U.S. Labor and the Neoliberal Turn

Abstract

Despite the downward spiral of union membership and power during the period they explore, these two fine studies of late twentieth century U.S. labor history both are surprisingly optimistic. Minchin provides a straightforward institutional history of the AFL-CIO starting in 1979, the last year of George Meany’s 24-year reign at the organization’s helm, up to just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His main sources are the Federation’s archives, where he studied many documents not previously exploited by scholars, and sixty original interviews with AFL-CIO leaders and staffers. Perhaps because of his extensive reliance on this material, Minchin’s narrative largely reflects the viewpoint of the D.C. labor establishment and at times uncritically reproduces the official “glass half full” perspective that its spokespersons often promote. Windham was an AFL-CIO staffer herself for a decade prior to embarking on an academic career (indeed she was one of Minchin’s interviewees), but her approach is quite different, focusing primarily on rank-and-file workers. She carefully reconstructs four union organizing drives that took place in the 1970s, none of which have been previously documented in any detail. All four involved categories of workers who had been influenced by the social movements of the 1960s: women, young workers, and African Americans. Windham’s optimism is rooted in her finding that workers were eager to unionize when they had the opportunity to do so, despite rapidly increasing employer resistance. Although Minchin and Windham focus on distinctly different levels of labor movement activity and slightly different time periods, both inquiries shed new light on the ways in which the neoliberal turn affected American