The Bosses' Union: How Employers Organized to Fight Labor before the New Deal

Abstract

This book examines a time in the early twentieth century when worker influence at the workplace through union representation looked like it might become a commonplace feature of American life—but did not. To understand why, the book focuses on employer organizations and their efforts to discredit worker power during the Progressive Era and into the 1920s. It examines the range of employer positions and employer rhetoric through analyzing such organizations as the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation, arguing that variance masked a fairly uniform and persistent rejection of labor unions. It also analyzes employer collective action, showing how employer organizing, as well as employer influence through lobbying and publicity, benefited not only from employers’ financial resources but also from their social connectedness. The book particularly focuses on the employer campaign against the “closed shop,” the common union demand that workers at a unionized workplace be union members. Unions saw the demand, which developed out of nineteenth-century craft practices, as part of their effort at workplace governance. Employers, however, claimed that it trampled workers’ individual rights. Partly because this claim resonated with middle-class worries about unmediated working-class power, employers succeeded in using a language of individual rights to cast a pall on workers’ organizations while organizing themselves into effective bosses’ unions.