Among labor historians and supporters of the American labor movement, the signal phenomenon to be explained is the absolute decline in the proportion of the workforce that is unionized and in actual union membership since the middle of the twentieth century. The proportion of unionized workers grew steadily from 7 per cent in 1930 to 28 per cent in 1954. In the almost six decades since that peak, labor's share of the overall workforce has declined steadily, to 20 per cent in 1980 and to less than 12 per cent in 2011.Footnote ¹

Scholarship in the past three decades has examined this decline which clearly has multiple roots. Cultural issues have been understandably significant in the discussion. Carol Quirke's new book, Eyes on Labor, while focused entirely on the period of labor's growth, speaks to an important dimension of the origins of the labor movement's decline. She does not make the connection as strongly as she might, but in her analysis of the impact of labor and news photography from the 1930s to the 1950s she provides an important new view of the success of employers and the corporate media in the United States in setting a framework for viewing trade unionism and labor conflict in negative terms. Even during the period of the labor movement's greatest growth, its phenomenal success was undermined by the ability of capital to set the terms of the debate and to place trade unions on the defensive.

Eyes on Labor, by exploring the depiction of labor's organizing in news photography and unions’ use of photography in their own publications, provides an original and convincing view of the cultural war that developed in the 1930s and 1940s to frame Americans’ views of the labor movement and collective bargaining. It shows employers and corporate media on the offensive, and trade unions retreating to a defensive, bureaucratic position as they articulated their goals and methods to members. Succeeding chapters offer case studies of distinct campaigns and sources that speak to change over time in the depiction of labor struggles and the labor movement's construction of its identity in its publications for members.

Quirke's account begins with an overview chapter that traces the depiction of labor conflicts from the 1877 railroad strike to the 1919 strike wave, and labor conflict during the early New Deal years. Then she moves into more fine-grained case studies of LIFE and other news magazines’ treatments of labor struggles in the 1930s and coverage of a sit-down strike at Hershey's Chocolate in April 1937 and the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago later that year. Two final substantive chapters explore the United Steelworkers’ publication, Steel Labor, and the use of photography among rank-and-file members of Local 65 of the United Wholesale and Warehouse Workers’ union in New York.

Quirke offers a particularly rich treatment of labor photography in LIFE, setting the magazine well within emerging consumer culture and examining its evolving treatment of the labor struggles that dominated headlines in 1936–1937. LIFE embraced labor as a part of its prospective mass market, with coverage of labor and labor struggles appearing in fully two-thirds of the magazine's issues in its first year (p. 58). Still, LIFE emphasized the domestic aspects of sit-down strikes, rather than the motivations and goals of the strikers. LIFE photos focused on Henry and Edsel Ford, titans of industry, even though the Flint sit-down was aimed at General Motors. Sit-downers were worthy of attention but photo journalism avoided serious treatment of the issues at stake. Quirke's analysis extends to other strikes, uses generous photographic spreads, and provides close “readings” of the visual sources. In the end, she concludes, “LIFE's lighthearted approach muted class hostility and portrayed management as sympathetic to labor's needs” (p. 74), hardly a reasonable rendering of the broader meaning of the sit-down movement in the United States in the late 1930s. In further coverage of labor into the early years of World War II, LIFE emphasized labor violence on the one hand and de-emphasized rank-and-file agency in comparison with the unions’ bureaucratic, even managerial, leadership.

Equally valuable interpretations emerge in Quirke's analyses of photo coverage of the the sit-down strike at Hershey Chocolate and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in South Chicago. In the Hershey chapter, Quirke describes the public relations and anti-union campaigns the company and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) unleashed to sway public opinion against the strikers, and shows that national news magazines basically published company accounts of the conflict. Quirke concludes her treatment of the strike and its news coverage: “there is no doubt that with the Hershey strike, the account told over and over again was a story whose contours had been designed by the NAM” (p. 148).

The story of photography and the Memorial Day Massacre is a more complicated one that stresses the contested nature of views of labor protest. Concluding a peaceful picnic and rally to muster support for a strike against Republic Steel, strikers and their supporters moved to set up a picket line at the company; Chicago police then opened fire, killing ten and wounding another ninety (p. 154). Quirke's treatment really begins with the publication of newspaper photographss and accounts of the event, particularly newsreel footage of the confrontation. In a remarkable discussion, Quirke show how initial newspaper accounts and the newsreel interpreted the visual evidence as showing that the violence of protestors had provoked a necessary police response. Newspaper stories repeated uncritically police officials’ claims about the protestors’ provocations.

Much of this chapter is then devoted to demonstrating how labor, Chicago supporters, and sympathetic members of the La Follette Committee in the United States Senate presented evidence that decisively undermined the police construction of events and press coverage based on those accounts. Quirke shows convincingly that the photographs did not simply reveal the “facts” about the confrontation but required accompanying interpretation. That interpretation, in turn, was very subjective, though in the end unions and supportive politicians summoned such a massive array of evidence that they succeeded in turning around the original police assertions and showed how peaceful protestors became the victims of stunning police misconduct. The chapter is a real tour de force and displays the strengths of Quirke's analytic strategies.

Having demonstrated in these first chapters the influence and limitations of corporate and state manipulation of news photographs to counter the rise of mass-production unionism, Quirke moves in the final third of her study to examine how labor unions themselves employed the new possibilities of photography in mobilizing their members. The perspective offered, in the end, is an ambiguous one, with the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) using photography in their publications to assert bureaucratic control of members, while New York's Local 65, a large local of distributive workers, employed photography to empower its members and underline the union movement's broader goals.

Quirke's discussion of the USWA's publication, Steel Labor, emphasizes how the union's leaders avoided publicizing union struggles through photography, but typically venerated union leaders and emphasized how much the union did for its passive but fortunate members. Quirke views the changing use of photography as emblematic of the taming of CIO mass-production unions as they became junior partners with corporate management in administering American industry. Quirke argues that CIO unions “pushed moderation”, promoting the message to members, “be good and your union shall reward you”. In her view, “Members became part of an imaged [or imagined] community bound by the conventions of a staid, gender-divided, associational life, with modest demands for inclusion in the promise of American life” (p. 189). She does an excellent job of showing how the use of photography in union publications mirrored the retreat from activism that characterized the CIO mass-production unions’ political path more generally.

The story of Local 65 and photography presents at one level an exception to the broader pattern for CIO unions as a whole. This New York union put cameras in the hands of union members and shared a grass-roots view of unionism very different from that of the steelworkers. For a period union struggles and members’ activism played prominently in the union's publication, New Voices. But Quirke's treatment ends as Congressional anti-communist investigations led the union to beat a retreat, to re-affiliate with the CIO, and abandon the grassroots emphasis that had distinguished its use of photography for more than a decade. Soon, the union's paper was merged with that of the larger CIO union into which the local was folded and its distinctive use of photography and its emphasis on grassroots activism came to an end.

Carol Quirke tells a remarkable story – prescient in many ways. Though her account ends in the mid-1950s, it offers important lessons for an understanding of labor's decline in the half century since then. We are all the richer for the photos she shares and explores in this important new study.