Same as it ever was? The structure of the working class

Monthly Review, July-August, 1997 by Peter Meiksins

The American labor movement has declared its intent to organize, once again, the American working class. After decades of stagnation and decline, and faced with the virtual extinction of private sector unionism, organized labor has finally realized that it needs to return to the aggressive organizing tactics that were the key to its success in the past. But, while the tactics may be old, those being organized are not. In fact, one of the reasons for the decline of American unionism has been the unions' inability and unwillingness to grasp that there is a "new work force" in the United States. This more diverse workforce has developed as the demographic composition of the workforce has changed and as the evolution of capitalism has altered the overall occupational structure and the conditions of work in both old and new occupations. This "new work force" needs to be organized, to be sure. But it will not be unless the labor movement abandons the "narrow" unionism of the past, with its focus on white, male industrial workers, replacing it with a more flexible, diverse unionism responsive to the diverse employees and workplaces of the post-industrial age.

This story contains two crucial assumptions about the structure of the working class and about the way in which that structure is likely to affect the future of the labor movement. It assumes, first of all, that the working class has developed a structure that is fundamentally different than it was in the past, obliging the labor movement to adopt fundamentally new tactics. The second assumption is that the principal problem posed by the structure of the working class is one of organizing i.e., getting new kinds of workers to join unions. This assumption is logically connected to the first one that the working class has been fundamentally transformed. Should we accept these assumptions?

While it is obvious that the contemporary working class is diverse and structurally complex, it is not clear that this is something entirely new. Diversity and complexity may have taken new forms, but this is not the same thing as saying that what preceded it was simple or homogeneous. In fact, the "old" working class was diverse too and the traditional labor movement's experience with organizing a diverse working class can teach us something about the prospects for working class organization in the present. The problem with the "story" being told about contemporary workers is that it obscures the lessons that can be learned from past experience by defining diversity and complexity as something entirely new.

Working Class Diversity

Let us begin with some facts about the structure of the contemporary working class and the ways in which it represents a departure from the past. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on two major sets of changes: a) demographic changes in the composition of the working class, particularly gender and race; and b) changes in occupational structure and the organization of work brought about by trends in contemporary capitalism.

There is, to begin with, the remarkable growth of female employment in the decades since the Second World War. 64.1 percent of American women participated in the labor force in 1995, up from about 33 percent in 1950. The vast increase in female labor force participation has been more than a matter of numbers. The female labor force has also become considerably more diverse, as groups of women who in the past tended not to seek paid employment (middle-income married women, women with small children in the household) were both pushed and pulled into the wage economy.

The influx of women into the paid labor force has produced a more diverse, but highly segmented working class. Women workers remain heavily concentrated in a narrow range of largely female occupations (secretary, nurse, teacher, etc.,). Even those occupations which appear to have achieved a degree of gender integration (such as commercial banking or real estate sales) can be shown to be, in fact, segregated, with women concentrated in less lucrative, less desirable portions of the "trade."(1) Despite some improvement, women workers continue to earn less than male workers (70 percent).

Racial and ethnic diversity has also taken on new importance in the contemporary workforce. African-Americans have always formed a significant part of the American labor force, but have increased slightly in recent decades, representing slightly more than 11 percent of the total population of the country, and slightly less than 11 percent of the workforce. But the fact that African-Americans are far less concentrated in agricultural employment than they were in the past makes them increasingly important to the future of union organizing. Meanwhile, the number of Hispanics in the population and the labor force has grown sharply. Hispanics now form over 9 percent of the civilian labor force. To this can be added growing numbers of Asian Americans, so that, by some estimates, non-whites now comprise almost 25 percent of the labor force.