Compared to their counterparts around the world, US trade unions have historically been reluctant to undertake broad programmatic and transformative agendas. The division emerged most clearly in the early twentieth century: In France, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) embraced a revolutionary syndicalist line that championed workers’ ownership of the means of production. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) formed common cause with key trade unions; by World War I, it had become the single largest political party in the country on a platform of universal benefits for the working class. Even explicitly nonrevolutionary movements, like those of Australia and the United Kingdom, had by this period formed distinct labor parties committed to advancing the interests of workers at the national level.
No such developments would take place in the United States. After abandoning the campaign for an independent labor party in 1894, the American Federation of Labor instead prioritized sectional bargaining on behalf of its own membership, often against the interests of workers as a whole. This is especially true in the case of state welfare benefits: while trade unions have been essential to the expansion of social insurance systems around the world, US trade unions broke ranks with reformers to actively campaign against proposals for state benefits at crucial historical turning points. Why, in the words of the historian Mike Davis, is the US working class “different”?
Scholars from Eric Hobsbawm to W. E. B. Du Bois have posited that differences in status, race, ethnicity, and religion divided the American workforce and prevented the emergence of successful class coalitions. In dramatic showdowns like the Haymarket affair and the Pullman Strike, American workers also suffered a degree of state- and employer-backed violence unseen in other industrialized societies — with federal militias and police opening fire against strikers.
But a more subtle form of repression has also informed the United States’ sectionalist labor tradition. Since their emergence in the early nineteenth century, trade unions in the US have repeatedly obtained legal recognition only through their role as insurance providers. Barring a brief period between 1935 and 1948, organized labor in the United States relied on insurance benefits to maintain members and a legal existence — putting it at odds with campaigns for state benefits and forcing it to bargain on behalf of a select group of relatively well-off workers. US labor’s resistance to universal benefits was thus not inevitable; it was rather reflective of the position labor held in a wider political economy.