“Anti-Heroes of the Working Class”: A Response to Bruce Nelson

International Review of Social History

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 375-388

  Faue, Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84937281250     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859000114063     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. New York Times, 20 February 1995;
2. For the SEIU vision, see John J. Sweeney and Karen Nussbaum, Solutions for the New Work Force: Policies for a New Social Contract (Camp John, MD, Press, 1989)
3. on Justice for Janitors, see Richard W. Hurd and William Rouse, “Progressive Union Organizing: The SEIU Justice for Janitors Campaign”, Review of Radical Political Economics, 21:3 (1989), pp. 70–75.
4. Roberta Spalter-Roth, Heidi Hartman and Nancy Collins, “What Do Unions Do For Women?”, in Sheldon Friedman (ed.), Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, (Ithaca, 1995), p. 195.
5. While their absolute numbers are relatively low, African-American men are the most highly unionized segment of the labor force; in 1992, 24 per cent of all African-American men employed in the non-agricultural labor force were unionized, compared to the general unionization rate of 16 per cent: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Membership, 1992”, Monthly Labor Review, 116 (March 1993), p. 2.
6. Challenges to the unitary conception of class predate recent studies of race; a useful perspective for labor history is that of Alice Kessler-Harris, “Treating the Male as Other”: Redefining the Parameters of Labor History”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 190–204.
7. See David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1994)
8. David Roediger, Towards an Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London, 1994)
9. The “new institutionalism” was first used to describe developments in political science. -See Rogers M. Smith, “Political Jurisprudence, the ‘New Institutionalism,’ and the Future of Public Law”, American Political Science Review, 82:1 (1988), pp. 89–108;
10. James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors in Political Life”, American Political Science Review, 78:3 (1984), pp. 734–749.
11. Michael Goldfield, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism during the 1930s and 1940s”, International Labor and Working Class History, 44 (1993), pp. 132;
12. Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1994).
13. Bruce Nelson, “Pentecost on the Pacific: Maritime Workers and Working Class Consciousness in the 1930s”, Political Power and Social Theory, 4 (1984), pp. 141–184.
14. This is an argument Nelson neglects entirely, except to comment on older analyses that laid racism at the employer's door. For the employer assault, see Howell Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s (Madison, 1982)
15. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–1960 (Urbana, 1995)
16. Gilbert Gall, The Politics of the Right to Work (Wcstport, 1988).
17. For examples of the cultural assault on organized labor, see Donald R. Richberg, Labor Union Monopoly (Chicago, 1957)
18. John L. McClellan, Crime Without Punishment (New York, 1962)
19. Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964”, Journal of American History. 82:2 (1995), pp. 55–79.
20. On structural sectoral and occupational shifts in the labor force, the consequences for labor were known as early as the 1950s, but the news hasn't reached some historians yet. See Daniel Bell, “The Next American Labor Movement”, Fortune (April 1953)
21. Daniel Bell, “Prospects for Union Growth”, in Walter Fogel and Archive Kleingartner (eds), Contemporary Labor Issues (Belmont, CA, 1966), pp. 225–238;
22. see also Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (Glencoe, IL, 1960)
23. Sidney Lens, The Crisis in American Labor (New York, 1959)
24. Irving Bernstein, “The Growth of American Labor Unions”, Labor History, 2:2 (1961), pp. 131–157.
25. Sugrue, “Crabgrass Politics”.
26. David Brody, “The CIO After Fifty Years; A Historical Reckoning”, Dissent (Fall 1985), pp. 457–472;
27. see also his Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York, 1980).
28. Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (Pittsburgh, 1975).
29. Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, 1988).
30. The “New Men of Power” in the labor movement may not have had the power of court-martial to force workers to behave themselves, but they did have a number of sanctions at their disposal. On the desegregation of the armed forces and racial attitudes, sec Richard Dalfiume, The Desegregation of the Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953 (Columbia. 1969).
31. Elizabeth Faue, “Paths of Unionization: Community, Bureaucracy, and Gender in the Minneapolis Labor Movement, 1935–1945”, in Ava Baron (ed.), Work Engendered: Toward a New Labor History, (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 296–319.
32. Elizabeth Faue, Comment, “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Industrial Unions” panel, Rethinking American Labor History: Gender, Race, and Class conference. State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 10 April 1992.
33. See also Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York, 1977), for a similar argument about the need to balance the numbers.
34. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, 1987), compares policies toward women in the automobile and electrical industries. While her argument is oriented toward other questions, the difference in proportion of women in each industry's labor force can be used to explain major differences in union attitudes toward gender equality.
35. For the post-war period, and the impact of McCarthyism on reinforcing women's equal place, see Lisa Kannenberg, “The Impact of the Cold War on Women's Trade Unionism: The UE Experience”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 309–323.
36. This can be seen in the cases both of garment workers and in the hotel and restaurant workers, where twentieth-century shifts in the waitperson labor force led to gerrymandering, including the development of separate women's locals. See Alice Kcssler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition-Building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s”, in Ruth Milkman (ed.) Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston, 1985), pp. 110–138;
37. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 1992).
38. Nelson refers here to a specific case study; see Rick Halpern, “Interracial Unionism in the Southwest: Fort Worth's Packinghouse Workers, 1936–1954”, in Robert Zieger (ed.), Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South (Knoxville, 1991), pp. 158–182;
39. see also his Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1920–1960 (Urbana, forthcoming)
40. Roger Horowitz, “'Without a Union, We're All Lost': Ethnicity, Race, and Unionism among Kansas City Packinghouse Workers, 1930–1941”, presented at Rethinking American Labor History: Gender, Race, and Class conference. State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Department of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 10 April 1992.
41. Kevin Boyle, “'There are No Union Sorrows that the Union Can't Heal”: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United States Automobile Industry, 1945–1960”, Labor History, 36 (1995), pp. 5–23;
42. Bruce Fehn, “'Chickens Come Home to Roost': Industrial Reorganization, Seniority, and Gender Conflict in the United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1955–1966”, Labor History, 34 (1993), pp. 324–341;
43. Dennis Deslippe, “'We Had an Awful Time with our Women*: Iowa's United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1945–1975”, Journal of Women's History, 5:1 (1993), pp. 10–32.
44. Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition-Building”;
45. Faue, “Paths of Unionization”.
46. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York, 1995), pp. 370–381.
47. 29 The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor, p. 376.
48. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights;
49. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (Chicago, 1981).
50. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk (Berkeley, 1991).
51. For another case of this, consider the salutory impact of the woman's department of the UAW on the union's eventual acceptance of policies supporting gender equality; the department was one of the prime movers in the formation of CLUW as well. See Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 19351975 (Ithaca, 1990).