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

Abstract

This deeply detailed book probes an underexplored area of U.S. labor history: the troubled battle to organize West Coast cannery workers during the first fifteen years after the passage of the Wagner Act (1935). Charles W. Romney tells the complex tale of a three-cornered struggle among rival unions, recalcitrant employers, and an often-indecisive and internally divided federal government that, even at its strongest moment, proved too weak and plodding to effectively protect workers' rights. Romney argues that a focus on “legal procedure” hobbled the government's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), thereby helping the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), outflank the more progressive (and communist-led) Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers Union (FTA), an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the fight to unionize canneries. Initially, Romney explains, the FTA “thrived by embracing the procedural culture” of the NLRB (p. 3). Thanks to government intervention, the FTA gained a foothold in the West. Yet it depended on an unreliable ally. By the time the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947, the NLRB's support for progressive unionism had evaporated. Legal procedures that once protected the FTA now worked to its disadvantage, especially since the law barred communist-led unions from availing themselves of NLRB protection. “Workers supporting progressive unions had embraced a procedural language to claim their rights” only to soon discover “that their rights had vanished in an endless legal discourse” (ibid.).