JBVELUT-SISP2013Boycotting the system: Labor market polarization and contentious action
in the New Gilded Age (1990-2013) Jean-Baptiste Velut is Assistant Professor in American Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University of Paris. He wrote a dissertation entitled “Free or Fair Trade? The Battle for the Rules of American Trade Policy from NAFTA to CAFTA” (2009, Sorbonne Nouvelle University/City University of New York) and has published several articles on US foreign economic policy and globalization debates in the United States. His current research focuses on contemporary progressive movements (alterglobalist movement, consumer activism, Occupy Wall Street, etc.).
In the United States, the past two decades have shown a sharp contrast between the
seemingly idyllic picture of the “Roaring Nineties” and the grim socio-economic reality of
George W. Bush’s “lost decade” that culminated with the Great Recession. The return to
austerity politics has nourished both Americans’ nostalgia for the Clinton years and their
disillusion in the political system. Beyond this dichotomous interpretation of contemporary
economic history, a single phenomenon has transformed both the US labor market and
Americans’ political response over the past decades. Under the triple forces of globalization,
technological advances and supply-side reforms, US employment has split between a
mushrooming lower class, a hollowing out middle-class and a robust and disconnected higher
class.
Despite the dislocating effects of labor market polarization and “jobless recoveries”, the
two-party system has remained mired in partisan conflict and political inertia. Yet, in various
spheres of American society, different forms of collective action have emerged to protest
against the collusion of political and economic elites and the betrayal of the American dream.
Since the 1990s, American grassroots movements have mobilized for global justice, launched
local living wage campaigns and “Occupied” public spaces to protest against social
inequalities. “Citizen consumers” have activated their buying power and repoliticized
consumption through boycotts and “buycotts” on behalf of social banking, local food and fair
trade.
In this paper (which is part of a broader book project), I will argue that these
unconventional or disruptive forms of political participation constitute direct responses to the
conservative nature of the US political system, whose focus on austerity measures risks
exacerbating social inequality and the hollowing out of the middle-class. The first section will
paint the picture of the dual phenomenon of polarization that has put America’s market
democracy under considerable stress. The second part will review political and sociological
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explanations of social change and connect them with recent political events. The final section
sheds light on the recurrent pattern of contentious action against economic and political
polarization and discusses its impact on the electoral-representative system, along with the
prospects for a departure from the Gilded Age economy.
A tale of two polarizations
The New Gilded Age The first, and most discussed type of economic polarization has been the return to extreme
forms of social inequality unseen since America’s Gilded Age. At the top of the revenue
ladder, the income share (including capital gains) of the richest 1% more than doubled from
10% in 1980 to 23.5% in 2007 – its highest level since 1928 – before receding to 19.8% in
2011. Income concentration is perhaps even more striking for the 0.01% who saw their
national income share increase six-fold from 1% in the late 1970s to more than 6% before the
crisis. Meanwhile the latter group’s average capital gains and revenues jumped from $3.8
million to $38 million – a ten-fold surge in thirty years. By contrast, the average revenues of
the bottom 90% of the American population barely budged, from $33,500 in 1978 to $35,200
at the dawn of the Great Recession. (World Top Incomes Database, 2013).
Today, the gap between America’s top business elites and the average worker has become
abyssal. International measures of inequality (using the Gini coefficient after taxes and
transfer) rank the United States as the most unequal OECD countries after Chile, Mexico and
Turkey (OECD, 2013). While these trends were long in the making, they accelerated during
the “lost decade” of the Bush years. During the economic expansion of the first decade of the
twenty-first century, revenue gains were largely confined to America’s richest 1%, who
between 2002 and 2007 captured nearly two thirds of all income gains, while the large
majority of Americans (99%) saw their revenues increase by 6.8%. If the financial crisis
initially seemed to bring these trends to a halt, it did not fundamentally alter the course of
what Paul Krugman has called the “Great Divergence.” Indeed, although wealthy Americans
proportionally experienced greater asset losses during the stock market crash, they managed
to monopolize 93% of all income gains in the aftermath of the crisis (Saez 2012).
Yet, once again, these changes long preceded the financial crisis. The “Big Zero” –
another apt nickname for the aughts – saw a sustained increase in poverty, from 11.7% in
2000 to 15.1% in 2010. After 2.6 million people joined the ranks of the American poor in
2010, the total number of people living under the poverty line ($22,314 for a family of four)
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reached a fifty-year high at more than 46 million (Tavernise, 2011). Adding to this cohort the
“near poor” – people with income less than 50% above the poverty line – brings the broad
number of poor people in the United States to 100 million people in the United States – one in
three Americans (DeParle, Gebeloff & Tavernise, 2011). Under more conventional OECD
measures – revenues less than 50% of the national median income – the US poverty rate
reached 17.3% at the end of the aughts, a level higher than all OECD countries except
Mexico, Israel and Chile (OECD, 2013).
Americans are not exempt from extreme poverty, as the number of people living on two
dollars a day per person or less has doubled since 1996 to reach 1.5 million (Stiglitz, 2012,
16). Nor is employment a safeguard against poverty. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the share of the “working poor” in the US workforce rose from nearly 5% in 2007
to 7.2% in 20101.
Finally, the American middle class has not been immune to these economic trends. As
mentioned earlier, the vast majority of Americans have reaped very limited gains from the
dramatic wealth creation of the past three decades. The picture is particularly bleak for male
workers, whose median personal income has barely changed in forty years, and after the crisis
was back to its 1967 level ($33,000 in 2011). Women median income fared much better, if
only to bridge the gender gap that left their revenues inferior to men by one third ($21,000 in
2011). Since 1975, the median income of US households has increased by a mere 11.6% - in
contrast with a 582-per-cent surge for the top 5% households (U.S. Census Bureau, ibid., table
H-3 and H-6). US household median income more or less stagnated after their peak in 1999,
before falling back to their 1995 level as a result of the 2007-2009 recession (ibid., table H-3).
In sum, regardless of whether the American economy was “back” in the 1980s or “roaring” in
the 1990s, the past three decades saw a sustained increase in wealth and income disparities
that singled out the United States as the land of inequality among developed countries.
Labor market polarization What distinguishes the modern Gilded Age from its nineteenth century precedent is a
phenomenon that has further divided the US economy and that is described as labor market
polarization. This process can be broken down into three trends: 1) rising demand for high-
wage, high-skill occupations; 2) a decline in mid-wage, mid-skill employment; and 3) a
persistent increase in low-wage, low-skill jobs (Autor, Katz & Kearney, 2006; Autor, 2010).
1 The BLS defines the working poor as people who spent at least 27 weeks working or looking for work annually and whose income falls behind the poverty line (BLS, 2010).
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high-skilled workers on the US labor market. According to “skill-biased technological
change” theory, technological change has favored high-skilled over lower-skilled labor, as
highly educated workers are more likely to capture productivity gains resulting from
automation (Goldin & Katz, 2008). This trend has exacerbated the dislocating effects of
globalization which also tends to reward high-skilled workers in developed countries but to
punish lower-skilled labor. This does not mean that high-skilled workers are guaranteed to
find employment. As Krugman notes, these structural changes cannot be reduced to a blue
collar vs. white collar dichotomy. In an increasingly competitive labor market, even educated
workers can be excluded from the labor market (Krugman, 2011).
Mid-skilled or mid-wage workers performing routine tasks have suffered the most from
these trends. Manufacturing workers have been particularly hit by the gradual opening of the
BRICS, which brought three billion workers to the ranks of the global workforce and by the
great productivity gains brought by automation. The US manufacturing sector experienced a
dramatic decline in employment during the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the
US lost more than five million manufacturing jobs (Scott, 2010). In the nontradable sector,
technological advances have reduced the need for routine tasks like sales, office and
administrative occupations, thereby cutting the rolls of mid-skilled workers. As economists
Jaimovitch and Siu have shown, the “hollowing out” of the middle class occurs primarily
during and after recessions, when mid-wage occupations, unlike low-wage and high-wage
jobs, are not only temporarily eliminated, but disappear after the economy is revived. Thus,
since the early 1990s, the “jobless” recoveries have affected disproportionately the US
middle-class (Jaimovitch & Siu, 2012; NELP 2012).
At first sight, these trends point to a dichotomy between the losers and winners of
globalization in its broad sense, i.e. the increased interdependence of national economies and
the new technologies undergirding this process. Yet, at the aggregate level, not all workers are
subject to the pressures of international trade; nor are all occupations dislocated by
technological advances. The recent trends of the US labor market cannot be reduced to the
skill-upgrading process that the United States experienced from the end of the nineteenth
century and throughout the twentieth century (Katz & Margo, 2013). At the bottom of the
labor market pyramid, demand for low-skilled workers – especially in the food sector, retail
and employment services – has remained robust. This partly explains why the share of low-
paid full-time workers in the United States was estimated at 25% in 2010. While the United
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States was not alone in experiencing this phenomenon, it had one of the largest cohort of low-
paid full-time workers among a sample of thirty-seven countries2.
The statistics of the past decade provide a clear picture of this three-tier phenomenon.
Between 2001 and 2012, the number of low-wage positions increased by 8.7%, while higher-
wage occupations rose by 6.6%. Meanwhile, mid-wage jobs decreased by 7.3% (Figure 1).
Figure 1
As mentioned earlier, the gradual transfer from mid-wage occupations to low- and high-
wage jobs often occur during economic recessions. The crisis of 2007-2009 did not only take
a particularly heavy toll on the US middle class, but the “low-wage recovery” that followed
failed to compensate for mid-skill job losses. The latter represented 60% of total job losses
during the Great Recession but only 22% of jobs created during the subsequent period of
economic recovery. By contrast, lower-wage occupations represented 21% of job losses
during the crisis but 58% of jobs created during the recovery (NELP, 2012). The proportion of
higher-wage jobs destroyed and created remained more or less constant over the same period
(Figure 2).
2 The International Labor Organization (ILO)’s 2010/2011 Global Wage Report revealed that low-wage employment had increased in 25 out of 37 countries over the past fifteen years (ILO, 2010/2011).
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Figure 2
In sum, the United States has experienced two forms of economic polarization over the
past three decades. First, a small fraction of the US population has concentrated an increasing
share of wealth and income gains since the late 1970s, pitting the 99% against the 1%.
Second, the labor market has also divided among three segments: a mushrooming lower-class,
a hollowed-out middle class and a healthy higher class. The political responses to these
dramatic structural transformations of the US economy have been very contained, revealing a
sharp contrast between the dynamics of American capitalism and the statics of US democracy.
Institutional resistance and political inertia
If the US economy has always stood for its flexibility, resilience was built in the US
constitutional framework. The separation of powers, the bicameral structure of the legislative
branch, heterogeneous electoral terms and the distribution between delegated and powers
reserved to the states are as many proofs that the system of checks and balances was
established to preclude usurpation of power. For the Founding Fathers, the complexities of the
US institutional apparatus were also designed to protect the system against the excesses of
“popular government” and its propensity to “instability, injustice and confusion.” This is why
James Madison pleaded for a “republic,” based on representation and delegation, instead of
what he described as “pure democracy” that would be inclined to a “factious spirit” (Madison,
1787).
Although the Federalists succeeded in designing a robust constitutional framework that
would survive the contingencies of history, they could not stem the rise of political factions.
Ironically, the growing influence of political parties and interest groups, far from fostering
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political instability or “insurrection” as Madison envisioned, has acted as a bottleneck for
political reform. The government’s ability to face up to these external and internal pressures
has ebbed and flowed throughout US history. Yet, before we undertake to examine the
dynamics of democratic change, we need to provide further evidence about the current
affliction of the US political system.
To begin with, despite century-old efforts to regulate lobbying in the United States3, the
influence of organized interests has gradually permeated all branches and levels of
government. Elections are perhaps the most obvious entry point for interest groups to make
their voice heard. The rising costs of both congressional and presidential electoral campaigns
is indicative of the growing financial pressure to which political candidates are exposed
(Figure 3). In less than fifteen years, the total cost of the election cycle (including both
congressional and presidential races) has increased nearly four-fold, from $1.6 billion in 1998
to $6.3 billion in 2012 (Open Secrets, n.d.)4.
If election outcomes cannot be reduced to campaign contributions5, the rising tide of
money in politics means that political reforms are severely constrained by the growing
presence of interest groups in Washington, DC. Over the past few decades, the number of
registered lobbyists has increased exponentially. Between 2000 and 2005 alone, the number
of registered lobbyists doubled to reach 35,000 (Hamburger & Wallsten, 2006, 105). A more
contested democracy is not inherently destructive. Yet, the proliferation of interest groups has
a dual impact on the policy process. First, wealthy and powerful citizens are more likely to
engage in interest groups politics that poor and vulnerable ones. As Schattschneider noted
long before K Street became a household name, “the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the
heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent” (1960, 35). Second, conservative
forces, in the strict sense of the term, tend to have the upper hand in the pressure group system
as it is often easier to oppose a bill than to promote reform (Key, 1942). The Byzantine nature 3 One of the first official attempts to regulate the influence of moneyed interests was the civil service reform of 1883, which stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit. 4 While lawmakers have long attempted to circumscribe moneyed influence, the Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked these efforts under the First Amendment. In 1976, Buckley v. Valeo overturned legislative reforms to restrict campaign finance, arguing that limitations on independent spending from citizens or groups of citizens constitute a violation of freedom of speech. More recently, the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010) upheld this broad interpretation of First Amendment rights, by declaring that corporations and unions have the right to spend unlimited funds on campaign advertisements, under the elusive condition that they do not “coordinate” with political candidates. For a discussion, see de Chantal (2012). 5 Admittedly, both congressional and presidential elections in 2012 revealed that electoral outcomes are not determined by outside spending. Indeed, many political candidates that were outspent by the notorious “Super- PACs” (Political Action Committees) – independent political groups funding campaigns in the post-Citizens United era – managed to win elections: Barack Obama being only the most prominent example that Super PACs do not necessarily carry the day. Overall, however, Obama managed to raise more money than his Republican contender: 716 million against 446 million dollars. (Opensecrets.org, n.d. B).
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of the Dodd-Frank financial reform (2010) and Obamacare (2010), the failure of climate
change reform during Obama’s first term, along with the collapse of gun control legislation
in early 2013 are only a few examples of the grinding forces at play in the interest group
power structure.
The polarization of the American political sphere has compounded the paralysis of the
political system. Over the past two decades, the gap between the Republican and the
Democratic parties has considerably widened. The origins of this phenomenon can be traced
to the contested legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. The current syndrome of hyperpartisanship
developed in three phases: 1) the mobilizing effects of the Clinton presidency on the
Republican Party and the bitter conflicts that opposed the two parties in the 1990s; 2) the
divisive leadership of the Bush administration in both domestic and foreign policy spheres; 3)
the partisan battles that culminated in the aftermath of the financial crisis and which became
ever more prominent after Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives in 2010.
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the unbridgeable chasm between political parties is the
series of protracted budgetary debates – from the debt ceiling crisis to the fiscal cliff – that
have hampered political action amidst the greatest economic recession since the Great
Depression. From a longer perspective, another measure of political polarization is the
increasing use of the filibuster procedure to block any reform in the Senate. Figure 4 provides
a brief overview of the history of the filibuster by showing the evolution of “cloture” motions,
the procedure used to break a filibuster. This graph reveals a constant progression from the
late 1960s until now. The Obama presidency stands out for the dramatic increase of
congressional obstruction.
Some political analysts interpret hyperpartisanship as the reflection of the “disappearing
center” in the electorate, arguing that over the past four decades, Americans have gradually
moved closer to the extremes of the ideological spectrum. For Abramowitz, political
polarization is a bottom-up process, an unfortunate byproduct of the electoral system. At first
sight, election results tend to corroborate this scenario (Abramowitz, 2010). In 2012,
American voters were almost equally split (51.1% v. 47.2%) over the two main presidential
contenders.
Yet, in reality, this picture is skewed in several respects. First, ideological identification
and party affiliation do not always guarantee political consistency across issues (Converse,
1962). Additionally, on a range of socio-economic and cultural issues, Americans are
generally more moderate than bitter partisan battles might suggest (Bartels, 2008). What’s
more, the fact that American voters may be divided on certain issues like abortion or gay
marriage does not mean that these questions are among their political priorities. Finally, the
demands of marginal segments of the population are not always reflected in partisan debates
given their lower participation in the policy process (Minnite & Piven, 2012). Thus, far from
the product of successful representation as Abramowitz suggests, polarization is closer to a
“breakdown” of the electoral-representative system (Fiorina and Abrams, 2009). The crisis of
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America’s contested democracy is perhaps best illustrated by the historically low approval
ratings of Congress over the past few years, which reached 13% in March 20136. And if
political scientists may disagree on the roots of hyperpartisanship, they at least agree on the
perils of political inaction and the need to purge the American republic.
Social change in theory and practice The previous sections demonstrated the increasing pressure built up in the American
political economic regime as a result of the dual process of economic and political
polarization. How long can the “disconnect” between the disruptive dynamics of capitalism
and the statics of American democracy persist? What political forces could trigger a
reconfiguration of America’s contemporary political economic regime7 and remap the
connections within the state-market-society triptych? The theoretical foundations of social
change have received considerable attention among historians, sociologists and political
scientists alike. As regards the history of American democracy, theories of social change can
be divided into two main strands: electoral realignments and social movement mobilization.
Critical elections and electoral realignments
Within the first literature, political scientists have claimed that US history is divided into
partisan regimes, i.e. electoral coalitions aggregating different constituencies for a durable
period (Key, 1955; Schattschneider, 1960; Burnham, 1970)8. Regime change occurs through
“critical elections” which stand out historically for the intensity of electoral participation and
the profound readjustments in the power structure (Key, 1955, 4). For Burnham, these critical
realignments are inevitable and serve as a safety valve once pressure has built up and the
political system is ready to explode: The periodic rhythm of American electoral politics, the cycle of oscillation between the normal and the disruptive, corresponds precisely to the existence of largely unfettered developmental change in the socioeconomic system and its absence in the country’s political institutions (81).
6 This is based on Gallup’s question “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?” See http://www.gallup.com/poll/161210/congress-approval-stagnant-low-level.aspx 7 Eisner defines a political economic regime as a “historically specific configuration of policies and institutions which structures the relationship between social interests, the state and economic actors in multiple sectors of the economy” (2011, 30). 8 The first reference to critical elections appeared with V.O. Key (1955) before being elaborated by Schattschneider (1960), Burnham (1970), Sundquist (1973).
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The dialectic between economic change and political inertia is therefore at the center of
critical realignment theory. Despite its methodological weaknesses9, theories of partisan
regimes have remained appealing in at least two respects: first, because they capture the
dialectic of change and continuity under a parsimonious, albeit imperfect model; and second,
because they allow to bridge the gap between socioeconomic and political spheres. This
explains why it has influenced countless studies of American politics, from classic studies of
presidential politics (Skowronek, 1997) to recent analyses of American political economy
(Krugman, 2007; Eisner, 2011).
In the aftermath of the 2008 election, American political analysts pondered whether
Barack Obama’s electoral coalition constituted a new “partisan regime”. Indeed, the state of
the union seemed like a syndrome checklist for the harbingers of critical elections listed in
Burnham’s classic study of critical elections: abnormal stress in the economy, new political
demands, ideological polarization and high levels of political participation. In addition, the
Democratic Party’s leading edge over the GOP among young and urban voters, ethnic
minorities, non-believers and to a lesser extent, women, raised debates over the advent of a
durable electoral shift that would confine the GOP to a dwindling segment of the population.
Yet, as often, history proved to be less orderly than political scientists would have it. To
begin with, while traditional Democratic constituencies were significantly mobilized in the
2008 elections, voting patterns did not provide a clear electoral realignment or “dealignment”
(Mayhew, 2000). Second, the Democrats’ humiliating defeat in the 2010 mid-term elections
(“shellacking”) seemed to question the very idea of a durable partisan regime. Third, the
“change we can believe in” fell short of a paradigm shift that would address the structural
socio-economic transformations described earlier. Admittedly, the stimulus package
(American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), healthcare reform (Affordable Care Act
of 2010) and financial regulation (Dodd-Frank Act of 2010) did mark a return to greater
government intervention in the economy. However significant, this brief interlude of
Byzantine reforms failed to durably challenge the dual polarization of politics and economics
in the United States. Perhaps the 2008 elections were not as historic as one might have
expected; perhaps the President, his rhetorical skills notwithstanding, did not detain the
“power the persuade” that would allow him to overcome institutional obstacles; or it might be
9 Critical election theory has been dissected and rebuked on both methodological and empirical grounds. American political scientists have long debated which elections constitute the true electoral landmarks that fit with this cyclical pattern, debating e.g. whether the 1928 election was more “critical” than 1932, or what year marked the end of the New Deal regime. For a discussion, see Mayhew (2000).
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that the critical election that will truly transform American politics is yet to come (Neustadt,
1990).
Social disruption as historical agent An alternative approach to US history has further questioned the ability of the US
electoral system to adapt to new challenges. One strand of historical sociology interprets
radicalism and social movement mobilization as the real engines of social reform. Under this
scenario, the potential for change lies not in electoral behavior and critical elections but in
social disruption, i.e. people’s determination to “challenge authority” and redefine the
contours of democracy (Piven, 2006; Aronowitz, 1996). In the parlance of social movement
theorists, “cycles of contention” are often prerequisites for social change. Thus, American
democracy was born out of people’s struggle against colonial oppression; the creation of the
US welfare state, far from being imposed by political elites, was their inevitable response to
the mass protests of the 1930s; and the civil rights and health care reforms of the 1960s were
once again propelled by grassroots movements (Piven, 2006; Kazin, 2011).
Today, the decline of radicalism is therefore the cause of political inertia in the face of
rampant social inequality. Sociologists have interpreted the tribulations of the left as the result
of a host of internal and external challenges, among which the early political victories of the
movement and its inability to sustain mobilization, internecine conflicts between different
ideological factions as well as repression from political and economic elites (Domhoff, 1990;
Kazin, 2011). And yet, every time a progressive movement emerges, be it the Seattle protests
or Occupy Wall Street, scholars are quick to predict the downfall of the neoliberal regime.
And yet, if contentious action has often been a prerequisite for social change, it cannot be
understood as inherently conducive to democratic reform. First, disruptive power is not
confined to progressive causes. The religious right and the Tea Party are also bona fide protest
movements that cannot be erased from US history. Second, protest movements are more
likely to fail than to shatter the power structure. Worse, they may even trigger a conservative
counteroffensive that may roll back earlier achievements – as the past three decades have
shown. Thus, prospects for social change may not lie in protest movements per se as much as
in their relationship with the party system, what Piven describes as “dissensus politics”:
By raising new and divisive issues, movements galvanize groups of voters, some in support, others in opposition. In other words, protest movements threaten to cleave the majority coalitions that politicians assiduously try to hold together. It is in order to avoid the ensuing defections, or to win back defectors, that politicians initiate new public
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policies. The prospect or reality of voter dissensus is the main source of movement influence on public policy (2006, 104).
This postulate has two implications. First, paradoxically, despite the rigidities built in the
American democracy and the need to resort to social disruption to achieve any significant
reform, the solutions to America’s political or socio-economic illnesses remain within the
framework of the electoral-representative system. As Kazin notes, political radicals made a
big difference in American history when they were “junior partners in a coalition driven by
establishment reformers” (2001, xiv). This does not mean that all roads lead to co-option.
Instead, it shows that the dynamics of change often transcend conventional dichotomies
between radical and reformist goals, between grassroots movements and top-down reforms.
Second, theories of electoral realignments and social disruption need not be mutually
exclusive. In a democratic system – however rigid or imperfect – a movement’s strength lies
in its signifying power, i.e. its ability to make its political claims relevant to the electorate.
This power is double-edged insofar as it can fracture electoral alignments to the benefit or to
the detriment of a protest movement. The current political inertia may not be due to the lack
of social disruption in American politics, but to the inability of protest movements to threaten
the two-party system enough to trigger electoral realignments.
The new cycle of contention Judged by the number of labor reforms over the past two decades, the “hollowing out” of
the middle class remains, at best, a good catchphrase for electoral campaigns. Yet beyond the
scope of national elections, labor market polarization has been at the center of political
protests for more than two decades. As the following examples of social disruption will show,
American democracy has remained highly contested from both inside and outside the
electoral-representative system.
Long before the gloomy “lost decade”, American workers began to mobilize against what
they rightly perceived as the decline of the middle class under the pressure of globalization.
The spark that lit the fire was the debates surrounding the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), designed to liberalize trade and investment on the North American
continent. Fears of offshoring and environmental dumping in Mexico – the famous “race to
the bottom” of globalization – prompted labor unions, environmentalists and consumer
advocates to join forces against NAFTA, which long remained the symbol of everything that
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was wrong about corporate globalization. While the alterglobalist movement10 in the United
States is often reduced to the Seattle protests of 1999, it combined both outside- and inside-
the-Beltway tactics for more than a decade in an attempt to tamper the dislocating effects of
globalization on the US labor market. Often forgotten is how close this movement came to
shatter the two-party system in the early 1990s. Capitalizing on the politics of NAFTA
unveiled by the labor-environmentalism or “blue-green” alliance, third-party candidate Ross
Perot led a fierce populist campaign11. In the end, he obtained 19% of the suffrage, the highest
performance of a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt’s third-party candidacy in
1912.
Perot’s electoral performance represented a first reaction to the dislocating effects of labor
market polarization, a prime example of dissensus politics which attested to the impact social
mobilization could have on the electoral sphere12. Indeed, throughout the nineties, the
Democratic Party struggled to find a common voice on US trade policy. Despite Bill Clinton’s
efforts to promote a form “globalization with a human face,” his party was – and remains –
deeply divided between “fair traders” and “free traders”. This internal divide was conspicuous
when Clinton failed to obtain fast track authority to renew his trade-liberalizing agenda,
largely because of the mobilization of labor, environmental and consumer organizations. It
was also at play in the streets of Seattle in 1999, or in Washington the following year, when
Clinton strove to push for the permanent normalization of US-trade relations with China. Yet,
despite the disruptive candidacies of Ross Perot in 1992 and Ralph Nader in 200013, the
alterglobalist movement of the 1990s did not manage to shift labor market polarization and
the decline of the middle class to the center of American politics.
Another sign of the contentious politics of globalization was the anti-sweatshop
campaigns that were launched on US campuses in the late 1990s. Inspired by the battles of
global justice advocates, student activists throughout the country mobilized to demand that
university licensees produce their clothes and other products under decent working conditions
10 Although less common than “antiglobalization,” this term, as well as the “global justice movement” more accurately reflect the broad range of ideological perspectives converging under the umbrella movement advocating that “another world is possible.” 11 He was credited with no less than 39% a few months before the 1992 presidential election (McCann, Rapoport & Stone, 1999, 1). Admittedly, Perot only represented the nationalist fringe of the “umbrella” antiglobalization movement, as opposed to more progressive groups like Public Citizen or the Sierra Club. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the American left has no monopoly over disruptive power. 12 For an overview of the antiglobalization movement in the United States, see Velut (2010). 13 The case of Ralph Nader can also be interpreted as a consequence of these tensions within the Democratic Party. The alleged “spoiler” of Al Gore’s election had indeed been at the center of the alterglobalist movement through the alliance-building efforts of Public Citizen. His anti-corporate and anti-establishment platform echoed many claims defended by Ross Perot.
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and allow independent monitoring of their subcontractors. Although anti-sweatshop
campaigns did not explicitly fight against labor market polarization, they were largely
influenced by labor unions’ vehement opposition to trade liberalization without enforceable
labor standards. Additionally, the grassroots dimension of the anti-sweatshop crusade was
also a reflection of the inability of the federal government to implement labor reforms in the
face of structural economic transformations. Indeed, within a few years, the model of
“sweatfree communities”14 that emerged at Duke University was adopted by 180 universities,
before spreading to 118 school districts, 15 counties, 40 cities and 9 states15.
A very similar illustration of these bottom-up processes was the rise of living wage
campaigns in the mid-nineties. This time, social mobilization targeted the lower-class segment
of the domestic labor market, i.e. the vibrant working class at the bottom of the income
pyramid. In 1994, a coalition of religious and labor activists in Baltimore mobilized on behalf
of the working poor to demand a living wage for all workers. This grassroots campaign led to
a city ordinance that would require city contractors to pay a wage high enough to keep a
family above the poverty line. Soon after, social activists throughout the country emulated the
Baltimore campaign to win living wage ordinances in more than 120 localities16. Here again,
advocacy efforts were a local, grassroots response to political inertia in Washington, DC. By
promoting local instead of national reforms, living wage activists reenacted the bottom-up,
disruptive forms of political participation of the progressive era and the New Deal, efforts
which culminated with the creation of the federal minimum wage.
Unlike alterglobalist advocacy, living wage campaigns did not threaten the establishment
to the extent that it was partly co-opted by the Democratic Party. During the 2008 election,
Barack Obama capitalized on this grassroots power through the organizing efforts of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU). In early 2013, the president renewed his 2008 pledge
to raise the minimum wage from $ 7.25 to $9 an hour so as to defend the “true engine of
America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle-class” (Obama, 2013). Whether or not
this pledge was sincere, the Democrats’ plan to raise the minimum will likely go unheeded in
the face of Republican opposition in Congress.
14 Sweatfree communities are states, cities or counties that have adopted strict policies restricting public procurement to goods produced in decent working conditions. 15 The list is available on http://www.sweatfree.org/ 16 For more detail on living wage campaigns, see Luce (2002) and Levi, Olson & Steinman (2003).
16
A final example of the bottom-up pressure building up in American democracy was the
upsurge of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the fall of 2011. This movement was perhaps the
clearest example of the effects of political inertia and economic polarization on social
movement mobilization. From a political standpoint, it reflected the disillusions of the
American left with the two-party system, and most specifically with Barack Obama, who had
channeled some of this disruptive power in his 2008 grassroots campaign. On the economic
level, “We are the 99%” was a rebellious cry against social inequality in America. By its very
nature, OWS was quintessentially a movement against labor market polarization. Indeed,
beyond widely discussed statistics on wealth and income disparities, the demographics of
Occupiers captured the anxiety stemming from the ruthless nature of the labor market.
Disproportionately represented among protesters were young and educated citizens17 who, in
the aftermath of the crisis had trouble finding job opportunities. These labor trends were
certainly due to the devastating socio-economic effects of the Great Recession. Yet, as
mentioned earlier, they reflected the increasing competition at the top of the skill pyramid.
Perhaps what distinguished OWS from other disruptive forms of political participation
was its refusal to engage with party politics. This rejection of the two-party system had less to
do with the supposedly ill-focused agenda of the movement than with its raison d’être as a
prefigurative form of democracy challenging America’s political establishment. Or to be more
specific, OWS’s ambivalence towards the electoral system reflected the internecine tensions
between progressive reformers and anarchists. The latter had a strong influence on the
trajectory of the movement from its origins and kept the movement away from reformist
goals. This did not prevent OWS from altering the policy sphere. Not only did the “American
Fall” of 2011 changed the terms of the debate on social inequality in America, but various
activist networks throughout the nation survived along after police evictions and redirected
their energy toward other causes, the most prominent of which were the relief efforts
undertaken by “Occupy Sandy” in the aftermath of the hurricane. Yet, as of 2013, the political
legacy of the Occupy movement is incommensurate with the dramatic hopes raised in the
early days of the encampment in Zucotti Park. This failure was largely due to the movement’s
inability to challenge the two-party system.
17 According to one study, 37% of participants in one demonstration organized by OWS were under 30 years old. 76% of them held a Bachelar’s degree (Milkman, Luce & Lewis, 2012).
17
Conclusion What should be made of this series of contentious actions? Without historical distance,
these isolated eruptions of discontent may seem like the death throes of American democracy.
Yet, in effect, these examples of social disruption are not more scattered than the movements
of industrial workers, agrarians, and women activists that took place at the end of the 19th
century and were later reconstructed as the umbrella movement of progressivism. The
challenge of studying history in the making is to decipher cultural and political hieroglyphics
to anticipate structural change, to distinguish what Braudel calls “surface disturbances” from
the real “anomalies” of a stalled democratic process that could foreshadow a paradigm shift
(1976; Kuhn, 1996).
The examples of social mobilization discussed above are the direct product of the
combined forces of economic and political polarization. They are reminders of the
tremendous pressure that has built in the American political system over the past decades.
One obvious lesson from these progressive movements is that disruptive action is not
inherently conducive to social change. While recent progressive campaigns did achieve
results at the local level and/or changed the terms of the debates on globalization, employment
and inequality, they did not fundamentally challenge the political status quo. The reasons for
their limited results partly lies in their inability to rally a movement broad enough to disrupt
electoral alignments. By lending its support to the controversial figure of Ross Perot, the
alterglobalist movement came close to shatter the two-party system. Antisweatshop and living
wage campaigns were successful at the local level, yet did not truly connect with national
politics beyond the election 2008. The Occupy movement was perhaps the most disconnected
from electoral politics, whether at the local or national levels, which largely explains why its
political legacy remains so elusive.
The dynamics of social change needs not be reduced to dichotomies between radical and
reformist, electoral processes and disruptive action. The question is not whether Martin
Luther King or Lyndon Johnson was the real force behind the civil rights reforms. History has
shown that the key to social change resides in the interconnection between outsiders and
insiders. Activists need the support of political elites, as politicians need popular support to
undertake a transformative agenda. Co-optation is not a one-way street. With enough
leverage, movements can co-opt political elites to join their causes. If the last twenty years are
any indication, social mobilization against economic and political polarization is likely to re-
emerge under new forms. Whether the next progressive movement triggers radical reforms,
18
political indifference or an aggressive backlash will, for better or worse, depend on its ability
to bridge the gap between disruptive action and electoral politics.
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