My labor friends like to comment today that “it all started with Reagan.” As if a switch had been thrown and a cascade of awful things was suddenly unleashed on us. No so fast. For me, a young blue-collar worker, the hellish years of Reagan started when Carter was elected. No doubt Jimmy Carter inherited a titanic mess; the 1970s were years when the many sins of the past were catching up with the United States. But Carter raised hopes and expectations that the unemployment and inflation crises would be confronted and working people would not be the victims. Instead, we all found out that Carter was the original “New Democrat,” long before we knew what that meant. It meant a Southern, conservative Democrat not beholden to “big labor” and “liberals.”
Over the four years of his presidency, Jimmy Carter stumbled and ricocheted from one failure to the other. His pro-business bent led him to deregulate the trucking industry, the airlines, the railroads, and natural gas prices. This restored profit for corporations but led not to job growth but mass layoffs for the unionized workers in these industries. The consequences of this handiwork are still with us today. In order to curtail the raging price inflation of the times, Carter was eager to cap wages, only offering murky and unenforceable controls on prices. Corporations easily skirted the price controls. Working people and retirees saw the purchasing power of their paychecks and pensions evaporate week to week. Carter’s political fortunes evaporated likewise.
Unions that confronted inflation aggressively in their collective bargaining were coerced by the White House into standing down. Carter invoked the shameful Taft-Hartley Act against the United Mine Workers in their 1977–78 national coal strike. Most strikes in vital industries were pressured and threatened into settlements far short of what was needed for the membership. None received any White House support.
These collisions with labor led Carter to abandon any pretense of support for much-needed labor law reform as well as legislation protecting jobsite picketing by the building-trades unions. Both pro-union bills were fanatically opposed by big business, so Carter abandoned the pro-worker legislation. As his political fortunes plummeted, Carter began to oppose just about any beneficial legislation for working people, always claiming that the new law would be “inflationary.” His timid support for the heavily watered-down Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1977 was an early signal to labor that there was not going to be any significant legislative relief for working people under this president.