Carter presidency was a turning point for labor

“He was a genuinely good man whose post-presidency focus on humanitarian work and championing human rights around the world was deeply inspiring.” So said the AFL-CIO on news Dec. 29 of the death of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter at the age of 100. It was about all the labor federation could say and not commit sins against historical memory. 

Carter did lead a distinguished life post-presidency. His work brokering peace and monitoring overseas elections for fairness earned him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. And his nonprofit Carter Center did more than any other to eradicate preventable tropical diseases like Guinea worm.

But when it mattered most, when he occupied the White House from 1977 to 1980, Carter was a great disappointment to American working people and their labor movement.

“Carter was the first neoliberal president,” says Marcus Widenor, emeritus labor studies professor at University of Oregon. Neoliberal is the name for the economic and political philosophy that began to gain momentum in the Carter years — the idea that government shouldn’t “interfere” in the economy but should “get out of the way” and let “the market” work its magic. 

 During the Carter presidency, Widenor was a union organizer trying to organize garment shops in Alabama. Powerful clothing and textile unions saw the threat of foreign imports, and called on Carter to put a quota on the import of inexpensive shoes. Carter refused, and even vetoed bills raising tariffs on textile imports. Over the next decades, American apparel manufacturing largely vanished. 

“He’s a conservative,” said national AFL-CIO president George Meany in 1977. Not as conservative as Ronald Reagan or Ford, Meany said, but conservative all the same. The AFL-CIO had disliked Gerald Ford, and campaigned hard for Carter in 1976 after he won the Democratic nomination. But within months, disillusion was setting in. At a White House luncheon in the Spring of 1977, AFL-CIO officers accused the president of not living up to his campaign promises to prioritize job creation, and criticized his trade policy and his minimum wage proposal.

The AFL-CIO was pushing to raise the minimum wage from $2.30 up to $3 an hour, and automatically index it to annual inflation. The Carter administration disagreed, and wouldn’t go above $2.65 (23 cents below the government’s official poverty line), saying to go higher would damage “business confidence.” Meany called Carter’s number “shameful.” 

Broken promises on jobs

But the bigger issue was jobs. When the former governor of Georgia campaigned for president in 1976, he said creating jobs would be his top focus. The month he took office, unemployment was 7.3%, the highest it had been since the Great Depression. Americans weren’t used to joblessness that high.

Yet within months of taking office Carter announced a new goal that would get in the way— balancing the budget by 1981. Without shame or irony, the Carter administration also proposed tax cuts for big business, saying that would stimulate job creation. It was a chorus line that could have come right out of the mouth of Reagan four years later.

The great deregulator

In the popular memory, it’s Reagan, “the Great Communicator” who’s associated with deregulation. In fact, the movement to dismantle federal regulation started with Carter. 

“America has the greatest economic system in the world,” Carter said in his 1979 state of the union address. “Let’s reduce government interference and give it a chance to work.” 

During his four years as president, Carter signed into law bills deregulating airlines, trucking, railroads, telecommunications, and natural gas. The laws were passed with the help of a new breed of business-friendly post-Watergate Congressional Democrats. The old New Deal regulatory order had valued stability, and its guard rails had enabled high-wage union jobs and lifelong careers. It didn’t take long for deregulation to lead to catastrophic disruption — a wave of bankruptcies in trucking, the collapse of PanAmerican and Eastern Airlines, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of union jobs. Deregulation of airlines and railroads also ended their obligation to serve unprofitable destinations, sapping the vitality of smaller cities and towns.

Failed labor law reform

Out of all issues, closest to the heart of organized labor is the right of workers to strike and form effective unions. Here too, Carter was a big disappointment.

A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed a powerful tactic of building trades unions known as common situs picketing. Labor had pushed Congress to pass a law restoring it, but President Gerald Ford had vetoed it. Carter said during his campaign that he would sign it, and labor tried to pass the bill again, but the Carter administration lent no support, and the bill failed.

Organized labor had also been trying since 1947 to win back rights lost when Congress passed the law known as Taft-Hartley. The AFL-CIO wanted a reform bill that would eliminate the “right-to-work” rule that lets states ban the requirement to pay union dues. But Carter, former governor of right-to-work Georgia, pushed to weaken the bill. In the end, the bill would have done little more than speed up union elections and deny public contracts to labor law violators. It passed the House but, again without White House support, failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

Forty-five years later, the Carter years look like a turning point.  Deregulation and unrestricted trade were about to destroy millions of stable high-paying union jobs in manufacturing, trucking, and airlines. Whatever nostalgia working people may have for the former peanut farmer who was still teaching Sunday school into his 90s, when it mattered and Carter was behind the wheel, America made a wrong turn for workers. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?  

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