The Employee: A Political History by Jean-Christian Vinel (review)

In the failed 2014 attempt to establish a union in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the United Auto Workers (UAW) argued in favor of Volkswagen’s works council—a labor-management collaboration that evoked the ideal of social harmony and democracy in the workplace. A UAW statement (September 6, 2013) regarding the union drive argued that “the role of the union in the 21st century is to create an environment where both the company and the workers succeed.” The idea of social harmony is a rather old conception that, like the Chattanooga vote, has been under attack from conservatives. The antiunion forces in Tennessee disseminated several fearful messages about what unions would do: (1) undermine worker initiative and independence; (2) increase costs with unreasonable wage and benefit demands; (3) increase economic inefficiencies and insecurities, including the possibility of plant closure; and, most damagingly, (4) spread these outcomes throughout the state and likely repel new business investment. Each argument took a stab at social harmony and workplace democracy while also keeping a model of adversarial labor-management relations intact. Most importantly, the statement tacitly accepted the primary importance of managerial authority and the assumption that worker loyalty was somehow undermined by a more democratic workplace.

Jean-Christian Vinel highlights in his excellent new book that the language of social harmony could have radical potential. The Employee is a rich intellectual, cultural, and political history that provides needed context about the deeper cultural and political dynamics shaping this and other unionization efforts. Vinel uses a broad array of sources (National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] and Supreme Court decisions, Robert F. Wagner papers, congressional hearings, the writing of John Commons, among others), and his analysis offers a complex search for logic in what has legally defined an employee and thereby who has been eligible for unionization under labor law. Bringing together various strands of labor historiography, Vinel argues that the “other side of labor pluralism” that called for expansive workplace democracy” (6) has been forgotten or undervalued in the literature; in essence, the sharp critiques of US labor law and collective bargaining by critical legal theorists—while insightful and understandable—missed the progressive side of “this science of social peace” (85). Vinel directs the reader to the common interests between employer and employee that several Progressives and labor reformers adamantly stressed in their passionate drive to resolve the labor question. Tracing the origins of the idea of the employee and worker back to the nineteenth century and pushing forward through the Wagner Act to the twenty-first century, Vinel demonstrates how conceptions of social harmony as articulated by Progressives and Wisconsin school labor reformers allowed for workplace democracy. This ideal challenged the autocratic nature of the workplace but did not displace managerial authority. Instead, a consistent faith in collective bargaining, the right to association via unionization, and therefore the right to petition remained central to the industrial plural-ist approach to labor relations. The democratic logic of collective bargaining stood on the inherent assumption that workers and employers shared a common interest and that conflict could be resolved based on this understanding.

The conservative backlash against the Wagner Act revealed the extent and nature of business resistance to unionization. Business leaders and their advocates countered with a convoluted argument that worker loyalty was incompatible with unionization, at least for certain workers (whomever they wished to label a “supervisor”). The “language of social harmony through democracy,” according to Vinel, invalidated the loyalty argument (234). This potential cooperative ethic so challenged managerial authority that employers embraced an adversarial model of labor relations that narrowed the definition of “employees” to caricatures imitating worker ants. Any workers using judgment (foremen, university professors, nurses, engineers, etc.) became potential managers or supervisors ineligible to form unions, at least as codified in the Taft-Hartley Act’s 1947 revisions to the Wagner Act and then in numerous NLRB and Supreme Court rulings. The unionization occurring under the Fordist industrial order remained to some degree immune from such limitations...