ABSTRACT
Labor-community collaboration has occurred most notably during the major social reform periods: the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and, to a lesser degree, the 1960s Civil Rights and Great Society period. The most recent phase of labor-community alliances-from the 1980s to the present-differs significantly from the previous collaborative periods in being a time when social reforms were under broad assault from neo-liberal forces in business and government. Indeed, the 1980s resurgence of labor-community collaboration coincides with the crisis of Fordist capitalism, the demise of the postwar capital-labor compact, and the onset of industrial restructuring. As labor became weaker and the economy globalized since the early 1970s, labor-community collaboration returned. The Fordist and post-Fordist capitalist crisis, then, spurred labor to gradually readopt a social unionism it had practiced in previous periods.
