Alternative Visions - Union Labor’s Great Detour: 1947 to 2021

 Dr. Rasmus follows up last week’s analysis of the Union defeat at Amazon by placing it in historic context, from the growth of union membership in the 1930s and 1940s to the great strike wave of 1970-71 and the Great Detour and decline of unions under Neoliberal industrial parties that began with Reagan in the 1980s and continues to this day. How the 1947 Taft Hartley and 1959 Landrum Griffin Acts stopped union strikes for recognition in their tracks and how Employer-State strategy cooperation in the 1970s and beyond have rolled back union membership in the private sector from its peak of 35% (80% in basic industries like auto, steel, transport, etc.) to its barely 5% today. Rasmus explains the strategies and tactics used by employers, with aid of government, to prevent unionization in NLRB elections, such as recently occurred at Amazon. How these strategies and tactics—along with offshoring, free trade, onshoring of H1-B visas, outsourcing, contingent, gig, and other work—have together resulted in a near collapse of private sector unionization in America. Rasmus concludes with a comment on the failure of Obama administration do reform the problem of de-unionization and pass ‘card check’, as well as a review of the Biden administration’s recent PRO Act bill recently passed by the US House of Representatives but all but dead in the US Senate committee.