Understanding the Strike of '79
THE THESIS THAT the social relations of production have undergone a qualitative transformation since the early 1970s is well established. As capitalism has re-created itself on a global plane, far more extensive than anything existing before, the restructuring of social and economic relations has been far reaching. The balance of power in the relationship between capital and labor has shifted substantially in favor of capital in the past two decades, as deindustrialization and capital mobility have been used as weapons in negotiations with workers (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Aronson and McKensie 1980; Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf 1986; Burawoy 1985; Buss and Redburn 1983a, 1983b; Dandaneau 1996; Davis 1986; Gertler 1988; Harvey 1988; Holmes 1988; Lynd 1982; Mitchell 1985; Moody 1988; Perry 1987; Piore and Sabel 1984; Schoenberger 1989; Scott and Storper 1986; Shaiken 1984). This transforrnation is the essence of what Harrison and Bluestone (1988) call the "great U-turn" a devastating reversal in the ability of workers to secure conditions that are in their interest.
Nowhere has the effect of this social restructuring been more dramatic than within the industrial workplace. At the point of production, the "new social contract" between capital and labor, as it is commonly referred to, that had emerged during the relative prosperity of the postwar era, decomposed. The new social contract was an unspoken agreement that was founded on a number of fundamental conditions. The first factor was the militancy that emerged among the American working class in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most visible indication of this militancy was the wave of sit-down strikes that spread like wildfire across the country and stimulated the unionization of basic industry. Millions of workers joined unions in the greatest upsurge in the history of the labor movement. American labor came out of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) era stronger than ever, with a third of all workers organized into unions. Most of the basic industries were completely unionized. This became a significant factor in the relations between capital and labor. (For an overview of this era, see Boyer and Morais 1955; Brecher 1972; Preis 1964.)
Another critical factor involved the prospects for transnational capital based in the United States. American corporations faced very positive market prospects worldwide. World War II destroyed the productive apparatus throughout much of the industrialized world, but not in the United States. On the contrary, the technology of mass production was highly developed in the United States by that time.
The increasing role of the state, in the relationship between capital and labor after World War II, is another important factor. The expansion of this role had begun with New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, especially with the passage of the Wagner Act and the establishment of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Many of the characteristics of the new social contract emerged during the war years as unions worked with capital and the state, under a no-strike pledge and arbitration procedures, to pursue the war effort.
The final element emerged in the years following the war as the left-center coalition, under which communists and socialists had worked within the CIO, broke down. The split, promoted by the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, resulted in the expulsion in 1949 of eleven CIO unions for being "communist dominated." This removed the most radical, anticapitalist ideas from the mainstream of the labor movement. It promoted accommodation to capital and passivity within the unions and laid the basis for the CIO to merge with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955. (For a review of literature on these issues, see Kimeldorf and Stepan-Norris 1992.)
The combination of these factors created the foundation for the social relations of production that developed in the postwar period. Owners of large-scale capital, cognizant of labor's strength and seeking stability and uninterrupted production to tap the global market, were ready to accept new arrangements. Under these new conditions, labor would get a steadily rising standard of living, and capital would get the relatively unchallenged right to implement productivity increases through the use of new technologies and by reorganizing the labor process. The increase in surplus value that would result from increasing efficiency would be used to pay for rising wages and benefits for workers. This basic arrangement held through the 1950s and 1960s, leading some social theorists to proclaim the "end of ideology" (Bell 1960).
Capital's commitment to this arrangement began to evaporate, however, as the rate of profit declined steadily from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf (1986) estimate that the "net after-tax profit rate... [for] the domestic non-financial corporate business sector" declined steadily from more than 10 percent in 1964 to less than 5 percent in 1974 (pp. 135-36). Beginning in the early 1970s, capital began to export work, especially in its highly de-skilled forms, to low-wage areas around the world. This began to create a far more globally decentralized system of production, as capital sought to reverse the slide in rates of surplus value and profit (see Scott and Storper 1986; Shaiken 1984). As this process proceeded, transnational corporations began a program of rampant downsizing to become "lean and mean" in an attempt to meet the increasingly rigorous demands of global capitalism. In the earlier stages, this meant eliminating lower-level workers. As the process proceeded, it increasingly focused also on middle-level managers and professionals (see Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Harrison and Bluestone 1988). The highly productive systems of Taylorism (see Braverman 1974) and Fordism (see Gramsci 1971; Gertler 1988; Schoenberger 1989; Harvey 1988; Holmes 1988) were extended globally as corporations in both developed and as developing countries imported and refined these forms of production. Excess capacity has developed in many industries. The result has been that millions of workers in the United States and in other developed countries have lost jobs. The number and the proportion of unionized workers, especially in the United States, has declined significantly (Moody 1988, 3-4). Living standards for the American working class, which rose during the relative prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, declined after the mid-1970s as the society began a steady slide into a low-wage economy (Harrison and Bluestone 1988, chap. 5).
Where workers kept their jobs, the threat to shut down operations or to relocate production was often used to force workers to accept new work forms intended to increase the rate of exploitation. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the threat of job loss began to replace the commitment to improve living standards as capital's favored method of reorganizing production.
When the Reagan administration broke the air traffic controller (PATCO) strike in 1981, it signaled a fundamental change in the role of the state in capital-labor relations. Where workers went on strike, "permanent replacement workers" were increasingly used to break them. These mechanisms have been used repeatedly to shift the balance of power increasingly away from workers and toward capital on the shop floor and in the collective bargaining process. The workplace environment has become far more coercive, echoing the past and reflecting the fundamental change that has occurred in the relations of production.
A number of recent studies have begun to reconceptualize the dynamics of the workplace. This involves viewing the workplace as an important locus of interaction among the structural aspects of production, the contradictory impact of unions, and the role of agency and consciousness in the reconstruction of labor movements. Burawoy (1979, 1985), Edwards (1979), and Fantasia (1988) view the consciousness of workers as contradictory, reflecting the contradictions of the society in which they live. Fantasia argues that despite the contradictory consciousness among workers, "cultures of solidarity" emerge, under various conditions, to challenge the existing order. Other studies are moving toward a new understanding of the relationship between the institutional aspects of unions and the agency of the working class in the development of the labor movement. (See Kimeldorf 1991 and Kimeldorf and Stepan-Norris 1992 for a review of this literature.)
This investigation looks at empirical changes inside one workplace. Its most important focus is the consciousness of powerlessness, insecurity, and loss of control that intensified dramatically among workers as the globalization of production forced changes on the shop floor after the mid-1970s. The fundamental argument is that alienation increased at the workplace, both objectively and subjectively.(1) This is an example of a cycle of tendencies operating at the workplace. Market conditions generate pressure for capital to alter the organization and technology of production to increase the production of surplus labor. The reshaping of the labor process that results transforms the conditions of the informal work group at the workplace, which alters workers' consciousness and intensifies the potential for action geared toward reform in both working conditions and union structure. The tentative and contingent nature of these relationships is noted. There is considerable variation in the process, depending on the character of the workplace and the broader historical conditions at a given point in time. In this study, however, we see an instance of this cycle.
THE AIMCO EXPERIENCE: 1977-1991
Between 1977 and 1991, the years under investigation here, Aimco was a division of the mammoth corporate conglomerate, ITT. The division consisted of three plants involved in the manufacture of brake parts and a number of warehouses for distribution. The largest plant employed about 800 workers just outside of Toronto, Ontario, and produced brake shoes and pads. A foundry in St. Catherines, Ontario, employed about 150 workers to produce raw castings of brake drums and rotors. These castings were then shipped to a machine shop in Tonawanda, in western New York, where about 180 workers operated machinery to prepare the parts for the market. The Tonawanda plant is the focus of this investigation.
In the late 1970s, Aimco workers fell somewhere in the upper-middle range of unionized labor in the western New York area. Most were able to purchase homes, own automobiles, and have …
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
| October 01, 1998 | Welborn, Gary | COPYRIGHT 1997 Sage Publications, Inc.
Image Credit: http://libcom.org/history/1978-1979-winter-of-discontent
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