History is About the Future: A Review of Kim Scipes, Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement (Cornell University Press, 2026)
It is no secret that the American labor movement is struggling. Union membership has declined precipitously over the last four decades. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, whereas in 1983 just over 20% of the country’s wage and salary workers were members of unions, today that figure has been cut in half. And the decline over the last seventy years is even more severe, as the percentage of workers who were unionized in the mid-1950s may, according to some scholarly estimates, have reached a high of about 35%.
How is this to be explained? And what can be done about it? Kim Scipes, a sociologist, labor historian, and forty-plus-year labor activist (he worked as a unionized printer before returning to academia to earn his doctorate at the age of 51), makes a major contribution to the discussion of these issues in Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement.
For starters, he makes the provocative claim that the term “labor movement” is a misnomer when applied to what is going on today, or, for that matter, the entire post-1949 period. What we have instead, he claims, is merely a “trade union movement.” “The difference,” he explains, “is that a trade union movement looks out for the well-being of union members only, instead of all working people, as a labor movement does.” 
Scipes’ method in investigating these issues is comparative. In what ways have the behaviors of more successful unions differed from those of less successful ones? But what is needed is a controlled comparison—or at least a historical comparison that allows for a study that closely approximates the degree of control that one can engineer in a laboratory. As has often been remarked, history does not set up controlled studies, but sometimes it comes close. Scipes takes advantage of a case in which it did come close.
His study compares unionization in two different industries in the Chicago area (including Northwest Indiana) between 1933 and 1955: steel and meatpacking. Scipes asks why these two industries developed so differently despite similar external conditions. They developed at the same time, in the same place, with very similar workforces drawn from the same labor pool, and while initially being part of the same larger organization (the CIO), under the exact same leadership. All of these factors count as controls, leaving us to search elsewhere for the causal factors behind the differences in unionization development between the two industries.
Scipes’ study documents the much greater success of unionization in meatpacking (the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, or PWOC) than in steelwork (the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, or SWOC). In analyzing the causes of this disparity, his method might be classified as one of explanation by elimination. He gives careful, detailed consideration to several external factors that might have affected the two labor organizations differently, but found, upon investigation, that they did not do so. The one factor that did make a large, measurable difference was internal—how each organization chose to address white supremacy and racism and, more generally, the extent to which each moved toward “business unionism” or “social justice unionism.”
To determine where a labor union falls on the business unionism/social justice unionism continuum, Scipes developed a scale in which points were awarded or withheld based on a union’s behavior on twenty distinct issues, including:
Are leaders elected or appointed?
Do top officers reflect rank-and-file racial demographics?
Do top officers reflect rank-and-file gender demographics?
Do union concerns extend beyond workplace issues such as wages, working conditions, and benefits?
Does the union actively target continuing discriminations (such as race, gender)?
Does the union develop and present ongoing education programs?
Does the union join with grassroots community-based groups to work for social and/or economic justice?
There are also several questions about the extent to which rank-and-file workers, in addition to persons in union leadership positions, are included in union discussions, debates, and decision-making.
On the basis of this measuring tool, the packinghouse workers’ organizations scored 29 out of 30 points, while the steelworkers’ received only 2 out of 30.
But if choosing a social justice orientation (including a strong and active anti-racism component) is essential to a successful union movement, as Scipes argues, why would this be so?
Scipes offers several explanations. If racism in the workplace is not successfully confronted, management can exploit that for its own interests, weakening solidarity among the workers, and thus also weakening their bargaining position.
And if racism prevails outside the workplace, that benefits management as well. Hiring Blacks then acts as “strike insurance.” Black workers, who would face discrimination in attempting employment were they to lose their present job, would thus have a motivation to side with management in a dispute with the company’s workers.
And if management wants to break a strike and destroy a union, it needs to find replacement workers who are so desperate that they are willing to act as scabs and work for low wages. Racial discrimination is a good way to keep people in such a state of desperation.
Yet another reason for a union to combat racism and discrimination in the wider community, beyond the workplace, is that if people of different races lead qualitatively different lives outside of the plant, this, according to United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) President Ralph Helstein (quoted by Scipes), “sooner or later will create schisms, misunderstandings and problems” within the workplace.
Scipes provides an excellent example of the different behavior of the steelworkers and meatpacking workers with regard to issues of racial discrimination outside of work. When a Black family moved into the Trumbull Park Homes, a public housing project on Chicago’s south side, whites in and around the neighborhood rioted, with violent incidents continuing for more than six months. (This was in 1953-54.) There is no record of the steelworkers’ unions taking any action in opposition to this racist violence, and it is likely, because of their residential density in the area, that some members participated in it.
The UPWA, in quite radical contrast, responded by having members go door-to-door in the project, informing blacks that the union would support their right to live there, and encouraging white residents to accept their new neighbors. The union also brought black and white members to picket city hall to demand action on the part of the Chicago Housing Authority in support of the right of blacks to live at Trumbull. In 1955 the city responded by officially opening public housing to blacks.
On the basis of his careful, detailed, thoughtfully constructed study, Scipes concludes that
Social justice unionism is the model of unionism to which all union should aspire and into which they should transform themselves. I argue we have to go forward with working people together; we cannot go forward separately.
Any attempts of transformation, however, must be democratically decided by members; they cannot be limited to staff or formal leaders, or even activists. There should be widespread education, open discussion, and meaningful consideration before a collective decision is made…. I argue transforming our unions from business unions into social justice unions is essential to re-creating a labor movement in the United States of America, which we haven’t had since 1949.
Scipes offers some interesting suggestions as to how this might be accomplished. He notes, first, that unions cannot easily win battles without public support. Such support can be built by working with other people in the community to address community problems, such as “youth unemployment, lack of skills training, drug abuse, and inadequate housing.”
At the next level, the union might put serious money and effort into training organizers across the community, with the goal of building community organizing. For example, workers at all the different fast-food restaurants in town might come together in one big union, so workers at McDonald’s in a struggle with management would be supported by workers at Burger King and Taco Bell. Similarly, workers in all of the home improvement establishments in the area (Menards, Lowe’s, Home Depot) might form one big union.
And at the next level, what if these big unions formed ties of solidarity with one another, and with “the gas station attendants’ union, and the school bus drivers’ union, and the teachers’ union,” and so forth?
What needs to happen immediately, according to Scipes, is for social justice unionists to start a discussion with every union possible. The question should be: “What form of unionism do we want to see going forward? What kind of union gives us the most power and best opportunities? Should we go on alone, and not worry about anyone else, or do we need to build strong ties with our communities for the good of all, and try to achieve a movement for social justice, inside the union and in the community?”
History is about the future. Scipes’ clearly written and powerfully argued study of the past resurrects forgotten, or perhaps never widely noticed, clues as to how to build a better future. We shouldn’t let these valuable insights slip through our fingers.
