 Hi, Professor Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts. And we're here today to talk about the labor accord or the problems of American unionism in the post-New Deal era, say 1947 to the 1970s. Basically, what came out of the New Deal was a partial victory for the New Dealers. Well, what came out of the 1930s and 40s was partial victory. Some income redistribution, some, as we've talked about, some partial social welfare programs, an incomplete welfare state, and a very incomplete process of union organization. At the peak, right after World War II and through the early 1950s, about a third of the American workforce belonged to labor unions. It was much more than a third in many states. Michigan and the auto industry was almost completely unionized. New York, California, Massachusetts, high rates of union organization, steel, mining, construction, transportation, virtually completely unionized. Other industries, retail trade, finance, insurance, real estate, agriculture, textiles, very little union organization or restricted to a few particular areas. Ladies apparel in New York City is highly unionized. Ladies apparel in Atlanta or Miami or Houston, much less so. Geographic differences. As I said, Michigan, northern states are beginning with M, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Massachusetts, highly organized, high rates of union organization. Southern states and most western states, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Mississippi, Alabama, very low rates of organization. So you have an incomplete union victory. And it's pretty static for a while. This Congress of Industrial Organizations coming out of the New Deal, coming out of the 1930s, made a big push in 1946, Operation Dixie, complete failure. Union organizers were sent south in large numbers, especially to organize the textile industry. Some were lynched. The motels were firebombed. Their cars were blown up. They were arrested. Interracial black-white meetings were assaulted by the Ku Klux Klan. Failure. And the CIO never really tried again. The result of this incomplete union penetration is that the wages and benefits workers receive depended on whether they were in a union establishment, which industry they were in, which region of the country they were in. If you were in Michigan, in the auto industry, in unionized plant, you were fine. You had wages and benefits and opportunities to grieve, to protest, conditions that were like a social revolution compared to 20 years earlier. For America's working class, there really was a golden age from the 1940s through the 1970s where conditions were better than ever before or since for those workers. For shipyard workers in Alabama, for textile workers in North Carolina, for apparel workers in Houston, for agricultural workers, nothing. They were stuck in the dark ages. The establishment unionism that came out of the New Deal era did not apply to them. Now, we could talk about that's unfortunate, it's unfair, it's bad, these people should have the benefits of union organization, et cetera. But think of it in terms also of the union workers in Michigan. How do you deal with this situation? Walter Ruther, the head of the United Auto Workers, had a strategy. It didn't work, but it was a legitimate strategy. His approach was full steam ahead. We're going to push our employers to give us everything we can get, pensions, health insurance, supplemental unemployment benefits, education benefits. We want it all. We want everything. We want a dental plan. We want eye care coverage. We want everything, not just because we want it, but because we want our employers to go with us. Beowulf, be quiet. Quiet. We want our employers to go with us to Washington, to demand of the federal government that they extend these types of benefits to everybody. And they're only going to go with us to do this if they know that that's the only way that they can get out from under the heavy load of carrying these benefits and high wages to us. So his idea was good health insurance plans for the United Auto Workers. GM, Ford, Chrysler, and the other companies in the auto industry will eventually figure out that the only way that they can be competitive with those guys down south is by forcing the Southerners to also pay for health insurance. And the way to do that is to do it through the federal government. So the UAW embarked on a long-term strategy walking on two legs, the political leg, lobbying in Washington, the industrial leg, pushing for benefits, and the plan was pushing for benefits will push the employers to join us. It didn't work. It was a good idea. I'm still a little, I'm not sure why it didn't work. But the employers did see things differently. And their approach was instead of trying to force the fellow employers to join in paying for high benefits so that in Michigan they could be competitive, they would join their fellow employers, non-union employers, and get out from underpaying those benefits by relocating. Jefferson Cowey's great book, Capital Moves, addresses this for RCA, which moved its production from Camden, highly-unionized Camden, to weakly-unionized Bloomington, and then to Memphis, and then all the way over to, across the border in Mexico, to avoid unions, and to get out from paying these benefits. RCA and General Electric didn't go to Washington to force other non-union companies to pay the types of benefits and wages that they were paying. Instead, by the 1970s, they had joined a phalanx, an alliance of industrialists and capitalists, to drive down benefits and to drive out unions throughout the whole American economy. And that's what we're going to talk about next time. Thank you, and have a good day. Bye-bye.