Unionism in the Twentieth-Century United States: A Re-examination

Abstract

Sidney Fine. "Without Blare of Trumpets:" Walter Drew, the National Erec- tors' Association, and the Open Shop Movement, 1903-57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. x +384. Robert H. Zieger. The CIO 1935-1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii + 491. Colin Gordon. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920- 1935. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii + 329. Conflict between workers and their employers over distribution of the fruits of production in democratic nations has taken place in two spheres: the electoral-representative and the labour market. The absence in the United States of a successful political party committed to and dependent for its support on the working class has placed a heavier burden upon unions as the protector of worker interests than in many industrialized countries. Much ink has been spilled to explain the first phenomenon. The preoccupation with answering Werner Sombart's query about why there was no socialism in the United States has tended to divert attention from the weakness of unionism in this country. That weakness was temporarily disguised by the surge in union membership from the 1930s until the latter 1950s. Union decline since, however, has sparked new interest in the sources of labour organizational failure.