As unionization rates have collapsed in recent decades, Andrew Kolin’s book on the political economy of “labor repression” in the United States is of obvious interest. Collective bargaining has fallen back across the Global North in the past 50 years. From 1960 to 2016, according to OECD data, trade union density fell from 32 to 17 percent in Japan, from 40 to 25 in the United Kingdom, from 35 to 17 percent in Germany, and in the United States, most drastically, trade union density fell from 30 to 10 percent of the workforce. Although focused solely on the United States, Kolin offers an ambitiously sweeping account in ten chronological chapters of capital’s campaign against workers’ organizations and power, stretching from colonial times to the present, and encompassing a capacious consideration of “labor repression.”

For Kolin, the political economy of labor repression is rooted in the “institutional exclusion” of workers from democratic decision making in capitalist societies. In his view, within the context of capitalism, as long as political power and economic resources remain monopolized by “capital,” there is little hope for workers to escape repression. Moments of “class alliance” and compromise, such as the New Deal, were simply transitory moments that allowed conservative union leaders to crush any meaningful challenges to the capitalist order. The only path out of “labor repression” for Kolin is through cooperatives and experiments in direct worker’s democracy. Although there is some attention to recent literature, Kolin’s account leans heavily on several classic texts and surveys, and largely reiterates the “corporate liberalism” scholarship of the 1960s such as Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: The Free Press, 1963) and James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal and the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

The first chapter takes us from Jamestown through the American Revolution. Labor repression, in any specific sense, often retreats from the narrative, with Kolin instead presenting a broad recounting of colonial and revolutionary history, highlighting the suffering of the common folk and the dominance of elites in the founding of the Republic. We move next to a more thematic analysis of “Inclusion-Exclusion and the Growth of American Capitalism,” yet narrative largely supplants the development of further analytical clarity for this conceptual framework. Particularly disappointing given the recent interest in slavery and capitalism (see Eric Hilt, “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism’” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 2 [June, 2017]: 511–536), Kolin’s discussion of slavery completely ignores recent scholarship, relying entirely on Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Given the theme of labor repression, one might have expected more attention to both private and public police forces, and also to slave patrols, as seen in Sally E. Hadden’s Slave Patrols: Law and Violence and Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). Chapters Three to Five survey the evolution of industrial conflict across the nineteenth century, with particular attention to the “exclusion” of workers from control of the labor process and the rise “labor reformism” focused on bread-and-butter issues. Chapter Six examines the tension between the top-down policies of labor bureaucrats and the uprisings of shopfloor militants that Kolin celebrates as demanding greater workplace democracy. In chapter six, and even more so in Chapters Seven to Nine, Kolin focuses on the marginalization of communist labor organizers as the defining moment of labor repression in the United States. For these core chapters, Kolin leans heavily on older works from the 1970s, as well as some more recent work on the left and industrial unions, most notably the excellent work of Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

On reading this book, I suspect most will wish for more. Economic historians will be surprised to see no measurement of the scale of labor oppression over time. It’s striking for a book with “political economy” in the title to lack even a single table or chart. Historians of capitalism and labor will be surprised that the coverage of recent work is limited. Much of the narrative is carried by classics such as Philip Foner’s, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1947) and Joseph G. Rayback, A History of American Labor (New York: Macmillan, 1961). Melyvn Dubofsky’s work is a main source in several chapters for Kolin’s narrative. Yet Dubofsky’s emphasis on the power of workers in the electoral arena is never addressed, and cuts against Kolin’s stress on the encompassing nature of exclusion and repression. Indeed, Kolin only engages with other historians by claiming that nearly all have missed the systemic nature of labor repression in a long footnote in the introduction (xxxiii– xxxiv). While many important works are drawn upon, the sum is less than the parts. Thus the book largely sits outside recent debates in the field.

Legal scholars will also be disappointed not to see attention to recent debates in their field. Research from Benjamin I. Sachs (“The Unbundled Union: Politics without Collective Bargaining” Yale Law Journal 123 [2013]: 148–207 and “Despite Preemption: Making Labor Law in Cities and States” Harvard Law Review 124 [2011]: 1153–1224) and Kate Andrias (“The New Labor Law” Yale Law Journal 126 [2016]: 2–100) has explored the collapse of the NLRA and its pluralist regime collective bargaining alongside the expansion of employment law at the state and local level, potentially filling the void left by organized labor’s decline. Similarly absent is attention to the relevant field of carceral studies. Following Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett (“How Unregulated IS the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution” American Journal of Sociology 104, no. 4 [January 1999]: 1030–60), prisons might be explored as key labor market institutions for the twentieth century United States, and thus relevant in the study of “labor repression.”

The shifting fate of organized workers in the United States belongs at the forefront of the agenda for economic history. This will require new research and a more historically nuanced understanding of the shifting strategies of employers and managers, as can be seen for instance in Chad Pearson’s Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Kolin’s account may impress with its ambition, but it offers little in terms of conceptual clarity or new perspectives. Kolin largely reiterates long-established arguments while leaving aside more creative avenues for exploring the political economy of labor repression in the United States.