Labor Movements and Capital Migration: The United States and Western Europe in World - Historical Perspective

It is our thesis that the U.S. labor movement in the 1930s and 1940s has “shown the future ” to the European labor movement of the late 1960s and 1970s; and that the structural link between the two movements is the transnational expansion of U.S. capital in the post-World War II period. Our argument is divided into four parts. In the first part, “Divergent Patterns of the Interwar La-bor Movement, ” after a brief comparative survey of the vitality and effectiveness of the labor movements in the United States and Europe in the interwar years, we conclude that the labor movement in the United States at the time showed both an unprecedented and largely unparal-leled strength. In “The Rise of Workplace Bargaining Power ” we develop a dual hypothesis to explain the main source of this strength; that is, the relatively more advanced stage of two proc-esses in the United States that strengthened labor's bargaining power vis-à-vis capital. These are, very briefly, first, the development of “labor’s workplace bargaining power ” arising from capital-ist transformations in industrial organization and labor process that increase capital’s vulnerabil-ity to workers ’ direct action at the point of production. The second process, partly related to the first, is the relative exhaustion of reserves of partially proletarianized or nonproletarianized labor available for mobilization, either to increase competition in the ranks of labor or to form part o