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Editor's Introduction

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-9061353

1558-1454

Leon Fink,

Labor Movements and Unions

Ranging widely in tone and topic, this issue contains a German and Brazilian twist. With a new take on the ethic of “functional autonomy” that David Montgomery associated with skilled metal trades workers, Rachel Miller identifies the core aspects of nineteenth-century working-class solidarity with the orchestra ensembles of professional musicians. Following the workplace conflicts of New York City's Musical Mutual Protective Union, most of whose members were German American, in the 1860s, she discovers that the musicians’ fierce dedication to the “mutual subordination and blending of instruments” in pursuit of a disciplined performance carried a political valence as well. Defending their “price list,” barring nonmembers from orchestra privileges, and upholding the “substitute system” that maximized their income all figured as major concerns of musical trade unionists, who self-consciously compared their work to that of skilled tailors. The latter-day accolade of being a good “blue-collar” player (most commonly associated with the lesser-known “grunts” on professional sports teams) we learn likely applied as much—and earlier—to the orchestra pit as to the playing field.An infamous symbol of the mid-twentieth-century attack on the gains of the labor movement is the subject of revisionist treatment in Up for Debate. Mapping CIO density alongside congressional voting data, political scientists Adam Dean and Jonathan Obert add a new layer of explanation for the passage of the fateful Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Beyond the impact of the postwar strike wave, southern Democratic fears of African American voter registration, and/or a conservative, business-oriented shift within the Republican Party, Dean and Obert point to the destabilizing impact of the CIO's own political mobilization effort, symbolized by the country's first political action committee in 1943 and the generally tightened bonds between the CIO and Democratic Party. While no doubt buttressing labor's perch within its preferred party, the authors argue, the move inadvertently drove erstwhile Republican moderate friends of labor into sharper lines of partisan polarization, ultimately helping to advance the constraints contained in Taft-Hartley.Among three critical commentators, Dorothy Sue Cobble welcomes Dean and Obert's use of statistical analysis but is unconvinced by their overall argument. Viewed within a longer time frame, she suggests, congressional sentiment behind the antilabor votes was accruing on multiple grounds, even as the more powerful branch of organized labor, the American Federation of Labor, was still staying out of the partisan fray. While accepting Dean and Obert's demonstration of congressional polarization, Devin Caughey and Eric Schickler question whether CIO-PAC made a crucial difference. Looking, as Cobble does, at a longer-run sequence of steady liberal-Democratic congressional decline after 1935, they argue that the close congressional/New Deal linkages consolidated in CIO-PAC likely protected labor from even more drastic legislative impositions. For his part, Kristoffer Smemo focuses on the divisions that the CIO's political surge created or accentuated among Republican leaders. As he summarizes, “The strength of the industrial unions on the job and at the polls created real tensions that a congressional vote for Taft-Hartley cannot wholly capture. The passage of Taft-Hartley also inaugurated a thirty-year period of Republican infighting over whether or not to accommodate the very existence of organized labor.” The authors respond with qualitative as well as quantitative good grace to their critics: one might summarize their political strategy here as one and a half steps forward, one step back.A second important forum is joined around John French's much-anticipated Lula and His Politics of Cunning. Rather than try to summarize the appreciative yet also probing remarks of the five commentators, I will simply say that it is a pleasure for Labor to welcome the variety of perspectives brought to the subject by this esteemed international panel. And also to welcome back to our pages the perspective of John French himself, who served us so crucially as Latin American associate editor in our first decade.How can organized labor defend/advance its gains from right-wing economic and political attack if its own members—let alone the larger public—have forgotten the lessons of earlier struggles? This is the project of “memory culture” that the German federation of labor (DGB) through the Hans-Böckler Foundation, its main academic think tank, has sought to advance through a wide-ranging, multiyear research commission. The commission, consisting of fourteen members, half of them labor historians and half trade unionists, was formally charged in 2017 with examining how the memory of trade unionism and its values are present in contemporary German society. As the director of the project (and our West European associate editor) Stefan Berger reports, the subthemes of women, labor migrants, and specific problems of workers in eastern Germany after 1989 claim special attention from the commission.There are always many ways to slice and dice each issue's book review offerings. Even as the reviews are generally assembled (thanks to the good offices of Vanessa May) according to their individual completion dates, they often inadvertently reveal larger trends in the discipline. In this case, two impressions among the multiple possibilities for commentary stand out. One is the arrival of a new brand of labor history by way of what reviewer Brian Luskey calls the “material turn” within the folds of the history of capitalism. The book in question is Jeremy Zallen's American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865, a searching treatment of both processes of production and victimization of workers in the century leading up to Edison's electric light bulb. The other is the sheer range of international or global labor histories at the moment. Of the fifteen new books covered here, fully eight range well beyond or entirely outside the United States. These include a major new anthology on Africa and another on women's work across the globe. Individual monographs variously take up workers in North Korea, communist railway unions in France, the hired foreign labor of the US Army, the Colombian version of development politics, and the role of Revolutionary Atlantic smugglers and pirates. If one had the time, one might attain a truly worldly appreciation of the labor history field.