Abstract
At nearly 400 pages in length, this book is dense. Its author, a Professor of Political Science at Hilbert College in New York, covers a grand sweep of US history to investigate how labor repression has been produced and reproduced by and within various institutions, from colonial days to the present. Reflecting the science part of political science, the author sets up his analysis (p. xii) in terms of the relationship between what he calls his “dependent variable” (the “institutional exclusion [that occurs] as capital assumes and works to maintain control over the state and the economy”) and an “independent variable” (the “key historical moments where one can measure the intent of labor repression in terms of the rise and fall of American capitalism”). Through this framework, he traces how overt and covert repression have been implemented historically, although the fact that covert repression is, by its nature, surreptitious suggests that instances of its articulation may be more difficult to identify than are those of overt repression, a methodological conundrum which the author never really addresses.
After a brief introduction, the book is organized into 10 chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter 1, the author explores labor repression from the colonial era to the mid-19th century, focusing upon indentured labor, how urban labor (under the moniker of the Sons of Liberty) was at the core of resistance to the British, and upon conflicts between the Constitution’s Framers and others over the place of working people in the new republic—despite their cries of freedom and liberty, many Framers and other elites were little inclined toward economic and political democracy for all. Two of the more interesting things detailed in the chapter are that waged labor really did not come to dominate the economy until after the Civil War and that, as it did, workers began turning to cooperatives as a way to defend their interests. This led to the creation of the first national organization to defend workers’ welfare, the National Labor Union (1866–1873), which was linked to the First International.
Chapter 2 continues the story of the growth of US capitalism, but also returns to discuss matters like the exclusion of labor from governance structures in 17th-century Maryland and Virginia. Although many interesting insights are provided, especially concerning how the law was used to limit workers’ organizing abilities and how the US Supreme Court’s 1886 decision to give personhood to corporations set the country on a course with which it is still dealing, such jumping back and forth through history across these two chapters made it a little difficult (for me) to follow the argument. This gave me the feeling of repetitiveness in some of the narrative, an issue which came up in other chapters—in Chapter 10, for instance, the discussion toward the end of the chapter of the growing influence in the post-1970s era of finance capital and of the decline of strikes seems to go over much of the same ground covered some 20 pages previously. For its part, Chapter 3 explores how labor fought back against capital’s efforts to control it, with the author detailing several important disputes from the early to mid-19th century. Professor Kolin shows that both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy had elements that appealed to workers—many believed that Jefferson’s calls for democratic ideals had relevance for their efforts to create economic democracy, despite Jefferson’s antipathy toward labor (which he saw as too tied to urban interests), while Jacksonian rhetoric about the evils of moneyed interests likewise appealed to many working people. Combined with the immigration of Germans and others who had been involved in Europe’s 1848 revolutionary politics, the time seemed right for the emergence of a powerful labor movement, although repression by US elites and recession in the 1850s limited working people’s abilities to pull this off.
Although in the second-half of the 19th-century workers did secure some successes, creating the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Knights of Labor, repression in the workplace magnified during the shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism. This is detailed in Chapter 4, where the author draws an interesting link between the emergence of large trusts and the restructuring of the workplace to secure greater control over workers through things like the introduction of Taylorism and a switch from workers’ activities being regulated by the foreman to their being regulated by the speed of the machinery to which a growing proportion of the working class was now tethered—by having to toil at the pace of the machine, workers increasingly lost control over their own bodies’ movements at work. Chapter 5 covers 1918 to the 1930s, detailing how the federal government repressed labor as part of a post-war Red Scare (e.g. the Palmer Raids), while capital made good use of the labor injunction. More broadly, the nature of US class relations began to change as technological innovation in the countryside drove many agricultural workers to migrate to the cities in search of work and immigration was limited to keep out foreign radicals and “ethnically inferior” groups (this was, after all, an era in which eugenics was popular), a move supported by the AFL. While capital led a drive for the open shop, it also made efforts to co-opt workers through profit-sharing schemes, stock options, and company-provided welfare programs, all to convince them that they had more to gain by collaborating with capital than by challenging it.
In Chapter 6, Professor Kolin shows how the nature of labor control changed again during the Depression, this time under the auspices of the New Deal and the panoply of new institutions which it brought. The author argues that FDR did not really see a place for unions in the New Deal, viewing government instead as the entity best suited to protecting workers’ interests. The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, for instance, shielded union collective bargaining rights, but was primarily designed to encourage capital-labor cooperation by increasing the Executive Branch’s control over the economy through allowing the President to issue “codes of fair competition”—a power which the Supreme Court ultimately ruled unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act effectively established US labor relations as locally focused (unlike in countries like Germany, where contract bargaining is much more nationally focused), which has both advantages and disadvantages—on the one hand, it allows workers and employers to respond to local conditions but, on the other hand, it also makes it more difficult to develop strategies to challenge trans-locally organized capital.
Chapter 7 continues the story of labor repression during the Depression by examining how anti-Communism and the search for reds in various New Deal agencies and unions facilitated the suppression of leftwing agitators. Chapter 8 extends the narrative into the Second World War period, with Professor Kolin highlighting how the federal government wished to rein in labor militancy that might disrupt the war effort—1944 saw more strikes per day than did any previous year in US history. Significantly, reactionary elements used this industrial unrest to undermine Communist unions and workers, even though the Party itself had advocated an alliance with business as a way to smash fascism (and so help the Soviet Union). The coming of peace in 1945 heralded more labor repression. As detailed in Chapter 9, the Republican-controlled Congress (with the help of conservative Democrats) overrode Harry Truman’s veto to pass the Taft-Hartley Act, which not only restricted unions at the national level but also opened the door to the creation of a whole new non-union geography of America through allowing states to pass Right To Work legislation, which several in the South and West quickly did. At the same time, the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) expelled Communist unions, while unions like the United Auto Workers were so keen to protect wages and jobs that they essentially agreed to cede to capital the right to manage the shop floor—witness the CIO’s 1946 Should Labor Have a Direct Share in Management? publication and the 1950 “Treaty of Detroit.”
In Chapter 10, Professor Kolin brings the story up to the present day, addressing the post-war era and efforts to restrain the labor militancy which had reemerged in the late 1960s/ early 1970s, as represented by groups like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM, made up of African American workers at Chrysler’s main assembly plant in Detroit), especially as growing inflation presented capital with a profitability crisis that it sought to resolve by extracting more surplus value from labor. With stagflation marking the end of the post-war capital-labor accord, both capital and the state launched attacks on organized labor—Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers is typically seen to mark this attack’s initiation but the assault had begun earlier with the deregulation of various industries under Presidents Ford and Carter. Deindustrialization, capital flight, the shrinking of the social safety net as politicians followed supply-side economic theory, the break-up of national contracts, the growing influence on the Republican Party of religious, anti-union organizations like the Family Research Council, and the impact of labor-saving technologies have since all represented attacks on working people’s futures. Finally, the book ends with a conclusion laying out some potential futures for labor, including creating a system of financing to fund workers’ abilities to take over failed companies and create socially useful products rather than goods that are merely manufactured to make a profit—lest this sound fanciful, we should not forget the famous Lucas Plan in which British aerospace workers in the 1970s laid out an ambitious blueprint to do just this.
The book, then, covers a great deal of territory. In such a lengthy manuscript it is, perhaps, inevitable that errors creep in, errors that need correcting in any future edition. Hence, on page xvi the IWW is listed as the “International Workers World” rather than the Industrial Workers of the World; on page 9 the author states that Pennsylvania adopted a uni-cameral legislature after the Declaration of Independence was signed, but in the very next sentence implies that it adopted a bi-cameral legislature; on page 97 Eugene Debs is listed as Eugene Deb; on page 162 the author states that Samuel Gompers was passed over by FDR as Secretary of Labor, which is perhaps not surprising given that he had died in 1924; on page 296 the Supreme Court’s NLRB v. Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company ruling that hiring replacement workers (“scabs”) is legal is listed as having been decided in 1983 (it was actually 1938); and on page 373 some of the references are listed out of order. There are also several typos/missing words in various parts of the text. However, one of the more frustrating things is that the text’s copyediting is wanting with regard to the use of commas, which seem to be inserted somewhat pseudo-randomly in many places.
Overall, I found this book a little frustrating. On the one hand, there is lots of really juicy stuff in here. But, on the other hand, there are parts that felt repetitive and the mass of information was sometimes a little overwhelming—personally, I would have preferred some pointers along the way as to which were the really important parts of the narrative that moved the story forward and which were merely filling in the detail. I would imagine that the book would be a little intimidating for undergraduates and would be more suited to use in graduate seminars, as it is not a breezy read.