Industrial & Labor Relations Review; Ithaca; Apr 2000; Marick F Masters;
Copyright New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations Apr 2000
The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance. By Taylor E. Dark. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press (an imprint of Cornell University Press), 1999. 233 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3576-5, $37.50 (cloth).
Informative and well written, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring Alliance is an insightful analysis of the role of labor in U.S. national politics between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s. Refreshingly, it departs from the now standard statistical manipulation of union political action committee (PAC) data. It pokes into how labor has fit-institutionally-into the labyrinth of electoral and legislative politics. The author lucidly presents a counterintuitive conclusion (p. 10):
My analysis emphasizes the persistence of historical patterns. In the unsettled politics at the end of the twentieth century, unions are still included in the American political system on roughly the same terms that they were fifty years ago.
With this book, Dark carves an important place in the union-and-politics literature. He examines the intricate but often overlooked connection between the structure of political decision-making and the influence of unions. In this context, labor's power rests not only on how much it can pour into the political resource mix but also on how its political operations fit into the predominant decision-making milieu.
When labor operates in sync with the tide of decision-making forces, its potential influence is enlarged, but still institutionally constrained by natural barriers to translating popular will into legislative reality. Thus, during the Johnson administration, when power was relatively centralized, labor was well suited, through its own elite power structure, to influence a Democratically controlled White House and Congress. Nevertheless, it could not overcome the power of southern Democratic congressional committee chairs who were hostile to a pro-labor-reform agenda. At that time, these chairs wielded considerable power in an elite-dominated Congress.
When unions are out of sync, their power lapses, until they muster the internal change needed to achieve realignment. As power in Congress and the Democratic party devolved and diffused during the 1970s, labor was unprepared to play the game. Led by politically entrepreneurial unions like AFSCME, the UAW, and CWA, however, labor itself began developing the grassroots political apparatus needed to compete in the new politics. It succeeded to the point where it has perhaps an even stronger alliance with congressional Democrats today than at any time since the New Deal. Yet, labor does not have the clout to overcome certain institutional barriers and macro-political forces that stand in the way of pursuing a purely union agenda-for example, strict Senate cloture rules, and a White House determined to support NAFTA.
The Unions and the Democrats is a uniquely documented analysis of both surface-level and hidden aspects of union political activity. It is organized around a set of more or less chronologically sequenced chapters. From the theoretical perspective that a union's influence depends on how it is structured to take advantage of the current norms of political decision-making, the book traces labor's role during the power broker days of the Johnson administration to the hyperpluralist conditions coterminous with the Clinton era. In-between, it examines how labor's influence waned during the 1970s, when power was violently wrung from the brokers in Congress and the Democratic party elites by a determined group of loosely coordinated liberal activists. In its chapters on regaining the Presidency (Chap. 6) and the Congressional Democrats (Chap. 7), the book details how labor smartly and painstakingly rebuilt its core position in Democratic interest-group politics. Unions built boundary-spanning alliances and assembled a grassroots resource-raising apparatus second to none in the politics of the post-Watergate era.
The book's strengths are numerous. First, it tells a fascinating story. Second, its theoretical grip is forceful. Third, it is rich in institutional detail. Fourth, it puts labor's role into the broader electoral/legislative contexts it deserves. Fifth, it is interpretively balanced-not polemically annoying.
One weakness is a perhaps over-optimistic reliance on readers' understanding of how Congress works. Also, the book could probably have benefited from an explication of how the campaign-financing system has worked to labor's advantage-and not by coincidence.
Overall, I recommend the book without hesitation. The Unions and the Democrats is must reading.
-- Marick F. Masters
Professor
Katz Graduate School of Business
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs
University of Pittsburgh