Much has been made of the AFL-CIO’s Labor ‘96 political campaign. Not since the CIO’s “People Campaign” in 1944 has the relationship between labor relations at the shop floor and executive political power been more central to the political education provided to millions of rank-and-file voters. The re-election of Bill Clinton then provides students of collective bargaining with an opportunity to assess what union workers have likely won by following Samuel Gomper’s famous nonpartisan warning that labor should “reward its friends” (American Federationist 1908).
The objective of this article is to define what kind of “labor regimes” Democratic Presidents have constructed in the Post-World War II era. By labor regime I mean the politically derived principles, norms, rules and power constellations that condition the effectiveness of American unions to confront capital (Kettler and Meja 1990). Regimes are formed within a context of contested claims between governmental actors and industrial relation combatants for state bequeathed resources and advantages. While legal and regulatory codification of labor issues are typical products of state behavior, labor regimes also condition and contribute to the development of industrial constituencies.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS URBANA-CHAMPAIGN