Class Politics and the State during World War Two

Abstract

The historiography of US labor during the Second World War has shifted away from New Left concerns with the fate of working-class militancy, becoming more attuned instead to the structure and development of the New Deal order. A quarter century ago, historians debated the extent to which the warfare state had emasculated working-class radicalism and constructed in its place a bureaucratized, corporateliberal labor movement. Few scholars doubted that trade unions were a fixed and permanent feature of the postwar political economy. But in the decades following the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the legal, ideological, and economic structures sustaining the institutional union movement are so weak, the agenda of most historians and social scientists has shifted to one that problematizes the rise, consolidation, and postwar devolution of the mid-century New Deal settlement. For US labor and other popular social movements, World War Two had a dichotomous character. In both politics and policy, war-era corporatist structures failed to win lasting institutional expressions, either during the war or in the decades following 1945. There was no "labor-management accord," although labor's strength did generate a kind of armed truce in key oligopolistic sectors of the economy. Anti-New-Deal conservatives in Congress and the corporate hierarchy sought, above all, to divorce industrial relations issues from the larger political universe. This was the meaning of "free" collective bargaining in the years after 1947. But during the war and reconversion years right afterward, elite power at the top of the mobilization apparatus was repeatedly challenged by insurgencies from below that sought to take advantage of the unprecedented demand for labor while at the same time actualizing the pluralist, social-patriotic ethos that was the quasi-official ideology of the World War Two home front. These social movements were a dialectical product of the mobilizing bureaucracies-the War Labor Board, the Fair Employment Practice Commission, and the Office of Price Administration-that were among the most remarkable features of the wartime New Deal. Indeed, this increasingly contentious juxtaposition between a state apparatus drifting rightward and a well-organized working class represents the great paradox of the war, a dichotomy that would be resolved in the postwar years by a rapid, politically brutal divorce between popular aspirations and the state policies needed to fulfill them. My introduction to the history of the American working class during World War Two came during the fall of 1970. At that time, the Berkeley branch of the International Socialists, a "third camp" formation of New Left sensibility and Shactmanite politics, was in the midst of furious debate. Many New Leftists had just begun a "turn toward the working class" that sent thousands of student radicals into factories, warehouses, hospitals, and offices. 1

Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies Part 2

“…Distancing himself from the radicalism of his activist and early career years, Nelson Lichtenstein, for example, has written that he no longer finds inspiration from “the wildcat strikers and the militant shop stewards” of the World War II period. “Their allure,” he wrote in 2000, “has faded over the years.” (Lichtenstein, , p. 271). He has come to appreciate the industrial relations system established in the '30s and '40s, acknowledging that it looks “a lot more attractive today” than it did when he assessed it as a young radical (Lichtenstein, , p. 70).…”

Neoliberalism Writ Large and Small

“…1 This ‗compromise' is generally held to have included a social welfare system, labour protections, ‗middle class' wages and benefits for unionised workers, and a balance of power between union and corporate hierarchies (ibid.). 2 1 Nelson Lichtenstein (2000), however, contests the idea of a mid-century ‗class compromise.' He argues that this concept is a construct of the 1970s, and errs in overgeneralising phenomena such as peaceful labour-capital relations and working-class prosperity that were in fact much more unevenly distributed than the construct implies.…”

What's a penny worth?

“…(IOW, 24 June 1946: 12) The OWIU's response to the two agencies was relatively consistent with the rest of organized labor: grudging cooperation with the NWLB, and enthusiastic support for OPA. The chief complaints regarding the NWLB targeted the inequalities of administered 'sacrifice' for the cause: its detailed administration of industrial relations, which, in combination with the 'no-strike' pledge and the wage ceilings set by the 'Little Steel' formula of July 1942, rendered the collective bargaining process useless, and froze unfair pay differentials as if pre-war inequalities were unworthy of redress (Leff, 1991;Lichtenstein, 2000). 17 Local 128 frequently went before the regional NWLB to protest 'gross inequities' in companies' wage structures, to protest the establishment of classifications 'obsolete and detrimental to many workers in the production department', or to help press for increasing the ceilings of those wages that had 'a bearing on rates paid our workers' (S. In contrast, OPA was enormously popular with unions and the public (Jacobs, 1997;Lichtenstein, 2000: 269-70), demonstrating the breadth of consensus on organized labor's analysis of inflation as the product of capitalists' administered scarcity.…”

“…Although a superficial picture of working-class pro-war sentiment was brilliantly torn apart in the early 1980s (Glaberman, 1980;Lichtenstein, 1982;Lipsitz, 1981), recent social history has nevertheless reasserted workers' active engagement in state-sponsored activities on the home front, and their significant ideological commitment to the 'Americanism' that emerged during the New Deal and buoyed both the war effort and Cold War politics. For recent accounts of working class support, see Gerstle (1989); Leff (1991); and Lichtenstein (1988and Lichtenstein ( , 2000.…”