The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)
Select Page

I’m sitting at our kitchen table in Brooklyn. It’s the mid-1970s. I’m not sure how the subject of Pittsburgh’s air quality came up, but my mother, who I’m sure had never been to Pittsburgh, was quick with an anecdote. “Did you know that Breyers Ice Cream doesn’t sell its famous vanilla bean ice cream there? People won’t buy it because they think the flecks of vanilla are little particles of coal dust that have gotten in their ice cream.” My mother was a notorious fabulist, and a morning spent poking around the internet suggests that this story was made up. Nonetheless, it lodged in my ten-year-old brain, shaping my image not just of Pittsburgh, but of the entire rustbelt. Imagine my surprise, fifteen years later, when I spent ten days there as a paralegal for a giant New York law firm, reviewing documents in our client’s offices, high up in the U.S. Steel Building. Not only did the air quality seem fine, but the city had all the accoutrements of late-1980s yuppie affluence: attorneys bedecked in pink tailored shirts and absurd shoulder pads, valet dry cleaning, Au Bon Pains everywhere, and all those damn flourless chocolate tortes.

I have no doubt that Gabriel Winant, the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, would be able to guess the type of product our client produced.  It was a pharmaceutical company. At the center of Winant’s fantastic book is the question suggested by my brief encounter with Pittsburgh: how did it change from the quintessential industrial city to one with an economy sustained by healthcare and all its associated businesses? Of course, lurking not far under the surface of that question is a more fundamental one. How did large swaths of the American economy move from high wage, unionized industries that grew the white middle class to service industries with polarized wage structures that have generated economic inequality, particularly along racial and gendered lines?

I’m sure that Pittsburgh’s civic boosters have a pat explanation for the city’s transformation.  Pittsburgh, they would say, was a city built by steel and the broad shoulders of the (white) men who labored in the mills. It was a dirty job, but it paid high wages that allowed (white) immigrant communities to climb into the middle class. By the 1970s, however, the steel industry was in trouble. Those high wages made it impossible to compete with steel produced by foreign companies, and the mills began to close. Fortunately, Pittsburgh was able to reinvent itself. Healthcare was its future. This quintessential form of the knowledge economy replaced dangerous jobs in the mills with ones in a clean industry where profits flowed from compassion, innovation, and the saving of lives.

The Next Shift leaves this story in tatters. First, Winant shows us that the “golden age” of industrial labor in Pittsburgh was anything but. Not only did mill work take a horrendous toll on the human body and the environment, but it was much more precarious than the traditional narrative suggests. Booms and busts, layoffs, and industrial conflict meant that steel workers and their families faced economic insecurity and its attendant social stresses even during the postwar era of unchallenged American economy hegemony. Of course, for Black workers things were even worse. Confined to the periphery of the industrial economy by employment discrimination and social segregation, African American workers faced an even more precarious economic existence than whites. Finally, Winant demonstrates with a subtlety still dismayingly rare among historians of the United States how the unpaid domestic labor of women working in the steel communities throughout the Monongahela Valley served as the foundation of the entire industry. Steel corporations and the United Steelworkers of America may have negotiated contracts that purported to pay a “family wage,” but The Next Shift demonstrates how women’s household labor in fact subsidized the industry through feeding and caring for its workers, consuming its products, and acting as a private welfare system that sustained the social order in times of economic downturn.

The Next Shift’s nuanced description of the steel economy is a significant accomplishment, but it is not the key point of the book. Instead, Winant’s bravura analytic move relates to the second part of our civic booster’s tale: the rise of the healthcare industry to be not only Pittsburgh’s largest employer but one of the fastest growing sectors of the United States’ economy. It is not serendipity that caused healthcare to replace steel. Instead, it was the structure of America’s labor law and its welfare state. U.S. labor law facilitated the unionization of steel workers and the creation of collective bargaining agreements that included generous healthcare benefits for active and retired steelworkers. At the same time, our otherwise underdeveloped welfare state provided generous health benefits though Medicaid and Medicare. Thus, when the industrial economy collapsed, enormous amounts of money continued to flow into the healthcare sector as the battered, aging bodies of steelworkers and their families availed themselves of the only social benefits, public or private, that actually addressed the needs of the working class in the deindustrializing Rust Belt. The healthcare industry prospered due to the legacies of the collapsing steel industry.

Yet, as Winant cogently describes, this is only half the story of this economic transformation. Unlike the steel industry, for most of the postwar period, union organizing in the healthcare sector was not protected by American labor law. Consequently, wages for most healthcare workers were unconscionably low and other employment benefits were negligible or nonexistent. Additionally, because of pervasive employer and union discrimination against Black and female workers, these low wage jobs in the healthcare industry were dominated by African Americans and white women. Thus, Pittsburgh’s transformation from a steel town to a healthcare town also saw the transformation of its working class. White, male workers receiving a relatively high wage, as well as substantial, private welfare benefits guaranteed by collectively bargained contracts were replaced by Black and female workers with substandard wages and few benefits, who were forced to fall back on the stingy public welfare state in times of economic crisis. Indeed, in the dismaying denouement of The Next Shift, Winant describes how healthcare workers were squeezed even further in the final decades of the twentieth century. Neoliberal policy triumphs of the last third of the century constrained public healthcare spending. Hospitals, nursing homes, and outpatient clinics responded by cutting costs, usually at the expense of workers’ pay.

This thumbnail description of The Next Shift does not do justice to its wide-ranging narrative that combines labor history with explorations of twentieth-century political economy, urban history, business history, and the tangled stories of race and gender in postwar America. The Next Shift also functions as an exceptional piece of legal history. Winant demonstrates how legal mechanisms were central in structuring the shifting identity of the working class. Consider, for example, the National Labor Relations Act and the Taft-Hartley Act’s exclusion of domestic workers and healthcare workers from the protections of American labor law. These exclusions, as well as Taft-Hartley’s sanctioning of right-to-work laws, created islands of unionized high-wage workers with substantial private welfare benefits amidst a sea of unrepresented low-wage workers. The occupations these exclusions encompassed, combined with the absence of meaningful anti-discrimination laws until the middle of the 1960s, meant that the islands were largely inhabited by white, male workers, while women and workers of color floundered in the sea. To overextend the metaphor, Winant’s story describes how the American economy moved from the land to the water.

Similarly, a key theme in Winant’s story is how America’s patchwork welfare state allocated the burdens of both social reproduction and economic downturns differently between the old working class and the new one. American labor law created the private part of this system, which links many benefits (most healthcare and retirement benefits) to employment. At the same time, the public side of this system, created during the New Deal and the Great Society, had a legal and administrative structure that generated expanded public healthcare spending at the same time as it neglected other forms of social spending. This neglect left African Americans and working-class white women no choice but to enter the workforce as low-wage healthcare workers. The law determined whether the money went, and workers had no choice but to follow it.

The Next Shift thus serves as an object lesson in how law structures society and its political economy. The passage of particular laws emerge as moments of contingency in Winant’s narrative.  Some, of course, are over-determined. Southern congressmen were not going to support the NLRA if its benefits flowed to economic sectors dominated by Black workers. In other instances, however, a law’s effect ricochets in unanticipated ways. The exclusion of health benefits from World War II-era wage control laws was not intended to create a dual system of welfare provision. Medicare and Medicaid were not designed to ensure that healthcare spending would shape the nature of the American economy as it transitioned from industrial to postindustrial. Yet as Winant demonstrates, these were, in fact, the results of these laws. The Next Shift thus describes the emergence of the new working class, and shows us how the law defined it.

Download PDF
Cite as: Reuel Schiller, Law and the Structure of the New Working Class, JOTWELL (September 16, 2022) (reviewing Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (2021)), https://legalhist.jotwell.com/law-and-the-structure-of-the-new-working-class/.