For nearly half a century, an air of inevitability has clung to the decline of the American labor movement. As union density has fallen to near 10 percent and strike activity has reached historic lows, labor has often fumbled in its response to political attacks. Since 2012, five states have passed anti-union “right-to-work” laws, after campaigns funded lavishly by right-wing billionaires. In June, the Supreme Court dealt another blow, ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees that public employees cannot be required to pay fees to a union. With this decision, public-sector unions are now set to go the way of the once-great industrial unions—institutions that underwrote the creation of middle-class wealth and crystallized a still-powerful image of American prosperity.
In the rearview mirror, the three decades after World War II, when the expanded labor rights regime of the New Deal was at its strongest, increasingly look like what the historian Jefferson Cowie has called a “great exception.”
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