AMERICAN LABOR STRUGGLES AND LAW HISTORIES
by Kenneth M. Casebeer (ed.).
Reviewed by Richard A. Brisbin, Jr.,
Department of Political Science,
pp. 696-699
In this volume Kenneth Casebeer, a law
professor, presents a collection of twenty-seven previously published historical
articles and book chapters interspaced with eight historical documents and other
snippets of original commentaries about collective struggles by American
workers. The authors of the
articles are either historians or law professors who write about labor history.
In selecting these scholar’s articles, Casebeer asserts in his
introduction that he is trying to correct the academic limitations of different
kinds of studies of collective action by American workers while offering
supplemental materials for courses about labor law and labor history.
In so doing, he seeks to portray the “history of actual people” (p.xiv).
His approach, he contends, rejects much scholarly writing about labor and
legality. The rejected approaches
include the focus on collective bargaining found in law school hornbooks, law
and society studies he neither cites nor examines, and studies that employ what
he refers to as “post-modern” methodologies or, apparently, since they are not
referenced, studies that focus on the discourse of workers.
Instead, he desires a historiography
that acknowledges the “centrality of the struggle of workers to gain power
otherwise denied them” (p.xi) and their efforts to establish economic democracy.
Nearly all of the articles therefore examine collective action by
unorganized or unionized workers against the legally secured power of employers
and the state at different junctures in American history.
Does Casebeer’s focus on workers’
struggles influence the articles he has selected for inclusion in the book?
His concern means that the articles most frequently examine strikes and
related job actions as a form of resistance against the legally constituted and
repressive powers of management and judges.
Although many articles begin with a “bottom-up” account of a strike or
other job action, the importance of litigation in the control of workers is
often a central element in the final stages of these conflicts.
Articles about the Philadelphia cordwainer’s strike of 1805, the Pullman
strike of 1894, the steel strike of 1919, the Gastonia, North Carolina textile
workers strike of 1929, the San Francisco general strike of 1934, [*697] sit-down
strikes in various industries during the Great Depression, and the Pittston coal
strike of 1989-1990 illustrate how collective action is domesticated by judicial
or legislative intervention.
Thematically related articles illustrate how employers or the state have
deployed law and legalized uses of armed force to break collective movements,
such as with the
As far as it goes this collection
provides stimulating reading about the linkage of employer and state power and
law in the control of American workers.
It is useful to have the studies bound in one volume rather than
scattered across a range of publications not readily accessible outside of
larger university libraries or schools with electronic collections of academic
journals. Nonetheless, a
bibliography would have further added to the utility of this volume as a
resource for political scientists interested in the relations of labor,
employers, and the state.
Given Casebeer’s focus on the
centrality of laborers’ struggles to gain denied power, one problem appears with
this collection. There is a failure
to include articles on a number of topics to flesh out fully the scope of the
political meaning of the resistance of American workers toward employers and the
longer term political and legal ramifications of collective action.
Most selections are case studies of a single set of events that do not
link the events to the broader politics of the era.
For example, the article about the
Additional examples of the volume’s
limited coverage of the scope of the politics of collective action by workers
appear. First, because the majority of
the articles focus on strikes and related acts of violence and disorder, except
for a study of a slowdown action at Elk [*698] Lumber by James Atleson, the less
visible, everyday tactics of workers to offset their legal subjection to
employers are largely ignored (for examples of such tactics see Scott 1990).
Second, the importance of both workers’ leaders and the presence of union
leaders in guiding or challenging the turn to disorder could be sharpened in
many of the selections to explore the spontaneity of bottom-up nature of
incidents of collective action by workers. A
leadership directed many of the collective actions, such as the Pittston strike,
but their varying contribution to the resistance is not that apparent in many of
the articles. Third, there is
little information in any of the articles on the ability of collective action or
litigation by workers to structure the political or judicial agenda and raise
issues for public debate (for an example, see McCann 1994).
Fourth there are no articles that address the successes of unions and
their collective political action—including electoral participation—in shaping
the legal status and power of contemporary workers.
From workers’ compensation through New Deal legislation to post-World War
II legislation unions played a central role in shaping American legislation (as
recounted by Orren 1986). Also,
especially in some states, unions have used legislative successes to insinuate
themselves into regulatory and educational politics, which is a partial cause of
attacks on union power by the contemporary Right recounted in Casebeer’s chapter
about the recent Wisconsin public worker protests.
Fifth, the volume contains selections about collective actions by racial,
gendered, and immigrant workers, such as articles about a black tenant farmers
union in Arkansas in 1919, black public service and home care workers during the
1960s and 1970s, and Latino workers at the University of Miami that suggest
collective actions often take on a racial, gender, or immigrant cast.
However, as in articles about the Pullman strike by David Montgomery, the
litigation about the firing of black millhands to satisfy white mob action
Martha Mahoney, and discrimination against black railway workers by Eric Arnesen,
most selections illustrate only indirectly how collective action has often
floundered because of deep racial differences among workers or employers’
exploitation of such differences.
Finally none of the articles explore the sources and nature of the decrease in
adversarial conflict in worker-employer relations that has arisen in
union-management relations in industries, such as steel and auto manufacture,
during the late twentieth century.
Despite these limitations in the
portrayal of the politics of collective actions by workers, the collected
articles will serve to inform the political scientist or law and society scholar
interested in aspects of the politics of American labor or the effect of
collective worker resistance in constituting the legal universe in which workers
function. Scholars also will find
these articles useful in various ways in classes that address issues about group
and [*699] social movement politics, the empowering and disempowering constitution of
legality, labor politics, and some specific constitutional controversies.
From them the informed scholar might begin to propose an answer to the
big question: Why has economic democracy not materialized in the
REFERENCES:
McCann, Michael W. 1994.
Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Orren, Karen. 1986. “Union Politics and Post-War Liberalism in the United
States,” 1946-1979,” Studies in American
Political Development 1 (1986): 215-51.
Scott, James.1990.
Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
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© Copyright by the author, Richard A. Brisbin, Jr.