Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism ed. by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson (review)

This collection of essays attempts to show how organized businesses exploited existing power structures and created new ones to combat organized labor. Most of the chapters in this volume are case studies showing how employer organizations in specific cities applied ideas and used changing federal laws and national trends, articulated in other chapters in this work, to break slowly the strength of labor unions. Using primary source materials and a focus on single employers' unions and sometimes single individuals, these studies fulfill the editors' notion that "people, not faceless markets, shape history" (2).

Source documents show the inner workings of employer organizations and demonstrate that not all employers were aggressive about breaking unions and pushing for the open shop. Howard Stranger's chapter about printers in Columbus, who faced substantial competition in the product market, reveals that employers' disparate goals often impeded collective action. Employers' associations managed to solve this problem by resorting to a variety of ideological and legal tools that made collective action difficult for organized labor.

Several themes are prevalent throughout the work. The use of race to divide labor and increase the power of capital through a segmented labor market and to pit workers against each other appears in several chapters. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger show how "race management" and "racist science" were part and parcel of Frederick Taylor's scientific-management theory, pointing to the ultimate reason for his firm's resistance to labor unions—the full control of the labor in the production process. Robert Woodrum describes how black dock workers were concentrated into certain jobs and excluded from others in Mobile, Alabama. Along with their job segregation, workers of different races had different labor unions in different localities. This arrangement facilitated the recruitment of white strike breakers when black longshoremen went on strike.

The second theme, which permeates almost every essay, is the use of the legal system to give firms and employer associations leverage against striking workers. Strategies included obtaining injunctions from business-friendly mayors and local courts to keep picketers away from businesses where workers were on strike, passing curfews and loitering ordinances, and redefining vagrancy to enable police forces to do employers' bidding—as in Thomas Klug's chapter about Detroit. At times, the employers' associations managed to corral local police and federal law-enforcement officials by hiring specialists whose careers blurred the line between public agents and private consultants, as illuminated by Fuerer in her discussion of Abner A. Ahner's Detective Agency.

The role of the federal government in tempering the power of organized labor changed with national and international events. According to Woodrum, the federal regulators who raised the wages of black longshoreman during World War I slowly lost power as employers in Mobile began questioning their authority. Michael Dennis recounts how grocery store chains in Virginia used the Fourth Circuit Court to overturn a complaint made to the National Labor Relations Board (nlrb) about employers' threatening and deterring a vote to organize labor.

The specter of communism often served as a bludgeon against organized labor at the national level, the union-organizing level, and local level. Regarding the national level, Dolores Janiewski chronicles how the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) used the threat of communist sympathies to weaken the labor-friendly La Follette Committee—a Senate subcommittee that investigated violations of free speech. The leadership of the Committee of Industrial Organization (cio) fell victim to the same techniques of red-baiting and anti-immigrant sentiment, when the HUAC attempted to have union leader Harry Bridges deported to weaken the power of the Dockworker's Union.

Many of the chapters use case studies to demonstrate the evolution of employer practices in restricting labor's bargaining power. The use of source documents should be appealing to a wide audience; broad issues relating to power structures and collective action emerge through the historical details...