Sit-down Strike Research Articles

Can Labor Still Use the Wagner Act?

History suggests that law will not save a labor movement on the defensive. the passage of the Wagner Act itself was made possible by the strike wave of 1934 and workers' rising expectations that the New Deal ought to give them a voice over their working conditions. While we should not expect the imminent return of the sit-down strike, pockets of worker resistance and experimentation are even now helping identify potential pillars of of a twenty-first century Wagner Act.

The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement by Lawrence S. Kaplan

Reviewed by: The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement by Lawrence S. Kaplan Gregory L. Schneider Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Conversion of Senator Arthur Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 294pp. $45.00. Any student of the origins of the Cold War has probably heard about or read a story about a meeting between Michigan Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, consummately described as an old Right isolationist, with President Harry Truman. The date was January 1947 and the subject was Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey. The new Republican majority, skeptical of the containment idea and of an expanded foreign presence in Europe, had to be scared about the threat of communism and the necessity of aiding Greece and Turkey with military and economic aid to resist Soviet pressure. Vandenberg was said to be so scared and wound up eschewing his isolationism and embracing the Truman Doctrine. Nothing in history is ever so neat. Vandenberg, a former Teddy Roosevelt progressive in his youth, had not been so scared. Rather, as this superb biography of the Senator and his transition to internationalism reveals, the transition from isolationism to internationalism was more gradual and evolutionary. It was not Soviet pressure on Greece and Turkey which played the major role in this transition; rather, it was Pearl Harbor six years before which played the crucial role in turning a skeptic about internationalism into an internationalist. Lawrence Kaplan is well positioned to tell this story as the master historian of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and as a student of American–European relations. Vandenberg was a Grand Rapids newspaperman, who spent one year at the University of Michigan before becoming editor of the Grand Rapids Herald. The editorial line was progressive Republican and so were Vandenberg’s politics. In 1928 he was appointed to an open Senate seat to fill a vacancy and during his time in Congress pursued a working relationship with both Herbert Hoover and with Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. While no New Dealer, he was also not a laissez-faire conservative and not a practitioner of the conservative anti-New Deal politics embodied on the political Right in those years. Vandenberg’s true interest remained foreign affairs and he was a committed isolationist. He had been a member of the Nye Committee hearings and had fought against the power of the munitions makers and war profiteers, giving many speeches in Michigan about the desire to keep out of foreign wars. Amazingly, given the drift toward New Deal liberalism in Michigan [End Page 139] and the sight of sit-down strikes in early 1937, Vandenberg easily won reelection as a Republican, showing his fungible manner in representing himself as an isolationist on foreign affairs and as a progressive on domestic matters. World War II changed Vandenberg’s views and moderated his prewar isolationism. He gained significant national attention for a speech reiterating a desire for a strong internationalism given on the floor of the Senate on January 10, 1945, a few weeks before FDR departed for the Yalta conference. The speech showed his growing internationalism and pursuit of clarification of the necessity for a new approach in American foreign policy. (Kaplan considered it such an important turning point that it is republished in the index to the book.) The speech drew notice from the administration and Vandenberg was named a delegate to the San Francisco conference to establish the United Nations. He worked diligently and sought the advice of both John Foster Dulles, the senior delegate to the conference and columnist Walter Lippmann. He took the work seriously and supported the San Francisco Treaty and the establishment of the UN. At the same time he developed a realistic assessment of the Soviet Union and was not prepared to accept the administration’s approach that Josef Stalin could be worked with to shape the peace. In this question regarding the onset of the Cold War it would have been nice to see more engagement with recent assessments of Truman by scholars like Wilson Miscamble’s From Roosevelt to Truman, which shows that the president was not the hard liner on the Soviets until late...

The Labor Movement and the Dilemma of Direct Confrontation

The perennial weakness of the American labor movement can be explained by a single, pervasive dilemma concerning its use of confrontational forms of protest. As its history makes clear, the labor movement cannot survive without resorting to mass picketing, sit-down strikes, and other disorderly tactics which challenge the power of employers but also directly threaten property rights, public authority, and dominant visions of social order. However, the labor movement also cannot endure the political and legal consequences which follow when it does embrace these tactics. In developing this thesis, this essay challenges both the aversion to militancy long typical of mainstream unionism as well as the fervent veneration of militancy by many of labor’s contemporary supporters. Instead, it counsels that the movement’s survival depends less on tactical choices than on workers’ success in challenging the political and legal power of capitalists out of which this dilemma ultimately flows.

Report: Bargaining Over Corporate Investment

20 | International Union Rights | 23/3 REPORT | COLLECTIVE BARGAINING IN CANADA Bargaining Over Corporate Investment: Innovation or Trap? Ever since the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, the cycle of ‘Big Three’ auto bargaining has been a major economic and political event, an indicator of the progress of the class struggle in North America. If such interest has sagged of late, it charged back into the news with the aggressive declaration of Unifor’s president, Jerry Dias, that winning new investments for Canada is at the top of the union’s agenda in its current bargaining round with General Motors (GM), Ford and Chrysler. Dias followed up this challenge to management’s right to unilaterally decide investments with the audacious warning that if these US-based corporations don’t deliver on bringing a fair share of investments to Canada, they can expect a strike. This has set up a confrontation with GM in particular, which has adamantly stated that it won’t negotiate over where to put its profits. Its investment decisions, it asserted, will be made by GM alone and only after the contract has been put to bed – effectively saying, with GM’s typical amalgam of arrogance and paternalism, that it will decide once the workers have shown they will behave. A remarkable aspect of these incompatible stances between GM and Unifor is that both the company and the union are taking different positions than they have in the past. The truth is that when it suited GM, it regularly brought its investment decisions to the table. In every bargaining round in the US since the end of the 70s, GM used the threat of withholding investment and the promise of bringing new investments to get wage restraint or, more often, concessions from the UAW. And for its part, the Canadian section of the union has, over most of that same period cautioned, against its current position, that collective bargaining is not the terrain for dealing with new investment. Jobs were a political issue to be resolved at the level of the state and to attempt to deal with it in bargaining would, the Canadians claimed, only lead to disaster. In the current context, as courageous as it may seem for the union to declare that it will go on strike for investment and jobs, it does seem incongruous to threaten to close plants that the companies don’t seem all that interested in keeping going. Currently, North American sales have recovered since the deep crisis of 2008-9 (sales are strong in the US and have been at record levels in Canada). Profits are impressive by any measure. Yet the recovery of production has varied sharply across North America. US assembly of vehicles has surpassed prerecession levels and Mexican assembly is booming, but Canadian assembly seriously lags. Going forward, things look to be even worse; announced investments in North America have, as the media and the union have noted, dramatically shortchanged Canada. A good part of the Canadian auto components sector is under threat. It is true that workers can, even in bad times and in plants destined for closure, impose significant short-term costs on their employer and so defend or improve their compensation. It is, however, another thing to imagine that such short terms costs, on their own, could be enough to reverse long term strategic decisions over investment. The Unifor leadership certainly has enough bargaining experience and savvy to appreciate this limit. The union may be using the high profile of bargaining in the auto sector, and the drama of a possible strike, to highlight the jobs issue politically, and thereby place it firmly on the political agenda. This is where the union has argued in the past the jobs issue in the auto industry always belongs. But does Unifor’s attempt to secure new investments through collective bargaining represent a powerfully militant, innovative approach on its part? Or could it be walking into a trap the automobile companies have set? If the government offers subsidies – the only public response being bandied about so far in the media, the industry or the union – is this really a solution? The Quagmire of Investment Bargaining It...

Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, 1936–1937

In this article we use the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike as a strategic case for examining the issue of movement success in seemingly disadvantageous structural conditions. Through an application and elaboration of social movement and organizational theory to the Flint sit-down strike we identify four key factors that help to explain the emergence of successful collective defiance by labor: (1) the violation of the autoworkers’ moral economy by General Motors; (2) the organizational flexibility of the UAW in adding new, revised, or revived mobilization and direct action strategies to protest repertoires to take advantage of preexisting social structures; (3) the identification of the sit-down strike as a strategy that leveraged the positional power of autoworkers; and (4) the on-the-ground organizational model used by the UAW, which allowed for democratic decision making that took advantage of local conditions.

Dark chocolate: lessons from the 1937 Hershey sit-down strike

The 1936–1937 General Motors sit-down strike may be the most famous work stoppage in American history. The victory in Flint so heartened workers that a veritable “sit-down fever” wave spread across America. But are labor scholars guilty of unintentionally spreading a Whiggish view of history? Just 7 weeks after the victory in Flint, Hershey Chocolate workers sat down. Within 7 days they were forcibly ejected from the factory and beaten by a mob. This article takes a look at the events in Hershey with an eye toward raising questions about the overall efficacy of sit-down strikes. Although it by no means wishes to diminish the heroism or the usefulness of the Flint sit-down, it argues that a balanced look at the past requires a deeper look into the strikes that failed. The question is of the utmost importance for the contemporary labor movement, as some activists have called for a revival of sit-down militancy as a tactic for organized labor to reverse decades of decline. This may not be wise strategy, as past sit-down strikes are too narrowly filtered through the triumphant lens of Flint.

Films in the Archive: Hollywood in Detroit

The Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 60,000 so-called ephemeral films, approximately 6,500 of which are freely available online for viewing and public download, is an amazing resource for research and teaching in the history of technology. Here, Shell highlights two sponsored films from a Prelinger sub-collection that have special relevance to the site of the upcoming annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Dearborn MI. Both films were produced by the same company, the Jam Handy Organization in the same year, 1936, and were commissioned by a single operation, the Chevrolet division of General Motors. These are the animated short A Coach for Cinderella and the half-hour symphonic film Master Hands. Coach and Master Hands appeared in 1936, the year of the first sitdown strikes in the auto industry.

Chicago and the Little Steel strike

The Little Steel strike of 1937 has taken on iconic significance for historians, in large part because of the anti-labor violence of the Memorial Day Massacre. What has garnered considerably less attention is the community mobilization that accompanied the strike. For a brief moment, steel workers and their allies challenged the anti-democratic tendencies in the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. While SWOC leaders focused almost exclusively on the achievement of a signed contract, women of the steel auxiliaries, workers on the picket line, and middle-class liberals from across Chicago sought to transform the strike into something larger than a showdown over union recognition. For this coalition, the Little Steel strike was a flashpoint in a wider struggle social democratic reform. In the mobilization prior to Memorial Day and in the protest movement that followed it, key elements of Chicago's liberal-labor coalition espoused the egalitarian values of the Popular Front. Far from an exercise in bread-and-butter moderation, the strike became the occasion for a larger social uprising. This expression of united front commitment drew on the example of the Unemployed Councils and the front-line militancy that is often only associated with the Flint sit-down strike and the general strikes of 1934. In Chicago, the Little Steel strike raised the possibility that steelworkers might embrace the ‘civic unionism’ that animated the left-led unions of the era.

Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the Vietnam War Era

Acknowledgments Prologue: Storm Warning Glossary 1 The Black Sailor: Chambermaid to the Braid and Nothing More 2 Racial Unrest Strikes the Army and Marines 3 The Zumwalt Revolution 4 Kitty Hawk: The Pot Begins to Boil 5 Blow Off: The Kitty Hawk Riot 6 More Unrest: The Hassayampa Riot 7 The Sit-down Strike on the Constellation 8 Negotiations with the Protesters: A Comedy of Errors 9 The Hicks Subcommittee Hearings: Questions and Motives 10 Violence on Nearly Every Ship: Race Riots after Constellation 11 The Struggle to Eliminate Bias in the Fleet 12 From Awareness to Af?rmation Epilogue Appendix: Navy Ranks and Ratings, 1973 Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Sit-down at Republic: Will it Give Labor New Legs?

"When capital is so mobile and mobilized, you have to break out of the box," advises longtime activist and scholar Frances Fox Piven. Breaking out of the box is precisely what a six-day sit-down strike by United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers Local 1110 did last December, producing a remarkable victory at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago. The sit-down resonated widely with the public, because it targeted Bank of America, a major bailout recipient, for its refusal to provide Republic with the funds needed to give the workers the payments due them.

Child of the Sit-Downs: The Revolutionary Life of Genora Dollinger

Carlton Jackson begins his biography of the labor activist Genora Dollinger with the most personal of comparisons. Dollinger, he says, was a lot like Jackson's coal miner father: a “frontline worker,” deeply devoted to her union and tireless in her pursuit of social justice, yet too pragmatic and hardheaded to “intellectualize or philosophize the interests and well-being of workers into some kind of esoteric oblivion” (pp. xi, xiii). It is hard to imagine a biographer establishing a more intimate identification with his subject, and it leads Jackson astray. Most obviously, Jackson's framework may well fit his father's story better than it does Dollinger's. There is no doubt that she was fiercely committed to her union, the United Automobile Workers (uaw). Her greatest moment came during the epic 1937 Flint sit-down strike, when she battled policemen and company thugs as the head of the uaw's Women's Emergency Brigade. Without her extraordinary courage, the strike might well have collapsed, taking the fledgling union down with it. But Dollinger was a “frontline” auto worker for only four years, from 1942 to 1945. Her real avocation was as a working-class radical, a left-wing Socialist who in 1938 embraced Trotskyism. That commitment—not pragmatic, hardheaded unionism—guided her as she wound her way through many of the progressive causes of the postwar era—civil liberties, civil rights, and feminism foremost among them. All the while she continued her engagement with the uaw, fighting to make the union conform to the vision that brought her into the streets of Flint in the bitter winter of 1937. A well-lived life, to be sure, but one defined by precisely the sort of intellectual and philosophical engagement that Jackson says Dollinger eschewed.

The Flint Sit-Down Strike Audio Gallery, http://www.historicalvoices.org/flint/. Designed and hosted by Matrix at Michigan State University. Audiovisual content provided by the University of Michigan-Flint and the Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Mich. Reviewed March 1-20, 2006

On December 30, 1936, General Motors (gm) workers in Flint, Michigan, sat down at their jobs. They stayed in the plants until a settlement was reached on February 11, 1937. The forty-four day strike was a victory for the United Auto Workers (uaw), a new industrial union that won the right to organize and represent employees of the largest auto company and one of the largest private employers in the United States. The gm sit-down strike had enormous significance for the history of labor, business, and the state. It also marked a turning point in uaw history and the history of working people in modern America. This Web site is part of Historical Voices, an online digital library of twentieth-century American spoken word collections. The Flint Sit-Down Strike site is more an electronic essay than an archive of interviews. The site's creators digitized the tapes of a quarter of the more than two hundred interviews conducted between 1978 and 1984 with people who were involved with the strike. Several interactive formats allow the viewer to hear excerpts from those interviews. Three “audio essays” consider the strike's organization, the strike itself, and its aftermath on pages that provide historical narrative and analysis interspersed with audio clips of interviews with participants and observers. The clips launch from text links of the interviewees' names and appear in a pop-up window where the clip streams and the text of the clip and a note identifying the speaker and the date of the interview appear. The interview excerpts vary in length from thirty seconds to ten minutes. In all, one hundred audio clips from interviews with fifty people are accessible on the site. Other interactive formats on the site include a timeline, a strike map, and three slide shows.

Worker Lawmaking, Sit-Down Strikes, and the Shaping of American Industrial Relations, 1935-1958

Between 1936 and 1939, American workers staged some 583 sit-down strikes of at least one day's duration. In the latter year, the United States Supreme Court issued its opinion inNLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, resolving the official legal status of the tactic.Fansteelmade it clear not only that a state could punish sit-downers for violating trespass laws, but also that an employer could lawfully discharge them—even if that employer had itself provoked the sit-down by committing unfair labor practices in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.

Feminist Critique and Cinematic Counterhistory in the Documentary With Babies and Banners

This essay analyzes how the documentary With Babies and Banners employs strategies of realism to counter the dominant history of the 1936 General Motors Sitdown Strike. By visually depicting women strikers' memories, this film challenges contemporary ideologies with regard to women and labor through an act of historical revisionism. I argue that this film not only creates a counterhistory, but also demonstrates women's capacity to transgress the gender politics that often constrain and oppress them.

Not Automatic: Women and the Left in the Forging of the Auto Workers' Union

Part 1 Lost history - Sol Dollinger: Toledo Auto-Lite strike of 1934 1935 Chevrolet transmission strike Homer Martin elected president factional warfare in the U.A.W. U.A.W. Twenty-point program U.A.W. targets Ford Motor equality of sacrifice anti-union forces ambush U.A.W. Local 212 mafia and Briggs linked by Senator Estis Kefauver hearings Reuther slams door on union democracy, 1947-1948 good housekeeping seal of approval who led the 1937 sitdown strikes in Flint? Part 2 Striking Flint - an oral history of Genora (Johnson) Dollinger by Susan Rosenthal: conditions before the strike preparing for battle sit down! women comer forward the women's emergency brigade breaking the stalemate a blow against racism the sweet fruit of victory fighting racism organizing the unemployed personality speaking class struggle during the war the employers strike back back to the future.

Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps during World War II

Acknowledgments Prologue 1. What Has Become of the Manhood of America?: Creating a Woman's Army 2. Ain't Misbehavin'? The Slander Campaign Against the WAC 3. The WAC Strikes Back: Constructing the Respectable Female Soldier 4. Work and Resistance in the WAC: Kitchen Police, Secretaries, and Sitdown Strikes 5. Protecting Whom? Regulating Sexuality in the Army and the WAC 6. I Want a Man!: Pleasure and Danger in the Women's Corps 7.The Lesbian Threat Epilogue Appendix 1. Meyer Oral History Questionnaire Appendix 2. Discussion of Sources Notes Index

The Triumph and "Tragedy" of Walter Reuther

The Triumph and “Tragedy” of Walter Reuther Bruce Nelson (bio) Nelson Lichtenstein. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit:Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995. xiii + 575 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. Walter Reuther, who served as president of the United Auto Workers (UAW) from 1946 until his death in 1970, has been the subject of many biographies. But after the publication of Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, it is unlikely that there will be another any time soon. 1 Lichtenstein’s biography is massive, insightful, and as close to definitive as we are likely to get. It does more than tell the story of Reuther’s life as a labor leader; it brilliantly situates his career within the larger context of the American political economy during the four decades when the New Deal order emerged, crystallized, and unraveled. Reuther was born in 1907 to German immigrant parents in Wheeling, West Virginia. His father was an ardent Debsian Socialist who nurtured in his sons a lifelong commitment to social justice and an abiding respect for the dignity and creativity inherent in the work of skilled craftsmen. Along with thousands of other young men, Walter was drawn to Detroit in the 1920s, where he became a highly paid skilled worker and an apostle of self-improvement whose values were so unabashedly bourgeois that his friends called him the “corporation lawyer” (p. 23). But the Great Depression launched Reuther in an altogether different direction. He reclaimed the socialist heritage of his youth; worked, with his brother Victor, as a tool and die maker in a Soviet auto factory; and returned to Detroit just as the fledgling industrial union movement of the 1930s was about to become a major force in American society and politics. He quickly became a member of the UAW’s fractious leadership corps, and ten years later was elected president of what had become the nation’s largest trade union. For the rest of his life he remained a man in the headlines—ambitious, articulate, and innovative, widely respected and resented, the most dynamic labor statesman associated with the rise of the New Deal order and its industrial relations regime. Reuther would make his mark, and find his most formidable adversary, at General Motors. But in important respects his career began at Kelsey-Hayes [End Page 488] Wheel, a relatively small auto parts manufacturing plant on Detroit’s west side. Kelsey-Hayes featured a heterogeneous work force, a weak and divided union leadership, and a company president whose shrewd paternalism had kept the UAW at bay, so much so that when Reuther entered the picture there were fewer than thirty-five union members in a work force of nearly five thousand. But in November and December 1936 two things happened that dramatically altered the balance of power. First, Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant reelection triggered a new surge of confidence among working people. Second, and perhaps more important at Kelsey-Hayes, a group of “semiprofessional agitators” succeeded in getting jobs in the plant (p. 65). The newly hired cadre were able to mount only a small sitdown strike, augmented by a thinly manned picket line on the outside. But the UAW came to the rescue with a “flying squadron” of 4,000 union partisans; the mayor of Detroit, sensitive to the sea change wrought by the Roosevelt landslide, kept the city’s famously belligerent police force in check; even the notoriously antiunion Henry Ford, who needed the parts to maintain his own production, put pressure on the company to settle. And so Reuther had his first victory. According to Lichtenstein, the pattern at Kelsey-Hayes was replicated throughout much of the auto industry, as the UAW was “built from the outside in, by well-connected and ideologically motivated organizers who saw their trade union work as part of a larger project of social reconstruction” (p. 65). But the match between outsiders and insiders was by no means perfect. The rapid development of the union that followed the Detroit sitdown strikes and the even more famous confrontation with General Motors in early 1937 sent the UAW careening in two...

Building the Union: Skilled Workers and Anglo-Gaelic Immigrants in the Rise of the UAW.

Building the Union provides a unique perspective on the history of automaking and autoworkers in Detroit, Michigan. Focused on the sitdown strikes and union organizing of the 1930s, it tells the story of a small group of immigrants--British and Irish workers driven from their homes by depression and civil war--who came to Detroit in the 1920s and played a pivotal role in the rise of mass production and the success of union unionism. Steve Babson challenges many preconceptions about the industrial and social history of America's Motor City. He examines a critical paradox in this history: as scientific management deskilled production work, it helped destroy the apprenticeship system that produced toll and die makers. Employers thought they could solve this dilemma by recruiting toolmakers from Britain and Germany. However, Anglo-Gaelic immigrants brought to Detroit more than just their toolboxes: their cultural baggage included a repretoire of collective action and organizational know-how. Building the Union makes provocative suggestions about the dynamics of class, craft, and culture in the rise of America's leading industrial union. Babson's focus on strategic groups and their role in galvanizing collective action also has implications that apply to the general study of popular protest and mass movements.

The Struggle for Academic Democracy: Lessons from the 1938 "Revolution" in New York's City Colleges.

On June 20,1938, the trustees of the City Colleges of New York changed the by-laws on the governance of the colleges. The transformation of New York City's colleges from autocratic to democratic rule virtually overnight was a revolutionary event in American higher education within the context of the 1930s. Abraham Edel writes of this revolution as an active participant and as an eminent philosopher who has experienced more than a half century of educational reform. The book focuses on the meaning and import of democratic organization in the governance of universities, but, at the same time, the author's personal reflections make it an intellectual memoir that charts the evolution of an idea. Labor unionism, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism shaped the political, social, economic, and intellectual climate of the 1930s. Edel relates this milieu to the authoritarian system of governance in the City Colleges. He describes the growth of a college teachers union, a sit-down strike by students, and the controversy, agitation, and organizing that hurled the teaching staff into political action. He identifies the pioneering significance of this revolution this experiment in democracy at a time when dictatorship was viewed as more efficient and examines the lessons learned by sudden rather than piecemeal reform, by human responses to institutional change, and by the relation of ideas to social movements. After tracing the history of this transformation, Edel works toward a philosophy of democratic governance by evaluating the variety of claims for participation in terms of the ultimate mission of the university. Admitting a preference for democratic forms, Edel examines current issues in academic governance and the often acrimonious debate over participation by various groups. Abraham Edel is Research Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, City University of New York.

American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900–1941 by Daniel Nelson

164 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE would have been net losers if all other industries also had been prevented from mechanizing. Workers in a particular industry are quite likely to lose from mechanization and productivity growth in their own industry (American and European farmers are a striking example), but they still are likely to benefit from productivity growth in general. These benefits will certainly accrue to them as consumers and, quite possibly, also in the form of new and better employment opportunities. If these benefits of mechanization are ignored, there is very little industrial technological change indeed that will pass muster. The author’s more general ideological bent is well demonstrated by the following: “In hindsight, there is little doubt that the tremendous social costs of unemployment and excess capacity, which were un­ avoidable under the existing market conditions, could have been avoided with a modicum of central economic planning and coordina­ tion that the UMWA progressives proposed. Public ownership and democratic control might well have stabilized production, allowed the rational deployment of new machinery, and at the same time estab­ lished a decision-making system in which workers’jobs and job rights would have been secured” (p. 160). Frankly, I am flabbergasted by this assertion. I certainly find no convincing evidence for it in the book. Perhaps it is based on the author’s observations of the British experience with coal mine nationalization? In any case it is interesting to note that the author is sufficiently hostile to neoclassical economic analysis that he does not even bother to discuss seriously the obvious market failure in coal mining—the existence of local labor market monopsonies. So as not to end on a totally negative note, let me mention a few positive features of the book. In my view, the most useful sections are those that describe in praiseworthy detail and with admirable clarity the technical evolution of automatic loading machinery and the effect of the new machinery on the nature, organization, and supervision of the work. There is also a considerable amount of interesting material on the relationship between the United Mine Workers of America and the local unions, particularly with regard to the key question of mechanization. Lars G. Sandberg Dr. Sandberg is professor of economics at Ohio State University. His principal research interests deal with European economic history during the 18th and 19th centuries. He is currently engaged in work using data on human heights as a measure of net nutrition and per capita consumption levels. American Rubber Workers and Organized Labor, 1900-1941. By Daniel Nelson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. x + 339; illustrations, notes, index. $32.50. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 165 Daniel Nelson has produced an impressive work rooted in the tradition of the “new” labor history. The book’s central theme is the optimism, self-confidence, and independence of the tire-manu­ facturing labor force. The 1913 strike that engulfed Akron’s tire plants met defeat largely because organized labor was “oblivious to the rubber workers” (p. 76). When the United Rubber Workers (URW) was formed in September 1935, rubber workers rejected the American Federation of Labor (AFL) because of its “miscalculations and blunders” (p. 162). And, when the URW leaders attempted to moderate the sit-down strikes of 1936, the independence of the rubber workers again prevailed. The book brings together diverse strands of the new labor history. It delves into issues of community relationships, the policies of organized labor, and industry organiza­ tion and production techniques. Each of these elements intersected on the shop floor and produced a dynamic labor-managementrelations process. One of the major achievements of Nelson’s work is its challenge of the standard story of the sit-down strike. Although the 1936-37 sit-down at the General Motors Flint, Michigan, plant made the tactic a national phenomenon, it originated in the rubber tire plants of Akron. The first important sit-down strike occurred at General Tire in the summer of 1934. Nelson’s account of the sit-down movement provides little support for the conventional notion that workers have been singlemindedly fixated on obtaining union recognition and that sit-downs were directed by...