In Labor’s Cause

February 23rd, 2007

David Brody's In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker is a collection of six essays on American workers on several different topics within US labor history. Brody was one of the premier labor historians of the late twentieth century and this collection is a reasonable starting point for exploring his works. Except for the final chapter, it is relatively accessible for academic history. Despite those positive aspects, parts of his arguments are incorrect – primarily stemming from American exceptionalist influences on his work. Every nation, including the United States, has unique features but that does not make it anymore exceptional than any other country. Brody overestimates the degree to which American workers have adopted capitalist individualism and underestimates the degree to which workers in other nations also adopted capitalist individualism.

The first essay, Time and Work During Early American Industrialism, examines the emergence of American workers' demands for the ten hour day. A modern conception of time as a commodity to be 'spent not passed' emerged with the demand, a radical change in working class culture for the time period. When the US first started transitioning to capitalism workers and employers initially retained an older pre-capitalist notion of time, which had implications for pay and labor discipline. For instance, many workers were initially paid by the day and expected to work sun up to sun down - leading to employers hiring workers in the summer (when the day lasts longer) and laying off workers in the winter (when the day was shorter). Although conflicts between workers and employers, including the first strikes unionization drives, initially focused on wages they soon added time to the issues over which they clashed, eventually culminating in the ten-hour day movement of the 1830s and 1840s. These early unions did not seek to sign contracts with employers as most US unions do today, rather they drew up a “bill of prices” with a specified pay rate, required all members to refuse to work for anyone who paid less, and organized strikes at employers who paid less. By the 1830s many unions included the ten-hour day in their demands, which proponents labelled “the ten-hour system” and treated as a quasi-revolution.

Brody’s second essay, The Course of American Labor Politics, is a good overview of working class politics, suitable as an introduction to the topic though somewhat marred by American exceptionalism. He views the US trade union movement as exceptionally apolitical and conservative, tracing the evolution of its relationship to the political system from the early 19th century to the late 20th century. He begins in Jacksonian America, when labor began forging its own independent voice through the organization of local workingmens parties and continues through labor's subsequent absorption into mainstream political parties (at first Whigs and Democrats, later Republicans as well). Labor reform movements after the Civil War failed and the a-politicism advocated by Samuel Gompers and others eventually triumphed. State actions against unions forced the AFL to get involved in politics, at first in a non-partisan manner but eventually forging an alliance with the Democratic party which was cemented by the New Deal, World War Two, and the early Cold War. In more recent periods the alliance with the Democratic party has continued even though organized labor receives even less from it than it did in the past. The chapter has a bibliographic essay instead of endnotes or footnotes.

Brody largely ignores more radical unions, like the Industrial Workers of the World, and the role of coercion in destroying radical labor. US labor history is full of violence and, especially in the 20th century, radical unionists have borne a disproportionate share of that violence. For example, violence towards the IWW during World War One and especially the subsequent Red Scare were a key reason for the organization's decline. Force, and the threat of force, were again deployed against radicals in the labor movement after the Second World War. Taft-Hartley purged radicals from mainstream unions while McCarthyite witch hunts further pulverized radicalism.

Part 3, Shaping a Labor Movement, is three essays merged together. The first, Ideology, is the weakest due to its American exceptionalism. Brody contrasts labor unions in the US with unions elsewhere, particularly Australia and Canada, arguing that unions in the US are smaller and not as well respected by the general population. He claims the failure of parties oriented around labor republicanism in the US caused the labor movement to search for an alternative, which they found in Pure and Simple Unionism, but this brought the labor movement into contradiction with American republican individualist values. He contents, “to embrace the republican values of the larger society was to have a labor movement that would not work. And to have a movement that would work required some degree of disengagement from those American values.” (p. 88)

Brody's argument in Ideology is flawed on multiple levels. First, Brody equates individualism with capitalist individualism but there are other versions of individualism like anarchism, which at one point was a significant part of the labor movement. Even if America were as uniquely individualistic as Brody claims, that could just as easily result in an anarchist labor movement as a conservative labor movement. Second, he assumes everyone in the United States shared the same capitalist individualist ideology, almost essentializing “national values.” Different Americans have often held different values, and at times large numbers have held collectivist values. To take a famous example, the socialist magazine The Appeal to Reason was one of the most popular periodicals in early 20th century America. The existence of large numbers of American workers espousing collectivist values well after the dawn of pure & simple unionism contradicts his conception of Americans as essentially individualistic. Third, he assumes capitalist individualism is something uniquely American, but similar ideas exist in many other countries. The United States is not the only nation to have a liberal revolution.

Career Leadership, the second essay in the chapter, discusses the top-heavy nature of the American labor movement. Compared to other countries, US labor unions have a higher ratio of officials to rank and file members and more staff who make a career out of union leadership. While his analysis is correct, its weakness is in its attempt to explain why this is. Essentially Brody claims unions were like this because everyone else is – union leaders are following the same self-interested individualist attitudes he attributes to the larger American society. Labor bureaucracy is probably encouraged by several alternative reasons Brody does not address, including differences in population density, the need of a larger bureaucracy to enforce union rules and agreements, additional administrative duties required of unions (like managing pension funds) not required of their European counterparts, and the violent destruction of less bureaucratic alternatives like the IWW. Even though his explanations are lacking, the essay is nonetheless a decent introduction to the origins of the trade union bureaucracy.

The last essay in chapter 3, Ethnicity, is a useful overview of the role of ethnicity in the working class. Although a good essay, Brody's argument that pure and simple unionism was, in part, a way of coping with ethnic splits within the working class is flawed. He claims political loyalties were divided along ethnic lines and by staying out of partisan politics the AFL was able to recruit members from different ethnic groups who supported different parties. Due to flaws in pure & simple unionism this strategy degenerated into racist favoring of the dominant ethnic groups. Brody's argument repeats a false dichotomy present in Ideology and Shaping a Labor Movement between supporting a radical party on the one hand and labor conservatism on the other. In the 1890s French labor unions also responded to political divisions among workers by disengaging from electoral politics but created revolutionary syndicalism rather than turning towards labor conservatism. Brody's argument does not fully explain why the AFL's attempts to overcome ethnic/partisan divisions resulted in pure and simple unionism rather than a radical non-partisanship as it did in France and elsewhere.

Chapter 4, Market Unionism in America: The Case of Coal, discusses the history of coal unionism. He argues that the nature of the coal market encouraged unions to collaborate with management to drive up prices or otherwise obtain favorable market conditions and thus higher profits, a portion of which would go to workers and the union. The essay has less of a bearing on the themes developed in earlier essays, but is not completely disconnected in that it deals with unions adopting a more conservative outlook, rather than focusing on class struggle against management. The United Mine Workers of America essentially acted as an enforced for a bituminous coal cartel. Its contract not only specified pay and hours for workers, but also specified the minimum price coal could be sold at. If an employer tried to sell coal for less than this amount the union would organize a strike (or other direct action) - compelling all employers to sell coal at a higher price. The bituminous coal industry was highly competitive and had numerous different employers, making reliance on a labor union the only way the cartel could compel all employers to keep prices above a certain level.

Chapter 5, The New Deal, Labor and World War II, attempts to explain why there was no major reform in the United States during the Second World War. Brody contrasts the American experience with Britain, which did have reforms during the war, and with other American wars such as the Civil War and the First World War, which also experienced reforms. He claims the lack of reforms was due to the decision of the Roosevelt administration to draw a sharp line between war and reform, the inability of “organized groups or coherent interests” to use “the war to promote reform,” and “the impact of war in America.” (p. 178) His argument is plausible, but based on a faulty premise. Many wars besides the Second World War did not result in reform and so there's no reason to expect the Second World War to do so. World War Two belongs to a whole class of wars that did not result in reform including the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Persian Gulf War, the Iraq war and the Mexican-American war. A better approach would be a comparative analysis to explain why some wars result in reforms and others do not. The reasons he cites for the Second World War would probably be an important subset of such an analysis, but we should not assume that wars automatically result in reform.

Brody's final essay, Workplace Contractualism: A Historical/Comparative Analysis, analyzes the rise and fall of workplace contractualism. Brody critiques other historians who argued that workplace contractualism - the now-common practice of unions signing contracts with no-strike pledges, grievance procedures, etc - was not inevitable and was not chosen until the 1940s. Brody convincingly cites multiple instances of workplace contractualism being instituted before the 1940s. However, he also concedes that other countries have very different labor relations systems, many of which do not have contracts or have very different contracts. The logical conclusion is that workplace contractualism is not inevitable, but the US was already on the path to it prior to the 1940s.

Although there are many problems with Brody's arguments one should not get the impression it is a bad book. Despite its flaws it remains an accessible work giving a good overview of the topics it seeks to cover.