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.The electoral context that made disruptive strikes so influential in the1930s had changed, however.Between April 1945 and November 1946,Harry Truman s approval ratings dropped from 87 to 32 percent.Andin the midterm elections of November 1946, the Republicans gained 124 | CHAPTER 6eleven seats in the Senate and fifty-six in the House, taking control ofCongress for the first time since 1928.The new Congress responded to the strike threat with the Taft-Hartley Act.The rhetoric with which this and other antilabor initiativeswere pushed, says Metzgar, dripped with antiunion venom. 42 The actbegan the process of rolling back the National Labor Relations Act.Itspecified the rights of employers in industrial disputes and restricted therights of unions; established elaborate reporting requirements regardinginternal union procedures; required the officers of unions that wantedthe protections of labor law to sign noncommunist affidavits; prohibitedvarious forms of secondary boycotts; outlawed the closed shop; andexplicitly allowed the right to work laws that were spreading, especiallyin southern states.This last would turn out to be calamitous for theunions as the mass-production industries began their postwar migra-tion to the Sun Belt.By the late 1950s, as strikes continued, the unionswere being tarred in Congress and on television by corruption and rack-eteering charges, leading to the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959.The unions were tamed by these developments, says Jack Metzgar,but they were not defeated.And average real wages continued toincrease until 1972.43 The Wall Street Journal recently captured what thismeant for many workers, in a story datelined from Milwaukee:In 1957, Wayne Hall, then 24 years old, responded to a help-wantedshingle outside Badger Die Casting on this city s south side.He startedwork the next day, and, over the years, rose from machinery operatorto machinery inspector to chief inspector.He helped organize aunion, got regular raises, enjoyed generous pension and health ben-efits and, eventually, five weeks of vacation.At age 72, he is retiredand can afford to travel with his wife to Disneyland and Tahiti.44But the numbers of unionized workers had peaked, and in the1950s, union density began a gradual long-term decline.When theemployer assault escalated in the 1970s, even the absolute number ofunion members plummeted rapidly.The administrative decisions of theNLRB played an important role in the decline, partly as a result ofthe practice of allowing the backlog of unfair labor practices cases to THE TIMES-IN-BETWEEN | 125increase, and partly as a result of rulings that failed to curb employerabuses in union representation election cases.Of course, changes in the economy were also at work, which grad-ually weakened the unions based in the mass-production industries.It isthese shifts in the postwar American economy that are usually empha-sized in accounts of the decline of the New Deal Democratic order.Suburbanization, and the prosperity yielded by unionism itself, loosenedthe allegiance of manufacturing workers to the Democrats.The migra-tion of industry to the nonunion Sun Belt weakened unions.And glob-alization eventually led to the shrinkage of the mass productionindustries.All this happened and shifted the ground on which a labor-based political party could be built.45 But none of it happened withoutthe cooperation of the Democrats, who promoted the highway subsi-dies, the water and sewer grants, and the defense industries that spurredsuburban and Sun Belt development.Nor did the Democrats mount thebig political effort necessary to reverse the provisions of the Taft-HartleyAct that made Sun Belt organizing so difficult.Moreover, the shrinkingnumbers of manufacturing workers were balanced by expanding num-bers of low-wage service sector workers whose Democratic preferenceswere strong, but for the most part they were not unionized, and nei-ther were they mobilized by the Democratic Party.46t would be a mistake to consider worker victories or setbacks in theIstruggle for unionization in isolation from broader domestic policiesthat affect working people, especially policies that supplement incomesand regulate the workplace.The strike movement played a role in win-ning these policies, and the policies in turn had a large impact on labormarkets and working conditions.In fact, the sharp distinctions we oftendraw between the poor and the working class, or the unemployed, theemployed, and the aged, are overdrawn.This is not to deny the per-sisting animosities between the unemployed or the irregularlyemployed and those with more stable employment.There are multi-ple reasons for these tensions, ranging from the status anxieties of sta-ble workers, to gender and racial prejudices, to resentments encouragedby the regressive tax systems that pay for income support for the poor,to the opportunistic propaganda of employers and politicians. 126 | CHAPTER 6Nevertheless, those who were poor and unemployed at one momentbecame workers at another and also became aged, or were in familieswith the aged.Even the protest movements were intertwined, in thesense that the militants of the unemployed movement in the 1930s car-ried their militancy into the workplaces and into the strike movement, asghetto militants sometimes carried their militancy into union strugglesin the 1960s.Moreover, the mobilized unemployed joined with strikingworkers at crucial moments, as when in the spring of 1934 A.J.Muste sUnemployed League recruited unemployed workers to reinforce thepicket lines of the striking auto-parts workers in the Battle of Toledo. The concessions won by the movements were also intertwined.Inthe 1930s the protests by the poor and the unemployed won a compar-atively generous if temporary relief system, followed by a public jobsprogram, also temporary, and then the more long-lasting series of pro-grams authorized by the Social Security Act, including old age anddisability pensions, unemployment insurance, and the categorical aidprograms we now call welfare. These programs were obviouslyimportant to the poor and the unemployed.They were also importantto working people.Labor-market instabilities and the biological exi-gencies of illness, injury, or old age often forced workers to turn to pub-lic benefits.The availability of unemployment insurance, old ageassistance, welfare, or Social Security pensions also meant that somepeople were removed from the competition for work, thus tighteninglabor markets.Moreover, the very existence of public benefits tendedto create a floor beneath which wages could not sink.In other words, the 1930s movements forced the initiation of atleast a minimal American welfare state.The programs were limited anddistorted to be sure.Program eligibility and benefits tended to reflectlabor-market conditions; those at the bottom of the labor market werealso those who were less likely to be protected by the programs.Agricultural and domestic workers, for example, were largely exemptedfrom the protections of the Social Security Act, except for whateverbenefits they would be granted from the state-administered categoricalassistance programs
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