1 gen 1964 anni - The Corporation Take-Over

Descrizione:

The massive defense industry was only one part of the nation’s economy. For more than half a century, the consolidation of economic power into large corporate firms had characterized American capitalism. In the postwar decades, that tendency accelerated. By 1970, the top four U.S. automakers produced 91 percent of all motor vehicles sold in the country; the top four firms in tires produced 72 percent; those in cigarettes, 84 percent; and those in detergents, 70 percent. The head of the American Chamber of Commerce declared that “we have entered a period of accelerating bigness in all aspects of American life.” Expansion into foreign markets also spurred corporate growth. During the 1950s, U.S. exports nearly doubled, giving the nation a trade surplus of close to $5 billion in 1960. By the 1970s, such firms as Coca-Cola, Gillette, IBM, and Mobil made more than half their profits abroad.

The new corporate giants required a huge army of white-collar workers. A new generation of business chieftains emerged, operating in a complex environment that demanded long-range forecasting. The culture of corporate life inspired numerous critics, who argued that the obedience demanded of white-collar workers was stifling creativity. The sociologist William Whyte studied somber “organization men” who left the home “spiritually as well as physically to take the vows of organization life.” Andrew Hacker, in The Corporation Take-Over (1964), warned that a small handful of such organization men “can draw up an investment program calling for the expenditure of several billions of dollars” and thereby “determine the quality of life for a substantial segment of society.”

Many of those “investment programs” relied on mechanization, or automation — another important factor in the postwar boom. From 1947 to 1975, worker productivity more than doubled across the whole of the economy. Many American factories replaced human muscle with machines running on cheap energy. Automation turned out products more efficiently and at lower cost but not without social costs. Over the course of the postwar decades, millions of high-wage manufacturing jobs disappeared, affecting entire cities and regions. Labor unions saw the moves as hurting both workers and markets. “How are you going to sell cars to all of these machines?” wondered Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW).



Organized labor contributed to the expansion of the middle class as well. For the first time ever, trade unions and collective bargaining — the process of trade unions and employers negotiating workplace contracts — became widespread factors in the nation’s economic life. Historically, organized labor had been confined to a narrow band of crafts and a few industries, primarily coal mining, railroading, and the building and metal trades. But over the Depression and war years, the power balance shifted in favor of unionized labor (Figure 25.2). By the beginning of the 1950s, the nation’s major industries, including auto, steel, clothing, chemicals, and virtually all consumer product manufacturing, were operating with union contracts

Labor unions reached their peak strength immediately after World War II, when they represented close to 40 percent of the nonfarm workforce. Although there was some decline after the mid-1950s, unions still represented nearly 30 percent in 1973. Thereafter, between the 1970s and the 2010s, their decline was precipitous.

Labor’s gains were the product of a hard fight. Unions staged major strikes in nearly all American industries in 1945 and 1946, much as they had done after World War I. Labor leaders such as UAW president Walter Reuther and CIO president Philip Murray declared that employers could afford a 30 percent wage increase. When employers, led by the giant General Motors, balked at that demand, the two sides seemed set for a long struggle. Instead, between 1947 and 1950 a broad “labor-management accord” gradually emerged across most industries, because each side gave a little: large manufacturers acceded to higher wages, confident their profits were secure, and unions dropped their demands for input in company decision making. This did not mean industrial peace — the country still experienced many strikes — but collective bargaining came to be accepted as the method for setting the terms of employment. The effect of labor’s increased leverage was climbing wages. The average worker with three dependents gained 18 percent in spendable real income in the 1950s. That new income brought a middle-class lifestyle, which often included first-time homeownership, within reach of millions of American workers.

In addition, unions delivered greater leisure — more paid holidays and longer vacations — and a social safety net. Across postwar Europe, many of America’s allies were building welfare states with some form of socialized medicine. Similar American proposals for national health care had been defeated in a bruising political battle during Truman’s presidency, but by the late 1950s, union contracts commonly included pension plans and company-paid health insurance. Collective bargaining had become, in effect, the American alternative to the European welfare state and, as Reuther boasted, the passport into the middle class.

Labor-management accord, however, was never as durable or universal as it seemed. Sheltered domestic markets were an essential condition for generous contracts, because they removed pressure on employers to lower wages to compete against less expensive goods. But in certain industries, the leading firms were already losing market share to low-cost domestic and foreign competitors — and those losses would mount considerably in later decades. Unlucky workers in unorganized industries, casual laborers, and low-wage workers in the service sector could not gain entry to the middle class. Ultimately, the greatest threat to labor’s gains was the oldest: the abiding antiunionism of American employers. At heart, business regarded the heyday of collective bargaining as a negotiated truce, not a permanent peace. The postwar labor-management accord turned out to be a transitory, not permanent, fixture of American economic life.

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