Article

Dados vol. 24 n. 2 Rio de Janeiro 1981

Sindicalismo e Política Social nos Estados Unidos

Figueiredo, Argelina Maria Cheibub

Abstract

The political values and beliefs as well as the organization of the American union movement in the pursuit of social welfare policies is the principal concern of this paper. It focus mostly the period from 1935 to 19SS during which the unions began to demand public social welfare programs and to involve themselves with national politics. The author argues that the union movement's change in favor of publicly-sponsored social welfare policies did not entail a break with the traditional "voluntaristic" orientation of organized labor, that is, its distance from electoral and partisan interests and its belief on the union's exclusive capacity to achieve working class demands. Similarly, the union's increased participation in the political life did not change its role of a fundamentally economic institution. The result was that throughout the period the union movement's position vis-a-vis the issue of social welfare is characterized by a discrepancy between stated objectives and practical strategies: the union movement, for one, used indirect and particularistic means to achieve collective and equalitarian goals. The author suggests that this situation resulted from past choices concerning the political role of unionism which drastically limited the repertoire of possible action alternatives and made the movement dependent of external circumstances. Past choices affected not only the achievement of social welfare policies in the United States, but also their content (the values that were incorporated into law) and scope (coverage and type of benefits).

Full text