Abstract
Even though the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016 blocked a decision in the Friedrichs v. California Teachers case, the threat of the open shop brought the topic into union conversations. Cedric De Leon’s book is a timely illumination of some historical precedents for our current political challenges in the labor history of the nineteenth century, charting the methods with which employers, using that elusive word “freedom,” tried to break unions. One topic is “Alternate Theories of Antilabor Democracy in the United States” (p. 6).
For a relatively short book, De Leon offers an enormously ambitious history of American workers in the nineteenth century as they tried to deal with both the growth of the factory system and the destruction of the individual social mobility of skilled artisans. He presents immigrants who wanted to become self-sufficient yeomen farmers as well as “unions which were different from the labor organizations of the antebellum period, which were benevolent societies in the main and struck only rarely” (p. 86). As importantly, these workers confronted both the slave system and their own “whiteness,” and raised the issue of American exceptionalism, “reflecting the vast literature that arose in response to Werner Sombart’s (1906) now century-old question: ‘Why is there no socialism in the United States?’” (p. 6).
The focus of the book is on the working class in Chicago from 1828 to the Haymarket Affair in 1886, and deals with the pluralism at the turn of the century. Describing how the words like “freedom” and “liberty,” and “right to work,” used in the Friedrichs case first developed as obstacles to workers’ collective actions, De Leon describes formidable political of repression in Chicago and, “the political establishment’s military and rhetorical response to three episodes of labor protest: the 1867 strike for an eight-hour day, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and the Great Upheaval of 1886” (p. 111). He details the antilabor legislation passed in Illinois, starting with the LaSalle Black Law of 1863, the Merritt Conspiracy Law of 1887, and the Cole Anti-Boycott Law (pp. 100-101).
As part of the repression, he emphasizes the “logic” of antiunion figures like Joseph Medill, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, who proclaimed “at a workingmen’s parade” in 1872 that “Rights of persons are exactly equal. The employer is not bound to offer more wages that he pleases, nor to accept the services of those he does not see fit to engage. He is under no obligation to pay any attention to the rules of labor unions . . .” (p. 109).
In the final section of the book “Neoliberalism in the Rustbelt,” De Leon looks at current events to “address the question ‘What can the origins of right to work teach us about the conditions of American workers and the U.S. labor movement under neoliberalism?’” (p. 130). He maintains that Indiana’s 2012 right to work law, “is postbellum boilerplate” and combines both the administration of Benjamin Harrison, where workers reached, “a détente between the workers who had for a time repudiated the major parties in favor of more radical organizations, on the one hand, and the political establishment—with its supporters among Chicago’s middle class and incipient bourgeois elite—on the other” (p. 131).
One concern for the usefulness of this book in a labor studies course is that the workers/students would have to be very sophisticated and might not grasp any practical value from it. De Leon is concerned whether he can “briefly preempt some concerns that my academic colleagues might have,” and answers a wide range of possible concerns by historians, sociologists, “neo-Gramscianists,” libertarians, Tea Party Conservatives, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce! He does, however, advise that “those who are not interested in the theoretical whys and wherefores can skip these remarks and move directly to the right to work section” (p. 130).
His conclusion, however, is very much to a practical point: Workers have had, and must therefore always be prepared, to defend their hard-won collective rights in the face of a political and economic system that was set up to preserve only the right of individuals to negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment. (p. 3)