Knocking on Labor's Door: Union Organizing in the 1970s and the Roots of a New Economic Divide

In Knocking on Labor's Door Lane Windham complicates our understanding of union organizing and the declining influence of organized labor during the 1970s. In standard accounts, the decade begins with considerable promise and labor activism but ends with significant drops in rates of union membership. In fact, in Stayin' Alive (2010), his acclaimed overview of the decade, Jefferson R. Cowie goes so far as to subtitle the book “The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.” Windham finds Cowie's requiem premature. Using statistics from the National Labor Relations Board, she demonstrates that the number of workers eligible to vote in union elections remained relatively constant throughout the 1970s and was also consistent with rates since the mid-1950s. In other words, unorganized groups of workers continued to seek union representation despite national drops in union density; the working class was hardly dead. Who were these unorganized workers whose enthusiasm for unionization has largely been overlooked? According to Windham, they were people of color and women of all races; some were baby boomers, and some were southerners. They were members of what Windham describes as “a reshaped and newly energized American working class,” a larger and more diverse working class than labor historians have typically imagined (p. 3). Having recently gained access to private-sector jobs in the mainstream economy, from which they had earlier been excluded, these workers understood unionization as a means to secure a host of benefits and protections. The workers' simultaneous commitments to civil rights campaigns hardly precluded them from embracing collective forms of activism, Windham pointedly notes, challenging scholars who suggest that identity politics derailed campaigns for economic justice.