An American Aristocracy

By the third quarter of the nineteenth century,  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels faced a conundrum: in the world’s two most powerful capitalist societies, workers movements had embraced an anti-socialist, nonrevolutionary, “bread and butter” line. In their writings on the United States and the UK, they lamented the persistence, on the one hand, of an artisan sensibility that aligned the interests of each country’s respective workers with those of capital, and, on the other, the “poor whites” who mistakenly perceived their interests to be in line with those of landed elites.

Aspects of this explanation would be picked up by the great social historians of subsequent decades. In the early twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois estimated that only 40,000 out of 1,200,000 unionized workers in the United States were black. The political elitism of the abolitionist movement and fierce racism of Jacksonian populism divided Northern workers from Southern workers and black workers from white workers. He expressed his frustration at this state of affairs in a 1906 essay, writing:

The Southern laborer and the employer have united to disenfranchise the Negro and make color a caste; the Northern laborer is striving to make the whites united with the Negroes and maintain wages; the employer threatens that if they do raise labor troubles, he will employ Negroes. The Northern laborer sees here the danger of a disenfranchised, degraded, and yet skilled competitor, and raises the note of warning. Is not this a drama worth the watching?

In what he termed a “labor aristocracy,” Eric Hobsbawm saw echoes of what Marx and Engels had described. Hobsbawm posited that the anti-socialist, “workerist” tradition of union politics in the United States and the UK may be reflective of a powerful, elite layer of workers in the two countries’ labor markets. These white, often Protestant, male workers were comparatively highly paid and benefited from their position in capitalist production. Their rather advantaged market position put them at odds with more precarious workers who were more likely to advance universalistic programs for political transformation.

Immigration was another feature that divided the US labor movement. Successive waves of immigration not only generated overlapping occupational, ethnic, and religious divisions but made it incredibly difficult to unify workers who lacked a shared language and culture along class lines. American workers were, in the words of Ira Katznelson, “workers at work and ethnics at home.”

Status, race, ethnicity, and religion thus became important avenues through which to explain the US working class’s extraordinarily divided character (gender being an important dividing line across countries). But the salience and political manifestation of these divisions were not inevitable. With the intensification of factory production, new waves of immigration, and the gradual entry of women and black workers into the workforce, the late nineteenth century saw repeated attempts at mass, integrated industrial and political action across America. But through overt military repression, these efforts were all defeated. The character of the US labor movement was not determined but forged in successive cycles of struggle.

The Line of Least Resistance

Open military confrontation was not the only avenue for repression that US trade unions faced in the prewar years. A persistent, but far more subtle, means of repression came in the form of legal regulation. American legal scholars have long pointed to the limited organizing rights US trade unions were granted. By the early twentieth century, even the most repressive regimes in other advanced capitalist nations had granted workers the right to associate for the purpose of collective bargaining.

By contrast, American workers’ associations would only gain a legal right to strike, picket, and boycott during the New Deal period. In the decades prior, they were subject to intense and persistent legal injunctions, cultivating an extremely hostile relationship to the courts and the state.

Although it constrained trade unions’ ability to organize mass movements, the US legal system also opened up alternative routes for organizational survival. Key among these was the provision of insurance benefits. In 1842, the Commonwealth v. Hunt case was the first to legalize workers’ associations. The law specifically stated that workers could organize for the provision of benefits for accidents, death, unemployment, funeral, and other work-related risks.

Benefits constituted what Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court chief justice Lemuel Shaw called “useful and honorable” services that workers associations could offer, thereby preventing them from pursuing harmful objects “injurious to the peace of society.” It is no surprise, then, that early trade unions from the Cigar Makers to the Knights of Labor were originally organized as benefit societies.

Benefit provision had the advantage of legitimating US trade unions in the face of authorities and enabling them to weather the brutal attacks waged against them through the preservation of their funds. But it also came with significant costs — because they depended on regular benefit contributions, unions were unable to sustainably organize precarious and low-wage workers who could not afford to consistently pay into the schemes. Perhaps more important, benefit provision put trade unions directly at odds with Progressive Era campaigns for state benefits: by surrendering their insurance funds, they would lose the only reliable claim to legality they had.

The early twentieth century would further intensify these pressures. On the one hand, fraternal mutual benefit societies — by far the most popular and pervasive form of workers’ associations — grew in number and social status. Through easily accessible charters of incorporation, fraternal benefit societies recruited unprecedented numbers of workers in what came to be known as the “Golden Age of Fraternalism.” On the other hand, collective bargaining, picketing, and strikes continued to be effectively outlawed in a series of legal rulings following the Sherman Antitrust Act.

In the run-up to the 1908 election, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) desperately tried to secure legal protections for trade unions from both Democrats and Republicans. At the same time, it reaffirmed its commitment to voluntary benefits, repressed radical elements of the labor movement, and made no effort to organize the country’s increasingly diverse workforce.

In 1914, the AFL’s efforts would come to nought. The Clayton Act, which AFL leader Samuel Gompers had hailed as labor’s “Magna Carta,” only echoed the same principles underpinning the Hunt decision of 1842. Leaving the legality of strikes and boycotts up to the interpretation of the courts, the act once more legalized workers’ associations organized for “peaceful” and “lawful” objects and instituted for the “purposes of mutual help.”

With collective bargaining outside the fold of the law, the AFL ended World War I with a staunch commitment to the provision of insurance benefits. Gompers’s accommodation to this new climate was, he argued, a response “the conditions by which working people [were] surrounded,” following “the line of least resistance and endeavor[ing] to accomplish the best results in improving the conditions of the working people, men, women, and children, today and tomorrow.”

Insuring Against Revolt

In 1935, the Wagner Act finally recognized trade unions and granted them the right to strike, boycott, and picket. The law initiated one of the most radical periods in US labor history: with the successful organization of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), integrated unions would flourish in the country’s major industries and mobilize workers along political lines. They would pave the way for the civil rights and Black Power movements, expanding the United States’ democratic foundations and championing solidaristic legislation. With the Wagner Act, the US finally came to see the success of black unions like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, out of which leaders like A. Philip Randolph would rise to advance the labor-focused wing of the civil rights movement.

This period of organizational freedom, however, was short-lived. By 1947, trade union organizing rights were once more dramatically reduced by the Taft–Hartley Act. By rolling back trade union rights to strike, picket, and boycott, Taft–Hartley once more constrained US trade unions’ capacity to mobilize for political aims like state benefits and equal rights for all workers.

With benefits once again core to their recruitment and survival strategy, US trade unions prioritized bargaining over fringe benefits for their own membership, pushing universal campaigns for state insurance out of the organized labor movement. As the sociologist Jill Quadagno argued in a 2012 academic paper:

The expansion of private health benefits divided the working class into those who had health insurance and those who did not, and it transformed the way organized labor mobilized politically. Instead of requiring leaders who could inspire the troops to stand by the barricades, the labor movement needed leaders who could master complex financial instruments. The next battle would be won by policy experts with calculators, not charismatic militants who could issue a call to arms.

Deeply entangled in a web of national insurance providers, the political mobilization of US trade unions was, since the nineteenth century, curtailed. While trade unionists across the world campaigned for state-provided benefit systems that would protect workers from the pressures of the labor market, US unions negotiated private benefit offerings to their membership. Organized labor’s complex involvement in financial markets would only become more pronounced in the 1980s, when its massive funds came under the control of asset management companies who managed them in the interest of shareholders, not workers.

None of these developments were the result of the conservatism of American unions alone but also the uniquely adversarial legal and political climate in which they were forced to take shape. So long as they were forced into insurance provision, US trade unions were hobbled in their capacity to unify, politicize, and mobilize.

But now, as then, this positioning is not inescapable. Just as the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the CIO, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters have historically continued to champion a more politicized unionism — one focused on advancing the interests of the entire working class — so today labor leaders like UAW president Shawn Fain leverage their platform to campaign against war, deportations, and benefit cuts. In the United States’ financialized economy, fostering class-wide alliances has never been the easy path, but it remains the only one worth taking.