Source: Sharon Block, On Labor blog, August 30, 2017
….The question that many of us have been asking since Election Day — “how did we get here” — has taken on greater urgency in the wake of Charlottesville. There has been much thoughtful writing and commenting on the root causes of this now evident phenomenon. I recently came across an article by Senator Robert Wagner, primary sponsor of our bedrock federal labor law, the National Labor Relations Act, that got me thinking about an unexplored possible contributing factor – whether there is a plausible relationship between the decline in the labor movement and the vulnerability of our population to fascism.
The framework of this argument was articulated by Senator Wagner in a May 1937 article in the New York Times Magazine. The NLRA had passed in July 1935 but questions about its future as a result of challenges to its constitutionality lingered until April 1937. As Senator Wagner was witnessing the rise of a fascist power, he described his ideal industrial state. One attribute of his ideal vision was a strong labor movement, bringing the experience of collective bargaining to the American working class.
In addition to the many economic arguments that Wagner made in defense of the NLRA was his argument that the process of being a member of a union and engaging in collective bargaining in the workplace gave Americans the experience of participating in a democratic process in a way that had become remote in their political life. He lamented that politics had been “impersonalized” and that the nature of the nation’s problems – too big, complex and fast-moving – made it difficult for ordinary Americans to get involved in addressing them. Thus, in his view, the workplace became the more likely venue for the “expression of the democratic impulse”…..
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