Opinion: The Vanishing Union Label
by C.M. Lewis
A buy American sign in a shop window. (Joe Shlabotnik/Flickr)
Even as campaigns for ethical consumption have skyrocketed in the past few decades, the classic campaign—“look for the union label”—has all but disappeared. With increased consumer concern over manufacturing conditions, and with increased domestic interest in and support for unionization, the union label should return: but what it means should change.
The “union label” was omnipresent in American society from the 1950s through to the 1990s, resulting from an ad campaign by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union with an iconic jingle. But it gained new life in the 1970s. One 1978 commercial from the ILGWU pointed to “disappearing” work, and clothes for “women and kids” coming from “foreign places,” encouraging consumers to “buy American” as much as it encouraged “buying union.”
It’s little surprise given the 1970s economic downturn and the decline of American manufacturing. Unions believed they could slow or halt the economic forces that resulted in widespread deindustrialization and job loss in the manufacturing sector. We know the end result: fewer traditional consumer products are made in the United States, let alone by union workers; domestically produced textiles and garments (where the union label campaign thrived) are all but gone. Even those products that are union made may not advertise it prominently—finding the label on a bottle of union beer is like playing Where’s Waldo.
One of the few places where the union label, or union “bug,” still matters is in politics. Democrats are expected to print using union labor, and campaigns that put out materials without union bugs often face hard questions from union backers. Invitations to President Joseph Biden’s inauguration boasted a prominent union bug, showing that they were printed in a union shop.
It should be far more pervasive, and far less performative: a box for politicians to check to satisfy labor, while only tokenly backing pro-worker political priorities. But to bring back the union label, we have to understand what it has meant, as well as what we want it to mean.
“Buy American” and the Union Label
Union labels have a complicated history.
Print advertisements aimed at union members can be found dating back to the turn of the century. A half-page advertisement in the Evening Statesman, a newspaper in Walla Walla, Washington, tells readers to shop at Golden Rule Department Store because they sold union tailored clothing made in a “well-lighted and ventilated shop under the most sanitary conditions.” One 1924 advertisement in the Connecticut Labor News telling “union men” to shop at Pager’s for union straw hats.
Such tactics weren’t restricted to the United States, or employed only by more conservative unions. The Irish Worker, a publication of the Dublin-based Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union—a revolutionary industrial union led by socialists—also carried advertisements directing readers to cooperatives, union shops, and union-made products. A January 6th, 1912 edition featured a front page advertisement advertising the “high-class work [and] moderate prices” of Curtis, Letterpress and Lithographic Printer, with the advertisement prominently labeling Curtis as a “Trade Union Shop.”
“Look for the union label” was more than the simple act of looking for a union bug—it was injecting labor politics into consumer choices, encouraging workers to make choices through their union values. But as Dana Frank argues, American union label campaigns often slipped into economic nationalism and outright nativism. The union label has been interwoven with “Buy American,” and “Buy American” campaigns like those launched by the United Auto Workers’ and the International Ladies’ and Garment Workers’ Union in the 1970s—reactions to capital flight overseas—fueled anti-Asian sentiment. According to Frank, it’s a short leap from “Buy American,” to “Hire American,” to “America First”—a reality shown by the economic nationalism expounded by the Trump wing of the Republican Party.
The slip into “Buy American” is still the case in the AFL-CIO’s messaging, sometimes in bizarrely contradictory ways. The AFL-CIO’s Fourth of July “Buy American” graphic buried “union made,” and even encouraged consumers to buy from Foster Farms, which recently saw an ugly decertification vote against an AFL-CIO affiliate, the United Farm Workers, amidst charges of numerous pandemic workplace health and safety violations. In short, consumers were encouraged to buy products from a company that has allegedly systematically violated workplace health and safety, at the cost of workers’ lives.
Why “buy American,” and how is that connected to looking for the union label? The logic behind “buying American,” as Frank puts it, is simple: the notion that American corporations will then create domestic jobs, which will then be union. If that logic ever operated as intended, nobody can credibly say it does so today. In an era of multinational capitalism, Japanese, German, and Korean companies are just as likely to create assembly jobs in the United States for the American market, albeit in the under-organized South.
Global Production and Ethical Consumerism
What “buy American” even means in a global economy is complicated. Many products have parts sourced from overseas, but are assembled in the United States by union workers. Some products assembled by non-union workers may have union-manufactured parts. A t-shirt might be made overseas, but have a design silkscreened on it by a union shop. With supply chains and parts sourcing increasingly diffuse and globalized, determining what truly makes something an “American” product, or a “union” product, is difficult.
But much of the public still scrutinizes the products they buy. With the rise of “ethical consumerism”—driven in part by the “fair trade” movement—labor standards are still part of consumer choices, and are even touted by some “ethical” brands as part of their manufacturing process. California-based clothing producer Vuori notes that their corporate standards for suppliers comply with International Labor Organization (ILO) guidelines, including freedom of association and collective bargaining. Whether such “values” apply universally is less clear. Everlane, an apparel manufacturer boasting manufacturing transparency and ethical standards, courted controversy with allegations of busting organizing attempts by workers based in the United States.
Labor has largely been left behind by the rise of “fair trade” and public concern over global working conditions—but not entirely. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), which originated in the late 1990s with the Union of Needletrade, Industrial and Technical Employees (UNITE), has campaigned on college campuses around collegiate apparel, which is typically licensed with major corporations like Nike. International worker solidarity forms a core of USAS campaigns, alongside campaigns supporting campus worker organization on college and university campuses across the United States.
Meanwhile, organized labor’s highest-profile interventions—like the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership between the United Steelworkers and American manufacturers—still focus on American manufacturing and “buy American” rhetoric. How equal a partnership it is remains questionable. The AFL-CIO’s Union Label Department and groups like Labor 411 still sporadically plug the same “buy union” and “buy American'' campaigns, often with little consistency or strategic thought. Databases are incomplete at best, and you sometimes find the spectacle of a product touted as “union made,” only to discover that although the warehouse drivers may be Teamsters, the production workers are all unorganized.
All of this makes the revival of a union label complicated in purely practical terms. There are also political questions, most often summarized in the glib rejoinder that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” More strategically, campaigns based almost exclusively on consumer choice as the key political act rely on the idea that consumer choices operating within a market context have transformative power. Criticism of that approach rightly points to the necessity for collective and state action, rather than individual consumer choices and market forces, to truly deliver fair labor standards.
But even if the traditional union label and “buy American” campaigns are both impossible and counterproductive, and even if there’s limited transformational potential, it doesn’t mean that any union label campaign is counterproductive, or that there’s no political potential.
Reimagining the Union Label
We should push the union label—but do it in entirely different terms.
We can't wholly reverse the reality of a changing economy, global supply chains, and increasingly offshored manufacturing, and we can’t continue the soft nativism of “buy American,” whether implied or explicit. But the union label can contain much more than that. It could serve as a mark of and political demand for worker dignity and power, disconnected from nativism and the notion of labor-management partnership. It could be internationalist, explicitly acknowledging the importance of independent trade unions and worker organizations overseas. It could be synonymous with hard scrutiny of service and manufacturing businesses and their labor practices. It could be a source of corporate fear, with rich executives fearing—as they fear Scabby—of being tarred as anti-labor. And it could be a call to organize: if it isn’t union, we’ll make it union.
“Looking for the union label” should carry an implicit threat: Lord help the boss if we don’t find it. Failing to pass muster should entail threat of boycott, pressure, organizing, and unrelenting scrutiny for employers who abuse and exploit their workers. Whether that employer is based in Pittsburgh, Berlin, or Singapore is irrelevant: their workers deserve dignity, and their labor is part of a global struggle for workers’ rights. What happens to workers overseas does not remain overseas, and the global race to the bottom for workers’ standards hurts everyone.
Consumer oriented campaigns still have limited strategic potential, and we need far more than carefully crafted advertising gimmicks put together by consultants. A catchy jingle didn’t stop ILGWU jobs from being moved overseas by the bosses. But consumption—like everything—is political, and we shouldn’t miss an opportunity to push worker politics into the political consciousness. The practical impact of a consumer buying “fair trade” certified products may be minimal, but the impact and potential of growing a public which views labor standards as crucial, political, and part of their day-to-day decision-making, is far greater. A new push for the “union label,” if reimagined, can do this.
Accomplishing this requires a genuine commitment to internationalism from the AFL-CIO, and an abandonment of the nativist impulses implicit in “Buy American.” It also means a far more confrontational stance toward the bosses, and abandoning the idea that when businesses prosper, workers prosper. Creating the sort of union label campaign we need requires political choices on the part of labor, and ones that challenge long-held assumptions and values.
The checkered and unfortunate history of union label campaigns shouldn’t serve as a deterrent against making them better, any more than the past checkered history of some labor unions should make us abandon worker organization. Old union label campaigns are in the past. Not only did they often serve reactionary ends, they failed at their stated purpose. Building new values into the union label is possible, and now is the time to do it.
C.M. Lewis is an editor of Strikewave and a union activist in Pennsylvania.