To explain the weakness of the union movement in the United States, compared to those in other countries or to other social institutions, historians often have pointed to exceptionally fierce employer opposition. But until recently, there have been few historical studies of business anti-unionism. Against Labor is a valuable addition to a small but growing literature.
Editors Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson have assembled eight essays about business anti-unionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with a strong introduction and a concluding essay about more recent years. Some of the contributions are deep but narrow case studies, such as Thomas A. Klug's look at the Brass Division of the Employers’ Association of Detroit in the years leading up to a dramatic 1907 strike and Robert H. Woodrum's chapter, “Race, Unionism, and the Open-Shop Movement along the Waterfront in Mobile, Alabama,” on the period during and immediately after World War I. Others are broader in chronology or scope. Howard R. Stanger traces a Columbus, Ohio, employing printers’ association's shifting position on the open shop over the course of a century. Elizabeth Esch and David Roediger, in “Scientific Management, Racist Science, and Race Management,” reveal ideas about racial characteristics of workers that were widespread among early twentieth-century employers and industrial theorists, but based on nothing resembling systematic study.
The essays in this volume are notable for their intensive research in primary sources, in some cases material previously examined by few or no historians. For the most part, they are not pathbreaking, in the sense of introducing novel interpretations or uncovering data that force a fundamental rethinking of anti-unionism. Dolores E. Janiewski, for example, contributes a fascinating account of dueling congressional committees during the 1930s: the pro-union Senate Civil Liberties Committee (better known as the La Follette Committee) and the anti-union—or at least anti–Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO)—House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (the Dies Committee). Both committees had networks for secret intelligence gathering and close ties to private parties, and in the Dies case, links to various police and military officials as well. By fleshing out the story of government and liberal support for the CIO and the fierce reaction to it, Janiewski's essay deepens but does not change our understanding of the period.
A few contributions do challenge historiographic orthodoxy. In her revelatory profile of strikebreaker and anti-union consultant A. A. Ahner, Feurer points to continuities from before, through, and after the New Deal in anti-union activity and sees the use of crude anti-union violence and sophisticated anti-union legal tactics not as polarities but as parts of a long-running, multifaceted business strategy. Stanger, in his essay on Columbus printers, somewhat contrary to the general thrust of the volume, documents how many employers, especially before 1960, shied away from militant anti-unionism.
Even though no one essay in this strong collection presents a wholly new interpretation of business anti-unionism, taken together the contributions provide rich material for reconsidering this understudied issue. In their introduction, Feurer and Pearson argue, “Few issues have united the business community more consistently and deeply than anti-unionism” (p. 1). As they note, the essays in the volume reveal the long chronology and breadth of business support for efforts to counter unions and establish the open shop, with backing among both big and small enterprises (not mostly among the latter, as some older histories suggest) and across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, Feuer and Pearson stress that it took a “militant minority of employers” to create the organizations that proved so effective in fighting unionism (p. 5). One key to their success was their ability to mobilize state support in the struggle against labor.
The essays in Against Labor generally consider business anti-unionism within the framework of labor relations and, to a lesser extent, politics and ideology. With the exception of Michael Dennis's study of grocery chain anti-unionism in the South in the early 1990s and Peter Rachleff's concluding essay, “Capital and Labor in the 21st Century,” the historians represented do not position anti-unionism within the frame of general business concerns, including those concerns not related to labor. We get little sense of how the fight against unions fit into the broader dynamics of business development. The fact that it took the persistent efforts of a “militant minority” and nearly a century of proselytizing to create the current business consensus against unionism suggests that anti-unionism was not always a high priority for business and opens the question of what circumstances led it to become one. Rather than concluding a discussion of anti-unionism as a critical aspect of American history, this collection opens up the field for more, much-needed study.
