The Employee: A Political History Jean-ChristianVinel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The Employee: A Political History Jean-Christian Vinel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.Today, millions of workers in the United States find themselves excluded from the legal category of the employee-a critical distinction that would otherwise permit unionization and collective bargaining. In this book, combining labor history, sociological analysis, and legal history, Vinel traces the history of this term from its entry in the public lexicon during the Progressive Era through the New Deal order to recent efforts to amend federal labor law. All the while, this French Americanist connects his expose' to the larger narrative of American progressivism and liberalism, management practices, and the history of social thought on both sides of the Atlantic. Vinel provides deeper insights through cross-national comparisons, especially with France and Britain. Through a meticulous analysis of Supreme Court rulings and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions, he demonstrates that the definition of employee has always been politically contested and influenced by competing claims on the part of business and labor.In the context of the 1947 Taft-Hartiey Act, businessmen pressured Congress into amending the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (or Wagner Act) so that foremen in the nation's leading automobile, steel, and mining companies would not be allowed to organize and make common cause with rank-and-file workers. Relying on a concept inherited from the colonial master and servant doctrine, corporate America insisted that unless they were production workers, employees owed a duty of loyalty to their employers. They reasoned that, for supervisors, foremen, and managers, unionism was incompatible with the faithful exercise of duty because it would result in divided loyalties, that is, these workers would be torn between their allegiance to the union and their responsibilities toward their employer. As a result, since the 1940s the protection of the right to organize in the United States has been subject to a tension between freedom of association and loyalty. The book shows that at different junctures business executives were seriously concerned about the possible defection of workers they deemed essential to their authority over the workplace, including foremen, procurement buyers, nurses, and even university professors, as in one famous case that culminated in the 1980 Supreme Court decision NLRB v. Yeshiva University that largely blocked collective bargaining for private college faculty members.In offering his political genealogy of the Wagner Act, Vinel argues that opposition to class antagonism shaped elite conceptions of labor relations at the turn of the twentieth century and informed views of the democratization of the workplace. During the Progressive Era, labor reformers-mostly middle-class men and women-formulated their own version of the nineteenth-century conservative discourse of social harmony and thereby took a middle position between classical liberalism and socialism, emphasizing the pursuit of the public interest and the promotion of the working-class's welfare as a means toward social cohesion. A leading figure in this effort was John R. Commons, the founder of the Wisconsin school of labor history, who offered a new vision of social harmony in the workplace: by fostering collective bargaining it was possible to inculcate cooperative values in workers and to deflect class antagonism. …