Earlier. He called them the turbulent years. The years that gave rise to the cio and all of the organizing and mieverything we saw then. They werent years of upheaval, organization and progress so much as a big turnabout. A way in which the american working class suddenly took a turn to a different stage in its existence where we could say that from the 30s to the 70s was an experience of almost unbroken progress and expanding rights for workers. But in the years between 1968 and 1988, a lot of that turned around. So turnabout years. I want to start with three stories that help locate whats going on in this period. Then talk a bit about whats happening to the economy. Talk about Public Sector workers in the period and the physical austerity they faced and conclude with barometers of whats happening to working class america by the end of this period. So to begin, let me start with three stories. Im going to locate these in 1977. So roughly about halfway into the period that were talking about. Its 32 years after the conclusion of world war ii. Its 32 years of pretty much american progress, economically, at least into the early 1970s, when workers saw their standard of living rising and increasing opportunity. In fact, even increasing rights as we have seen africanamericans and women for the first time win some protections of their workplace rights against discrimination. But into the mid1970s, it became clear that all was not necessarily well with the american working class. I think one way that you start to see this is expressed in the music and culture of the time. Take, for example, what was a leading country and western hit of 1977, a song that you couldnt hardly turn on the radio without hearing. It was written by a writer called david alan koe. It was performed by a singer with a perfect name, i guess, johnny paycheck. The song was called take this job and shove it. I think it says a lot about what was going on in these years for many workers. Ive been working in this factory, the lyrics go, for 15 years. All this time i watch my woman drowning in a pool of tears. Ive seen a lot of good folks die that had a lot of bills to pay. I would give the shirt right off of my back if i had the guts to say, take this job and shove it. It goes on to talk about his foreman, he is a regular dog. His line boss thinks he is so cool. But, you know, lord, i cant wait to see their faces when i get the nerve to say, take this job and shove it. Now, that was an experience that a lot of people felt, even into the 1970s in their work, in many workplaces in this country. The angst of many workers in this time i think is expressed in those lines. The phrase, take this job and shove it, it turned out, i think, starts to take on interesting, deeper meanings in 1977 though. Consider, first, what was happening that year in atlanta, georgia. On march 28th of 1977, sanitation workers went out on strike in atlanta. It was an all africanamerican sanitation work force. They were led by a fellow named lehman hood. You see him with the then president of their union jerry wurf. He had been marching in memphis with dr. Martin luther king in 1968. In 1970, he had gone to atlanta and helped lead the organization of sanitation workers then and lead them out on strike in that year. They ended up getting a union. In fact, winning a pay increase as a result of that strike. But by 1977, the progress had seemed to slow in atlanta. What was really ironic about it was that the city, by 1977, had its first africanamerican mayor, Maynard Jackson. Jackson had been deputy mayor of atlanta in 1970 when the earlier strike happened. Courageously, he broke with his mayor, a white mayor and said, you have got to help these sanitation workers. Their wages, he said, are a disgrace before god. In fact, he helped to turn Public Opinion and help win that strike for the strikers. He then went on to become elected mayor in 1973 with the help of that union and with the help of the guy lehman hood. Once he became mayor of atlanta, he turned and he felt he needed to build support among the white Business Establishment of the city. It would look bad, he felt, if he caved in as he saw it to the demands of the citys workers, even the sanitation workers, who had struggled over the years and their wages in 1977 were still poor. They went out on strike. Jackson refused to negotiate with them. In fact, he issued an ultimatum. You return to work in 72 hours, he said, or you lose your jobs. You are fired. Hood was shocked. This was a guy he knew. He had worked with. He turned in this way. In fact, he proved true to his word. They didnt return and he fired them. In fact, in the middle of this, to add insult to injury, the political establishment of the Civil Rights Community atlanta for the most part sided with the mayor. In fact, Martin Luther kings father, nine years after his son had been assassinated in memphis helping sanitation strikers, he felt that this strike might damage the first africanamerican mayor of atlanta. And he came down hard against the strikers. He said publically to Maynard Jackson that if they dont return to work, you should, quote, fire the hell out of them. In fact, thats what jackson did. Later on the strike broke and many of them did get their jobs back. But it was clear one thing, times were changing. And not necessarily in a good way. Here is a protester being arrested during the strike against protesting against jacksons stand in atlanta. So that is story one. Story two, a completely different part of the country just months later, september 1977. September 19th, it was a monday. In youngs toyoungstown, ohio, j of pittsburgh. It had been a steel making center in the country. In fact, it was known as steel town, u. S. A. Steel city, u. S. A. As this postcard from the 50s had it. In the years from the 1930s to the 1970s, it had been a center of huge employment of many steel workers, people like johnny metzger. Although, he himself didnt work in youngstown. It had been the site in the 1930s of struggle. This very plant, the youngstown chu sheet and tube plant, workers had to go over this bridge to get into the plant back in the 30s. When they organized the cio. One thing they had to do over the years that galled them is they had to pay a penny, a toll to get in and out of work on this bridge. They said, to hell with that toll. They formed a union. They initially lost the strike in the little steel strike of 1937, as we saw most unions did. But they got the union finally by 1941. And they built it into a really good job to have. When they arrived on september 19, 1977, that morning, 5,000 people to go to work, summarily they were told without warning, were closing down the plant. That day they were out. Some of them had only recently graduated from high school. They looked forward to working there as their parents had done, as their grandparents had done. It was a solid job. Suddenly, it was gone. It became known in youngstown as black monday. It wasnt the end. Within five years, 50,000 jobs were lost in whats called the Mahoning Valley in what had been the heart of the steel making center of the country. It was being wiped out. It began that day in 1977, at least symbolically. The third story, that summer of 1977, the congress introduced, with a democratic president , jimmy carter, in office, a bill called the labor law reform act. It quickly passed the house. It passed the house by october of 1977. What was the bill being pushed through congress for . Well, by 1977, it was becoming increasingly clear to people who supported unions that the wagner act, the National Labor relations act really no longer functioned. Employers, as we talked about before, they found no penalty really in engaging in unfair labor practices. The number of charges that employers that were brought against employers for engaging in those practices was skyrocketing, up 400 , between 1960 and 1980. The number of workers fired for trying to form unions, up 300 . Those who had to be given back pay up five times. A industry having emerged of labor consultants who advised companies on how exactly to pursue these policies, when to fire people, how to appeal it in the courts, how to basically get around the law. The bill was supposed to fix all that. It got through the house. It ran into a bridge wall in the senate. The democrats controlled the senate. They controlled the house. They had a democratic president who said he would sign it, juny carte jimmy carter. They couldnt get 60 votes. And it died. There have been several attempts since then. They have all failed. In the middle of this period of postwar boom that lifted so Many Americans by the mid 70s, something was happening. Something disturbing. That led to the events in atlanta, to the shutdown in youngstown, that led to the bottling up of any possibility of being able to modernize the labor law that was already by then 40 years old and growing increasingly anacronistic. American was entering a new period. I want to talk about two aspects of this period. One is what started to happen to the economy. As all of this was occurring. Because the country started to go into a rapid economic reorganization. This was just a set of factors. I would say five big things came together in the period between 1968 and 88 to change everything for workers. A fateful convergence, i would call it. The first is what happened to oil and gas prices and how that led to a word that nobody had ever heard of before. A concept that was alien to economists even 20 or 30 years before. A concept called stagflation. What happened was this. In october of 1973, a war took place between israel and some of its arab country neighbors. Its known as the yom kipur war. The u. S. Supported israel in that. In retaliation, some arab member stations of an Organization Called opec, the organization of Petroleum Exporting countries, decided to embargo oil sales to the united states. This sent fuel prices skyrocketing. Just in a matter of weeks in the fall of 1973, the country saw huge lines at gas stations, rationing of gas happening in many states. Stealing of gas out of each others gas tanks sometimes by siphoning. That was how desperate some people were for gas. I dont know if you can make out that one picture. Its a father and son saying, gas stealers beware, were loaded. He has a gun in his hand. Dont try to take gas from us. What could lead to this kind of sense of panic almost . I think for working class america, probably there was nothing symbolic more of postwar prosperity than having your car and the mobility that came with it. Suddenly, gas prices were making driving that car increasingly difficult. What that led to was a bigger economic phenomenon that we call stagflation. There were two oil shocks in the 1970s. The first happened in 1973. The second began in late 1978. You can see them on this chart here. What happened during these shocks is that prices skyrocketed at the same time the gnp growth plummets. That means unemployment goes up. Here is what was weird about that. Prior to the 1970s, it was a basic law of economics that unemployment and inflation tended to balance each other out. When unemployment was up, that meant workers were out of jobs, they werent spending money, that would drive prices down. Unemployment up, prices down. If unemployment started to fall, that would tend to push prices up because people had money. They had jobs. What happens when both rise simultaneously . That had never happened before. As you can see in these periods, that happened. It was given the name stagflation. Its hard to exaggerate the degree of disorganization and fear that that produced in many working class households that were simultaneously fearing losing their jobs in this crisis but also at the same time seeing prices rise. It had a big, big impact. Look at the changes in Consumer Prices over the years. There was a big inflation spike during the war. One right after it. But then two big spikes in the 1970s. In which for a time inflation got up above double digits, more than 10 increase in the cost of things on average over the course of a year. At the same time, that was happening, unemployment was also high as you see on this graph. That led to a tremendous sense of being squeezed by Many Americans. What followed with that, what coinci coincided was just about total, sudden stop in the growth of real wages. What that means is, in the growth of the purchasing power of the average persons paycheck. What does a dollar buy . All through the postwar years, there was a continuous rise in that. The purchasing power of the american paycheck grew over time. You could buy more with it. But suddenly, boom, it flat llid and even went down. The real average Weekly Earnings made a downturn after 1973. What impact did that have on families . As you can see here, it meant that family Median Income suddenly stopped growing and flatlined. Individual income was declining. Family income was stagnant. By the way, what do you think accounts for that . If individual income was declining, shouldnt Family Income have been declining . Why wouldnt it have been . Transition from single breadwinner to double. Thats exactly right. The transition to two bread winnewi breadwinners. What families did is they deployed women with children into the workplace faster. A couple of the demographic consequences of what happened. One was that women share in the paid labor force, boom, jump by more in the 70s than any decade. Crossed the 50 mark for the first time. It started to affect when people married and when they had children. People started to marry later. This might seem astonishingly young to you, that in 1971, most women on average married at age 20. Can you believe that . It had risen to all of 22 by 1981. Men from 22 to 24. That still might seem young to you, because its continued to go up. Right . The biggest reason that it went up then was that people were uncertain about making the economic commitments necessary in this new environment. So you had stagflation, you had stagnant incomes. Then you had the beginnings of the phenomenon that we have come to call globalization. It was beginning already after world war ii. We had basically bombed to rubble the german economy. The japanese economy. But we helped rebuild those after the war. And then we also saw our companies become multinational and increasingly invest abroad. It got to by 1971 actually for the first time the u. S. Imported more than it exported. So that was happening even before the dislocations i mentioned in the 70s. What made globalization much more real for people in the 70s was a transformation that was happening in logistics. This is something that i think shapes all of our lives even today. Where you can order something, say, from amazon and have it within a day. All of that, i think, can be dated to what began to happen in the 70s with shipping containerization. Actually, not much had changed in the way ships were loaded and unloaded between the 19th century and the 1960s. They were mostly loaded and unloaded by longshoremen who put boxes on pallets that were hauled up in a cargo net, deposited on the dock or taken up from the dock and deposited in the hold where longshoremen would stack them in the hold of the ship. By the 1950s, a shipping entrepreneur named malcolm mcklain came up with a revolutionary idea. What if you put all of the things that were made in a factory into a container at the factory and then put that container on the back of a truck or train, took it to a dock, put it in the ship, sent the ship to wherever it was going, it was unloaded and then that same container was either put on a train or a truck and brought exactly to the location where it was needed . Where the goods had been ordered. This would so streamline shipping. Thats what he did. He founded a Company Called sealand. He shipped his First Container from new jersey to texas in 1956. The first one from the u. S. To asia in 1968. It was really in the 70s that containerization took hold. And what it did was it totally transformed shipping in this country. By 1980, 70 and plus of goods between the u. S. And europe were sent this way. 80 between the u. S. And asia. These giant ships if you are driving on 95 past baltimore, you see those big cranes that are meant to move those containe containers that ply the atlantic and pacific. It made shipping so cheap to move goods that suddenly u. S. Workers found themselves competing with workers around the globe making things that could be shipped so cheaply it didnt matter how far from the point of use that they were ultimately made. What began to happen in response to that is the creation of Global Supply chains. Supply chains that made use of the technologies and could assemble a kind of Global Assembly line. Consider the automobile, the product that invented the assembly line, henry ford. Before the 1970s, almost all the parts in an automobile assembled in the u. S. Were made in the u. S. By the 1980s, they could be made increasingly anywhere and they could be brought here cheaply. Once these Global Supply chains started to emerge, that really changed things. The Way Companies could make all of this logistical revolution work was in combination with other new technologies that really also took off in the 70s. The communication satellite, that meant that a corporation could be in immediate contact with any of its contractors arn around the world. The upc code, barcode developed in the 70s and took off that made it possible to scan an item in china later and to immediately know in the u. S. When it had been loaded, where it was anywhere in the world. Of course, the computer. The combination of those things changed the structure of the economy. That was already going on by the mid 70s. With all of this, a fourth event happened. That is, corporations began to change in some fundamental ways. Their relationship to the market, to the Financial Market also began to change. I would say the first change is a change from a kind of capitalism that i would call managerial capitalism to one that i would call shareholder capitalism. Before explaining that change, let me say a few things about what made it possible. The 1970s saw the intersection of three things occur that made a financial revolution in the country possible. The first was that there was a tremendous increase in the pools of capital in this country that were looking for an outlet, a place of investment to get retu