Losing Density
The answer lies in the recent history of our cities, of our labor movement, and of the relationship between the two. The pre-New Deal labor movement was built largely around strong urban unions—in skilled trades, in unskilled services, and in local manufacturing—whose bargaining power was rooted as much in the urban form as it was in the workplace. In many settings, such unions—printers, carpenters, flat janitors, waitresses, teamsters—shaped local politics, sustained local solidarity (through secondary boycotts), and pooled resources in the provision of basic services (such as health centers).
In the 1930s, the emergent CIO took a different tack, building silos of solidarity around particular industries and pattern bargaining across their constituent firms. The CIO was often indifferent (and sometimes hostile) to the older local unions, many of which (especially in construction) clung to the rival American Federation of Labor. Labor maintained its metropolitan presence in settings where strong local and industrial organization overlapped (autoworkers in Detroit, steelworkers in Pittsburgh, packinghouse workers in Chicago, dockworkers in San Francisco) but local solidarity—in all these settings—depended on the continued health and growth of both the big industrial unions and the central cities in which they were rooted.
On both scores, the decline was dramatic and devastating. In 1950, about a third of American workers belonged to unions. By 1990, this had fallen by half, to under 17 percent, and now sits at just over 11 percent. And these numbers are cushioned by the growth and relatively stability of public sector unions over that span: in the private sector, union density was under 25 percent by the early 1970s, half that (under 13 percent) by the late 1980s, and half that again (6.7 percent) by 2013. At its peak, the labor movement helped sustain the shared prosperity of the post-World War II generation. At its nadirs, in the first decade of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century, union weakness sat alongside (and contributed to) stark inequality.
American cities declined at the same rate (and for some of the same reasons). Decline, in this respect, was reflected in absolute losses: Some metropolitan regions grew more slowly than the national as a whole. And it was reflected in local distribution of those losses: Most central cities shrank even if the metros of which they were a part continued to grow. Of our fifteen largest central cities in 1950, eleven saw their peak population in that year—the only exceptions being New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston. And the others didn’t just stop growing: nine of those cities lost more than a quarter of their population over the next 50 years, and five (St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Cleveland) lost more than half.
The demographic shift was in part regional (rustbelt to sunbelt) but it was mostly local, that is urban to suburban. Residentially and commercially, cities simply got thinner. Consider St. Louis. In 1930, the metropolitan area encompassed four counties (two in Missouri, two on the Illinois side) and a population of about 1.3 million—of which over 60 percent lived in the City of St. Louis. In 1970, the metro area included two more counties on the Missouri side, and growth was confined to the suburbs: the City claimed barely a quarter of the metropolitan population (620,000 of 2.36 million). By 2010, the metro area sprawled across 17 counties and the City claimed just 10 percent of the metro population (now nudging 3 million). Population density, about 1,000 persons per square mile in 1960, was less than a third of that (322 persons per square mile) by 2010.
Those overlapping trajectories of decline are underscored by the graph below, which plots the decline in union density against the decline in the central city populations of the six largest “rustbelt” cities (St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland).
The sources of union decline and urban decline are complex but familiar. Even at its peak, the American labor movement was regionally, sectorally, and jurisdictionally fragmented. Even where it was strongest, it depended upon fragile, industry-specific, deals with leading employers. As a result, its political presence never matched its numbers. Hemmed in by broader political constraints and its own organizing and political strategies, the mid-century labor movement is commonly characterized as timidly contractual at the bargaining table and barrenly married to the Democrats at the ballot box.
At the same time, the stakes at the bargaining table, which, in the American setting determined not only wages but social benefits like health care and pensions, were unusually high. This meant that the political backlash—which began in many states with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and spread across the economy with the business offensive of the 1970s—was also unusually severe. Labor organization peaked earlier and at a lower rate in the United States than among most of its peers. And the political, legal, and administrative attacks on labor rights since the 1970s led to much steeper losses in the US than in any of its peers.
In American cities, decline reflected some of the same pressures (deindustrialization, globalization) facing labor. But, in most “rustbelt” settings, urban decline began decades before any hint of trouble in the larger economy. Racial transition in American cities in the 1930s and 1940s yielded a nasty pattern of segregation and discrimination enforced and sustained by restrictive deed instruments, private realty, federal housing and mortgage policies, local zoning, and an enthusiasm for urban renewal that equated black occupancy with blight. Fragmented local government, flush with federal redevelopment and highway funds, became a sort of centrifuge that flung people, employment, and tax capacity to the suburban fringes.
Again, consider St. Louis. The City saw major plant closings and disinvestment in its core [see map below], and waves of new retail and commercial and industrial investment on the suburban fringe. Employment simply moved from the City to St. Louis County, and then further out. Commuting times—especially for suburb-to-suburb commutes—rose steadily in St. Louis (and in most other metros). And all of the natural solidarities of local employment began to dissipate.
These losses are commonly viewed as a consequence of deindustrialization and globalization; as a story of factories moving to Ciudad Juárez or China, and of working Americans—now cut loose from the smokestacks of the central city—moving to the suburbs. But this misreads the timing, and the spatial pattern, of economic and demographic flight from the midcentury city. As Jefferson Cowie has shown (in his masterful account of RCA’s departure from Camden NJ), industry’s first strategy was to leave the city for cheaper and less-union friendly settings—including the suburban fringe, struggling rural outposts, or the right-to-work South. For RCA, this meant targeting female workers (the wives and daughters of workers in Indiana’s declining stone industry) in Bloomington, and then African-Americans in Memphis, before crossing the Rio Grande.
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