The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders
The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) is a study of US union leaders by C. Wright Mills , published in New York in 1948. The results show that trade unions have given up their opposition role and have reconciled themselves with life within the capitalist system. The work is a classic of the sociology of work .
context
The New Men of Power is the first part of the trilogy ( Stratification Trilogy ) about the investigation of the power relations within different layers in the USA, which was followed in 1951 by the analysis of the American middle class ( White Collar: The American Middle Classes ) and finally in 1956 by the analysis of the American power elite ( The power Elite ).
content
Mills analyzes the "Labor Metaphysics", that is, the ideological self-image of the US trade unions of his time and the actual harmonious cooperation of the union leaders with the employers and managers in an elite layer of managers.
Its introduction begins with the words:
Inside this country today, the labor leaders are the strategic actors: they lead the only organizations capable of stopping the main drift towards war and slump. Today, within this country, the union leaders are the strategic actors: they lead the only organizations capable of stopping the prevailing trend towards war and recession.
In doing so, they determine the direction of politics in the USA, which is characterized by de-democratization, but also that of world politics, since this is determined by the USA.
The most important task of the union leader is the collective bargaining, since the employment agency is not a market, but gives the big business a preponderance, which can only be balanced by an organization of the work. Big entrepreneurs dictate wages and working conditions, they also set prices and are supported by the state as long as the unions do not negotiate rules, protect consumers and avert control over the state.
In the first chapter he compares the concepts of the trade union, from Leninism to the independent left, the liberals around Louis Brandeis and Herbert Croly , the communists, the "practical conservatives", to the "sophisticated conservatives", and compares their different attitudes in times of the Depression.
The workers were pacified by the "bread and butter" policy, in which political goals were excluded. The union leaders, said Mills, have obediently subordinated themselves to the new regime and made the unions a “shock absorber” between employers and workers.
On the whole, Mills describes the unions as the only force that could bring about a renewal of society. He assigns a leading role to the intellectuals in the union. The official of the trade union bureaucracy, which slightly to the "whore of power" ( whore of power would), he does not expect any innovative impetus, as they power would lose prestige and status at a reorientation of its activities in alliance with the intellectuals of money.
Reception and impact history
In his review of Mills, which is based on Max Weber's bureaucracy analysis, Nelson Lichtenstein misses the explanation of how the special interests of the union leadership emerged, the representation of how intellectuals can mobilize the labor movement again and sees a lack of consideration of the union history and the role of racism and sexism in the US.
literature
Individual evidence
- ^ Charles Wright Mills, Helen Schneider: The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders . University of Illinois Press, 1948, ISBN 978-0-252-06948-2 ( google.de [accessed December 4, 2016]).
- ^ Charles Wright Mills, Helen Schneider: The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders . University of Illinois Press, 1948, ISBN 978-0-252-06948-2 ( google.de [accessed December 4, 2016]).
- ^ Andreas Hess: The political sociology C. Wright Mills': A contribution to the political history of ideas . Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-01310-5 ( google.de [accessed December 4, 2016]).
- ↑ http://lh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/lh/article/viewFile/5507/4702