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"Closed shop"
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Reform or Repression
Historians have characterized the open-shop movement of the early twentieth century as a cynical attempt by business to undercut the labor movement by twisting the American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency to their own ends. The precursors to today's right-to-work movement, advocates of the open shop in the Progressive Era argued that honest workers should have the right to choose whether or not to join a union free from all pressure. At the same time, business owners systematically prevented unionization in their workplaces.
While most scholars portray union opponents as knee-jerk conservatives, Chad Pearson demonstrates that many open-shop proponents identified themselves as progressive reformers and benevolent guardians of America's economic and political institutions. By exploring the ways in which employers and their allies in journalism, law, politics, and religion drew attention to the reformist, rather than repressive, character of the open-shop movement, Pearson's book forces us to consider the origins, character, and limitations of this movement in new ways. Throughout his study, Pearson describes class tensions, noting that open-shop campaigns primarily benefited management and the nation's most economically privileged members at the expense of ordinary people.
Pearson's analysis of archives, trade journals, newspapers, speeches, and other primary sources elucidates the mentalities of his subjects and their times, rediscovering forgotten leaders and offering fresh perspectives on well-known figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Booker T. Washington and George Creel. Reform or Repression sheds light on businessmen who viewed strong urban-based employers' and citizens' associations, weak unions, and managerial benevolence as the key to their own, as well as the nation's, progress and prosperity.
eBook
The Bosses' Union
At the opening of the twentieth century, labor strife repeatedly
racked the nation. Union organization and collective bargaining
briefly looked like a promising avenue to stability. But both
employers and many middle-class observers remained wary of unions
exercising independent power.
Vilja Hulden reveals how this tension provided the opening for
pro-business organizations to shift public attention from concerns
about inequality and dangerous working conditions to a belief that
unions trampled on an individual's right to work. Inventing the
term closed shop , employers mounted what they called an
open-shop campaign to undermine union demands that workers
at unionized workplaces join the union. Employer organizations
lobbied Congress to resist labor's proposals as tyrannical, brought
court cases to taint labor's tactics as illegal, and influenced
newspaper coverage of unions. While employers were not a monolith
nor all-powerful, they generally agreed that unions were a
nuisance. Employers successfully leveraged money and connections to
create perceptions of organized labor that still echo in our
discussions of worker rights.
eBook
The Origins of Right to Work
\"Right to work\" states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws, observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era. InThe Origins of Right to Work, however, Cedric de Leon contends that this antagonism began a century earlier with the northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.
In doing so, de Leon connects past and present, raising critical questions that address pressing social issues. Drawing on the changing relationship between political parties and workers in nineteenth-century Chicago, de Leon concludes that if workers' collective rights are to be preserved in a global economy, workers must chart a course of political independence and overcome long-standing racial and ethnic divisions.
eBook
Origins of Right to Work
Cedric de Leon traces the antagonism between pro-business politicians and labor to the Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment equated collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.
Book
Hayek on labor unions and restraint of trade
Friedrich A. Hayek thoroughly criticizes labor unions in Sect. 18 of The Constitution of Liberty published in 1960 and insists in the same section that closed-shop contracts should be illegal. He also views yellow-dog contracts, which were designed as countermeasures against the labor unions, as illegal. However, it has been pointed out that, according to Hayek’s social philosophy, neither the closed-shop contract nor the yellow-dog contract should be seen as legal issues, as they are based on free will between the parties and have no compulsory elements. The key to solving this dilemma is in understanding how Hayek views the core concepts of the U.S. Antitrust Law, namely, restraint of trade and monopoly. The aim of this article is to examine the theoretical structure of Hayek’s arguments on those types of contracts, freedom and coercion, the ‘restraint of trade’ doctrine, and the rule of law. It addresses the important common law issues of freedom, coercion, monopoly, restraint of trade, and the rule of law.
Journal Article
Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?
Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable.
Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar.
Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.
eBook
Black and Blue
In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five.Black and Blueexplores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline.
The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement.
From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power,Black and Bluechronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
eBook