Labor Movement

The evolution of modern industrial capitalism brought closely associated new organizational forms, such as corporations, the welfare state, and labor organizations, but these forms had marked contrasts in trajectory, structure, and success. In the United States, nineteenth-century craft unions emerged to provide mutual aid and to promote standards and regulations but also to oppose unskilled and foreign labor. Union leaders were committed to economic objectives for their members but avoided [Page 813]mobilization of a mass political movement based on workers' common interests. Union leaders opposed industrial unions that developed along with mass production, urbanization, and waves of immigration, such as the International Workers of the World (IWW), which mobilized unskilled and immigrant workers and promoted mass politics.

U.S. labor leaders focused on organizing and collective bargaining but not on occupying government office. In part this choice responded to Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891), which supported worker rights but only if unions would focus on workplace economic gains, not societal transformation that challenged private property rights. U.S. labor leaders succeeded in organizing substantial majorities in major economic sectors—mining, transportation, capital goods, and durable goods manufacture—but pursued limited political goals within a two-party system. Business unionism taught leaders that union prosperity depends on internal control and discipline but also that aggressive demands can undermine union security in an increasingly global postwar economy by pushing employers overseas or undermining their competitive strength.

In contrast, European and Third World nations produced industrial unions whose leaders more often were political leaders. Thus, unions' leaders engaged in party politics, and unions became identified with social legislation defending and promoting workingclass interests. Expressing this alternative vision of unions' political and social leadership, in 2002 the former Brazilian metalworker union president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, achieved the ultimate potential for transforming union leadership into national leadership as Brazilians elected him president. Elsewhere, the Labour Party's Tony Blair serves as the United Kingdom's prime minister, and Sweden's Social Democrats have dominated national politics for most of the past century.

Labor leaders, both in unions and in associations of unions, such as the AFL-CIO, represent a complex set of actors in a diverse population of organizational contexts and social relations. At one extreme, the local level, leadership encompasses the pragmatic duties of shop-floor stewards and union local presidents. At the other extreme, reflecting unions' structural evolution into national associations, union leadership may also participate in elite power structures. For example, some U.S. labor leaders have become part of a national policy elite; AFL founder Samuel Gompers and George Meany prominently represented labor in mainstream political institutions. Others, such as Eugene V. Debs and A. Philip Randolph, founded unions and emerged as influential leaders of social movements. U.S. labor leaders have not, however, followed the path of their counterparts in Europe, where labor parties participated in electoral politics and sometimes controlled national governments. As a result of these different leadership models and political strategies, U.S. labor laws contrast with those of other nations; labor standards and collective bargaining rights lack state support found elsewhere.

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