Conclusion
This book has developed along three related tracks. On the most general level, I have sought to contribute to a theory of social reform by analyzing the contingent character of business power and the possibilities and limits of anticapitalist state action in the United States. At the same time, I have drawn on a framework derived from that theory to explain OSHA’s inability to protect workers from occupational hazards. Finally, the theory and framework have been used to consider proposals to restructure American occupational safety and health policy. Here I bring together the conclusions reached along each of these tracks and weigh their implications for the future of social reform in the United States.
At the outset, I argued that the structure of capitalist democracy creates powerful obstacles to anticapitalist reform. Nonetheless, theory and history suggest that the ends served by the state are variable; the state can act in the interests of workers. But if reforms are to serve workers, two things have to be accomplished. First, reformers must increase the ability of public officials to take actions counter to business interests by loosening the state’s dependence on private capital investment. Second, reforms must actively involve workers in the implementation of social policy. These two preconditions are also mutually reinforcing. When workers are actively involved ip policymaking and implementation, they are not likely to abandon reformist public officials at the first sign of economic decline; public officials who are free to pursue worker interests may be less sensitive to the problem of business confidence; and workers actively involved in reform are less likely to embrace economism as a political strategy.
The rise and fall of OSHA illustrates both faces of social reform in capitalist democracies. On the one hand, it makes clear that the capitalist state is capable of passing social legislation over the opposition of business and in the interests of workers. With the passage of the OSH Act, the mobilization of new social and political movements, the White House’s interest in them, and the determined efforts of labor activists led to a major extension and redefinition of worker rights. On the other hand, the failure of workplace regulation makes clear how business mobilization can combine with the structure of capitalist democracy to frustrate the implementation of anticapitalist reforms. In a period of economic uncertainty, political opposition by business was translated into a concerted and ultimately successful attack by the White House on OSHA
The liberal approach to regulation left the agency particularly vulnerable to these political and structural forces: an overly statist but insufficiently radical approach to implementation failed to confront the obstacles to successful reform. Because it remained limited vis-à-vis the larger processes of production and capital investment, government remained highly vulnerable to the problem of business confidence. Moreover, because command-and-control regulation did not actively involve workers in the reconstruction of the workplace, the OSH Act failed to create the social and political support that might have helped public officials sustain reform in the face of business mobilization and economic decline. In this sense, the OSH Act proved counterproductive; it focused political opposition on the agency without creating the political and institutional preconditions for effective state action.
Worker Agency and the Social-Reform Cycle
In contrast to other studies, the present book suggests that worker agency—participation at the workplace and in politics—is a critical component to successful occupational safety and health regulation. Rank-and-file mobilization and the development of a movement for workplace reform created the preconditions for the passage of the OSH Act in 1970; subsequently, worker demobilization on the shop floor and in Washington undermined the implementation of the act. This study also suggests that regulatory reform must build on, and promote, worker agency if the OSH Act is to be implemented.
This problem of worker agency is doubly disturbing. On the one hand, it leaves public policy subordinated to a particularly vicious social-reform cycle in which the state’s ability to serve workers’ interests changes with movements in the economy.1 Although the state can and does respond to popular pressure, social reform is vulnerable to economic cycles and countermobilization by business. Poorly organized, neither the poor nor the middle class can resist this pressure. Better organized, the labor movement has chosen a political strategy that leaves it overly dependent on the goodwill of public officials. Fearful of the impact of public policy on investment, labor leaders often abandon reforms when business confidence sags. This is especially true when social policies seek to regulate business in the interests of workers as a class. When that happens, countermobilization by business is apt to be intense, and social reform is likely to prove particularly vulnerable to rationalization.
Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the history of postwar social policy. The Great Society reformers did radical things; social regulation challenged the market and asserted a new, positive conception of human interests beyond the values of production. It created state-enforced social rights for people who could not protect themselves—consumers, neighborhood groups, and workers. Some of the various health, safety, and environmental laws even encouraged people to participate in government. Workers can accompany OSHA inspectors; environmentalists can sue the EPA to implement clean air and water statutes. But, at bottom, reformers created a paper state-long on statutes and regulations, but short on effective social power—because the state was left vulnerable to the punishing effects of the market and the debilitating consequences of the political powerlessness of the people it was designed to serve.
Some liberal reformers continue to defend the Great Society and explain its failures in conventional political terms. The climate of opinion changed in America, they maintain, and support for reform eroded. In another time, when better economic and political conditions prevail, or the underclass mobilizes, Americans will once again accept their social responsibilities to the poor and the disadvantaged; the state will again embrace reform. Then, with the resources and political support they need, public officials will implement the statutory commitments of the Great Society and press toward even more radical forms of liberalism.2
In one respect, this political argument is compelling. In the case of OSHA business opposition and the decline of organized labor powerfully limited what government could do to protect workers from occupational hazards. In another respect, however, this account of the demise of the Great Society is mistaken. As public opinion polls indicate, workers have not abandoned their commitments to social reform. In fact, majorities continue to support tax programs that reduce economic inequality; regulatory programs that control air and water pollution, regulate consumer product safety, and protect workers from occupational hazards; and public employment projects that create jobs.3
Thus this political explanation for the demise of the Great Society begs what is perhaps the most important question. Why have liberal reforms been so vulnerable to changes in the economic environment and the political opposition of business? It is by no means obvious that laissez-faire ideas should resonate so loudly in the corridors of government or that economic decline should lead so directly and effectively to the retrenchment of the welfare state. To the contrary, the inability of a capitalist economy to provide workers with a secure and steadily advancing standard of living in the 1970s and early 1980s, in com bination with a political attack on hard-won social reforms, might have led to a classwide mobilization in defense of liberalism. It did not.
The Future of Reform
If the analysis presented here is correct, it suggests two steps toward rethinking reform. First, social reformers, especially radicals who seek to loosen systemic obstacles to anticapitalist reforms, must begin with an analysis of the welfare state that takes explicit account of its structural limits and, simultaneously, the conditions under which they can be loosened. Second, the relationship between private and public action must be reconsidered and policy proposals fashioned that take maximum advantage of the opportunities for social change in liberal democratic systems.
The constraints on reform have already been discussed, and they point toward new reform strategies. The account of policy failure suggests that if reforms are to be sustained, they depend on independent political and economic activity by the people most directly served by reform. Most important, reformers must rethink the relationship between private and public action, and the role that reform can serve in facilitating both.
As a rule, Americans are trapped in a dichotomous way of thinking about the political economy that counterposes the state and the market and fails to consider the complex relationships between them. As a result, Americans swing back and forth between bouts of enthusiasm for state intervention and moods of deep distrust of all forms of public life—leaning first to “big government” and then to the “free market.” It is commonplace to point out that neither image is accurate. In comparative perspective, the American government is not very big; in historical perspective, the market is surely not free. There is another, more important point to be made about this hyperbolic and distorted view of the political economy: it obscures the problems and the possibilities of acting in either sphere. Reacting against first the state and then the market, Americans fail to develop either to the point where it could serve democratic purposes. At least domesti-cally, the state remains limited. At the same time, effective private action is fundamentally constrained by the obstacles thrown up to coordination and collective action by workers and consumers in capitalist markets.
Thus, taking reform seriously and seeking to empower people within this system requires a strategy that deals with both public and private spheres. The obstacles to effective private action must be lowered and collective action facilitated. Concurrently, the state must be reorganized so that it too can act effectively. Both spheres must be joined by a common ethic of participation.
As we have seen, the argument for private action is usually made by conservatives, who mean to confine social practices to the pursuit of private interests in markets; they question the efficacy and legitimacy of almost all forms of state intervention. Reformers need not adopt this view to take the point that liberal reforms have leaned too heavily on the state and that state action has been poorly thought out and poorly organized. As I have tried to demonstrate in this book, there are costs to statism, and benefits to be derived from close attention to which forms of state intervention help workers use public authority to promote self-organization and self-protection.
The issue of occupational safety and health suggests some specific illustrations. As a general rule, state action seems most effective as a way of determining a national, comprehensive approach to the problem of health and safety. Within that framework, there is a good deal of room for local efforts. Rather than rely on factory legislation, government can create rights to participate in the determination of working conditions and mandate in-plant mechanisms that involve workers in plant-level decision making. Public policy can then be used to coordinate central decisions about resource allocation and long-term health and safety goals with the local activities.
The discussion of the social democratic approach suggested one possible framework, but, for the moment at least, it can serve only as a frame of reference. Few Americans demand this approach to reform, and if it is imposed from above, it will turn out to be more corporatist than democratic. In any event, social democratic policy approaches do not guarantee that workers will organize, that they will define their interests broadly, or that they will take advantage of opportunities to participate in the implementation of protective policies.
Nevertheless, the range of alternatives considered points out some things that are ignored in American debates. First, it directly raises the question of how to recombine production, politics, and markets to maximize both participation and effective state action. Second, it suggests that organized labor and middle-class reformers must reorient their approaches to reform. Both must replace the liberal form of state intervention with one that is simultaneously more participatory and authoritative. Both must increase public control over the levers of investment. The latter is particularly important because the relationship between public authority and private investment establishes one of the fundamental parameters of individual and group decision making, including the decision by workers to seek short-term material gain or long-term political changes, and the decision by public officials to challenge private property rights or rationalize social policy.
Reform movements must also look for issues that simultaneously raise demands for participation and effective state action. Only then can they escape the private-public dualism that imprisons American political thought. Demand for a strong occupational safety and health program, built on mandatory enterprise-level programs and coordinated through a national health plan, is one example. Environmental protection organized around community boards and regional assemblies is another. In both instances, demands for protection from the hazards of capitalist production are combined with demands for increased participation in the organization of work and greater public control over investment.
Moreover, these issues appeal across occupational, income, gender, and racial lines. The demand for workplace safety and health, for example, can be formulated as a general claim for a democratic approach to basic decisions about the allocation of resources to competing uses, such as health care or hotel building. Of course people demand health care today, but their demands are rarely raised in this broader context—tied to demands for decision-making power and institutions in which that power might be exercised. Instead, they lobby for larger budgets and stronger programs. This conventional approach encourages divisions based on particular claims: for consumer, worker, or environmental protection; health care for the aged; housing for the poor. By focusing on the process by which allocational decisions are made, the common interest in securing greater public control over the levels and kinds of capital investment in society is underscored.
Both organized labor and middle-class reformers also must change their political strategies. The labor movement must seek more than social rights and adequate budgets. It must demand increased worker participation at work as it seeks greater leverage over the political system. It must seize on issues that cut across traditional industrial and sectoral lines and help to unite diverse constituencies. Concurrently, middle-class reformers need to extend their vision of participatory democracy to the workplace and the organization of production. They too must recognize the importance of public control over investment and worker participation at work for democratic politics.
One final point remains. This book began with a theoretical account of the structural obstacles to successful social reform in capitalist democracies, and the case of OSHA illustrates how difficult it is to use state action to serve workers. Nevertheless, I have recommended proposals that are self-consciously reformist, which might appear to contradict the basic thrust of the preceding analysis. Indeed, it is possible to find in the OSHA story compelling reasons to abandon reformism entirely.
There is another lesson here, however. By leaving the debate over the future of reform and social policy in the United States to conservatives and neoliberals, radicals abandon whatever ground can be gained by challenging the reigning orthodoxy with concrete proposals that move society in a different direction. To gain this ground, however, reformers must develop a subtle and nuanced understanding of public policy that combines a radical vision of what another society might accomplish with a close look at how state action contributes to, or undermines, progress toward that goal.