2
civil rights in the labor movement and because of the continuing importance of labor and the
south to civil rights legislation, no one institution would have the weapons to accomplish the task
at hand. As a result, by the late 1960s, multiple agencies were addressing this issue, often
working at cross-purposes, producing inefficient and conflicting policies. To resolve this
quagmire, courts stepped in, punishing resistant unions with often overwhelming financial
penalties and scaling back many important protections of union workers.
The federal government’s fragmented, patchwork policy-making had important and
unintended consequences for labor unions, civil rights activists, and the Democratic Party. As
unions were forced to diversify, they struggled internally and financially, losing considerable
economic and political clout in the process, both with regards to their collective bargaining
agreements with employers as well as in national politics.
4
Large numbers of white union
members fled to the Republican Party, leading to the collapse of the New Deal order and enabling
harmful retrenchments in labor and civil rights policy.
5
On the job, this had a very real impact for
civil rights economics: while the percentage of African Americans in unions increased, the
overall number of union members, including African American union members, declined.
6
Specific to 20
th
century labor policy, see Margaret Weir, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment
Policy in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
4
See Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Judith Stein,
Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
5
See Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on
the Democratic Party (New York: Norton, 1991); Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and
Decline of the New Deal Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Paul Frymer and John David
Skrentny, “Coalition-Building and the Politics of Electoral Capture During the Nixon Administration:
African Americans, Labor, Latinos,” Studies in American Political Development 12:131 (1998). Regarding
the impact of the Reagan Administration on the decline of union legal protections, see Katherine Van
Wezel Stone, “Labor and the Corporate Structure: Changing Conceptions and Emerging Possibilities,”
University of Chicago Law Review 55:73 (1988); Lee Modjeska, “The Reagan NLRB, Phase 1,” Ohio State
Law Journal 46:95 (1985).
6
Stein, Ibid; Katherine Van Wezel Stone, “The Legacy of Industrial Pluralism: The Tension Between
Individual Employment Rights and the New Deal Collective Bargaining System,” University of Chicago
Law Review 59:575 (1992), footnote 18.
Convention