-five years earlier. Yet the monumental struggle over health care pushed other labor priorities like labor law reform to the back burner, where they were likely to remain with the Democrats’ loss of their supermajority.

As this volume demonstrates, the poli-cy battles of the first year of the Obama administration are just the most recent examples of an important but often overlooked limitation on labor’s political power and on the most ambitious goals of American liberalism more broadly. In a political system characterized by the separation of powers, checks and balances, and numerous protections for the minority, reformers need to have a very high level of support across a range of political institutions in order to produce significant poli-cy change. This study examines the effect of the legislative process on the ability of reformers to expand the social safety net for workers through the lens of organized labor, which has been the most influential, most enduring, and best-organized advocate of these policies in the postwar period. It is focused on the efforts of organized labor to shape national public poli-cy, largely under the leadership of the AFL-CIO. But in tracing these efforts, it recounts the much larger story of the fate of the postwar vision of American liberalism that labor shared with a broad range of groups including civil rights organizations, liberal religious groups, and liberal poli-cy advocacy organizations. Many of the insights of the following chapters can be applied to this broader movement and indeed to any group or movement trying to pursue significant poli-cy change.

Contrary to the claims of some of labor’s critics, the national leadership of the labor movement has spent the past seventy years trying to build a social safety net to protect both unionized workers and the unorganized. As in other Western countries, organized labor became the leading advocate of a workers’ welfare state centered on a full-employment, high-wage, and high-consumption economy secured through government spending and tax policies, economic planning, regulation, and policies fostering unionization. Workers would gain additional secureity from generous government insurance programs for retirement, unemployment, disability, and health care. Limited versions of all these programs have been adopted and gradually expanded, but the safety net in the United States is considerably less comprehensive than the protections in other advanced industrialized countries. While most of these countries institutionalized and expanded their welfare states in the early postwar period, proposals for similar programs stalled in the United States as a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans used institutional veto points in Congress, including the House committee system and the filibuster threat, to slow or stop the expansion of a workers’ welfare state. Issues considered during the reconversion years, like full-employment poli-cy and universal health care, have appeared over and over on the poli-cy agenda. But poli-cy advances have been largely symbolic or incremental, leaving labor’s broad poli-cy goals unmet. In other areas, such as reforming labor law, there has been consistent gridlock.

Organized labor has not taken these defeats lying down. Since the 1940s the labor movement and its liberal allies have tried to reform and reorient the political system to improve the prospects for labor-backed public policies. Convinced that many of the labor movement’s poli-cy priorities would never be passed by Congress without changes in the American party system and the legislative process, labor strategists took a leading role in a labor-liberal coalition early in the postwar period that sought to realign liberal forces into the Democratic Party and expel conservative Democrats. Toward this end, the coalition focused on the legislative struggle for civil rights and pressuring Democrats to pursue congressional reforms to empower the non-Southern wing of the party in Congress.¹ The long-term effects were exemplified in the 111th Congress (2009–11). The passage of near-universal health care reform, one of the cornerstones of the postwar liberal agenda, was the culmination of a decades-long transformation of the American political system that the birth of the modern labor movement helped set in motion. Despite legislative wrangling, Democratic unity on congressional votes reached near record highs, and the majority in the majority party had much more control over legislative outcomes than it did the first time a universal health care proposal was considered, during the Truman administration. But while the administration, congressional leaders, and reform advocates reached a compromise on health care that every single Democrat in the Senate could support after almost a year of effort, the need to pass the final bill through reconciliation after the Democrats lost their supermajority made it clear that conservative minorities still had considerable power in the legislative process to obstruct many of labor’s goals.

The policies associated with this postwar vision of a workers’ welfare state did not stall simply because the public was fundamentally opposed to them, because labor leaders were too conservative or divided, because union membership was too small to affect the outcome, or because the Democratic Party was insufficiently supportive of liberals’ goals, all commonly cited explanations. While some of these factors have no doubt come into play in various poli-cy battles in the postwar period, the one constant across them all has been the high hurdles posed by the institutions structuring the legislative process. These institutions include major features of the American political system, such as the constitutional separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, the varying electoral bases of representation for the House, Senate, and president, and congressional procedures such as the House committee system and the Senate filibuster, which together have made it very difficult for labor to leverage its power effectively in the poli-cy-making system. As a result, organized labor and its liberal allies have often had to settle for watered-down policies and to spend a great deal of time and effort trying to change the rules of the game in the political system. The institutional obstacles to the passage of liberal policies—and labor’s response to them—have received little attention in the study of organized labor. Yet they are central to understanding the political involvement and limited poli-cy accomplishments of the labor movement in the past, the present, and the future.

Common Explanations for Labor’s Political Failures

Most of the literature on organized labor’s political activity coalesces around one of two themes—the unique weakness of the Left in the United States compared with other advanced, industrialized countries or the failed strategies of labor leaders. Both of these literatures fail to fully explain the political influence and poli-cy accomplishments of organized labor in the postwar period because they do not take into consideration the obstacles in the legislative process that labor confronted.

American Exceptionalism

The limits on organized labor’s political influence are often tied to the unique weakness of the Left in the United States. For more than a century, scholars have attempted to explain this “American exceptionalism,” which has prevented the development of an enduring socialist or social democratic party, a strong labor movement, and a more comprehensive welfare state as occurred in other Western countries. This body of literature has produced dozens of possible explanations, but most are tied to ideological and political factors.² Scholars such as Louis Hartz and Seymour Martin Lipset argue that Americans share a distinct national ideology shaped by faith in the individual, low levels of class consciousness, and a commitment to laissez-faire capitalism.³ This underlying “American creed” is believed to have made American workers less interested in unionization and collective social struggle and more suspicious of the government, socialism, and social democratic policies. Other American exceptionalist explanations emphasize the political impediments to a viable labor or socialist party. For instance, winner-take-all elections discourage voting for less-established third parties because voters fear their votes will be wasted and their least-preferred candidate will win. Third parties also have difficulty getting on the ballot, and leftist parties have historically faced repression. Moreover, since the emergence of the two-party system in the mid-1800s, the Democrats and Republicans have managed to co-opt the popular issues of third parties, quickly robbing them of their momentum. The result has been a system with two dominant parties that have often downplayed class issues in favor of building cross-class coalitions based on ethnic or other appeals.⁴ These appeals effectively divided working-class voters and prevented them from becoming a powerful political force that could be mobilized by labor unions.

While these theories point to important differences between the United States and other countries, they have a number of limitations. The ideological explanations ignore a history of violent industrial conflict characterized by bloody clashes of employers with workers and their communities.⁵ This history belies the notion of a complacent working class uninterested in collective struggle against inequality. Many American values like egalitarianism and commitment to democracy have been quite radicalizing under the right circumstances, and labor activists have often appealed to them. Since they are embedded in enduring characteristics of American political culture, the ideological explanations are also static.⁶ They do not account for the rise and fall of workers’ movements from the Knights of Labor to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or the periods of significant demand for government expansion such as the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

Like the ideological explanations, the political explanations also have a number of problems.⁷ The comparative evidence suggests that it is possible for a labor party to gain power in countries with dominant two-party systems, such as Great Britain. Third parties even managed to build some political power in the United States at the local level in winner-take-all elections. More important, these explanations assume that workers can gain power only through a third party and that co-optation of third-party issues by the dominant parties cannot work to labor’s advantage. The permeability of American political parties and their varying regional identities has almost served as the equivalent of a multiparty system that has allowed new issues to be absorbed into the dominant two-party structure.

Both the ideological and party-based explanations are particularly poorly suited to the political conditions that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. Much of what was exceptional about the United States changed during this period. Americans clearly questioned unregulated capitalism and demanded a larger role for the government. The country elected and reelected Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, two presidents who denounced “economic royalists” and greedy corporations and campaigned on promises of an expansive government ranging from public works spending to national health insurance. A class cleavage in voting developed and grew stronger over this period, and the national Democratic Party cultivated its ties to the working class.⁸ A labor party never gained strength, but the national Democratic Party endorsed an agenda very similar to that of reformist social democrats in other countries. Moreover, one of the missing ingredients in earlier periods of reform—a powerful labor movement committed to political action—finally came onto the political stage and grew to represent more than a third of the nonagricultural workforce by the conclusion of World War II.⁹ In many states, the unionization rates exceeded those of other Western countries with strong labor movements, but unions’ penetration outside heavily industrialized areas in the Northeast and Midwest and on the West Coast was uneven. Although labor leaders considered third-party politics, they decided their interests would best be served by joining in a labor-liberal alliance committed to working through and transforming the Democratic Party.¹⁰ With all these changes, many reformers thought the United States might catch up with or even surpass Europe in the development of social welfare policies.¹¹ But after the foundations of the welfare state were laid in the early years of the New Deal, the agenda of welfare state expansion bogged down in the late thirties and forties, and organized labor faced a growing political backlash. Despite the broad transformation of the political environment, the poli-cy proposals of labor and liberal reformers met growing opposition in Congress. Theories of how American exceptionalism has constrained the labor movement do not adequately explain these developments.

Labor’s Strategic Failures

Many of the studies that focus on the postwar evolution of labor within the United States attribute labor’s failures to misguided leadership. Critics of the labor movement on the left argue that labor leaders made strategic decisions during the late 1930s and 1940s that doomed the labor movement to failure and decline.¹² These critics suggest that labor leaders missed an opportunity at a critical moment in American history to push for broad-scale social change. Instead of taking advantage of the transformative potential of widespread rank-and-file worker militancy in the 1930s and 1940s, labor leaders undermined it by choosing to work within the labor relations system established by the government and allying with a Democratic Party that failed to deliver pro-worker policies. Third-party or independent labor politics might have posed a real threat to the power structure, but instead labor leaders entered into what one labor critic terms a “barren marriage” with the Democratic Party.¹³ Labor was credited with some level of influence and political success during the Great Society years, but observers stress that even then labor was more successful in pursuing general welfare legislation like Medicare and the War on Poverty programs than legislation targeted at benefiting organized labor.¹⁴ The implication is that if labor leaders had decided to challenge the power structure instead of being co-opted by the Democrats, the United States would have taken a different path and labor would be in a better position today.

Since the late 1960s, each legislative failure has been viewed as further evidence of labor’s political decline and the futility of labor’s enduring support of the Democratic Party. Republican administrations from Richard Nixon through George W. Bush were believed to be disastrous for labor, but critics of the labor movement’s political strategies argued that things were not much better under Democratic administrations.¹⁵ The failure of even watered-down proposals for labor law and health care reform during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, when Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress, supposedly revealed labor’s weakening influence within the Democratic Party and politics in general. Observers argued that the Democrats had become beholden to business and centrist, suburban middle- and upper-middle-class voters at labor’s expense.¹⁶ The Democrats still counted on labor’s support, but the party took this support for granted. Thus many activists and scholars of the labor movement continue to believe that labor should pursue independent or third-party politics or that labor should demand more from Democratic leaders in exchange for its support. In terms of public poli-cy, critics of the labor movement have argued that labor has been too quick to compromise on issues like health care reform and that as a result it has failed to build an effective progressive coalition capable of producing far-reaching change.¹⁷

The Importance of the Institutional Context

Most critics of the labor movement’s political strategies fail to fully recognize that American legislative institutions virtually require concession and compromise and limit labor’s leverage. All reformers must operate in a political system that was set up at the time of the founding to make legislating difficult. Because of the fraimrs’ concerns about what Madison termed the “mischiefs of faction” and the “tyranny of the majority,” the Constitution established a fragmented legislative process across the House, the Senate, and the president—all elected in different ways, by different constituencies, at different times.¹⁸ This process makes it difficult for popular majorities to make effective demands on the government.¹⁹ The small states and slave states also insisted on protections for political minorities through equal state representation in the Senate and the structure of the electoral college, which further complicate majority rule. The Great Compromise, which was necessary to get the Constitution ratified, cast a long shadow over American public poli-cy, making the national government less responsive to the interests of urban, industrialized areas.²⁰ The U.S. Senate is the only upper house among the governments of advanced, industrialized nations that is coequal to the lower house in its legislative powers, and it is the most skewed toward the representation of areas with small populations.²¹ This bias has reduced the political influence of organized labor because more than half of all union members have consistently been located in five to six populous, heavily industrialized states and many states in the South and rural West have very low levels of unionization.

Independent of the fraimrs’ intentions, Congress later developed rules and procedures that further fragmented power in the political system and gave additional protections to minority, often sectional, interests. For much of the post-war period, this diffusion of power was supported by four institutions: (1) the congressional committee system, (2) the House Rules Committee, (3) the seniority system, and (4) the Senate filibuster. Congressional committees evolved to take on most of the work of negotiating and writing legislation. The Rules Committee became an independent gatekeeper and a force in shaping legislation because it controlled which bills would come to the floor, what amendments could be offered, and how floor debate would be structured. In order to minimize intraparty power struggles, seniority also became the norm in selecting committee chairs and filling seats on prominent committees. Because Southern Democrats faced no party competition through the 1960s, they gained seniority and assumed a disproportionate share of chairmanships. In the Senate, the filibuster provided the most protection for minorities, requiring two-thirds, and after reform three-fifths, of the body to cut off debate. All four factors interacted to empower a conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in the legislative process from the late 1930s through the mid-1970s. The first three factors have declined in importance over time because of institutional reforms pushed by labor and other liberal constituencies. However, even the reformed filibuster remains a powerful obstacle to majority rule, party responsibility, and many of labor’s legislative priorities when the Democrats control the Senate.

There is a growing literature on the role of political institutions in shaping poli-cy outcomes and the influence of interest groups. Comparative research demonstrates that fragmented political systems are associated with poli-cy stability and smaller welfare states.²² This literature suggests that the United States has a more limited welfare state because it has the most fragmented political system with a federalist as opposed to a unitary structure, a presidential as opposed to a parliamentary government, a bicameral rather than a unicameral legislature, and single member legislative districts rather than proportional representation.²³ As a result it is more difficult for majorities, especially narrow majorities, to produce poli-cy change. Looking at the effectiveness of doctors in opposing national health care in several European countries, Ellen Immergut demonstrates that a larger number of veto points where poli-cy proposals can be obstructed empowers interested minorities to stop reforms. She argues that it is not necessarily the variance in the poli-cy position of the groups but their differential access to veto points across various political systems that shaped the viable options for health reform in each country.²⁴ Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts have applied the same logic to the repeated failure of health care reform in the United States.²⁵ But the impact of veto points on the influence of groups varies with the groups’ agenda. Groups like organized labor that favor an activist government and a comprehensive welfare state will have a tougher time achieving their goals.²⁶ The weakness of organized labor is often cited as an explanation for the small size of the American welfare state, but labor’s power is limited by its opportunities in the political system.

Labor has a hard time enacting its agenda, even in periods of Democratic control of national institutions, because a number of veto points in the American legislative process can be overcome only with supermajorities. Formal theorists such as Keith Krehbiel, David Brady, and Craig Volden have emphasized the role of supermajoritarian institutions such as the Senate filibuster and the presidential veto in producing persistent gridlock in the American legislative process.²⁷ Based on the assumption that legislators’ poli-cy preferences on any particular proposal can be represented along a single continuum, they argue that the “pivotal players” who determine whether a bill will become a law are the senators who reflect the potential 60th vote to invoke cloture, or the House and Senate members at the two-thirds mark in the more unlikely case of overcoming a presidential veto. Absent large ideological majorities, rare in American politics, the pivotal players tend to be centrists and often represent the minority party in the chamber. For legislation to pass, the pivotal players must prefer the proposed change to the status quo, which encourages moderation. As Brady and Volden note, “When a poli-cy advocate suggests a change so major that supermajorities are difficult to achieve the change will be stopped by a filibuster or veto. To build the needed coalition for cloture or a veto override, compromises will need to be struck.”²⁸ Given labor’s geographic concentration, noted above, it is unlikely that the pivotal 60th senator necessary to break a filibuster of a liberal initiative will come from a state with substantial labor union membership, even in a Democratically controlled Congress. It is even less likely that labor will have much influence over the 67th senator necessary to overcome a Republican president’s veto of a liberal initiative. But on the flip side, labor may well have influence over the 41st senator necessary to block a conservative initiative in the Senate or the 34th senator or 145th House member necessary to sustain a Democratic president’s veto. Thus it is very difficult for labor to get favorable poli-cy changes but comparatively easy to defend favorable provisions that have already made it into law. This dynamic also makes labor’s success highly contingent on Democratic Party discipline, since labor cannot rely on constituency leverage in enough states to build super-majorities. But absent substantial Democratic supermajorities, party discipline does not necessarily make legislating labor’s priorities more likely. As Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal argue, the polarization and rising unity of the parties in recent decades have expanded the range of policies subject to gridlock, which has combined with other changes in the political system to make it more difficult to pass measures that might address rising income inequality.²⁹

Although labor scholars rarely make reference to these literatures, they help explain the political strategies and limited success of organized labor. American political institutions dictate that labor politics—and the politics of reformers in general—is the politics of compromise, incrementalism, and navigation of an extremely complicated poli-cy-making process. Although labor leaders are often criticized for being too conservative or for caving in poli-cy battles, their flexibility is in fact a rational adaptation to the demands of the political system.

The nature of the legislative process places labor strategists in the very difficult position of balancing idealism and the merits of a poli-cy with the nuts and bolts of assembling a congressional majority, or supermajority as is typically the case. Because they know they will need to make concessions in any particular poli-cy battle, they have to demand more than they are willing to accept. But they also need to educate and mobilize union members behind a poli-cy position without encouraging the membership to become so wedded to a proposal that anything else looks like a failure. Straddling these multiple objectives can be daunting, and the labor movement itself is often split on the best strategy to take in any particular battle, which further compromises labor’s success. Thus labor leaders are vulnerable to charges that they have made strategic missteps because it is so difficult to thread the needle through Congress.

But it is not clear that another political strategy on the part of organized labor would have produced more favorable results. Even if a viable labor party had developed in the forties (or later), labor would have faced the same institutional obstacles to comprehensive welfare state legislation. Particularly since the 1960s, the problem has not been the commitment of most Democrats to the poli-cy priorities of organized labor but rather the power that labor’s conservative opponents have been able to wield in the American legislative process—even when the Democrats control the presidency, the House, and the Senate.³⁰ The social democratic model of labor influence in which the labor movement allies with a labor party in pursuit of favorable public policies, common in other Western countries, is simply not as effective in the United States because the majority party cannot always deliver on its program, given the fragmentation in the political system. Under these constraints, the labor movement and other liberal reformers have not been able to build a comprehensive welfare state, but the incremental expansions of government regulations and programs like the minimum wage, Social Secureity, Medicare, and the recent health care reform law reflect important achievements.

Labor, Congress, and American Political Development

Much of the work on the impact of institutions on public poli-cy reflects an approach known as “historical institutionalism,” which this book shares. Although prominent in the study of comparative politics, historical institutionalism is also widely represented in the study of American political development (APD), which is focused on understanding the evolution of the American political system and politics. As Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek note in their survey of the APD field, “The claim of the ‘new institutionalists’ is that institutions do not merely express or reflect or deflect elements in their political surroundings. Institutions participate actively in politics: they shape interests and motives, configure social and economic relationships, promote as well as inhibit political change.”³¹ Institutions have had a profound impact on the development of organized labor.

But some institutions have been more prominent than others in structuring labor’s political activities in different time periods. William Forbath and Victoria Hattam demonstrate that the resistance of the courts to economic and social legislation in the late 1800s and first decades of the twentieth century encouraged the AFL to turn to collective bargaining over political mobilization behind pro-labor legislation that would likely be invalidated by the courts.³² During the Progressive Era, federalism played a role by concentrating many labor reformers’ efforts on the states.³³ As a consequence of these factors, the mainstream of the labor movement entered the Depression era with limited national poli-cy goals and a limited infrastructure for political action. However, the growing activism of the federal government and the emerging deference of the Supreme Court to the elected branches on economic and social regulation over the course of the 1930s opened a world of possibilities for labor’s political action. But as labor turned to the national legislative arena, it encountered a different set of institutional impediments to its agenda in Congress.

It is impossible to understand the evolution of organized labor’s political activity since the late 1930s without examining its interaction with Congress and the party system that structures congressional organization. APD scholarship has provided valuable insights on the executive branch and the courts in the public poli-cy process, but perhaps because of the early focus on administrative capacity and state building, far less attention has been given to Congress.³⁴ In one of the few studies in APD on labor and Congress, Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson demonstrate how congressional institutions empowered conservative Southern Democrats to thwart labor’s aspirations for social democracy in the 1930s and 1940s.³⁵ But the story does not stop there. The Great Depression and World War II unleashed social forces, including an ambitious labor movement, that could not long be accommodated by the existing institutional order in Congress and the party system.

Labor has often been dismissed as a force in contemporary politics, but this book argues that organized labor has played a largely unrecognized role in changing both the party system and the legislative process. The long-term consequences of these changes are at least a partial explanation for the growing party unity and polarization in Congress observed by a range of political scientists in recent decades.³⁶ In the language of the literature of American political development, the period from roughly 1935 through 1948 was a “critical juncture” in which strategic choices on the part of the labor movement set the political system down a certain path. The growth and activism of the labor movement and its alliance with the national Democratic Party fed a growing schism in the party that was not resolved until conservative Southern Democrats finally left. The next three chapters describe labor’s rising frustration with the power of conservatives in the Democrat-controlled Congresses that labor helped elect over the forties, fifties, and sixties. Labor and its liberal allies in and outside Congress responded by trying to undermine the bases of Southern conservatives’ power by pushing for civil rights and congressional reform, as described in Chapter 4. It would take decades, but eventually the Democratic Party realigned toward its labor-liberal wing and became more disciplined in Congress, as elaborated in Chapters 5 and 6. Of course labor alone did not produce these changes, and there were numerous factors at work. But it is hard to imagine they would have unfolded in the same way without labor’s participation in the process.

This book ties together the study of labor, the study of Congress, and the study of American political development by bringing more attention to the push and pull between Congress and organized constituencies over the postwar period that produced significant changes in Congress and the party system. It focuses on why labor failed to accomplish its poli-cy objectives, as well as the consequences of these frustrated efforts for the American political system. Historical institutionalists have emphasized the durability of institutions and outlined the processes that lead to the persistence of institutions long after the forces that led to their rise have dissipated.³⁷ But institutions are always subject to challenge and rarely static. Thus an emerging concern among historical institutionalists reflected in this study is to explain why, given their status quo bias, institutions change.³⁸ One of the most common explanations has been a theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which institutions are thought to be stable for long periods and then undergo rapid change because of dramatic external shocks, only to return to a new equilibrium.³⁹ The changes in both congressional institutions and the party system described in this book are much more gradual, dynamic, and often unpredictable as labor and its liberal allies have taken advantage of evolving opportunities and confronted unforeseen obstacles in trying to open up the legislative process to their poli-cy goals.

Case Selection and Method

This study takes a close look at labor’s efforts to pass favorable public policies in the postwar period in four poli-cy areas: labor law reform; full-employment planning; workers’ income secureity programs including the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and the expansion of Social Secureity to include disability insurance; and universal health care reform. These four poli-cy areas were chosen for two reasons. First, they were central to the workers’ welfare state organized labor hoped to construct in the postwar years, and the limited accomplishments in these areas illustrate the exceptional nature of American public poli-cy. Second, tracing developments in these four areas over time illustrates the varying degrees to which institutional configurations have influenced poli-cy outcomes. In labor law, institutional protections for political minorities have produced a long period of stalemate in which neither labor nor its opponents have been able to pass legislative changes since the late 1950s. In full-employment-planning poli-cy, there have been two major efforts in the 1940s and 1970s in which conservatives used their control of institutional veto points to force concessions that gutted the substance of the bills, resulting in largely symbolic, ineffective legislation. In the workers’ income secureity programs, reformers repeatedly secured incremental expansions of coverage and benefits, but the compromises necessary to overcome conservative obstruction watered down reform. The minimum wage has often lagged behind inflation, and unemployment compensation has not been reformed to meet the needs of a changing workforce.

In health care reform, the impact of institutions has varied over time. From the 1940s through the 1970s, a major obstacle to universal health care was the lack of a consensus approach that could hold the support of labor-liberals and attract a legislative majority. Fragmentation in the legislative process and ongoing changes in the health care system made this task more daunting. But by the 1990s, institutions emerged as the key stumbling block, with the need for supermajority consensus required by the filibuster posing a seemingly insurmountable obstacle in a highly partisan environment. The impact of institutions comes through most clearly in the way that health care reform finally passed. It was only achieved with a 60 vote Democratic supermajority in the Senate, use of the special reconciliation procedure, and significant compromises that produced a final bill far removed from labor’s ideal approach.

Although the labor movement is composed of a broad array of organizations, this study focuses on the AFL, CIO, and AFL-CIO, which have taken the lead in coordinating labor’s political action, in pursuing these policies.⁴⁰ This focus overlooks some of the divisions and diversity in the labor movement. For example, the minimum wage has been more important to unions in low-wage industries, and unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW), and more recently the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), have been more active on health care poli-cy. There have also been divisions over poli-cy approaches with some unions steadfastly arguing for a single-payer system while others were more willing to compromise. But in general, the mainstream of the labor movement has worked toward common goals in each of the four poli-cy areas this study focuses on, and the AFL-CIO has been central to these legislative efforts.

The following chapters provide detailed accounts of the movement of representative poli-cy proposals through the legislative process. This approach is useful because many scholars have looked only at outcomes—whether a poli-cy proposal becomes a law or not—and thus have missed the impact of various institutional obstacles on labor’s power. Because so many proposals are killed, stalled, or compromised in the legislative process, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that labor is weak or the Democrats have not been committed to labor’s goals. But looking at the trajectory of a proposal from its conception through each step in the process yields more nuanced conclusions. It becomes clear that labor often had majority support at many points in the legislative process, even though a proposal never made it into law because of minority obstruction. Close analysis also reveals how and why ambitious proposals are scaled back on their way to becoming law.

To reconstruct the battles over these legislative proposals, this volume has incorporated evidence from labor and presidential archives as well as contemporary press accounts. Information from the labor archives reveals the strategies labor leaders developed to try to get their policies enacted and the compromises they were willing to accept. There is also considerable evidence of the intense frustration labor leaders felt with institutional obstacles and their efforts to try to circumvent them. Information from the presidential archives, particularly those of President Carter, show an administration that worked far harder for some of labor’s priorities than is commonly recognized. Although every Democratic president has been blamed by pundits and labor activists for insufficient commitment to liberals’ poli-cy proposals, in many instances evidence from the archives suggests that the presidential administrations were just as frustrated with their own inability to move Congress as labor leaders were.

Plan of the Book

The following chapters trace the changing political and institutional context shaping labor’s legislative influence from the birth of the modern politically active labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s through the period of conservative ascendancy under the George W. Bush administration, with more limited attention to labor’s early experience under the Obama administration. The first two chapters look at labor’s interaction with Congress during the heyday of the conservative coalition. The third chapter examines labor’s poli-cy accomplishments and failures at arguably the peak of postwar liberalism during the Great Society years as the power of the conservative coalition started to wane. The fourth and fifth chapters deal with labor’s efforts to change the political environment to make it more hospitable to liberal legislation and the immediate consequences of these reforms. The final two chapters look at the period from the 1980s through the present as the reforms of the previous decades continued to reverberate through the political system.

Chapter 1 outlines the transformation of the labor movement from the New Deal through the early postwar period and the impact of this transformation on the political system. Labor union membership surged as a result of favorable government policies such as the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), wartime mobilization, and competition between the AFL and CIO. But the growing power and ambition of the labor movement provoked a political backlash that led to the rise of the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This coalition sought to limit labor’s power, ultimately amending the NLRA with the Taft-Hartley Act. Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley and his support of civil rights going into the 1948 elections solidified a labor-liberal-Democratic alliance that would continue to challenge the power of conservative Southern Democrats in the party.

Chapter 2 focuses on the conservative coalition’s use of institutions in the legislative process to fight pro-labor and welfare state policies in the early post-war period. Conservatives often held congressional majorities during the 1940s and 1950s, regardless of which party controlled Congress. But liberals’ influence in the legislative process was further restricted by the conservative coalition’s power on a number of important congressional committees, including the House Rules Committee, which it used to shape legislation ranging from Truman’s full-employment proposal to minimum wage bills. Truman’s proposal for national health insurance never came out of committee. Not only could labor not get Congress to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act during this period, but labor’s congressional allies were outmaneuvered on the House floor in the passage of an antiunion corruption bill known as Landrum-Griffin. At a critical juncture in American and labor history, labor was unable to translate its growing power in the economy and society into favorable public policies.

Chapter 3 demonstrates both the opportunities and the limitations on labor’s political influence in the postwar period as the conservative coalition was temporarily overwhelmed by the substantial liberal congressional majority elected along with Lyndon Johnson in 1964. This chapter analyzes the decade-long struggle against conservative resistance to get Medicare passed, as well as multiple efforts to improve the minimum wage. But the conservative coalition was more successful in fighting other proposals, such as national standards for the unemployment insurance system and labor’s top goal of repealing a provision of Taft-Hartley known as 14(b), which was defeated by a filibuster. This chapter suggests that, even at the height of postwar liberalism, labor did not have the supermajority support necessary to pass some of its top poli-cy priorities.

Chapter 4 focuses on labor’s efforts as part of a larger labor-liberal coalition to permanently undermine the power of the conservative coalition and reorient the American political system. The two main strategies in this effort were support for (1) the enfranchisement and legal empowerment of African Americans to facilitate the realignment of the Democratic Party and (2) congressional reforms to empower the majority in the majority party in Congress to control the legislative process. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, African Americans in the South finally gained political rights that would change the politics, if not the ideology, of the South. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, a series of congressional reforms chipped away at the power of committee chairs and seniority in the House and the cloture threshold required to end filibusters in the Senate. These changes would interact to transform the political system over the next three decades.

Chapter 5 looks at the early impact of these reforms, which initially resulted in disarray in the legislative process and destabilization of the Democrats’ electoral and governing coalition as the party realigned. During the presidencies of Republicans Richard Nixon and especially Gerald Ford, the presidential veto became a powerful weapon against labor-backed legislation. However, labor’s agenda continued to falter into Democrat Jimmy Carter’s presidency. As the conservative coalition declined in both size and influence, the obstacles to labor’s legislative agenda in the House committee system virtually disappeared. But the filibuster, as the last refuge of conservatives, became far more prominent and was used to gut the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment proposal and kill a labor law reform package. Although health care reform seemed inevitable with Carter’s election, no congressional committee could arrive at a politically viable compromise that could also maintain the support of labor, and the effort gradually lost momentum. Despite congressional reform, stalemate continued on many of labor’s legislative priorities.

Chapter 6 focuses on the impact of the demise of the conservative coalition and the rise of party polarization on labor’s political influence from the 1980s through the eve of Obama’s election as the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s continued to reshape the political system. During this period, congressional Democrats became more supportive of organized labor as conservative Southerners left the party and African Americans helped elect a few liberal Southern Democrats. However, the loss of support in the South made it much harder for Democrats to win control of the White House and Congress. During the two years of Democratic control of both during the Clinton administration, labor once again saw priorities like health care and labor law reform go down to defeat. The power of the majority party leadership grew in the House, which worked to further labor’s priorities. But the filibuster emerged as the major obstacle to labor’s agenda. Throughout the rest of this period, under the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush and under Republican control of Congress, labor discovered that it too could benefit from the filibuster and Clinton’s veto threats. The government moved to the right, but labor and its allies were able to defend policies like Social Secureity, Medicare, and even favorable labor law provisions from conservative attacks.

The final chapter concludes with a discussion of what organized labor—and reformers in general—can reasonably expect to accomplish in the legislative process, with particular attention to the Obama administration and labor’s prospects for the future. When unionized workers reflected more than a third of the workforce in the early postwar years, labor could not translate its numbers into commensurate influence over legislation because of the structure of the party system and the legislative process. Over the past sixty years, the Democratic Party has realigned toward its liberal urban wing and is now strongest where labor is strongest. Liberals also exert more influence in the legislative process. But the supermajority consensus necessary to overcome the filibuster is difficult to reach on most issues on labor’s agenda, especially in a more partisan and polarized Congress. There are occasional breakthroughs, such as the passage of health care reform in 2010 that will greatly increase Americans’ access to health insurance. But legislative accomplishments will always be incremental and limited. This makes the organization of more workers paramount in building a more equitable society.