(C) Common Dreams
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Bill Clinton’s Presidency Was a Disaster for Labor [1]

['Anne Colamosca', 'Tyler Austin Harper', 'Jared Abbott', 'Fred Deveaux', 'Cori Bush', 'Shawn Fain', 'Jason Resnikoff', 'Justin H. Vassallo', 'Kim Moody', 'Richard Fording']

Date: 2024-08

Review of A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism by Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein (Princeton University Press, 2023)

After twelve years of Republican rule, an air of high anticipation permeated Washington as forty-six-year-old William Jefferson Clinton, former Arkansas governor and Georgetown graduate, took office in 1993. But it quickly became clear that “a revival and modernization of New Deal-style liberalism,” something many Democrats had been waiting for, “was stillborn at the dawn of the Clinton era.” So write Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein in A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. In their recently published book, the noted labor historians offer a compelling account of how Bill Clinton’s initial promises of empowering American workers and encouraging progressive values rapidly turned into failure. A product of Stein’s (who died in 2017) time studying Clinton’s early political career in Arkansas and developed with this impulse by Lichtenstein, the book puts particular focus on Clinton’s deep roots in right-to-work Arkansas and the cronyism between Clinton and his profoundly anti-union donors. It was in this state, according to a clothing workers’ organizer quoted in the book, that Clinton acted as “an opportunist, sometimes creatively adventurous,” but simultaneously “a cynic and a cad,” always willing to drop friends and promises if his personal political project was “faced with the sort of opposition all too common in a state once loyal to the old Confederacy.” Many, particularly in organized labor, were to face Clinton’s “calculated betrayal.”

The Neoliberal Turn By the end of the 1990s, after the biggest stock market boom the country had ever seen — real wages were rising, the federal budget was actually running a surplus, and high tech and finance were flying high — things would come to a devastating stop, and everything would disintegrate, leading to, according to Lichtenstein, the 2008 bubble that caused a near decimation of the global finance world. Today Clinton’s presidency wins little respect. Few liberals want to return to the Democratic Party of the 1990s because so many see his presidency as a betrayal of the progressivism that was once the hallmark of the New Deal and the Great Society. According to Lichtenstein and Stein, his presidency was merely an “accommodation to an ideology that privileged trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and privatization of government services, while tolerating the growth of class inequalities.” In addition to servicing longtime Democratic donors, at the heart of the presidency was a growing belief that America’s high-tech “new economy” was unlike any other that the nation had witnessed. The Silicon Valley high-tech industry — sustained by four decades of large federal subsidies — would come into its own in the stock market during the 1990s. The economy grew for 116 months, with economic growth averaging 4 percent a year and twenty-two million private sector jobs being created. But as Lichtenstein and Stein remind readers, much of this was impressive in numbers alone. Most of the job growth was in retail trade, hospitality, care work, and so on. These sorts of jobs — which Clinton had created as Arkansas governor — had no health benefits, pensions, or decent working conditions, and would soon morph into the “gig economy” work blighting the world today, with workers additionally subject to a growing culture of surveillance and workplace spying. The benefactors were companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and FedEx, not the software engineers and new technical specialists that many anticipated. In his first administration, a much-touted health care reform bill led by Hillary Clinton failed badly. By 1994, it was dead on arrival. As Secretary of Labor Robert Reich finally conceded, “The quest for universal health provision had . . . [a] rich history, but ‘managed competition’ was something brand-new. Designed to placate all the powerful interest groups, . . . this scheme had few defenders who were both knowledgeable and committed.” It was a profound failure among those who had long wanted an extension of Medicare, passed in the 1960s by Lyndon B. Johnson in his Great Society program. What did get passed was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Though it was not the most economically consequential, the authors argue that it “remains the most politically and ideologically toxic” issue pushed by Clinton, a “political blunder of the first order” that opened up an opportunity for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections and alienated large segments of the working class who, as Lichtenstein underscores, eventually became a significant proportion of today’s Donald Trump supporters. Although Northerners were the most vocal opponents of NAFTA, it hit the South harder than the North. No demographic in the United States shifted more decisively to the GOP in 1994 than Southern whites, particularly those whose education ended with a high school degree or less. Ironically, NAFTA’s impact on US employment was not great. In the two decades after the trade bill passed, just forty thousand jobs were lost each year, a very small fraction of the nation’s larger job churn. In contrast, Mexican employment in agriculture tripled in just four years to 762,000 jobs. But there was a deeper impact. Blue-collar workers were constantly attacked by threats that their plants would be closed if they tried organizing or striking, keeping organized workers very much on the defensive.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/bill-clinton-neoliberalism-welfare-nafta

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