From all the data so far presented, it is apparent that the American labor movement is in the grips of a profound crisis. Unions are winning proportionally fewer representation elections, contesting fewer elections, and winning in smaller units. These patterns are especially evident in the electoral performance of industrial production-oriented unions in the northern industrial states over the past ten years. Since the early 1950s, it has often been asserted that the union movement would inevitably decline because of its lack of appeal to the growing service-sector occupations and to the southern region of the US. And yet, some thirty years later, it seems that the union movement is most vulnerable in those sectors and areas once thought to be the heartland of American unionism.

In the previous chapter it was noted that there are distinct differences between unions in their organizing strategies. For example, the IBEW has concentrated on skilled tradesmen in a variety of electrical-oriented sectors located across the US. In contrast, the UAW has concentrated on a group of auto-related industries located in just a few regions. One goal of this chapter is to provide a rationale for this organized strategy. Most of the literature fails to integrate the macro-structural determinants of unionization with the local context of representation elections. The geographical diversity of representation elections, so obvious in election outcomes, seems too often lost in the rush to prove single equation (parsimonious) models of unionization.

The United States economy is undergoing a profound transformation. As we saw in the previous chapter, rapid penetration of the domestic US market by overseas producers and concomitant unanticipated reconfiguration of product markets have left many domestic producers significantly under-capitalized, and many sectors, industries, and firms in decline. These factors have drastically affected the livelihood of many thousands of workers and their communities. Corporate restructuring programs have begun rationing the remaining jobs amongst existing facilities on the basis of labor costs, labor productivity, and union cooperativeness. Some corporations like Mack Trucks have unilaterally instituted restructuring plans. But there are others which have deliberately involved their unions in the process of job rationing.

This chapter considers an instance of cooperative job rationing, and advances three related arguments. First, it is suggested that cooperative restructuring programs can pose fundamental threats to the internal political coherence of unions. Second, it is also suggested that because of the democratic imperatives faced by unions, community loyalties may fragment union solidarity. And third, cooperative restructuring programs threaten the very future of unions as institutions. The chapter is based on a case study involving United Auto Workers Local unions 12 (Toledo), 72 (Kenosha), and 75 (Milwaukee), the UAW International, and the American Motors Corporation (AMC) and its Jeep Division located in Toledo, Ohio. The dispute concerned the implementation of an Employee Investment Plan (EIP) and Preferential Hiring and Corporate Seniority (PHCS) program involving the three UAW Locals over the period 1978 to 1986.

In the first half of this decade, the United States economy went through a remarkable cycle of fortune. From the severest recession since the Great Depression, the national economy has prospered to the point where some believe that its success threatens the integrity of the whole economy. While the economy is not quite at full employment, domestic macroeconomic indicators appear robust when compared to European conditions. Even so, the economic recovery has been very uneven, sectorally and spatially. Restructuring and deindustrialization have accompanied the recovery so that even as the economy has added new jobs, other union jobs have been lost. The new jobs created are quite different, by skill, sector, union representation, and location, to the jobs lost. There appears to be a new economic geography, markedly different than the post-war era.

In terms of labor policy, there remain important issues to be considered in how restructuring should be designed and accommodated. One fundamental issue has to do with how local labor relations might be modified so that American industries, particularly heavy manufacturing industries, remain economically competitive in the face of foreign competition. This is not simply a question of economic efficiency, or of policy inventiveness. While many citizens, whether labor or management, Democratic or Republican, secular or nonsecular, desire economic success, there are just and unjust ways of ensuring future prosperity. Current policy options for redesigning local labor relations have significant equity dimensions which may be as important as their economic consequences.

In an era predicted by some to be the mature, growth-consolidation phase of industrial unionism (Lester 1958), the United States labor movement is fighting for its survival. Industrial labor unions, the traditional centers of union power in the economy and in the labor movement, are particularly threatened. Some of these unions have lost as much as 40 percent of their membership base over the last decade. Not only have they suffered from economic restructuring, but these unions are winning proportionally fewer and fewer representation elections, contesting fewer elections, and winning only in smaller and smaller electoral units. Internally and externally industrial unions are under siege.

One startling aspect of recent patterns of union decline is that the survival of industrial unions is under threat even in their home domain: northern industrial towns and cities. Diversification strategies like the United Auto Workers' southern strategy have become practically impossible to affect. Declining membership is the norm, and growth of membership a distant memory. In contrast, over the past decade service workers' unions seem to have been able to extend their representation of American workers, though even this trend has slowed in recent years. With structural changes in the economy, large-scale displacement of industrial employment, and a relatively poor performance of industrial unions in representation elections, the flow of members to the American labor movement has slowed to barely a trickle.

Any understanding of the interrelationships between organized labor and American communities must inevitably consider the role and status of the administrative arm of federal labor law, the National Labor Relations Board. It is the NLRB which is responsible for the administration and interpretation of the National Labor Relations Act. In addition, it is decisions of the Board which have had profound impacts on the economic health of American communities, the success and failure of organized labor in local representation elections, and the extent of managements' prerogatives in terms of the relocation of work, to cite just three of many related dimensions.

The current NLRB was a product of the Wagner Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 5 July 1935. Drawing upon the experience of immediate predecessors (the National Labor Board of 1933 and the National Labor Relations Board of 1934), sponsors of the new Board hoped that it would be a unifying but independent force for the administration of federal labor law (see First annual report of the NLRB 1935: ch. 3). In retrospect, achievements of the Act and the Board went well beyond supporters' goals and President Roosevelt's modest ambitions: “an important step toward the achievement of just and peaceful labor relations in industry.”

Given evidence of the decline of organized labor, it is not surprising that there should be pressure to reform the rules governing the representation process, the National Labor Relations Board, and American labor law in general. In recent years, there have been a series of hearings in Congress reviewing the integrity and efficacy of federal labor law. In 1984 there were hearings on the question: Has labor law failed? Evidence collected during hearings on this question concerned management practices in representation elections, the NLRB's adjudication of disputes arising out of representation elections, and the design and enforcement of current statutes relating to the representation election process. The majority report of the House Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations concluded that labor law had failed and had been “deteriorating throughout the 1970s [and] has currently reached crisis proportions” (I).

Implied, even sometimes explicitly identified in these hearings, were a couple of assumptions. First, it was assumed that reforming the regulatory environment (rules of representation elections, treatment of unfair labor practices, etc.) would substantially improve labor unions' electoral performance. Second, it was further assumed that only labor law reform could ensure the future of organized labor as an American institution. It is obvious that labor law reform was not a priority of the Reagan administration; if there had been labor law reform during this era, it would have been very hostile to the interests of organized labor.

The story of the droughts of 1972 and 1973 in Nigeria has been effectively told by Van Apeldoorn (1978a, 1981), and by others for West Africa. There were signs of trouble as early as 1969, but these were ignored – perhaps because of their patchy distribution – until a full-scale harvest failure occurred in 1972. Even this disaster was uneven in its impact. But by the end of that year, there was no doubt that the Dry Zone of West Africa was facing its worst food crisis for more than a generation. My purpose in this chapter is not to reproduce what has been done, on a more general level, elsewhere, but to examine some extensive data collected amongst drought-affected communities within the lifespan of the disaster (which may be considered to have ended, for the time being, with the rains of 1974).

THE DROUGHTS OF 1972 AND 1973

The droughts that occurred in 1972 and 1973 had major significance on all four of the dimensions – meteorological, hydrological, agricultural and ecological – defined in chapter 1. Expectations of rainfall, although not stated quantitatively in terms of the ‘normal’, nevertheless guide decisions made by indigenous land users. In the semi-arid zone, expectations are defined in terms of the growing possibilities for the major crops, and for pasture and browse. Beyond the northern limit of rain-fed agriculture (in the arid bioclimatic zone), only the second dimension is relevant.

From the perspective of adaptive response, desertification differs from drought not only in its time perspective (a long-run process as opposed to a short-run event), but also in the extent to which it can be considered as exogenous to the human system. The question of adaptation becomes subsumed in the larger one of causation. To what extent are the communities that inhabit areas prone to desertification themselves responsible for the degradation that threatens their livelihood?

It was argued in chapter 1 that a simplified definition of desertification as ‘the degradation of ecosystems in arid or semi-arid regions’ has theoretical and practical advantages. The standpoint of the present chapter is therefore ecological. Its objective is to review field evidence for ecological degradation, in relation to land use, in four of the subsystems proposed in table 1.1: the woodland, grassland, soil and morphodynamic subsystems (the hydrological subsystem was discussed in chapter 6). The evidence is ambiguous if not, in places, contradictory. Such an outcome should be expected in a complex, multivariate problem involving most aspects of the relationship between a society and its environment. Nevertheless it is only by accumulating judgements based on empirical studies that environmentalist slogans can be replaced by more balanced evaluations. This case study gives ground for questioning conventional wisdom that emphasises the role of ‘over-exploitation’ at the expense of that of meteorological drought.