A labor victory in the new Congress depends on the definition of what it means to win. Labor’s broad agenda is passable in almost inverse relationship to that agenda’s capacity to strengthen the institutional and political power of trade unionism itself. This has been true for more than forty years, ever since the mid-1960s, when, during the second of the two great surges of liberal legislation in the last century (the mid-1930s is the other one) civil rights, Medicare, immigration reform, and aid to education passed with relative ease, while the repeal of 14b, which allowed Southern and Western states to pass and maintain right-to-work laws had no chance in a Congress dominated by ostensible liberals.

Today’s Congress is far less liberal than that of forty-two years ago, and of course there is a right-wing Republican in the White House, but the dynamic is much the same. Those elements of labor’s agenda that are the least attached to the institutional needs of trade unio...

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FOOTNOTES:

• [1] Center for Union Facts, “When Voting Isn’t Private: The Union Campaign Against Secret Ballot Elections,” p. 4, at www.unionfacts.com.
• [2] H R Policy Association, “Mistitled ‘Employee Free Choice Act’ Would Strip Workers of Secret Ballot in Union Representation Elections,” p. 2, at www.hrpolicy.org.
• [3] For a larger discussion of this perspective see Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 36, where Leiserson is quoted.
• [4] David Brody, Labor Embattled: History, Power, Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). The essay from which this material is drawn, “Labor Elections: Good For Workers?” first appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of Dissent.
• [5] James Brudney, “Neutrality Agreements and Card Check Recognition: Prospects for Changing Paradigms,” Iowa Law Review, vol. 90 (2005), pp. 868-873.
• [6] Brody, “Labor’s Rights: Finding a Way,” in Labor Embattled, p. 153.
• [7] Michael Kranish and Ross Kerber, “Rep. Frank Offers Business a ‘Grand Bargain,’” Boston Globe, November 19, 2006.
• [8] For the complex politics of this bargain see Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Temple University Press, 2003).
• [9] My discussion of the La Follette Committee relies heavily upon the excellent history by Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee & the New Deal (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1966).