1980-2000 - The New World Order
Shifts in the structure of American society, begun years or even decades earlier, had become apparent by the time the 1980s arrived. The composition of the population and the most important jobs and skills in American society had undergone major changes.
The dominance of service jobs in the economy became undeniable. By the mid-1980s, nearly three-fourths of all employees worked in the service sector, for instance, as retail clerks, office workers, teachers, physicians, and government employees. Service-sector activity benefited from the availability and increased use of the computer. The information age arrived, with hardware and software that could aggregate previously unimagined amounts of data about economic and social trends. The federal government had made significant investments in computer technology in the 1950s and 1960s for its military and space programs.
In 1976, two young California entrepreneurs, working out of a garage, assembled the first widely marketed computer for home use, named it the Apple, and ignited a revolution. By the early 1980s, millions of microcomputers had found their way into U.S. businesses and homes, and in 1982, Time magazine dubbed the computer its “Machine of the Year.”
Meanwhile, America’s “smokestack industries” were in decline. The U.S. automobile industry reeled under competition from highly efficient Japanese carmakers. By 1980 Japanese companies already manufactured a fifth of the vehicles sold in the United States. American manufacturers struggled with some success to match the cost efficiencies and engineering standards of their Japanese rivals, but their former dominance of the domestic car market was gone forever. The giant old-line steel companies shrank to relative insignificance as foreign steel makers adopted new technologies more readily. Consumers were the beneficiaries of this ferocious competition in the manufacturing industries, but the painful struggle to cut costs meant the permanent loss of hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs. Those who could made the switch to the service sector; others became unfortunate statistics.
New immigrants changed the character of American society in other ways. The 1965 reform in immigration policy shifted the focus away from Western Europe, facilitating a dramatic increase in new arrivals from Asia and Latin America. In 1980, over 808,000 immigrants arrived, the highest number in 60 years, as the country once more became a haven for people from around the world.
Population patterns shifted as well. After the end of the postwar “baby boom” (1946 to 1964), the overall rate of population growth declined and the population grew older. Household composition also changed. In 1980 the percentage of family households dropped; a quarter of all groups were now classified as “nonfamily households,” in which two or more unrelated persons lived together.
Additional groups became active participants in the struggle for equal opportunity. Homosexuals, using the tactics and rhetoric of the civil rights movement, depicted themselves as an oppressed group seeking recognition of basic rights. In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission lifted its ban on employment of homosexuals. Many states enacted anti-discrimination laws. Then, in 1981, came the discovery of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). Transmitted sexually or through blood transfusions, it struck homosexual men and intravenous drug users with particular virulence, although the general population proved vulnerable as well. By 1992, over 220,000 Americans had died of AIDS. The AIDS epidemic was by no meanslimited to the United States, and the effort to treat the disease now encompasses physicians and medical researchers throughout the world.
For most Americans the 1990s would be a time of peace, prosperity, and rapid technological change. Some attributed this to the “Reagan Revolution” and the end of the Cold War, others to the return of a Democrat to the presidency. During this period. the majority of Americans — political affiliation aside — asserted their support for traditional family values, often grounded in their faiths.
New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that the country was experiencing “moral self-repair,“ as “many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960s and 1970s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980s,” were now in decline.
Improved crime and other social statistics aside, American politics remained ideological, emotional, and characterized by intense divisions. Shortly after the nation entered the new millennium, moreover, its postCold War sense of security was jolted by an unprecedented terrorist attack that launched it on a new and difficult international track.
For many decades, American unions have faced an increasingly difficult environment that has caused steady declines in their membership.1 To address these challenges, unions have actively searched for new and innovative approaches to political action, organization of new members, and member mobilization. Some have undergone restructuring, and many have reached out to other unions and to like-minded organizations, both nationally and internationally, to form alliances. Observers both inside and outside the labor movement have analyzed these efforts and their effectiveness. In the early 20th century, many labor unions were organized as loose-knit associations of working people with a staff of volunteers, most of whom lacked professional training in the management of organizational resources. By the 1950s, unions had grown to large organizations with significant annual revenues, many full-time employees, and operations of national and even international scope. Nonetheless, in the 1970s and 1980s, academic observers such as Derek Bok and John Dunlop pointed out that US unions rarely engaged in the budgeting, strategic planning, program evaluation, and human resource management practices that characterized other organizations (government, business, and nonprofit). Subsequent studies, including those by Clark and Gray in the 1990s and 2008, documented the evolution of union administrative practices. Unions are increasingly adopting more formal, systematic, and professional administrative practices. Interviews with union officials and observations by other researchers suggest that both external and internal pressures have caused American unions to seek ways to become more effective and efficient.9 The primary impetus comes from shrinking resources in the midst of a difficult political and economic environment.10 Against a backdrop of several decades of declining union density in the United States, labor organizations can be seen turning to modern tools of management as a necessary response to the effects of membership loss. The declining membership dues base that many unions have experienced has focused attention on budgets, strategic planning, program evaluation, and new ways to recruit, employ, and multiply the impact of human and financial resources. Modern unions put a high priority on offering their members the organizing tools, the training and the knowledge they need to prevent injuries and improve performance. Progress has not come easy for workers in this country. Improvements in safety conditions in our Nation did not come because a politician thought they would be a good idea, or some scientist decided that a chemical was too dangerous. Every incremental improvement in working conditions has been earned with the blood and broken bones of working people, as a result of the battles fought - some won and some lost — in thousands of workplaces and union halls across the country. Innovations in administration have been encouraged by labor’s national federation, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and the example of other unions. For many years, the meetings of the AFL-CIO executive board and its standing committees have provided a useful, if informal, forum for union leaders to exchange new programmatic and administrative ideas. Likewise, the federation regularly sponsors meetings of its affiliates’ department heads responsible for such activities as organizing, political action, and legal representation to share information on productive internal practices. Perhaps most notably, in the 1990s, the AFL-CIO began the practice of bringing national secretary-treasurers together to discuss administration methods that are more effective. Today, this practice continues under the leadership of the current AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer. More recently, the human resource directors of AFL-CIO unions also have begun to hold periodic meetings to share information and best practices.
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