Charles W. Romney. Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935–1950.

Abstract

The title of Charles W. Romney’s Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions, 1935–1950 promises far more than the book delivers. Rather than a study of how the “American State” defeated progressive unions, it examines only one putative progressive union, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA; originally the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America [UCAPAWA]), which was defeated by an allegedly conservative union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in a battle to represent California cannery workers. This is a shame, because Romney constructs his case study on an unusually broad range of archival sources and on the best older and newer literature analyzing the relationship among the state, the law, and industrial relations. Romney divides his study into three parts. Part I, covering the years from roughly 1935 to 1945, describes how New Deal labor policies, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, and the implementation of that legislation by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) enabled the FTA to unionize hitherto nonunion canneries primarily in northern California. Part II explains how wartime labor policies fostered further union penetration of California’s canneries but also stimulated competition between the FTA and the Teamsters Union to represent those workers. Part III, covering the immediate postwar years, 1946–1950, explores how and why the Teamsters triumphed over the FTA. Employers preferred to bargain with a more conservative union, the Teamsters, and the federal administrative state as exemplified by the NLRB pursued tedious and time-consuming legal procedures that benefited larger and more financially secure unions. Or, as Romney concludes, “The NLRB’s emphasis on legal procedure let the Teamsters establish a ‘conservative order’ with ‘grateful employers’ … a conservative order that continues to shape law, labor, and the state” (212).