Papers presented by Melanie Sheehan since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"Retooling: The Big Three US Auto Firms in the 1980s"
Melanie Sheehan, Harvard Business School
Abstract:
The 1980s have variously been described as a period of financialization, globalization, industrial policy debates, corporate restructuring, automation, deindustrialization, and union decline in the United States. The tendency to generalize about processes in the economy as a whole, however, has obscured the particular ways that business leaders navigated the period and how their specific decisions affected US workers. This paper focuses on the Big Three auto firms—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—to understand how these processes unfolded, how and to what extent they related to each other, and how they impacted the workforce. The paper seeks to understand how corporate leaders strove to “reinvent” the US auto industry as they navigated the 1979 oil crisis, the “Volcker shock” and the recession of the early 1980s, and rising import competition, particularly from Japanese firms. In so doing, it seeks to offer a nuanced explanation of how macroeconomic changes, technological innovations, and business decision-making affected the labor movement and the nature of work in the United States.
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2022 Mexico City
"‘We Cannot Wait another Decade or More for the United Nations’: The AFL-CIO and the Problem of Scale in Regulating Multinational Firms"
Melanie Sheehan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Abstract:
As international trade and multinational production expanded in the early 1970s, political leaders from the Global South and trade unionists from the US and Western Europe mobilized for the international regulation of multinational firms. These critics of multinational firms differed in their points of emphasis and often contradicted each other. Yet both contributed to increasing pressure within such forums as the UN Economic and Social Council, the International Labor Organization, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development for international action to rein in the abuses of multinational firms. However, the AFL-CIO, the leading trade union federation in the United States, looked warily upon these efforts and maintained a certain distance from them, opting instead to endorse national action to curb investment outflows and restrict imports. This paper considers the motivations and implications of the AFL-CIO’s decision to prioritize national action in response to the challenges that multinational firms posed to labor on a global scale. It argues that the AFL-CIO pursed a strategy to salvage US industrial power to maintain the economic underpinnings of the post-World War II domestic social and political order. Yet this strategy detracted resources and attention from simultaneous efforts by the United Auto Workers and Western European trade unions to regulate firms at the international level. At the same time, US and Western European business associations combined action at the national and international levels and appealed to both globalist and nationalist rhetoric to counter labor’s influence in international organizations. The paper therefore suggests the importance of studying fracture in organized labor during the 1970s for understanding the political economy of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Cooperation or Competition? U.S. Labor Unions, the ICFTU, and the Question of Import Protection, 1953-1969"
Melanie Sheehan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Abstract:
This paper contends that US industrial labor unions’ involvement in international trade union confederations was a critical component of their favorable attitude toward trade liberalization in the early Cold War. Disillusioned with economic nationalism in the wake of Depression and War, these leaders sought freer trade flows. Yet they insisted that international trade union organizing and the promotion of fair labor standards must accompany trade liberalization to reduce job losses caused by labor cost differentials. They therefore collaborated with trade unionists from both the developed and the developing world in international labor federations to negotiate the oft-competing interests of importing and exporting countries. Through these organizations, international unionists advocated for trade union protections, international commodity agreements, and government spending to retrain workers left unemployed by import competition. Yet cooperation faltered within international labor federations by the 1960s as divisions between industrializing and deindustrializing economies deepened and as efforts to procure trade adjustment assistance proved inadequate. The breakdown of cooperation within international labor federations on economic matters thus facilitated intensified economic nationalism among US unions by the end of the decade.