Why and how did unionist visions for industrial democracy decline after the Second World War? Using California canneries as a case study, Charles Romney offers a refreshing yet sobering answer to this major question in modern American history. Romney admits that Cold War repression, union competition, and strategic errors contributed to progressive union decline by 1950, yet he contends that these forces hold less explanatory power than the cumbersome procedures of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In nine short and sharp chapters, Romney shows how the NLRB proved too slow, costly, and politically conservative to consistently adjudicate workers’ claims. This inefficiency, especially after the war, provided fertile ground for a dominant conservative order that often ran counter to workers’ own preferences.

In the late 1930s and accelerating during the war, northern California cannery organizers and workers began to build strong progressive unions. Attacked as “weasels” by conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) unionists, United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers (UCAPAWA) organizers offered a message of racial and gender equality that resonated with the canneries’ overwhelmingly female and minority workforce. But their success often came in spite of the national NLRB rules and procedures. The NLRB determined union representation based on a closed shop and the collection of pledge cards. This policy favored unions already representing workers inside factories, and conservative AFL locals sometimes colluded with company officials to fire the competition. Also, many cannery workers were migrants, evading union organizers’ efforts to collect pledge cards in seasonal industries. Progressive unionists overcame these handicaps before and during the war, when less competition existed between unions and the military pressured producers to safeguard food supplies for the troops. Allying with sympathetic administrators in the NLRB's San Francisco office, these CIO unionists even convinced administrators to accept sworn testimony rather than strict pledge card counts for seasonal citrus workers.

But after the war, Romney explains, conservative unionists, politicians, and companies solidified their control over West Coast canneries. In a massive October 1945 election, workers overwhelmingly voted for the Food and Tobacco Workers union (UCAPAWA changed its name to FTA during the war). But the competing Teamsters union dismissed these results and vowed to take control of these shops. The Teamsters appealed the NLRB results to the Washington office and lobbied conservative Congressman to intervene on their behalf. This strategy succeeded when NLRB leader Paul Herzog dismissed the election results in order to preserve the agency's standing with Congress. NLRB leaders thus conceded to the very group that sought to delegitimate them.

On the local level, the Teamsters organized “goon lines” (113) because they had no fear of the state intervening against them. Their control over the trucking industry emboldened them to effectively close canneries. Later, the Teamsters sent men to beat workers on the picket lines of a last-resort strike. They also distributed fake pamphlets that depicted the FTA as controlled by Moscow. Anticommunism, violence, and other nefarious tactics, Romney argues, would not have been so effective if the procedural state had been able to intervene. Instead, the NLRB acted slowly, which led to extensive attorney fees and burdened unions to collect evidence. Even worse, the Wagner Act and other existing labor laws could hold employers, but not competing unions, liable for unfair labor practices. While the FTA union's slogan, “Can the crops, not the workers” (137), demanded a state that could respond to workers’ authentic demands for representation, the Teamsters slogan, “We'll win even if we lose,” (160) demonstrated the union's disrespect for democratic voting procedures or the NLRB.

By the late 1940s, the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act further marginalized the FTA. In refusing to abide by the anticommunist provision in Section 9(h), FTA leaders effectively severed their access to the NLRB's limited protections. Romney concludes by criticizing the FTA for this defiance – a stance he blames in part for its disappearance from the CIO and West Coast canneries by 1950. But given the alarming lack of NLRB power or enforcement prior to this decision by the FTA, compliance may not have made a difference. While the Taft-Hartley Act's Section 10(j) empowered the NLRB to oppose illegal blacklists and other antidemocratic tactics such as the Teamsters’, the agency declined to take this or any other step to rein in the power of the Teamsters and employers in the late 1940s. Such collusion rendered the procedural state complicit in the Teamsters’ violent and antidemocratic campaign to create a “conservative order in the agricultural industry” (212) for decades to come.

This book should interest historians as well as contemporary activists and unionists. It offers crucial context for today's long-overdue debate about which avenues of state intervention and forms of organization might prove necessary to get effective and efficient justice for workers in the twenty-first century.