Class Warfare (Page 3)

The activism of immigrant workers in California certainly wasn't making the construction industry happy. In one 1992 strike alone, thousands of immigrant drywall workers paralyzed home construction in Southern California--just one of many such battles. So a labor center with real links to those workers and the unions helping them was not something the builders were disposed to like.

This same change in the direction of labor studies has taken place far beyond California, reflecting a larger effort among labor academics to reject the habits and assumptions of cold war, business trade unionism. Cold war-era labor studies programs became large institutions on the campuses of land-grant state universities. They taught labor economics, trained stewards and union negotiators, and examined health and safety problems. But these worthwhile functions were tied to a philosophy of labor-management cooperation, which was founded on the premise that corporations would pursue a policy of enlightened self-interest--acceptance of unions and willingness to bargain.

The era of enlightened corporate self-interest is long gone, however, if indeed it ever existed. For more than two decades the country's largest corporations have busted unions as a normal part of business activity, and have lost whatever interest they had in labor-management cooperation. It should be no surprise, then, that the end of union acceptance in the workplace should bring with it an end to the prestige of labor-management cooperation in academia. If employers don't want it, who does?

In truth, the best labor studies programs these days aren't very interested in labor-management cooperation either. In general, they are less focused on the institutional needs of unions and more attuned to the larger social and economic issues affecting the labor movement. "Teaching students how to file grievances and write unfair labor practice charges in an era in which workers are fired in 31 percent of all organizing drives is pretty irrelevant," says Tom Juravich, director of the Labor Relations and Research Center at the University of Massachusetts.

"There are two different ideas of labor studies," explains Bernard. "One puts the labor movement under a microscope for outside people to examine it. When the labor movement was on the ascendant in the 1960s and '70s, universities saw them as a powerful institution in society. That was good, but the guiding idea in industrial relations was how to stop struggle and have labor peace, how to quiet people down. The other philosophy sees that labor is about working people, and is involved with them. We would expect to see programs like that come under attack."

In university industrial-relations departments of the cold war era, union-related studies were a small part of larger programs that analyzed ways to boost productivity and otherwise help employers manage workers. Today the conservative academics Bernard describes have gone off to business schools to teach human resource management. That leaves the field of labor studies smaller, but sharper. And that's the threat that right-wing think tanks have identified.

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