Social Progress After the Age of Progressivism: The End of Trade Unionism in the West

David Kettler and Volker Meja

Economics Working Paper Archive from Levy Economics Institute

Abstract: This essay is about trade unions, an institution that arose to play an important part in relation to the social progress characterizing much of the present century and that served as an important reference point for several varieties of normative progressivism. The past two decades of social progress in the most prosperous established nations appear to be rendering the institution obsolete. The objective of the paper is to reject all progressivist interpretations of this trend -- neither condemning the development as a regressive obstacle to progress nor welcoming it as a normal part of the developmental process. The aim is to inquire anew into the historical project of trade unions and the interplay between this project and the processes of social progress, past and prospective. The analytical thesis is that the institution has been multi-dimensional, serving in one of its dimensions as an important political response to social progress. The normative problem is whether the unions' political contribution to a socially conscious political democratization can be revived or transferred, when the unions' constitutive adaptations to past stages of social progress appear to be failing so badly in the present. After a brief overview designed to show that analytical awareness of social progress has historically been linked to critical politically-minded theoretical currents as well as to progressivist theories and that it has been the ideology-process that has tended to smudge this distinction, we briefly outline three alternative progressivist approaches to unionism. Next comes a review of the contemporary state of the problem and a proposal for an analytical approach that avoids the holistic errors of progressivist analyses and lets the political issues be properly posed. In this approach, unions are situated in the context of labor regimes, an historical concept that highlights the dual character of unions, between social progress and political constitution. The contemporary decline of unions is then analyzed in relation to both levels of analysis. The political dimension poses questions of strategy for unions, and the study closes with a critical assessment of strategic alternatives generated by the progressivist alternatives. The conclusion is skeptical and political rather than programmatic, but that illustrates the social-theoretical point of the exercise. The demise of progressivism does not automatically condemn either its contributions to social theoretical analyses of social progress or its political projects.

Date: 1989-02
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