owers were faced with two contradictory problems: to move the organization of labor and the overall social order in the direction that their ideology indicated, and to develop the industrial (and military-political) power of the Soviet Union as a state surrounded by actively or potentially hostile capitalist states.
The Soviet form of labor union, as it has existed through most of the period from 1917 to 1989, reflected the inherent tensions between these goals. To a typical American labor leader, the Soviet labor unions had a disturbing similarity to tame "company unions" (Ruble 10-11). They served as mutual-benefit associations for the workers at a given enterprise, and even with some effectiveness as a grievance mechanism. But they were entirely toothless in the face of "management," most of all in their inability to call strikes, an action forbidden by Soviet labor law. During much of the Stalinist era, indeed, Soviet labor was subjected to an essentially military degree of control (19).
In the late summer and fall of 1989, however, in the midst of the dramatic changes in the Soviet system unleashed by President Gorbachev, and known collectively by their Russian names of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), Soviet coal miners broke through this long-standing restriction and called a number of crippling strikes. The contemporary Soviet labor movement is thus in a state of dramatic flux.
Historical Background--United States
From the beginning, the American labor movement tended to move in a different direction than its European (and preCommunist Russian) counterparts. It may broadly be stated that the American labor movement was less radical in character, but that must be understood in the context of an American society that was less conservative in its fundamental structure. The United States had no feudal past, no old-established upper stratum of immense, family-based wealth. Cornelius Vanderb...