WORKING PAPER SERIES Innovations in Collective Action in the Labor Movement: Organizing Workers Beyond the NLRA and the Business Union Gabriel Nahmias PhD Candidate, MIT Department of Political Science
[email protected] MIT Work of the Future Working Paper 13-2021 February 27, 2021 400 Main Street, E19-733, Cambridge, MA 02139 Innovations in Collective Action in the Labor Movement Organizing Workers Beyond the NLRA and the Business Union Gabriel Nahmias MIT Work of the Future Initiative February 27, 2021 American trade unionism is slowly being limited in influence by changes which destroy the basis on which it is erected. It is probable that changes in the law have adversely affected unionism. [but] over and above these influences, the relative decline in the power of Ameri- can trade unionism is due to occupational changes and to technological revolutions. George E Barnett, American Economic Association President, 1932 I. There and Back Again In 1932, American Economic Association President George Barnett had every reason to believe that structural forces were suffocating the labor movement. Labor was in retreat (Barnett 1933). The American Federation of Labor had seen its membership drop from 5 million in 1919 to just 3 million in 1933 (Zieger, Minchin, and Gall 1986). Radical unions, like the International Workers of the World, had been successfully repressed during the first Red Scare (Dubofsky 2000). The Knights of Labor, who once represented 1 in 5 American workers, were a long distant memory (Zieger, Minchin, and Gall 1986). Indeed, by 1933, only 6.9% of workers were in a union (Mayer 2004).