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Preface
- Cornell University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
ix Preface At first I had planned to write a book about employer conceptions of workplace justice. What did American employers believe they owed their employees? What worker rights did they feel obliged to respect? Pitching this idea to friends and colleagues elicited a common response:“That will be an awfully short book.” Although my topic has evolved over time, I continue my effort to take employers’ professed principles seriously. This is not easy. Particularly in recent years, corporate leaders (and their political allies) seemto have become especially shameless in self-righteously portraying as a public service their pursuit of sordid self-interest. And closer to my own subject matter, contemporary American employers’claims about union rights and wrongs are easily dismissed as so much window dressing for their real interests. Yet such pronouncements often seem to be sincerely made. More important, they are widely accepted. Egregious polluters, after all, are not the only ones who believe that environmental regulation threatens the nation’s liberties, and employers fighting organizing drives are not alone in finding unions un-American. It is worth asking what cultural resources and social conditions make such rhetoric plausible to speakers and their chosen audiences. And while base self-interest may always be with us, the dazzling variety of public veneers poses a sociological puzzle. Why, given the extensive rhetorical tool kit at their disposal, did employers in specific times and places adopt such different tools for denigrating—or, much more rarely, legitimizing—unions? For the employers I studied, the answers had more to do with business communities than with personal circumstances. Their thinking about labor at work, moreover, proved to be closely linked with their recipes for good government in politics. My title thus echoes David Montgomery’s Citizen Worker in highlighting x PREFACE the influence of civic ideals on workplace ideology, while shifting the focus from labor to capital. And by adding the plural—Citizen Employers—I mean to emphasize the importance of employers’ collective organization and identities in shaping their approach to unions and employees within their individual firms. As I developed my ideas and tried out my arguments for this project, many colleagues tried to set me straight. Some—including Jim Atleson, Bruce Carruthers , Jeff Goodwin, Rebecca Emigh, Phil Scranton, and Theda Skocpol—did so at talks and conference presentations. Others took time to comment on drafts, answer e-mail queries, or listen to musings, notably Rick Baldoz, Emily Beaulieu, Charlene Bredder, Lis Clemens, Steve Cornell, Ellen Dannin, Paul Frymer, Jack Goldstone, Larry Isaac, Howard Kimeldorf, Tom Klug, Caroline Lee, William Roy, Kathy Thelen, Rhys Williams, and Mayer Zald. And department colleagues Amy Binder, Mary Blair-Loy, Isaac Martin, Akos Rona-Tas, Gershon Shafir, and John Skrentny have been especially generous with comments and encouragement . Special thanks, finally, to Howard Kimeldorf and Howell Harris for their detailed and constructive reviews of the penultimate manuscript. I also thank staff members at the Cincinnati Historical Society; the Cincinnati Public Library; the University of Cincinnati; the California Historical Society; the San Francisco Public Library; the Bancroft Library, University of California– Berkeley; and the Geisel Library, University of California–San Diego, particularly the long-suffering workers in its Interlibrary Loan and Periodicals departments. Financial support came from the National Humanities Foundation; the University of California’s Institute for Labor and Employment; and the University of California– San Diego Academic Senate. Others provided support in kind, including Ben and Kay Schneider (materials relating to Uncle Herman Schneider), Robert Manley (minute books kept by grandfather John Manley, secretary of Cincinnati’s Metal TradesAssociation),and especially John and Peggy Mooney (ready hospitality during my research visits to San Francisco). And I appreciate the good judgment and the heroic stints of microfilm reading contributed by research assistants Caroline Lee, Larissa Leroux, Dorothy Pizzaro, Rebecca Sager, and Eric Van Rite. At Cornell University Press, Fran Benson gave my work an enthusiastic welcome and steady support, Cameron Cooper and Teresa Jesionowski guided it toward publication, and David Schur gave it some final spit and polish. I have learned more from Colin Haydu than he thinks, although it is impossible to pinpoint where in this book that influence shows. The influence of Kathy Mooney, by contrast, is easy for me to see but impossible to acknowledge in full. She started asking me“what about employers”a long time ago,and has helped me refine my answers—and my prose—ever since. The book is dedicated to her. Jeffrey Haydu San Diego, California [44.201...