Published by EH.NET (January 2009)
Chris Howell, Trade Unionism and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations Institutions in Britain, 1890-2000. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. xi + 243 pp. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-69101-2106-0.
Reviewed for EH.NET by James W. Stitt, Professor of History, High Point University.
Organized labor has played a seminal role in modern British political and industrial history. Famous strikes, such as the General Strike of 1926, and famous periods of strikes, such as those before World War I or of the 1970s, form a crucial backdrop to comprehension of twentieth century history.
This convenient assumption about the constancy of labor's powerful role in British society and its relevance to the understanding of British politics and industrial history in the twentieth century is shattered by events after 1979. The influence of labor, perhaps reaching a high point in the 1960s and 1970s, ended, or seemed to end, quickly with Margaret Thatcher's election. Was this decline in influence permanent or temporary? If permanent, what can possibly explain how an institution as vital and potent as British organized labor could lose its status and authority so quickly?
Chris Howell, Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, finds traditional explanations of how British industrial relations operate inadequate to address the change of events after 1979. In his _Trade Unionism and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations in Britain, 1890-2000_, Howell contends that the framework heretofore common in studies of British industrial relations with an emphasis on voluntarism and a state inclined to abstain from intervention into the interactions of organized labor and employers is not sufficient to explain labor's rapid decline in influence after 1979. Other factors special to the 1980s alone cannot explain the decline in labor's role either, according to Howell. He posits both a new interpretation and a refined approach to the study of modern British industrial relations.
Howell claims that one can comprehend the reduced role of labor after1979 by understanding first that the state was not an abstaining entity but, instead, "played a central role in the construction of industrial relations in Britain in the last hundred years or so." Howell believes that critical study of twentieth century British industrial relations must consider the state as the fulcrum, not as an impartial observer.
Published by EH.NET (November 2008)
Lawrence Richards, Union-Free America: Workers and Antiunion Culture. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008. x + 245 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-252-03271-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
What accounts for the weakness of the American Labor Movement, the small proportion of workers who belong to unions in the United States? For over a century, the question of “American Exceptionalism” has been central to the field of labor history, indeed to the whole of the social sciences and the project of understanding popular unrest in capitalist societies. And it is of much more than academic interest; the weakness of the American Labor Movement is associated with the weakness of the American welfare state and with the unequal distribution of income in the United States.
In the past, the debate over American Exceptionalism pitted radicals who attribute Labor’s weakness to bad union strategy or to repression, against others who associate exceptionalism with popular individualism and the strength of liberal values in what Seymour Martin Lipset dubbed “The First New Nation.” This has been a sterile debate between opposing views supported by evidence that while often incontrovertible has been irrelevant to the other interpretation. Lawrence Richards, of Miami University of Ohio, now brings something new. Approaching exceptionalism from the left, he focuses on the attitudes of the workers concerned. He associates exceptionalism with popular resistance to unions; but he does so by citing a paternalist ethos rather than liberal individualism. Richards divides his study into two parts. The first, the weaker half, attempts a global evaluation of what he calls “America’s Antiunion Culture.” In 82 pages he uses newspaper accounts, cartoons, and the views of selected commentators to review the place of unions in American culture. He then states a fairly conventional conclusion that unions were unpopular because they threatened individual rights. Preaching an ideology of “collective advancement,” they violated “[t]he ideal of individualism, of getting ahead on one’s own” (p. 83). Frankly, this argument is as unpersuasive as it is unoriginal. How, I wondered, should one evaluate the place of unions in a culture that produces both On the Waterfront and Salt of the Earth in the same year that Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate? (Both movies are now in DVD special editions.)
Fortunately, the second part of Union-Free America is much stronger. Richards reviews three case studies, including two union drives and the conflict between a trade union (the American Federation of Teachers) and a professional association (the National Education Association). Richards provides a detailed and specific analysis of the troubles unions have had in organizing workers who often did not want to be organized. And, getting down to details, Richards drops talk of liberal individualism; instead, he shows that popular anti-unionism came from an attempt to forge alternative collective identities.