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Against Labor

Against Labor

How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism

Edited by Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson

Contributions by Michael Dennis, Elizabeth Esch, Rosemary Feurer, Dolores E Janiewski, Thomas A. Klug, Chad Pearson, Peter Rachleff, David Roediger, Howard Stanger and Robert Woodrum

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Imprint: University of Illinois Press

6 black & white photographs

Digital download
9780252099311
Published: March 2017

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

Against Labor highlights the tenacious efforts by employers to organize themselves as a class to contest labor. Ranging across a spectrum of understudied issues, essayists explore employer anti-labor strategies and offer incisive portraits of people and organizations that aggressively opposed unions. Other contributors examine the anti-labor movement against a backdrop of larger forces, such as the intersection of race and ethnicity with anti-labor activity, and anti-unionism in the context of neoliberalism. Timely and revealing, Against Labor deepens our understanding of management history and employer activism and their metamorphic effects on workplace and society. Contributors: Michael Dennis, Elizabeth Esch, Rosemary Feurer, Dolores E. Janiewski, Thomas A. Klug, Chad Pearson, Peter Rachleff, David Roediger, Howard Stanger, and Robert Woodrum.

Title

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Against Labor / Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson

1. Scientific Management, Racist Science, and Race Management / Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger

2. “Free Shops for Free Men”? : The Challenges of Strikebreaking and Union-Busting in the Progressive Era / Chad Pearson

3. Employers’ Path to the Open Shop in Detroit, 1903–7 / Thomas A. Klug

4. Race, Unionism, and the Open-Shop Movement along the Waterfront in Mobile, Alabama / Robert H. Woodrum

5. Through a Glass, Darkly: The NLRB, Employer Counteroffensives, Investigative Committees, and the CIO / Dolores E. Janiewski

6. The Strange Career of A. A. Ahner: Reconsidering Blackjacks and Briefcases / Rosemary Feurer

7. A Moderate Employers’ Association in a “House Divided”: The Case of the Employing Printers of Columbus, Ohio, 1887 - 1987 / Howard R. Stanger

8. Litigating for Profit: Business, Law, and Labor in the New Economy South / Michael Dennis

9. Capital and Labor in the 21st Century: The End of History? / Peter Rachleff

Glossary

Contributors

Index

Rosemary Feurer is an associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950. Chad Pearson teaches history at Collin College. He is the author of Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement.

"Boldly challenges the scholarship that considers employers as a malleable force that often compromises when social movements forge political environments that are inimical to their interests. Contributes enormously to our understanding of business tactics and strategy."--Immanuel Ness, author of Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

"At a time when public sector unions are under renewed attack and private-sector union membership hovers near levels not seen since the early twentieth century, Against Labor offers a potent, powerful reminder that, as Feurer and Pearson put it, 'People, not faceless markets, shaped this story.'" --The Journal of Southern History

"An excellent volume. The standard of scholarship and writing is very high, and the editors have worked hard to produce a cohesive collection of essays that shed much light on a still-understudied phenomenon in US and labor history more broadly."--Australasian Journal of American Studies