Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T20:45:24.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Coming Apart

How Union Decline and Workplace Disintegration Imperil Democracy

from Part III - Labor, Diversity, and Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2022

Angela B. Cornell
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Mark Barenberg
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the importance of intergroup solidarity in combatting ethnonationalist populism and in sustaining healthy forms of democratic contestation, and the distinctive capacity of trade unions to cultivate intergroup solidarity and elevate it from the workplace level up to the plane of national politics.  That distinctive capacity stems in part from unions’ roots in the experience of shared work and the common interests and intergroup ties that can grow out of that experience, and in part from unions’ ability, and indeed their need, to link intergroup solidarity to economic self-interest.  That is, unions can and must encourage workers to make common cause and to overcome racial and ethnic divisions in order to pursue shared economic interests.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alesina, Alberto, and Glaeser, Edward. 2004. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alesina, Alberto, Glaeser, Edward, and Sacerdote, Bruce. 2001. “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” NBER Working Paper No. 8524. National Bureau of Economics Research, Cambridge, MA, October 2001. www.nber.org/papers/w8524Google Scholar
Alesina, Alberto, Harnoss, Johann, and Rapoport, Hillel. 2013. Immigration, Diversity, and Economic Prosperity. London: Vox CEPR Policy Portal. https://voxeu.org/article/immigration-diversity-and-economic-prosperityCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Andrias, Kate. 2016. “The New Labor Law,” Yale Law Journal 126, 1: 2100.Google Scholar
Applebaum, Eileen, Kalleberg, Arne, and Rho, Hye Jin. 2019. Nonstandard Work Arrangements and Older Americans, 2005–2017. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. www.epi.org/publication/nonstandard-work-arrangements-and-older-americans-2005-2017/Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Autor, David, Dorn, David, Hanson, Gordon, and Majlesi, Kavesh. 2017. “Importing Political Polarization: The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure.” Working Paper No. 22637. National Bureau of Economics Research, Cambridge, MA, September 2016, revised December 2017. www.nber.org/papers/w22637Google Scholar
Bazelon, Emily, 2020. “Why Are Workers Struggling? Because Labor Law Is Broken,” The New York Times (February 19, 2020), www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/19/magazine/labor-law-unions.htmlGoogle Scholar
Blumrosen, Alfred W. 1984. “The Law Transmission System and the Southern Jurisprudence of Employment Discrimination,” Industrial Relations Law Journal 6, 3: 313352.Google Scholar
Borjas, George J. 1999. “Immigration and Welfare Magnets,” Journal of Labor Economics 17, 4: 607637.Google Scholar
Briggs, Xavier de Souza. 2007. “‘Some of My Best Friends Are…’: Interracial Friendships, Class, and Segregation in America,” City and Community 6, 4: 263290.Google Scholar
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2018. Contingent and Alternative Work Arrangements-May 2017. www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/conemp.pdfGoogle Scholar
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019. American Time Use Survey – 2018 Results. Table 8a. www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06192019.pdfGoogle Scholar
Carnes, Nicholas, and Lupu, Noam, 2017. “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working Class,” Washington Post (June 5, 2017), www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/Google Scholar
Chomsky, Aviva. 2019. “Sorry Conservatives – Unions Do Support the Green New Deal,” The Nation (August 7, 2019), www.thenation.com/article/archive/unions-support-green-new-deal/Google Scholar
Cohen, Jean L. 2019. “Populism and the Politics of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1, 1: 539.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jean L., and Arato, Andrew. 1992. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Lizbeth. 1990. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cohn, Nate. 2017. “The Obama-Trump Voters Are Real. Here’s What They Think,” The New York Times (August 15, 2017), www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/upshot/the-obama-trump-voters-are-real-heres-what-they-think.htmlGoogle Scholar
Collier, Paul. 2018. The Future of Capitalism. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Collier, Paul. 2019. Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Costa, Dora L., and Kahn, Matthew E.. 2003. “Civic Engagement and Community Heterogeneity: An Economist’s Perspective,” Perspectives on Politics 1, 1: 103111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Daniel, Lienesch, Rachel, and Jones, Robert P.. 2017. Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump. Washington, DC: Public Religion Research Institute. www.prri.org/research/white-working-class-attitudes-economy-trade-immigration-election-donald-trump/Google Scholar
Crain, Marion. 2002. “Whitewashed Labor Law, Skinwalking Unions,” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 23, 2: 211258.Google Scholar
Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Darling-Hammond, Sean, Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo, and Lee, Randy. “Interracial Contact at Work: Can Workplace Diversity Reduce Bias?” SSRN (April 2019) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3379069Google Scholar
Donohue, John J., and Heckman, James J.. 1991a. “Continuous Versus Episodic Change: The Impact of Civil Rights Policy on the Economic Status of Blacks,” Journal of Economic Literature 29, 4: 16031643.Google Scholar
Donohue, John J., and Heckman, James J.. 1991b. “The Law and Economics of Racial Discrimination in Employment: Re-Evaluating Federal Civil Rights Policy,” Georgetown Law Journal 79: 16191657.Google Scholar
Ehrenberg, John. 1999. Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Elk, Mike. 2018. “Justice in the Factory: How Black Lives Matter Breathed New Life Into Unions,” The Guardian (February 10, 2018), www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/10/black-lives-matter-labor-unions-factory-workers-uniteGoogle Scholar
Estlund, Cynthia. 2003. Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Estlund, Cynthia. 2015. “Are Unions a Constitutional Anomaly?Michigan Law Review 114, 2: 169234.Google Scholar
Estlund, Cynthia. 2018. “Rethinking Autocracy at Work,” Harvard Law Review 131, 3: 795826.Google Scholar
Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Farber, Henry S., Herbst, Daniel, Kuziemko, Ilyana, and Naidu, Suresh. 2018. “Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data,” NBER Working Paper No. 24587. National Bureau of Economics Research, Cambridge, MA, May 2018. www.nber.org/papers/w24587Google Scholar
Flanders, Laura. 2013. “At Thatcher’s Funeral, Bury TINA, Too,” The Nation. (April 12, 2013). www.thenation.com/article/archive/thatchers-funeral-bury-tina-too/Google Scholar
Fishkin, Joseph, and Forbath, William. 2014. “The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” Boston University Law Review 94, 3: 669696.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 1991. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, Richard, and Medoff, James. 1984. What Do Unions Do? New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Frey, William H. 2015. Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Frymer, Paul. 2008. Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fung, Archon. 2003. “Associations and Democracy: Between Theories, Hopes, and Realities,” Annual Review of Sociology 29: 515539.Google Scholar
Garden, Charlotte, and Leong, Nancy. 2013. “‘So Closely Intertwined’: Labor and Racial Solidarity,” George Washington University Law Review 81, 4: 11351210.Google Scholar
Gest, Justin. 2016. The New Minority. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldfield, Michael. 1993. “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 44 (Fall): 132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guinier, Lani, and Torres, Gerald. 2002. The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gupta, Sarita, Lerner, Stephen, and McCartin, Joseph A.. 2019. “Why the Labor Movement Has Failed – And How to Fix It,” Boston Review (June 06, 2019), http://bostonreview.net/forum/sarita-gupta-stephen-lerner-joseph-mccartin-why-labor-movement-has-failed%E2%80%94and-how-fix-itGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, Steven. 2020a. “Overhaul US Labor Laws to Boost Workers’ Power, New Report Urges,” The Guardian (January 23, 2020), www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/23/overhaul-us-labor-laws-unions-workers-power-reportGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, Steven. 2020b. “The Faces of a New Union Movement,” The New Yorker (February 28, 2020).Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Haney-López, Ian. 2013. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, Stacy L. 2017. “The Long Arc of Diversity Bends towards Equality: Deconstructing the Progressive Critique of Workplace Diversity Efforts,” University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender, and Class 17, 1: 61116.Google Scholar
Heckman, James J., and Hoult Verkerke, J.. 1990. “Racial Disparity and Employment Discrimination Law: An Economic Perspective,” Yale Law and Policy Review 8, 2: 276298.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Jennifer L., Weaver, Velsa M., and Burch, Traci R.. 2012. Creating a New Racial Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ingraham, Christopher. 2016. “Two New Studies Find Racial Anxiety Is the Biggest Driver of Support for Trump,” Washington Post (June 6, 2016), www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/06/racial-anxiety-is-a-huge-driver-of-support-for-donald-trump-two-new-studies-find/Google Scholar
Issacharoff, Samuel. 2018. “Democracy’s Deficits,” University of Chicago Law Review 85, 2: 485519.Google Scholar
Iverson, Torben, and Soskice, David. 2015. “Information, Inequality, and Mass Polarization: Ideology in Advanced Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 48, 13: 17811813.Google Scholar
Jäntti, Markus, Jaynes, Gerald, and Roemer, John E.. 2014. “The Double Role of Ethnic Heterogeneity in Explaining Welfare-State Generosity,” Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 1972. Cowles Foundation for Economic Research, New Haven, CT, December 2014. https://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d19/d1972.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Judis, John B. 2016. The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports.Google Scholar
Katz, Harry C., and Darbishire, Owen. 2000. Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Katz, Lawrence F., and Krueger, Alan B.. 2016. “The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States,” NBER Working Paper No. 22667. National Bureau of Economics Research, Cambridge, MA, September 2016. www.nber.org/papers/w22667.pdfCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaushal, Neeraj. 2005. “New Immigrants’ Location Choices: Magnets without Welfare,” Journal of Labor Economics 23, 1: 5980.Google Scholar
Kerrissey, Jasmine, and Schofer, Evan. 2013. “Union Membership and Political Participation in the United States,” Social Forces 91, 3: 895928.Google Scholar
Kim, Soohan, Kalev, Alexandra, and Dobbin, Frank. 2012. “Progressive Corporations at Work: The Case of Diversity Programs,” NYU Review of Law and Social Change 36, 2: 171213.Google Scholar
Klein, Ezra. 2020a. Why We’re Polarized. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Klein, Ezra. 2020b. “The Ezra Klein Show: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Hopeful,” Vox (June 5, 2020), www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21279530/ta-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein-show-george-floyd-police-brutality-trump-bidenGoogle Scholar
Kochan, Tomas A., Katz, Harry C., and McKersie, Robert B.. 1986. The Transformation of American Industrial Relations. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Kohler, Thomas C. 1993. “Individualism and Communitarianism at Work,” BYU Law Review 1993, 2: 727741.Google Scholar
Kohler, Thomas C. 1995. “Civic Virtue at Work: Unions as Seedbeds of the Civic Virtues,” Boston College Law Review 36, 2: 279304.Google Scholar
Kornblum, William. 1974. Blue Collar Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School. 2019. Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Economy and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law School.Google Scholar
Lamont, Michèle, Park, Bo Yun, and Ayala-Hurtado, Elena. 2017. “Trump’s Electoral Speeches and His Appeal to the American White Working Class,” British Journal of Sociology 68, supplement S1: S153S180.Google Scholar
Lee, Sophia Z. 2014. The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leong, Nancy. 2013. “Racial Capitalism,” Harvard Law Review 126, 8: 21512226.Google Scholar
Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism,” American Sociological Review 24, 4: 482501.Google Scholar
Llewellyn, Karl. 1957. “What Law Cannot Do for Inter-Racial Peace,” Villanova Law Review 30, 1: 3036.Google Scholar
Marshall, F. Ray. 1965. The Negro and Organized Labor. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Marshall, F. Ray. 1968. “The Negro in Southern Unions,” in Jacobson, Julius, ed. The Negro and the American Labor Movement. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968, pp. 128154.Google Scholar
McUsic, Molly S., and Selmi, Michael. 1997. “Postmodern Unions: Identity Politics in the Workplace (An Essay),” Iowa Law Review 82, 5: 13391374.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. 2009. Considerations on Representative Government. Auckland: The Floating Press. First Published 1861 by Parker, Son, and Bourn (London).Google Scholar
Moffit, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Monnat, Shannon M., and Brown, David L.. 2017. “More than a Rural Revolt: Landscapes of Despair and the 2016 Presidential Election,” Journal of Rural Studies 55: 227236.Google Scholar
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Karen. 2019. “Unions and Democracy,” Labor Studies Journal 44, 4: 365372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oswalt, Michael M. 2019. “Alt-Bargaining,” Law and Contemporary Problems 82, 3: 89139.Google Scholar
Parker, Kim, Horowitz, Juliana, Brown, Anna, Fry, Richard, Cohn, D’Vera, and Igielnik, Ruth. 2018. “What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban, and Rural Communities,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, May 2018. www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-divides-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/Google Scholar
Pain, Paromita, and Chen, Gina Masullo. 2019. “The President Is In: Public Opinion and the Presidential Use of Twitter,” Social Media + Society 5, 2: 8796.Google Scholar
Paluck, Elizabeth Levy, Green, Seth A., and Green, Donald P.. 2019. “The Contact Hypothesis Reevaluated,” Behavioural Public Policy 3, 2: 129158.Google Scholar
Pope, James Gray. 2016. “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Law and the Racial Divide in the American Working Class, 1676–1964,” Texas Law Review 94, 7: 15551590.Google Scholar
Post, Robert C. 1991. “Racist Speech, Democracy, and the First Amendment,” William and Mary Law Review 32, 2: 267327.Google Scholar
Purdy, Jedediah. 2017. “Wealth and Democracy,” in Knight, Jack and Schwartzberg, Melissa, eds. Wealth – Nomos LVIII. New York: New York University Press, pp. 235260.Google Scholar
Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Reich, Robert B. 2020. The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Penguin Random House.Google Scholar
Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business and Policy 1, 1-2: 1233.Google Scholar
Rosenfeld, Jake. 2014. What Unions No Longer Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scheiber, Noam. 2019. “In a Strong Economy, Why Are So Many Workers on Strike?” The New York Times (Oct. 19, 2019), www.nytimes.com/2019/10/19/business/economy/workers-strike-economy.htmlGoogle Scholar
Scholzman, Kay Lehman, Verba, Sidney, and Brady, Henry E.. 2012. The Unheavenly Chorus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Shierholz, Heidi, and Poydock, Margaret. 2020. Continued Surge in Strike Activity Signals Worker Dissatisfaction and Wage Growth. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. www.epi.org/publication/continued-surge-in-strike-activity/Google Scholar
Sinyai, Clayton. 2019. “Schools of Democracy,” Labor Studies Journal 44, 4: 373381.Google Scholar
Sitraman, Ganesh. 2017. The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. New York: Penguin Random House.Google Scholar
Smith, Stephen. 2019. The Scramble for Europe. Medford, MA: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2015. Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2018. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Taylor, Matthew. 2019. “Trade Unions Around the World Support Global Climate Strike,” The Guardian (September 19, 2019), www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/19/trade-unions-around-the-world-support-global-climate-strikeGoogle Scholar
Tomaskovic-Deney, Donald, Stainbeck, Kevin, Taylor, Tiffany, Zimmer, Catherine, Robinson, Corre, and McTague, Tricia. 2006. “Documenting Desegregation: Segregation in American Workplaces by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex, 1966–2003,” American Sociological Review 71, 4: 565588.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tropp, Thomas, and Pettigrew, Lind. 2006. “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, 5: 751783.Google Scholar
Wachter, Michael L., and Cohen, George M.. 1988. “The Law and Economics of Collective Bargaining: An Introduction and Application to the Problems of Subcontracting, Partial Closure, and Relocation,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 136, 5: 13491417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Tova. 2020. “Union Impact on Voter Participation – And How to Expand It,” Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Cambridge, MA, June 2020. https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/300871_hvd_ash_union_impact_v2.pdfGoogle Scholar
Weil, David. 2017. The Fissured Workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius. 1996. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Wilson, William Julius. 1999. The Bridge Over the Racial Divide. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Worland, Justin. 2020. “America’s Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism,” Time (June 11, 2020), https://time.com/5851855/systemic-racism-america/Google Scholar
Zavodny, Madeline. 1999. “Determinants of Recent Immigrants Locational Choices,” International Migration Review 33, 4: 10141030.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×