That the American labor movement is at a low point, no one should need reminding. This dire situation for working people is at least partially the consequence of intense organizing against labor unions undertaken by U.S. firms and their allies. More studies have emerged recently that place employer anti-union activity squarely in the history of post-New Deal conservatism, but few have tackled the longer history of this movement. In addition, while the more recent “new” history of capitalism focuses on the business side of the capitalist equation, it seems to have displaced the importance of class conflict and class formation in shaping American capitalism. The eight case studies in Chad Pearson and Rosemary Furner's Against Labor help reconstruct this longer history of employer organizing to undermine the power of labor unions.

These essays are connected by several themes, which are developed in a very useful introductory essay by the editors. First, employers mobilized along class lines in order to overcome their own divisions and to build networks with allies. It was through this movement building that employers became a “self-aware class” (5). The tenacity of labor unions, and, after the New Deal, the institutional power of unions, compelled employers to organize to counter labor. In this sense, employer movements were primarily reactionary, in that their ultimate goal was to prevent or, at minimum, circumscribe the potential solidarity of workers. Second, in order to achieve their goals, employers extended their battles against the labor movement out from the workplace and into the public sphere. Once there, employers attempted to establish the legitimacy of their goals to gain recognition from public officials, the broader middle class, and non-unionized workers. Finally, these essays highlight the importance of the local and regional levels in shaping the diverse patterns and outcomes of employer organizing.

Pearson's own contribution looks at the battle over strikebreaking, to show that employers understood exactly what was at stake in the struggle for legitimacy. The animus toward strikebreakers from union workers and their allies was immense. Employers associations recognized the importance of transforming the image of the strikebreaker from “scab” or “hero,” in order to help gain access to strikebreakers to undercut the efficacy of striking workers. Thomas Klug's essay traces the growth of the Employers Association of Detroit (EAD) from 1903 to 1907, in order to show how individual employers fought to overcome critical divisions to ultimately bring the Open Shop to the city. He uses previously concealed records from the EAD to reconstruct the breakdowns of solidarity among firms, which opened up spaces for unions to organize.

Two pieces focus on the intersection of race and racism in the movement of employers to divide workers and control workplaces. David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch focus on the role of racism in the growth of scientific management in the Progressive Era. They take their cue from the industrial relations expert John Commons, who observed that the pitting of “the races” against each other was “the one symptom of originality” of U.S. managerial theory and practice (27). “Race thinking,” they argue, “powerfully contributed to management” by lowering wages and pitting workers against each other. (44) This type of industrial race management drew on the legacy of slave management and was utilized by employers to prevent the solidarity of labor, which violated the norms of racial hierarchy. Managers drew on the ideology of race development in order to justify their methods of dividing workers along racial lines as progressive and working-class solidarity as reactionary. Robert Woodrum reveals how the Open Shop movement in Mobile, Alabama, intersected with, and drew strength from, the local infrastructure of white supremacy. The primary targets of employers and their allies were African American workers, who were initially successful at taking advantage of the favorable conditions for unionizing during World War I. Woodrum follows the career of Ralph Clemmons, Mobile's most significant and most targeted African American labor leader. The reaction to this accumulated power among black workers was wide ranging, drawing together the Ku Klux Klan, local police, and formal employers organizations, and eventuated in the kidnapping of the most powerful African American union leader.

The remaining articles fall outside of the chronological scope of this journal. They generally trace the development of anti-union organizing in the period after the 1930s and show how employers refined their tactics in order to respond to the relative institutional power accumulated by the labor movement in the wake of the New Deal. Dolores Janiewski gives an account of the alliance formed between Martin Dies and anti-communists in the American Federation of Labor, which helped anti-communism become a touchstone for forces hostile to unions during the first years of the Wagner Act. Feurer's own contribution follows the career of the infamous Albert A. Ahner, in order to illustrate the shift from the violent methods of “black-jack” union busting of the pre-New Deal era to the more legally sophisticated methods of “briefcase” anti-unionism in the post-World War II decades. Michael Dennis discuses struggles to organize supermarket workers in Hampton Roads, Virginia, in the 1990s and shows that their efforts were limited by an immobile National Labor Relations Board and a relatively hostile judiciary. The final essay, by Peter Rachleff, closes out the volume by connecting the long history of anti-unionism to the contemporary assault on public workers. He recommends future organizing around a “rights discourse” that “resonates with a wide audience of working and middle class women and men” (245).

A major contribution of this book is its re-centering of class conflict and social movement formation as animating forces of U.S. capitalism. These essays should be read as a springboard for future research, rather than as a comprehensive history of the topic. This is particularly true for scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who are interested in questions of social movement building. For example, future work could focus on the connections between the organizing efforts of employers and the wider progressive movement. Overall, Against Labor is sure to become a touchstone for scholars and activists interested in the deadly serious attempts of capitalists to build their own social movements as weapons against labor.