An Epitaph for a distinctly American labor movement, at 30

In 1996, Max Green, a former operative for New York’s United Federation of Teachers (UFT) who broke with trade unionism, wrote Epitaph for American Labor: How Union Leaders Lost Touch with America. In it, he detailed how labor unions over a crucial two decades of the Long Decline (the Lane Kirkland era running the AFL-CIO after 1979) found themselves on the left-wing of American life shortly after Big Labor’s heyday in a center-left mainstream that commanded the heights of American politics and culture.

To a certain trade unionist (typically one who considers himself politically centrist or center-right), the story of American unions goes something like the following:

Drawing on a distinctive American labor tradition separate from the Marxist class-conflict model of their European comrades, organized labor (a reliable and unquestionable proxy for the American working man) stood with his country through two World Wars and a global struggle with Communism. While demanding “more”—in Samuel Gompers’s word—for the honorable worker, American trade unions never succumbed to the siren song of class conflict and state ownership of the means of production (old-fashioned socialism), demonstrating labor’s “conservative heart.”  In so doing, organized labor earned the respect of the American people and privileges for its institution for all time—perhaps even to include the privilege to compel membership and private financial support.

This is bunkum. In America organized labor has differed from its European counterparts not in philosophy but rather in practical realities. Americans have proven to be more conservative over time than Europeans. We have retained our religious identification and practice and have identified individual effort as more important to success than communal or state action. And Americans have maintained a large and powerful military.

All of these actions have been to the longstanding irritation of our European cousins.

But the American labor movement has declined in broad membership and left the rump of labor unionism dominated by government workers, para-statal workers who nominally work for private employers (but whose employment is ultimately dependent on government spending), and ideologically motivated private-sector workers, such as journalists and graduate students. With this shift, American Big Labor has come to look more European than American.

Green lamented the beginning of that evolution back in 1996. In the decades since, the drift left has become more severe.

Meet the McGovernites

McGovernites, despite their 49-state electoral pasting in November 1972, were the future of the Democratic Party . . .

A crucial breaking point was the presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) in 1972. That year, the AFL-CIO, for the only time in its united history to date, declined to endorse the Democratic nominee for president. Notably, it could not bring itself to endorse McGovern’s rival Richard Nixon, despite Nixon having proved more amenable to Great Society liberalism than his Republican successors would.

Big Labor—at a time it really was “Big,” commanding roughly one-fourth of the nonagricultural private-sector workforce—sat comfortably in a Democratic Party mainstream defined by the New Deal and the Great Society in domestic policy and Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson in foreign policy. But President Johnson’s ever-expanding conflict in Vietnam put strain between the midcentury center-left mainstream and the New Left—a New Left labor itself had midwifed through the funds and institutional support of the United Auto Workers.

By 1972, the New Left had simply become the left, and it presented one of its own to the country for election in the form of Sen. McGovern. Despite McGovern’s impeccable pro-Big Labor credentials—he had hailed the formation of the UAW-Teamsters Alliance for Labor Action on the Senate floor—his dovish foreign policy and rhetorical alignment with the blame-America-first left was too much for old-line, Cold War liberals like the AFL-CIO’s top two men, George Meany and Lane Kirkland, to stomach.

But the McGovernites, despite their 49-state electoral pasting in November 1972, were the future of the Democratic Party, not Meany and Kirkland. This was one of the operating theses underlying the dearly departed Emerging Democratic Majority, a widely praised 2002 book that predicted enduring demographic dominance for the Democratic Party. As with all theories of American political coalitions, it lasted until it didn’t.

That had ramifications for Big Labor, which Max Green outlined:

As recently as twenty-five years ago [1971], those who called themselves traditional liberals (as against New Politics liberals) saw organized labor as perhaps the only hope for resisting the onslaught of the Left against the nation’s economic system, social culture, and foreign policy. Leaders of the Left agreed: the New Left and then the McGovernite wing of the Democratic Party took aim at the union movement, regularly denouncing labor leaders as defenders of America’s capitalist, racist, and imperialist establishment.

The McGovernites’ victory might have been inevitable, given that their coalition constituencies were growing while Big Labor had already passed its peak and entered the Long Decline. But even declining factions can still fight brutally to keep their place in a coalition or shape its future—even the New England moderate Republicans have not all gone to their rest. But Big Labor did not fight; as Green notes:

But, to the surprise of supporters and critics, labor put up little resistance to the Left. For all intents and purposes, the movement capitulated to it in less than a decade; by the early 1980s, labor had changed sides. Increasingly disaffected from American capitalism, it relinquished any serious claim to a distinctive character and for the first time became an integral part of the American Left. Organized labor came to mirror the Left in its criticism of capitalism; in its commitment to statist economic policies; in its abandonment of the traditional American value of individualism in favor of the race and gender-based policies of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements; and in its strong penchant for challenging the pursuit of U.S. interests abroad, particularly but not exclusively its opposition to the now bipartisan policy of promoting free market economies through free trade and other means.

A better candidate for when Big Labor initially lurched to the left would be in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations was both shot through with Communists and deeply influential in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Whether Green was right that the Long Decline was the “first time” organized labor “became an integral part of the American Left,” he identifies a major dynamic, one that the succeeding three decades only exacerbated.

Since Big Labor’s Long Decline became unmissable in the 1970s and 1980s, coalition dynamics have driven the union movement from the center of the liberal coalition to its activist-left flank. It is possible to trace organized labor’s alienation in three of the areas Green discusses.

First, there is economics, where (contrary to myths about long-dead labor leaders like Samuel Gompers) the union movement has consistently supported not just “big government,” but economic central planning with full employment as a singular goal, inflation be damned.

In foreign policy, the AFL-CIO continued to assert  its support for efforts to contain and roll back international communism. But in practice, it obstructed American efforts in Central America, tried to block the Reagan defense buildup by holding it hostage for left-wing domestic interests, and endorsed the socialist-to-communist programs of leftist leaders in Africa and Latin America. The passing from the scene of Kirkland specifically has only accelerated this trend.

In social policy, organized labor lost its socially moderating factions, what Green quoted AFL-CIO political (COPE) director Al Barkan as calling “the old New Deal coalition of ethnics.” This promoted ever closer union with organized identity-politics groups, feminist activists, and LGBT interests.

From socialism through socialism lite to socialism again

The government sector-share of union members has grown noticeably since Green wrote in 1996. [ . . .] By 2025, total union membership had fallen to about 14.7 million, but government-union membership had grown to approximately 7.3 million, raising the government’s percentage to 49.6 percent.

The original American trade unionists were at least socialism-curious. Samuel Gompers flirted with Georgism, studied the political writings of Karl Marx extensively, and firmly committed himself to Marx-influenced class analysis. But Gompers ultimately chose to pursue collective bargaining with private companies rather than state ownership of the means of production, the old definition of “socialism,” which would be adopted by British unionists when their Labour Party took power after World War II.

Gompers’s view was not universal; he, in fact, was ousted from union office by socialists in 1894 for a single one-year term. More enduring challenges came from Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World, which combined violent militancy with radical politics until the Woodrow Wilson administration’s complete disregard for civil liberties saw it broken up and Haywood exiled to the nascent Soviet  Union; and Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party, which received between 2.8 percent and 5.99 percent of the national vote in presidential elections from 1900 through 1920.

Organized labor endorsed much of the expansion of government undertaken by the New Deal and Great Society. But both those experiments in social democracy in America lacked Big Labor’s great desideratum: a full-employment guarantee. This would have included a requirement to reduce working hours below the five eight-hour days specified under New Deal-era legislation that essentially nationalized a long-standing union demand. Cutting working hours (without a reduction in pay, naturally) remains a union demand; in its 2023 strike against the Detroit Three auto manufacturers, the UAW demanded a cut to a 32-hour week that it did not receive in final agreements.

The problem for Big Labor in the 1970s and 1980s, as it remained in the Biden administration through the present, is inflation. Green writes:

Labor denied that any trade-off existed between inflation and unemployment. […] As long as some industrial capacity was unutilized (and there almost always seemed to be some, by labor’s account), the solution to inflation would be to produce more goods by hiring more workers. […] Similarly, whereas conventional economists held that interest-rate hikes would reduce inflationary pressures by reducing demand, labor argued that the opposite was true because increasing interest rates raised the cost of borrowed money and therefore the total cost of production.

The union position described by Green on interest rates has been consistently disproved by events. The era of “inflation targeting” by the Fed, which lasted from the late 1970s through the 2008 financial crisis, relied on raising interest rates to cut the growth of the money supply. It worked so well that annual inflation never exceeded 4 percent from 1990 through 2022, when the Biden administration adopted the Old Labor platform of expansionist fiscal policy while the Fed dawdled in raising interest rates to knock down price increases. (If the Trump administration gets its wish of low interest rates despite continued price-increase pressures, it will likely regret it.) Likewise, echoes of the union position against “automation”—increasing productivity—are heard today as well in campaigns against data centers, autonomous taxis, and other high-technology advances.

Perhaps most notable for the purposes of tracing labor’s continued march to the progressive left is Green’s account of the beginnings of the environmentalist-labor alignment. He wrote:

Labor’s preoccupation with increasing union jobs explains why the AFL lined up with the no-growth wing of the environmental movement in scoffing at green taxes–effluent charges designed to give companies an incentive to reduce pollution with maximum efficiency-as “licenses to pollute,” even though virtually all economists, liberal as well as conservative, thought otherwise. The alternative favored by the AFL and its environmentalist allies was a government requirement that companies use the best available technology.

Green described the AFL-CIO’s support for the mandate as largely cynical, noting, “Without any specific reference to unions, [economist Alan] Blinder concluded that ‘in effect environmental regulations act as a perversely discriminatory tax that deters innovation and favors outmoded plants with low productivity.’” And those outmoded plants with low productivity were more likely to be unionized or served by unionized services (like unionized coalfields) than their modern counterparts.

Cynical abuse of the legislative and regulatory process continues to define the green-labor alliance. During the Biden administration, Congressional Democrats proposed restricting a $4,500 tax credit for purchasing electric cars (a Big Green payoff) to cars manufactured where “the final assembly of such vehicle occurs at a plant, factory, or other place which is operating under a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by an employee organization.” That means a union shop (a Big Labor payoff).

Further aligning today’s labor with the radical left than it was even at Green’s Epitaph is the continued shift away from “true” private-sector unionism. Yesterday’s Big Labor was dominated by collective bargaining at firms engaged in ordinary commercial activities, such as shipping, manufacturing, private construction, personal services, and shopkeeping. Today’s Big Labor is dominated by government workers and “private-sector” firms that are existentially dependent on the government (loosely classifiable as “parastatal,” though unlike “true” parastatals in Europe they aren’t typically owned by the government).

The government sector-share of union members has grown noticeably since Green wrote in 1996. That year, the Union Membership and Coverage Database reports that of just under 16.3 million total union members, just under 6.9 million were public-sector workers, putting 42.1 percent of unionists in government work. By 2025, total union membership had fallen to about 14.7 million, but government-union membership had grown to approximately 7.3 million, raising the government’s percentage to 49.6 percent.

But that government proportion does not include the parastatals such as New York City hospitals dependent on the state Medicaid system that are organized by the powerful 1199SEIU, the “union that rules New York.” Similar examples include graduate student unions at nominally private universities such as Harvard and Stanford that rely on government grants and tuition subsidies; unionized defense contracting firms; unionized construction firms dependent on government project-labor agreements; and similar “private” businesses with a tenuous-at-best tie to private commerce.

It should therefore not be surprising that since John Sweeney, the former SEIU leader and card-carrying Democratic Socialists of America member, was elected to lead the AFL-CIO in 1996, the union movement has increasingly supported government control of the economy. Its (remaining) members rely on Big Government, not private enterprise, for their daily bread.

The anti-American left, with forced dues

After the fall of international Communism, the left, and what remains of Big Labor with it, subtly shifted from Moscow-directed Marxism-Leninism to Third Worldism as its defining foreign approach. And so, today’s unions [. . . ] side with Palestinian extremists against Israel.

Green had no time for the myth, promoted by labor unionists, that labor unions had contributed meaningfully to winning nations on the Western side of the Cold War. (The exception was Poland, where the trade union Solidarity used support from the AFL-CIO in its campaign for the downfall of the Soviet-backed regime.) Green wrote:

Not that [the AFL-CIO’s] anti-Communist efforts had been effective: just as labor’s ability to raise wages was more apparent than real, so was the part it played in the West’s victory in the cold war more myth than fact. Its intentions were praiseworthy. But, more often than not, the particular policies it supported were counterproductive. The stress on building trade unions abroad was a mistake of the first order. In not a single country did unions play the kind of role that American labor predicted. And, for the most part, foreign unions promoted statist policies that prevented or impeded economic growth and, in so doing, contributed to the creation of economic and social conditions that Communist Parties and other left-wing anti-American movements exploited.

American labor unionists in mid-century, when American Big Labor was reaching its height in political power, membership density, and economic influence, had a theory on how to keep European and industrialized Asian countries out of the Red camp. In their view, influential in the Truman administration, advancing market economics would be a total waste of time that would only promote Communism because the real fight to keep countries anti- or non-Communist was on the left alone, with control of the trade unions by democratic socialists being critical to preserving democracy. According to Green, the AFL (at this point, the non-Communist federation compared to the Communist-infiltrated CIO) argued the following:

The AFL also grossly overestimated the political importance of any given country’s trade union movement. Labor leaders strove to convince America’s opinion leaders and policy makers that control of a nation’s trade unions was decisive in a nation’s future. “As the war in Europe came to an end,” wrote David Dubinsky, “it became increasingly obvious that the question of whether democracy was to revive in the countries overrun by Hitler and Mussolini lay in the trade unions.” But what seemed obvious then, does not seem so in retrospect.

Instead, Green notes, it was guns, not butter, that decided a country’s alignment in the Soviet-American struggle: “In postwar Eastern Europe, the most important factor turned out to be the balance of international forces, which determined whether the USSR could send in the Red Army to support a Communist takeover or to put down an anti-Communist insurrection.”

Indeed, in Japan the administration of Allied Supreme Commander and de-facto viceroy Douglas MacArthur, responding to a general strike by the Communist-affiliated Sanbetsu union federation, rejected the AFL approach outright. Green wrote:

To deal with the general problem of labor unrest, SCAP [Supreme Commander Allied Powers, MacArthur’s office] proposed new labor legislation that would deny government workers collective-bargaining rights and would deny workers in government enterprises the right to strike. Richard Killen, who had been chosen chief of SCAP’s Labor Division with the blessing of both the AFL and the CIO, responded by resigning in protest. Later in the year, both U.S. labor groups passed resolutions condemning what they considered an antilabor policy that would drive Japanese workers and their country into the waiting arms of the Communists.

But Japanese workers and their country did not go into the Red camp. Instead, the small-c conservative and largely pro-U.S. Liberal Democratic Party would govern the country from its formation in 1955 through 1993 without interruption and for all but roughly six years from 1955 through the present day.

Green assessed labor’s contribution to the conclusion of the Cold War as likewise overstated and saw in the final years of the Soviet Empire the beginnings of an anti-American leftism that has flourished in the years since the Epitaph. The first notable flowerings of anti-American labor foreign policy, as opposed to merely hapless foreign policy, came in Central America, especially El Salvador and Nicaragua.

El Salvador was ruled by an anticommunist faction facing leftist insurgencies, and the Reagan administration supplied it with arms—which created problems for the AFL-CIO, which had factions within it that opposed supporting the anticommunist government. Regarding El Salvador, Green wrote:

The AFL-CIO leadership was fighting a rearguard battle against an internal Left that was desperately trying to be part of a “progressive” political coalition in the United States. Operating under the name of the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in EI Salvador, this labor Left included unions representing approximately half of the membership of AFL-CIO-affiliated unions. Although the national labor committee sometimes talked in the same language of conditionality as the AFL-CIO, it was understood by all that what it really supported was an absolute cutoff [of military aid].

Meanwhile in Nicaragua, the AFL-CIO “was highly critical of the Sandinistas [the ruling leftist political movement]. Moreover, criticism was the extent of the AFL-CIO’s opposition; it never supported aid to the armed resistance. As they had in El Salvador, unions that were part of the ‘National Labor Committee’ prevented the AFL-CIO from supporting the military dimension of U.S. policy in Nicaragua.”

After the fall of international Communism, the left, and what remains of Big Labor with it, subtly shifted from Moscow-directed Marxism-Leninism to Third Worldism as its defining foreign approach. And so, today’s unions, perhaps led by Shawn Fain’s UAW and its Harvard graduate-student vanguard, side with Palestinian extremists against Israel (formerly a labor-left idyll). As I wrote shortly after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks:

And as Labor Zionism crafted in the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust has declined in popularity on the Left, intersectional theory has risen. And intersectional and “decolonization” theory targets “settler colonial” nations for ultimate elimination—among them perhaps first and second are the United States and Israel. Let the would-be buyer beware.

Race, open borders, and The Acronym

The principal cause of Long Decline and contemporary-era labor unions becoming far-left social-policy groups is a familiar one: Unions’ memberships became unrepresentative of American working people.

McGovern’s platform was legendarily summarized as “Acid, amnesty, and abortion”—legalization of drugs, forgiveness for draft dodgers, and, well, “abortion” speaks for itself. (While famous right-leaning Washington journalist Robert Novak reported the statement, he wrote late in life that its source was Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D-MO), who ironically was briefly McGovern’s running mate.)

While that trifecta was too much for Meany and Kirkland, Big Labor (well, Smaller Labor) would shortly move in that direction as well. In doing so they followed their liberal-progressive co-partisans (and also the civil rights groups that some union leaders had worked alongside in securing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act) down the path to replacing the American ethos of equal treatment under law with racial box-ticking and affirmative-action set-asides.

The principal cause of Long Decline and contemporary-era labor unions becoming far-left social-policy groups is a familiar one: Unions’ memberships became unrepresentative of American working people. In a discussion of Big Labor’s support for school integration by the highly controversial strategy of busing, Green notes:

By the mid-1970s, white flight [the exit of mostly white, middle class families to the suburbs in part to avoid their children being bused], clearly, had defeated the efforts of courts and government agencies—cheered on by labor leaders and other bulwarks of establishment liberalism—to force the integration of big-city public schools. At the same time, white withdrawal triggered the decline of precisely the working-class urban neighborhoods that had long nourished trade unionism. In the early 1980s, after the damage was done, [AFL-CIO Committee On Political Education or COPE] Director AI Barkan was to lament that “thirty or forty years ago we had pure working-class precincts … [but] not anymore. The old New Deal coalition of ethnics is going. We’re losing the Italians, the Irish.”

By 1984, the “white ethnics” who had been the backbone of the labor movement and its socially (if not economically) centrist faction were gone. Green writes:

[In] the 1984 presidential election, when Walter Mondale, the Democratic challenger, endorsed by the AFL-CIO, received the votes of 55 percent of union members and their families. To reach this figure, he had needed the votes of 95 percent of black union members and their families. A clear majority of white union members and their families had voted for labor’s nemesis, Ronald Reagan. Labor was now politically at odds with the working-class constituency that it claimed to represent.

With white ethnics leaving organized labor and its political coalition, Big Labor turned to a more loyal constituency: organized civil-rights advocacy groups. While the relationship between unions and the civil rights cause was messier than today’s union propagandists claim, through the 1960s union leaders like A. Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther proved staunch allies of the campaigns for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. The partnerships developed on those campaigns, and the general social-democratic leanings of civil rights leaders (such as Randolph), led to further cooperation on left-of-center economic campaigns (including labor organizing).

This alliance has remained ironclad at the institutional level no matter how radical the racial-interest left has become. The Chicago Teachers Union, perhaps America’s most radical and most powerful government-worker union, joined the Movement for Black Lives in hailing leftist terrorist and cop killer Assata Shakur. The National Education Association essentially endorsed the left wing Omnicause, resolving to “provide an already-created,  in-depth study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” They are hardly alone.

In Green’s day, the union alliance with organized feminist groups (the “abortion” in Sen. Eagleton’s trifecta) was the social issue radicalization of the moment, and immigration was (believe it or not) a source of cross-party directional policy consensus. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act had normalized the status of a large number of illegal immigrants in exchange for tougher enforcement of other immigration laws. (Whether the latter actually happened is, charitably, disputed.)

By the mid-1990s, concern with the rate of illegal immigration had reached a point that even a Democratic presidential administration felt pressured to act in a restrictionist direction. A U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform authorized by a 1990 law and chaired by liberal former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) made numerous recommendations to tighten immigration controls, some of which made it into the 1996 bipartisan Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Big Labor, which had previously been hostile to or at times neutral on immigration, opposed the legislation, part of its millennium-era turn toward becoming what a New Republic writer characterized as the organized faction that is “a more steadfast champion of generous immigration reform” than any other “aside from Latino activists.” Once again, the pressures of leftist coalition-building overrode any countervailing forces, and Big Labor joined the leftist Omnicause. More importantly, the ideologically leftist-in-outlook unions that pushed the open-borders approach like the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and Unite Here gained influence within unionism itself, reinforcing the trend.

And because it is such a hot-button issue in the “culture wars,” one cannot leave the field while ignoring Big Labor’s relationship to the institutions that claim to represent the people with what might delicately be called “personal interests” defined by an ever-expanding acronym. The Canadian government, always a useful counterfactual for the question “What if America never had a conservative  movement?,” is partial to “2SLGBTQI+” to describe its “sexual and gender diverse communities.”

Green’s Epitaph was clearly written in a past that might as well have been a foreign country. In discussing Big Labor’s 1980s and early 1990s outreach to what today might be referred to as “The Groups,” he calls them “organized homosexuals,” terminology that shows (by how jarring it is to the 2026 ear) just how much mainstream acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has increased in the past three decades.

But, like The Groups themselves, Big Labor has moved far ahead of the country’s acceptance of what were once called “alternative lifestyles.” While a comfortable majority of Americans are accepting of or indifferent to same-sex couples who live otherwise normative lives (that Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, is himself in a same-sex marriage, was not a matter of controversy on his nomination), the aggressive promotion of transgenderism, especially to children, in recent years has proven extremely controversial.

And Big Labor has been there right alongside The Groups (like the Human Rights Campaign, Trevor Project, and GLAAD) pressing the vanguard of the “TQ” (transgender and “queer”) in The Acronym. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has noted:

Unions, allied with Democrats, have long supported a progressive agenda that includes collective bargaining for abortion coverage and transgender healthcare. The model language the AFL-CIO recommends to local chapters says “all health plans offered to bargaining unit members shall cover comprehensive . . . reproductive healthcare services, including contraceptives, abortion services . . . and gender affirming care.”

In 2012 the Service Employees International Union unanimously approved a resolution “calling on local unions to bargain for trans-inclusive healthcare.” The NewsGuild of New York/Communications Workers of America said in 2022 it “unequivocally supports access to abortion as a healthcare right.”

And this support for social-liberal vanguardism is not simply a matter of allowing consenting adults to do as they wish. Using a radical-left framework proffered by the left-wing-to-radical-left Action Center on Race and the Economy, the teachers union in the D.C. suburb of Prince George’s County demanded that the county “endorse and encourage  Schools.”  Among the “thirteen guiding principles” of that movement are “fostering a queer‐affirming network,” “embracing and making space for trans siblings,” and “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”

When Green wrote his Epitaph for American Labor, the writing was already on the wall that organized labor’s Long Decline would continue and that organized labor would further radicalize away from the American mainstream. The election of John Sweeney to lead the AFL-CIO in 1995 had already shown the rising power of the government-worker and ideologically leftist unions within the labor movement. The continued exit of traditional private-sector workers and their replacement by government workers and those in “political” employment such as journalists, nonprofit advocates, and graduate students has only accelerated the trends Green described that had led to Sweeney’s rise. To the extent that American labor was ever distinctly “American” —it probably was, at least in its rejection of the outright nationalization of industries, in the 1940s and 1950s—it is no more.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/an-epitaph-for-a-distinctly-american-labor-movement-at-30/