Labor Intensive (with Nelson Lichtenstein)

The Clinton presidency, the transformation of American capitalism, and the reanimation of the labor movement.

In his 1929 autobiography, Big Bill Haywood, the leader of the Western Federation of Miners and a founder of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, noted that the owners of the gold mines “did not find the gold, they did not mine the gold, they did not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belonged to them!”

The IWW—the Wobblies—were the Rebel Alliance of the American labor movement a hundred plus years ago. Haywood and his labor comrades had arguably as much if not more of an impact on the day-to-day life of today’s working Americans as any president, but they are generally given short shrift in the history textbooks. They unionized workers, and they organized strikes, and in the case of the Wobblies, they were not above corporate sabotage and other, more radical measures to achieve their aims—one of which was the eight-hour work day we all now take for granted. Big Bill would have approved of the “by any means necessary” approach of Malcolm X.

Haywood died in 1928. He never would have expected, and may have been incapable of even imagining, that a U.S. president would show up at a union picket line, as a show of support. That did not happen in his lifetime, needless to say; not even Teddy Roosevelt would have dared do such a thing. And it hadn’t happened since—until this past week, when President Joe Biden went to Michigan and joined the auto workers’ picket line.

A cynic might argue that “Union Joe” was pandering—that, with a big election coming up in a little over a year, he was there to court the UAW votes, and nothing more. But that didn’t look like pandering to me. And the union members didn’t seem to take it that way, either. After all, as Biden pointed out, he did the same thing when he was a senator.

Quietly, Biden has put together the most progressive resume of any president since LBJ, if not FDR. His policies almost always favor the working class over the privileged. Yesterday, speaking at the John McCain library dedication ceremony, he said: “Democracy means rule of the people, not rule of monarchs, not rule of the monied, not rule of the mighty.” In other words: rule of the prospectors and the miners and the millers, not rule of the owners of the gold mine.

The Democratic Party has not always been so cozy with labor. On the contrary; Bill Clinton, as both governor of Arkansas and president of the United States, regarded labor with “disdain.” That’s the word used by the historian and research professor Nelson Lichtenstein, author of the new book A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast.

The so-called “Fabulous Decade” of the 90s was not so fabulous when it came to labor. Unions were generally thought of as on the wane, if not completely archaic: mobbed up, corrupt, entitled, even irritating.

“Unfortunately, the labor movement in American in probably the 70s, and the 80s certainly and the 90s—it’s at its nadir,” Lichtenstein tells me. “It had some power still, but in terms of public perception of it. What was the leadership of labor doing, [AFL-CIO president] Lane Kirkland? He was much more interested in Eastern Europe—that was important; you know, solidarity—than at home. He was not a tribune. We didn’t have people like Sara Nelson and Shawn Fain and even Bernie. So the labor movement itself was…stolid and unattractive to liberals.”

Big believers in the “new economy,” Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, the almighty Robert Rubin, sided more often than not with capital. The former was loath to piss off Walmart or Tyson Foods, huge corporations that happened to be headquartered in his home state of Arkansas. The latter could never quite shake the neoliberal orthodoxy he acquired during his career on the arbitrage desk at Goldman Sachs. Labor was the odd man out. And while the 90s really was a fabulous decade according to some economic indicators—inflation and unemployment were low, and for a few years there was a surplus—for working people, it was no great shakes. Wages have been flat for a long long time. As Lichtenstein also details in his (excellent) book, some of the policies of the Clinton Administration—especially NAFTA and the push to deregulate derivatives—had catastrophic effects on the economy down the line.

Happily, labor is now making a comeback. Unions are on the rebound. Workers of the new economy have realized what Big Bill Haywood figured out a century ago: the gold miners—or, in the case of Elon Musk, the emerald miners—don’t deserve so much wealth and power. Investment capital is no more important to an enterprise than labor.

“I’m quite hopeful,” Lichtenstein says, of the renewed popular interest in labor. “I am indeed. I think that there really is a genuine shift in ideology and mood and expectations. Winning begets winning. And I think the Teamsters won, and I think the screenwriters—it looks like they’re going to win quite a good thing—and then I think this auto strike is being very skillfully run….I am hopeful, and I do everything I can to encourage this reanimation of labor.”

One of the ideological shifts involves the idea of what sort of worker can and should organize. Unions are no longer exclusive to the gold mine or the factory floor. Coffee baristas have formed unions. Graduate student employees have formed unions. Heck, even the men’s basketball team at Dartmouth voted to form a union. This only helps expand and empower the progressive movement.

As Lichtenstein says, “I think maybe one of the larger lessons in this book—well, you know, or maybe in my life—is: I don’t think liberalism can work without labor.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S6 E6: A Fabulous Failure (with Nelson Lichtenstein)

Greg Olear talks with historian and research professor Nelson Lichtenstein, author of “A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism,” about the “fabulous decade” of the 1990s, neoliberalism, Robert Rubin, Clinton-era deregulation, NAFTA, healthcare, and the current rise of the labor movement. Plus: a prince sings.

Follow Nelson:
https://twitter.com/NelsonLichtens1

Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-Failure-Presidency-Transformation-Capitalism/dp/0691245509

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Photo credit: Joe Biden’s Twitter feed. POTUS joins the UAW picket line, September 27, 2023.