Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
- Jun 25, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
★★★★★
Jefferson Cowie’s excellent Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class has been on my reading list since it was published 13 years ago. It’s so good I wish I hadn’t waited, but because it’s so good, it was so worth the wait. From organized walk-offs to wildcats, Bruce Springsteen to disco, the New Politics to the New Majority, Taxi Driver to Norma Rae, full employment to stagflation, and the bait-and-switch of economic issues for social ones, Cowie takes us through it all to break down the breakdown of the working class and answer the question, What the hell happened?
On the one hand, the oil embargos of 1973 and 1979 were a devastating blow to the economy, while, at the same time, labor unions were persistently applying upward pressure on wages. On the other, the government, unable or unwilling to solve the economic crisis, turned to social issues to attract, mobilize, and rally voters to their side (e.g. Nixon’s Silent Majority, segregationist George Wallace’s insurgent campaigns).
To be fair, nobody could agree on what to do with high prices and high unemployment: solving one meant worsening the other. To be unfair, seizing on the white working-class man’s struggles and turning them into fears and grievances about “the other” was a cynical and short-term ploy to win elections, and the dominoes fell something like this: civil (and eventually women’s) rights put pressure on unions to change; the unions, historically dominated and controlled by white men, destabilized and fragmented as new voices and new unions representing those voices (Blacks, women, migrants) entered the fray; Democrats sought to build inclusive coalitions with these newly enfranchised groups while ignoring besieged and aggrieved blue-collar voters; and Republicans saw an opening and grabbed it by the ballot box.
Unions, and the middle-class workers they represented, never regained their political power. When Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in August 1981, they lost most of whatever strength they had left. Things would never be the same again.
Comments