Not so simple

Labor History

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 196-198

  Forbath, William E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039702709     PISSN: 0023656X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (5)

1. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, The Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
2. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, The Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
3. Karen Orren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, The Law, and Liberal Development in the United States (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
4. Immigration restriction, a Cabinet-level labor department, a government employee eight-hour day (since government employees could not strike for that end) also were legislative ambitions. Immigration restriction, bans on child labor, eight-hours laws for government workers and, at the state level, for women - all aimed at putting a floor on the labor market. Along with the sought-for anti-injunction statutes, they were the visible hand of AFL voluntarism. See Forbath, passim.
5. The preceding paragraphs sum up much of the story I tell in Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. For the record, I should note that Greene sees a sharp difference between my account of the emergence of "pure and simple" labor politics and hers. Mine is a "single factor explanation"; moreover, it assumes an "absence" of labor politics and it "does not help us explain the trade unionists' aggressive political activism around the injunction and other issues" (9-10). I'm flattered to figure prominently in Greene's historiography, but I don't recognize my book in her description.