Categorization by identity, by region, by skill, and by contract term.

That might be a vague way for me to start, but stick around and you'll understand what I'm saying. I'll confess I had to look Sweden's union membership numbers up in order to make this comparison: ~70% this decade down from an 86% peak in 1995. Compare that to the U.S.: ~10% this decade down from a 34.8% peak in 1954. Indeed, there's a clear postwar divergence.

The following points are going to be much more general, so go ahead and verify me by looking to a survey like Joshua Freeman's American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000 (2012). Freeman is also an excellent labor historian, so I trust the parts of this book covering unions a bit more than his takes on foreign policy, cultural expression, etc.

In the context of Cold War politics, McCarthyist anti-Communists had become rather suspicious of powerful interest groups. You are more likely to know the role they played in Hollywood, purging and blacklisting Leftist screen writers. Well, the same pattern extended to Big Labor. Unions purged leaders with Leftist leanings. A new law called Taft-Hartley (1947) also greatly restricted the power of unions.

Enter identity politics. Unions already had a longstanding historical affiliation with the so-called white working classes. Many organizers had sided with conservatives on issues like immigration restriction, justifying segregation, and cementing gender roles. Working whites feared job competition. Civil rights organizers in the Movement for Black Liberation, Women's Liberation, the Chicano Moratorium, and the American Indian Movement never counted on Labor as more than a shaky ally.

Civil rights law then required Labor to cease outright forms of racial discrimination. As unions in the U.S. began implementing colorblind policies, white communities lost faith in organizations which used to show preference for their sons. Meanwhile unions in Sweden and Western Europe only grew stronger during this postwar moment of economic growth. Racial struggle in the U.S. reversed what might have been a trend to European-style unionization and even broader social democracy.

Next check out the regional distribution of laborers and work opportunity in the U.S. Postwar suburbanization involved white flight out of the cities, but I'll go so far as to suggest the regional shift from the Rustbelt into the Sunbelt is even more significant. Sure people moved because they liked warmer weather and bigger houses. But they also followed industry as it outsourced to right-to-work states.

I'm operating under the assumption that many labor policies in places like Sweden come down from decision making at the national level. Not so in the U.S. States do indeed have rights under the Constitution of 1787. And Southern states historically busted unions because local elites greatly feared the organization of Black labor, especially sharecroppers. After the New Deal electrified the South, industry came looking for a competitive advantage in a market where workers could not unionize.

Then there is the role of skill. The growth of corporate workforces involved all sorts of employees moving up the ladder into management jobs, which tend not to be unionized because they are so well paid anyway. So much in the way of wealth means the consumer class also coexists with a substantial service class paid wages flexibly based on the fickle tastes of the market for prepared foods, vacations, etc.

Service workers can and do unionize (see Annelise Orleck's work on 1970s Las Vegas hotel and casino workers) but huge employers in the food and restaurant industries tend to feminize and to juvenilize workforces (see Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Walmart). By recruiting women in regions like the South and youth in suburban places, companies like McDonalds and Walmart cultivate a docile workforce of supplementary earners, not the breadwinners who need those raises.

Finally, I come to contract term, which is closely interrelated with all the others. Temp work is the norm in a number of industries. Migrant labor picking fruit in Central California is only needed during particular seasons. Well go read Louis Hyman's book called Temp and you'll see that laws passed with those workers in mind now help tech companies in Silicon Valley contractualize the labor of so many among the coders who come in briefly as consultants. No possibility for unionizing.

We know the gig economy has been around for some time, especially in the U.S. South. I don't know the degree to which this pattern of avoiding providing benefits (pensions, health care, job security) has infiltrated Sweden's economy. But just look at the most common job in the U.S.: truck driving. This industry used to be heavily unionized under Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters. Now contract labor, often based in the South, prevails among this national workforce: 3.5m drivers plus 5m support staff.

All told, unionization is relatively weak in the U.S. These factors working against organizing are all open to contestation. Service workers do have a powerful union. Membership is evidently growing in the public sphere (see all those recent teacher strikes in places like Oklahoma!). But as you can see from the Swedish numbers, unions are beginning to slide there too. Keep your eyes open for the next practice of pushing back against the bosses.

Because they have minimum wages in America and therefore no need for organising.

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