The following quote comes from near the conclusion of Jonathan Cutler's book Labor's Time: shorter hours, the UAW, and the struggle for American unionism:
"The 1958 round of UAW collective bargaining negotiations was a major defeat, not only for the 30-40 demand, but for any positive labor program within the UAW. Faced with widespread unemployment and worker insecurity, Reuther dumped the 30-40 demand and the UAW moved into full retreat.
"The ultimate demise of the UAW, and of the industrial union movement more generally, was delayed during the inflationary years of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Nevertheless, the 1958 bargaining round in auto set the stage for the future of American labor. The shorter workweek movement had been decisively defeated within the industrial union movement and organized labor had demonstrated its complete helplessness in the face of recession and unemployment.
"The twentieth century ended with organized labor in the United States flat on its back. Shorn of any serious strategy for battling the threat of unemployment in a post-Keynesian economy, organized labor suffered mightily during the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s.
"Today, almost fifty years after the merger of the AFL and the ClO, organized labor in the United States is so unresponsive to its own rank and file and so removed from its own history of struggle that labor leaders are no longer even compelled to venture a position on the hours question. There is no hours question. The discourse of shorter hours—the vision of less work and more pay—has vanished from the horizon of possibility."
Posted by sandwichman at July 13, 2005 02:31 PM